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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

From the guy who didn't see the internet coming ...

Gates wrote his 'internet tidal wave' email mid 1995 (https://wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/) which was only two years after Berners-Lee publicly released Mosaic.

By the late 1990s, Microsoft's competition (including Netscape and Apple) were nearly dead. In fact, the browser that Apple originally shipped with OS X was M$ Internet Explorer.

Gates was several months late to the web, but it's not like he missed the boat.

I went from Apple to Microsoft in 1995 partially because Microsoft was so far ahead of Apple on the Internet. At the time, Apple was entirely concerned with promoting eWorld. (Ironic because Apple had a /8 IP allocation and was processing something like a quarter of Usenet traffic well before this.) They both had to get out of their walled garden “compete with AOL” models, but MSFT did it faster.

The other problem with the Mac in those years was that there was no decent web browser.

Windows MSIE eventually surpassed the usability, functionality and popularity of Netscape, but Microsoft's Mac version of MSIE did not.

In the late 1990s, many websites did not render or function correctly on Macintosh.

absolutely everybody in software was talking about the internet in 1995, and for the most part already on the internet, and companies were already pivoting to the internet left and right. It made me realize how discretionary is all the work we do in these large industries, because whatever we were working on in 1993 and 1994 no longer mattered, we were now working on enabling whatever assets we had to be compatible with the internet.

I’m not sure I’d agree with pivoting being a signal that prior work was discretionary. I think, in a lot of cases the strategic pressure from competition becoming more efficient or productive by capturing Internet traffic could have been a real reason as well.

no, not everybody ... pre-existing sectors with commercial applications, get this, existed before the Internet. Lots of companies had their verticals, and as mentioned elsewhere, the "open net" was not at all the same

I existed before the internet, and I worked with clients in pre-existing sectors with commercial applications in their verticals and once the net opened up, they all wanted to be on it.

I hope I turned that into jargon you can understand, because I sure couldn't make sense of it.

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