Microsoft employees recall their early years
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Later we discovered some other guys using the same name in the US (also with a mu) they had a basic interpreter, how lame! (we had a compiler) however we really didn't understand the advantages of being born in the right place .....
I really wish we'd incorporated, we could have sold the name for some silly amount of money
NZ is a fantastic country, but is relatively remote from larger markets, and its own population isn't large enough for the economics of scale to apply only locally. So even if you had tried, you may have failed. As you rightly say, power of location. On the other hand, now, due to globalization, things are possible there, too - for example, the app market is not limited geographically.
BTW, you should consider uploading your old compiler's code on GitHub if you still have it; there is increased interest in "software archeology" now, given that so many emulators have been built.
The software source was on cards (developed on a simulator on a uni mainframe, much like Microsoft were developing their code), sadly the cards were left behind when I moved to the US a decade later
But it wasn’t just his parents. His broader community and the environment he grew up in also played a key role in setting him up for success in ways that many others, may not have experienced. For example, from early on he had access to a PDP-10 and was allowed to practice programming from a very young age.
Not to undersell Gates, the guy was incredibly intelligent and hardworking, but the conditions he was raised in definitely gave him a head start. He had opportunities that were rare at the time, and an incredible support system that helped him develop his potential.
Bill even specifically mentions musicians. By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it. Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
> [2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
Nice try ChatGPT stealing from studio ghibli and Scarlett Johansson are still two egregious examples of what can kill artist's motivations. Why create or publish if credit is not given?
You're right to point out that the tide is shifting again. Perhaps at the end of this bubble, society and/or the behemoth companies will recognise the value and help build a more sustainable future for artists and creators. I'm cautiously optimistic.
That is true for content creators. Real artists don’t have a choice. They have to create art.
I do enjoy some Led Zeppelin, and I often enjoy the artists they didn't credit, even more.
It seems to be specifically the "hobbyists" that are also taking VC investment money for their "hobby project". It's pretty clear what's driving these decisions: VC's are not okay with a bootstrapped, penny-pinching business focusing on specialized support or custom development (which is the successful RedHat model), they want an early chance at really outsized returns.
Also in the early BSD/Linux days, there were distributors like Walnut Creek, Amiga had Fish Disks, and so forth, some money could eventually go back to tool writers.
It isn't only about VC money.
Ironic that Microsoft GitHub is so close to that
What I am curious about is what happens when the original product that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality. Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably started with search.
Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as Google search imo.
GSuite still hasn’t made any inroads into the enterprise of governments where the money is.
Everyone who uses Chrome on Windows, Macs, and iPhones makes a choice to use it. Everyone who uses Google makes a choice.
Google Cloud Platform is a part of Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, as well as Google Workspace (G Suite), enterprise versions of Android and ChromeOS, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine learning and enterprise mapping services. Since at least 2022,[9] Google's official materials have stated that "Google Cloud" is the new name for "Google Cloud Platform," which may cause naming confusion.
(Yes it’s a Wikipedia link. But if you go to the article it includes citations)
Microsoft does not include Office sales with its Azure revenue.
As opposed to Google Search which does what I need it to do (and could do before) less and less
The thing is, Apple of Steve Jobs was more than just a "does the job" kind of product company, which was IBM's and Microsoft's place. It was sort of magical and ahead of the curve on many innovative things that would revolutionize and set industry trends.
Now under Tim Cook it feels stale and boring, kind of like your grandads khaki pants, does the job but we've seen it already several times, give us something new and revolutionary not incremental upgrades to the same things from 10+ years ago.
Apple of today resembles more the Dell/Compaq of the early 2000s, focused on milking the user lock-in effects and optimizing the supply chain to increase margins except wrapped in flashy presentations, but just as soulless and dead inside as those.
You're forgetting the Apple Vision Pro flop.
I am a former Android user, but the quality of apps on iOS is just so much better. The apps "just work", and the integration with Mac, iPad, and watch is just simply so far ahead of anything Android offered, even if people think there is no innovation. IMO, it's so much better and the whole mobile space is stagnating, I think they will be fine even if they add features 3 years later.
I have a bit of hope that if they ever make a foldable phone, it’ll be small when folded.
Why do things need "innovated" constantly? Why keep making the phone slimmer rather than replace the battery with something more efficient, maybe add back the headphone port?
The original iPhone was a great leap forward, UX wise, but much like with a pickup truck at a certain point you'd expect minor tweaks with the yearly models.
But is adding features no one wants that sometimes degrade the user experience "innovation"?
I agree if they don't think about what consumers want and make updates they could get overtaken, but I don't think anyone is gonna jump to Android because they can get a 2MM smaller chassis --- the opposite, they might want an "innovative" phone with a removable and swappable battery, multiple SIMs, FM tuner, and a few other features that aren't "shiny" but the iPhone lacks.
> the failure of Apple Intelligence (oversold promise) has seriously hurt the brand
- My main compute platforms are now Linux and Windows, but even when I had a MacBook, I didn't really benefit much from whatever integration there was between the two.
- I tried and did not like Apple Watch, and I'm upset at Apple's treatment of other wearable makers like Fitbit and now Pebble.
- I'm frustrated that my iPhone 13 is still not USB-C when basically everything else I carry around is.
- I don't like how the Epic/Apple case went, and I wish Apple had been made to allow competing stores on their devices (the EU got this one right).
- With Apple having discontinued the "mini" models, physical size is no longer a differentiator— the Galaxy series phones are basically indistinguishable from modern iPhone models.
I can see how google can be seen as better in some ways, but brushing all case where it's worse as irrelevant looks like an easy shortcut to shut down complains without caring if they might be legit.
Like typing what you want to search in the search input and hit enter?
Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.
Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.
For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.
Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.
https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/r...
Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit embarrassing though, since they used a California standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush at.
> Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.
Real question: Do you think normies distinguish between traditional Google search results and AI Overview? To me, normies use Google to find an answer. They don't care too much where the answer comes from.
It’s hasn’t been for 25+ years (more than 50% of Microsoft existence).
1998 Revenue Breakdown
—————————————————————-
$7.04B Productivity Apps
$6.28B Windows
$4.72B OEM
$1.94B Consumer
> Productivity Apps
> OEM
> Consumer
I think you are correct on the OEM vs Consumer split. Long-forgotten memory: For awhile people would resell OEM software licenses online. OEM software licenses could only be sold as a bundle with PC hardware. But that limitation did not specify /what/ PC hardware or that it had to be an entire working system. So resellers would collect outdated 1MB SIMM memory cards or other small, cheap, outdated components and package them with the CDROM.
iPhone defines Apple, and that is justified considering the single product makes up 55% of the company's revenue.
But then I realized that slowly over time, iPhones grew to get into the price range of full-on computers. And also, even the cheaper iPhones add in up sales when you sell over a billion of them.
Nah, Happy Anniversary, Microsoft. As much as we do not get along, you did do _some_ good in the world.
Seems a little irrational.
Torture itself is irrational, but so are the things that humans will do or say when subjected to it.
First the new _animated_ boot splash with the ms-logo, then the elegant start up piano sound, the amazing new start button with a menu with so perfectly organized applications, settings and a run input. It was like stepping into the future.
Windows 3.11 and dos 6.22 was normal yesterday, it worked, was cool and had all the stuff I loved to do - but after this day they felt dated and ancient.
Such moments are rare. Microsoft rocked so hard
Sadly that future is now behind us. Nowadays I struggle to figure out what is a button, excuse me, clickable.
More like stepping into the past with things that the Mac, Amiga and NeXT machines could do out-of-the-box in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I mean, 8.3 file names? Seriously? Who thought that these could be "user friendly"?
The path length (including full folder path and the file name) was limited to 260 characters.
Bill was coming from the wealthy family, his mum was IBM VP and gave his son a contract to sell operating system, even though there were better alternatives on the market. Ye good ol' story about corporate corruption that gave us such amazing products like Internet Explorer 6, Windows 98 Millenium Edition or Windows Vista.
We could've lived in a so much better World if we didn't have to deal for years with crappy Microsoft operating system and other MS products.
from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
She was later appointed to the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she became the first woman to lead it. Right Time, Right Place
Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft.
Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.This development environment looks interesting：why two shelves?
Also the place look like a cheap airline cabin. I thought all MSFT employees have their own offices back then. Maybe it's because that's the lab?
Everyone did have their own offices in the early-mid 90s. By the late 90s we were sharing, depending on seniority (years in the company, not title, which was refreshing).
It looks very similar to a QA Lab at a place I worked at in the early 2000s. They essentially commandeered a larger conference room and there were just (cpu) boxes everywhere.
Meta under Zuckerberg has been able to stay relevant. But FB is already seen as being for old people.
There will never be exact replicas of Apple and Microsoft again, but there undoubtedly will be many companies in the future that we will eventually look back upon in the same way.
What about Microsoft makes them not innovate? To innovate you have to hire smart developers and let them do what they love doing. This will result in some waste, as only some of the ideas will be successful financially. But the ones that succeed will be innovative. Microsoft doesn't do that. They hire good developers and assign them to a Program Manager who gives them a fully nailed-down spec for what to build. Inevitably the Program Manager (who are often business people) will find financially successful products to clone. This rarely results in waste as the product they are cloning has already created a market, Microsoft only needs to take the market from the innovator, which they do by bundling the product with either Office or Windows.
I’ll never forget when they dedicated a minute or two in a keynote a few years ago to how they improved the volume indicator visual overlay in iOS to be less obtrusive like they talked to god himself to figure this out, when Android had that style for years…it was brilliant marketing.
I say all of this as a die hard Apple guy.
And unlike with a lot of companies, they often continue to invest and move their acquisitions forward, such as github.
Microsoft 2025 isn't the same bastard from 1992.
Which helps them win in the enterprise. Not just their acquisitions, but if MS puts out a tech you can be confidently sure they are going to support it for a long time. There's been a few examples contrary to that - Silverlight and their UI frameworks they can't seem to get a handle on, but everything else they've put out exists long-term, and is generally backwards compatible.
There aren't many others that offer that level of stability. We tend to value new and shiny, but non-tech companies don't they want boring and stable, which is why Microsoft won there. Hell, you can still run a lot of apps from the Windows 3.11 era on Windows 11 with minimal fuss. The same can't be said for most other platforms.
Microsoft tech isn't necessarily sexy or exciting, but it checks boxes and is supported for a LONG time, and for a closed source OS, Windows is surprisingly open and configurable (well, used to be anyway - that seems to be going away with 11+)
There are other innovative Microsoft products. Visual Basic was a very nice rapid GUI development environment in the 1990s. Windows 95’s interface was the result of a lot of research done on the user experience, and the result was a GUI that not only has persisted (with many modifications, of course) for about 30 years, but has inspired other desktops such as various Linux desktops, and in some ways even influenced later Mac operating systems.
Let’s also not forget Microsoft Research, which has produced a lot of interesting work in operating systems and programming language research.
When Windows 95 has made MS-DOS obsolete, Excel had the huge advantage of being a native Windows application, so I have switched like everybody else from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel, because switching between Windows and MS-DOS was unpleasant and inconvenient, and because the new Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows did not have any of the advantages of Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, while being inferior as a Windows program to MS Excel.
Even if I have switched to Excel, for supporting the general Windows features, like nice TrueType fonts and being able to use great amounts of memory in a faster way, due to direct access instead of using extended/expanded memory, at that time Excel did not have any spreadsheet-specific feature, graphic or otherwise, that was better than Lotus 1-2-3.
Despite strongly preferring Windows 95 to MS-DOS, I have always regretted a few MS-DOS programs that had a much better user interface than any Windows program that I have ever seen.
One of those was Lotus 1-2-3. Learning to use MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 was significantly more difficult than learning MS Excel, but once you were an expert the speed of doing any spreadsheet operations using keyboard shortcuts was many times greater than what is possible in Excel with a mouse-based UI, or even with the Excel keyboard shortcuts, which are much less efficient.
While the early Excel was extremely easy to use, that is no longer true about modern Excel or MS Office. Even if I had used for many decades MS Excel and several other spreadsheet applications, when I open now the recent versions of MS Word or MS Excel, I am no longer able to find most of the commands that I need and that I know that they must exist, except after a long random search through various menus, because those no longer have a hierarchical structure whose principles of organization I can discern. This is completely different from older versions of Excel, where one needed no help and no manuals to easily find any required command.
.NET is certainly not "a copy" of Java, it's just Java done correctly ;-)
"The Trouble with Checked Exceptions" - https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...
You're conflating "incorrect" with "mistake," no one is saying the C# team forgot to add checked exceptions.
<insert correlation id>
[no option to continue]
Those are our error messages of today.
And yes, even the brightest can be wrong from time to time or frequently
Is that in your .NET code? Time to switch to Java!
In either case I encourage you to try out .NET before making a statement, there's a good chance it will pleasantly surprise you.