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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Let’s not forget that Microsoft developed a lot of tools in the first place, as in, they were one of the companies that created things that didn’t really exist before Microsoft created them.

Git isn’t even very old, it came out in 2005. Microsoft Office first came out in 1990. Of course Office wasn’t using git.

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Office is a package including things like Word and Excel. Word itself came out in 1984 for the first Macintosh. Windows OS did not yet exist.

Some examples would be useful here. Not knocking MS tools in general but are there any that were industry fists? Source code control for example existed at least since SCCS which in turn predates Microsoft itself.

Of course that's only half the story - Microsoft invents amazing things, and promptly fails to capitalize on them.

AJAX, that venerable piece of kit that enabled every dynamic web-app ever, was a Microsoft invention. It didn't really take off, though, until Google made some maps with it.

That would segue into a discussion about NetDocs at Microsoft.

background - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) - 1998, XMLHttpRequest appears.

NetDocs vs Office - https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/064-the-st...

Resolving NetDocs vs Office [Spoiler Alert - if you don't know about NetDocs, there's a big reason which tells you who "won" this fight] - https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/071-resolv...

Aftermath - https://www.eweek.com/development/netdocs-succumbs-to-xp/

Microsoft rarely did or does anything first. They are typically second or third to the post and VC is no different.

Most people don’t know or realize that Git is where it is because of Microsoft. About 1/2 of the TFS core team spun out to a foundation where they spent several years doing things like making submodules actually work, writing git-lfs, and generally making git scale.

You can look for yourself at the libgit2 repo back in the 2012-2015 timeframe. Nearly the whole thing was rewritten by Microsoft employees as the earliest stages of moving the company off source depot.

It was a really cool time that I’m still amazed to have been a small part of.

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