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Comment by yrochat | Hacker News Reader

> He joined Microsoft 22 years ago because he saw how clearly Microsoft empowers people to do magical things and ultimately make the world a better place.

Bad start.

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Why? Don't think of Microsoft as it is now, think of it as it was 22 years ago.

Exactly. That was a few years before Microsoft has succeeded at their mission of putting a computer on every desktop.

Twenty-two years ago, Windows 95 was three years in the future. As I recall, Microsoft's only truly great product was Word (Excel was getting there, I think), although I guess Flight Simulator wasn't too bad. Microsoft was trying to pretend that Windows 3.1 was a competitor to the Mac. Lisp machines were still trying to make a go of it.

In 1991, Microsoft was already ascendant. You may be too young to remember, but MS-DOS was everywhere. Given the failures of Commodore and Atari, the rise and fall of the 80's unix wars, and with Jobs no longer at Apple, Microsoft essentially took visionary leadership of the computing scene by default.

Instead of using proper unix machines, my early computing years were spent on DOS and Win 3.1.

I was around back then, and was using Macs and Unix, looking down on folks for using Windows & DOS. To this day, I can't begin to fathom the sort of mindset it takes to settle for worst.

I certainly would not have agreed that Microsoft ca. 1992 was at all visionary. I felt embarrassed for them and their users back then, much as I would for an adult who shows up at the office proud of the childish fingerpainting he spent the last month making. Grasping, copying, but not visionary.

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