Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL | Hacker News Reader

Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL

nplusonemag.com

160 pointsdang24 comments

This passage hits pretty hard in terms of company culture. I think this is what Peter Thiel meant by "dont fuck up the culture" to Airbnb.

"Those were the years of Microsoft’s long, slow decline, which continues to this day. The number of things wrong with the company was extraordinary, but they can be summed up by the word bureaucracy. Early on at Microsoft—and even later, when we first started Messenger—you could just do things. You had a good idea, you ran it by your boss, you tried it, and if it worked, in it went. After a while, you had to run everything by a hundred people, and at some point the ball would get dropped—and you’d never hear back."

A decent portion of the bureaucracy is scar tissue from the antitrust case. Another big chunk (at least in Windows-land) is the commitment to backwards compatibility over new functionality. The third chunk was compliance with governmental requirements for purchasing by the federal government. There's things like "any software the feds buy must have Foo", and that's a really big deal for Microsoft, who set up a whole group to ensure that everything has Foo.

It was pretty painful. A feature I was involved with got nixed by the Compliance team due to concerns around backwards compatibility. They had no incentive to say Yes, either, since that would mean more work for them.

But some of it was just math -- a large company with many teams that need to coordinate slows things down. I like this anecdote from a Microsoft engineer about how it took a year to design a really crappy shutdown menu with nine (nine!) options.

It turns out there 43 different people who had a voice in the feature, which was hashed out over a series of grinding meetings involving teams responsible for kernel, shell, Tablet PC, Longhorn, and (drumroll please) "Windows Mobile PC User Experience"."

"In Windows, the [repository] node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes."

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

> "In Windows, the [repository] node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes."

Does it take less time for a patch to the graphic system (for example) to trickle up to the Linus' tree? And to end up in an LTS distro?

Depends what it is, but commonly - no. There's been research on this:

http://mcis.polymtl.ca/publications/2013/msr_jojo.pdf

What percentage of submitted patches has been integrated successfully, and how much time did it take? Around 33% of patches are accepted. Reviewing time has been dropping down to 1–3 months, while integration time steadily has been increasing towards 1–3 months, bringing the total time to 3–6 months.

That's based on 8 years of data.

been reading old articles from Joel Spolsky and the need for backward compatibility to break down barriers put up by prospective customers.

has a few passages that illustrate how that startegy helped Microsoft Excel trounce Lotus 123 plus chat wars won by AOL around that time.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

thoughtful analysis. re backward compatibility, any suggestions on what the company should have done differently? the tension between compatibility and innovation seems like a central challenge of platform leaders like microsoft. re government compliance, did the company consider shipping different features for government customers -- like how some companies offer enterprise tiers for high-end business customers?

There seems to be a tipping point at a lot of really successful companies where they get a little too top-heavy. Too many executives, too much management (often as rank and file are being laid off or shown the door) and not enough people doing things.

IIRC at one point the AIM server started doing a challenge: "send me N bytes at offset X of the aim.exe binary". I recall the open-source AIM clients themselves set up a service that would return substrings of the binary so that their open-source clients could continue to login without needing to ship a copy of the binary.

Legally speaking, couldn't AOL have created some kind of TOS which required people to only connect to the servers with their own clients?

Sure, people would still ignore the TOS, but a big company like Microsoft would comply or risk a lawsuit.

That's certainly how things would work today. At the time the law regarding connecting to another party's servers was significantly less settled. (Not that it's entirely settled now.)

Pretty interesting reading about the MSFT-AOL interop issues. I was also under the impression Messenger was closed/proprietary, correct?

As an unrelated note, this part is weird: "Microsoft’s Vista operating system, which needed to be restarted almost from scratch in order to ship three years late, came because it was written in a new language of Microsoft’s own design, called C#, that did not offer sufficient micromanagement to make Vista run quickly enough" ... not sure what he's talking about there. Anyone?

Pre-reset Longhorn had a lot of explorer in C#. That explorer leaked memory, I'm sure someone on BetaArchive has said why at some point, but I can't remember. I'm thinking something to do with the sidebar for some reason.

I was pointed to this a couple of days ago, and half of it was behind a paywall. So be warned. I've already saved the page as a pdf, just in case.

The paywall was really hostile too. I might have tipped 50c or $1 or whatever to read the rest of the article, but I have very little incentive to subscribe to a magazine I've never heard of to finish reading.

If there was a "Buy with 1-click on Amazon ($0.50)" button, I would have clicked it.

Today AOL would just threaten a CFAA lawsuit and interop would quietly disappear.

I'm pretty sure I read this last week and it wasn't behind a paywall. Maybe just me. I (along with another developer) spent some time developing an MSN client in VB6 (and later, JS/HTML in Mozilla XULRunner) and quite frankly, it felt like a losing battle trying to keep up with the protocol changes. By the time we were ready to release our MSNP7 version, MSNP9 was out and they were revoking access to earlier versions.

Here's some more detail [1] on the buffer overflow AOL was allegedly exploiting to validate their AIM client. Probably wouldn't fly these days.

[1] http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/security/aim/index.htm

"Handling shutdown was a pain, making sure the windows closed down neatly and all the program’s resources were cleaned up properly without the program crashing."

Which must be why this program always refused to simply exit, preferring to minimize itself to the system tray instead!

> Despite Microsoft’s purchase of Skype, Messenger is still going today, a little Methuselah wandering in the Microsoft product mausoleum.

Not exactly. Messenger has been End-of-Lifed except on Windows 2000 (in all territories) and in China (on all platforms). On any other platform or territory, your login is refused and you're told to upgrade to Skype.

You can still third party MSN clients and there's fix going around to make the official MSN client work again.

> there's fix going around to make the official MSN client work again

I just love the irony of this situation

As rpgmaker states: You can still use the network, though.

There was a recent discussion on the FreeBSD ports mailing list about removing some msn related ports (i.e. users complaining about removing ports, exactly because of the reasons stated by rpgmaker: It still works)

Flagging this as it is behind a paywall.

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