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Comment by daveloyall | Hacker News Reader

@com2kid Microsoft defined what computers are capable of. Let me clarify: most people heard Microsoft's version of reality first--and they were amazed!

We all were. Computers have changed life for all of us. But computers aren't what they could have been...

Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity.

Some people use computers to save lives, right? How many more lives might have been saved over the past couple of decades if MS hadn't held features--ideas! concepts!--back again and again to enforce planned obsolescence? How many times did they obfuscate a communication protocol to maintain market dominance?

I appreciate that some current MS employees aren't responsible for what happened before they were hired on.

I hope you appreciate the magnitude of those past sins. There are reasons people yell!

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> Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity.

I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly.

> How many more lives might have been saved over the past couple of decades if MS hadn't held features--ideas! concepts!--back again and again to enforce planned obsolescence?

Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?

If you want to talk about Microsoft's "past sins", I believe data trumps anecdotes: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498

If you have any solid data (rather than oft-repeated anecdotes) that MS inhibited innovation on a large scale, I'd like to see it.

People certainly yell for reasons, but those reasons are often very poorly informed.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/

> I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly.

Yes, these new trends are worrisome. But it's not the first time!

I firmly believe that we'd all be better off if THIS guy had been the one to introduce computers to the common man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf4EMN6-XA

To this day, Microsoft is putting computers in schools--but not LOGO, not free software, not unix, not lisp, not crates of disposable m68ks and bread boards... Nope, they are putting products in front of new generations eyeballs.

Data can trump anecdotes, and it should when a culture believes they are doing the right thing but things are still going poorly and nobody understands why--at those times, by all means, collect some data and analyze it!

But when "everybody knows" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it!

The whole planet got 0wned by MS before many of us here were born--certainly before most of us were competent. So this is what we've got, this is where we are.

Big picture: Where do we go from here? Immediate situation: don't become part of a new generation of MS fanboys. We don't need that.

The first link is an interesting tale of technical gamesmanship, but I don't see much bad about Microsoft in there. Other than the author's manager's empty threat to sue him, which is more of an individual case. I haven't heard of Microsoft suing employees are frequently as, say, Amazon actually does.

As for the Halloween documents, come on, 1) you're going to cite ESR, really? and 2) that boils down to "they said something bad about my religion / OS of choice". Marketing strategy commonly involves belittling your competitors. I laughed along at the Mac vs PC ads, even though I knew most of them were simply hyperbole.

> But when "everybody knows" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it!

1) Just like "everyone knew" the earth is flat?

2) "Everyone knows" Microsoft is "doing something wrong" only if you don't step out of the HN / Silicon Valley bubble. You and PG and thousands others might think MS is "irrelevant" and "dead" and "evil" and "produces crappy software", but it's trivially disproved by noting that it has consistently been in the top-5 brands worldwide by many different rankings (google it) for many years.

We may not need MS fanboys, but we sure has hell don't need MS haters who base their beliefs on incorrect information.

1a) I've cited ESR, really!

1b and 2b) I think you've made my point. So are we going to tell the rest of the world, or let them dangle?

> Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?

Are you joking? I'll just give you one example: IE 6 and its complete disregard for open standards, end-user security and its lack of change put the web in stasis for years. At first, it didn't make much difference that we had Firefox because developers still made their pages only compatible with Microsoft's non-compliant browser, which was understandable as most people used it. Since IE lost ground the web has become a much more open and welcoming space for experimentation and advancement of its technologies. And that's undeniable.

1. Letting IE stagnate is different from holding back "ideas! concepts!" because Firefox (free software) and Opera were still around to pick up the slack. Sure, it caused (and still does) a lot of pain to web developers to make cross-browser compatible webpages, but that's not the same as "holding back ideas".

2. Note also that vendor prefixes always were and are still a thing, so it's not just IE that had "non-compliant" features. Adding non-compliant features and then working them into the standards seems to be the natural way web technologies advance.

Especially with Opera in mind, I recall many new features being added to browsers regardless of IE's stagnation. Sure, they were not widely used because the then-dominant IE didn't have them, but that didn't prevent Opera and Firefox from adding them. So, unless you conflate "experimentation and advancement" with "widespread adoption", I would disagree that IE held back experimentation and advancement of web technologies.

> Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?

1. It's not just that the held back. It's not even primarily that they held back. It is that they taught countless CEOs that Excel was the state of the art way to think.

I don't believe that the best tools are widgets. I believe that the best tools are programming environments. When I really need to get some facts straight, I turn to my trusty shell and unix family of processing tools. When my boss has the same need, she turns to Excel. WTF? Sure, you can do some reasoning with that tool... "But for BETTER reasoning, upgrade to Excel 95!"

2. Even if some old ideas were never completely lost, they were unknown to most people. If it hadn't been for some crotchety old neck beards, we wouldn't be having this conversation... And some of them had to completely dedicate their lives to preserving the idea that computers are not a product, they are a gift to humanity.

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