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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

> Will Bill Gates ever make up for the billions of damage he caused humanity by using underhand tactics to destroy his opposition? Maybe. But while everyone praises him at the moment, I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit. You almost can't start calculating the damage he caused precisely because it is so mind boggling.

I would be very interested if you could elaborate on the specifics of "the billions of damage he caused humanity" and "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years", these seem like rather extraordinary claims.

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I've competed in the compiler business against Microsoft from the very beginning. They are smart and tough competitors. But they were never, ever, mean. On the contrary, Microsoft has been invariably friendly and collegial towards my business, and helpful when I've asked for help, and this was from the beginning (the 80's) right up to the present.

for the younger folks here on HN I wanted to point out that Mr. Bright was the creator of the Zortech C and C++ compilers of old, as well as the co-creator of one of the most famous early computer strategy games of all time, Empire and Empire Deluxe. He would know whereof he speaks.

I personally used the Zortech tools in my C/C++ days, played Empire a ton, even written a few hobby clones of Empire.

So, not anything like Apple or DR DOS or Netscape that ever came near threatening MS.

So how is your compiler business today? Was it ever even remotely competitive with Microsoft strategy? no ? Thought so.

In fact you might call yourself lucky for not going into business with MS, or you would end up like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendo

Microsoft was a major blocker to the uptake of unix-like operating systems, using their market dominance to force hardware suppliers to ship equipment with an OS. Given that unix is frequently free (particularly for home users), you could claim that a significant portion of the literally hundreds of billions of dollars Microsoft made from Windows licensing does in fact constitute damage to humanity through paying for something they could have done without (though phrasing it as 'damage to humanity' sounds a bit more of a moral argument).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...

This argument would make every commercial competitor of free software as "evil". It would also imply that all humans should seize all commercial software development as soon as something free is available. This is obviously not true. People don't pay for things that they don't have to. Windows was much more user friendly operating system than *nix and despite of several of its shortcomings, it was fairly usable by huge swatch of non-technical people. This why people demanded it on their PC and directly or in-directly paid for it.

People don't pay for things that they don't have to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...

The same kind of thing happened 15 years later with UEFI and Secure Boot.

seriously? Out of all crowds I would think anyone here would immediately get the terribleness of IE and how it had a huge impact on keeping the internet back. And IE's (diminishing) dominance has everything to owe to the monopoly Microsoft imposed on that space for a long time.

I cannot believe people still argue that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was a BadThing™.

http://xkcd.com/1118/

It's so unbelievably mild to the walled gardens of today's app store where Apple, Google or Microsoft could freely choose to eliminate all browser apps on their platform if they chose.

That wasn't the bad thing. Killing off the IE team when it hit 90+% marketshare and not releasing ANY new browser for more than five years... yeah. that was a bad thing.

Apple does prohibit other browsers on their (iOS) platform. You can ship a "browser" app, but it must use their engine. You cannot bring your own. Alternate iOS browsers are basically just reskinned copies of Safari.

As for the others, they're more open because they see it as a competitive advantage. That's something Microsoft didn't have to think about, since they owned 95% of the market and nobody would figure out how to break in for over a decade.

I wouldn't say that bundling IE was bad. What was bad was so thoroughly crushing all of the competition that "Windows" and "PC OS" became all but synonymous, and then that lack of competition causing terrible stagnation and the terror-filled reign of IE6.

> Apple does prohibit other browsers on their (iOS) platform.

That is not true, otherwise, what do you have to say regarding Chrome for iOS [0]?

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google...

It's a reskinned Safari, as I said.

That comic does not suggest that it wasn't a bad thing. Just because worse things happen does not make less bad things into good things.

Just neglecting to continue to develop a piece of software isn't exactly "inflicting billions of damage" on "humanity". Letting IE stagnate was a dumb move, but it's not like MS had a moral imperative to constantly improve it. Shame on the marketplace if it took a while for a feasible competitor to emerge.

Perhaps you're too young, but you don't seem to understand what MS did.

They drove the competitor (Netscape) out of business by giving away their browser. There's no way for the market to correct for that or "a feasible competitor to emerge".

It amazes me that someone who's only 5 years younger than me and even has a CS degree is so completely out of touch with recent computer history. I understand why, everything changes so fast, but you cannot understand what MS did if you weren't there. Their callous destruction of Netscape stopped an era of rapid innovation in internet technologies, HTML & js simply stagnated for almost 6-7 years afterwards, before it had been iterating rapidly.

It is now back to iterating like it did, these last 2-3 years and the WHATWG, it really feels like things are back on track again, though some really, really important things are still taking a while (like observables, which are super important for GUI driven apps).

I guess I just don't see a direct correlation between what happened with MS in the late '90s and how web technologies have evolved (or not evolved) after that. Who's to say things wouldn't have been as bad (or worse) without IE?

It's an imponderable, we'll never know the answer. You are extrapolating it out to a scenario where IE didn't exist, and Netscape, the standards organizations, and all the other key players were harmonious stewards of some sort of golden age.

I'm not saying that I support anything that Microsoft did in the '90s, rather that it is totally plausible to me that the players in the no-IE parallel universe were perfectly capable of screwing things up just as badly or worse. Since it's extrapolation, what's plausible to us says more about how we feel about the different players than anything else.

It wasn't so much IE in itself but the IE/Frontpage/ActiveX trinity they managed to make synonymous with enterprise for a while. It was a nasty time to work in the Internet space, especially for a web developer.

They did a lot of other strange things as well. I know Microsoft people showed up to at least one IETF working group pretending to be interested in doing standards work, only to return later having patented key points of the standard, saying they weren't interested anymore.

So IE was just a small part of that famous strategy, even if it was a central piece. But the bundling was never much of an issue unless you were a direct competitor. The only reason that's what people remember is the court case was widely reported in media at the time.

I agree with you. Netscape (4.0 iirc) was a horrible piece of software. MS originally went off on its own with IE because the standards bodies were so slow. It wasn't embrace and extend so much as it was ship working software. XML/XSL transformer in the browser, IE had that. Invention of AJAX, yep, IE also.

The problem was the combination of IE6 (at the time, the best browser out there) and MS business tactics simply crushed everyone else. At that point MS decided to work on other things and let IE waste.

Then Firefox amd Safari arose, and it didn't really work out well for Microsoft. I mean, I see that as Microsoft's mistake, not them setting the market back. And what if microsoft did keep pushing on IE at the time? Things might have been worse off now for it.

I'm 41 and lived through this era and totally disagree with the idea that Microsoft killed Netscape (I don't disagree that Microsoft wanted Netscape dead, I just firmly believe Netscape was doomed anyway).

But if anyone killed Netscape by giving away free software it was the Apache project since for a while selling web server software was a viable business, while OTOH there's really no historical data to support the fact that selling web browser licenses was ever going to be an economically successful strategy outside of niche markets like Opera.

And whether or not Microsoft directly killed Netscape or not, I'd argue that the web would not be nearly the ubiquitous technology it is today if web browser software typically cost money, which means that by standardizing web browser software as free Microsoft did the entire web industry (if not netscape) a great service, really.

They released a free browser and then didn't innovate. You can paint the picture however you like for yourself, but I distinctly remember what it was like to try to develop anything in javascript for IE. It was beyond horrible. In their defence they did come up with Ajax which has been a boon of course.

And yet most software today is free. Yes, I was on the internet in that era. And no, I never did understand what was so awful about giving away software. All the software I write today I give away, too :-)

I, for one, am happy not having to pay for my web browser.

Aren't Mozilla and Google giving away their browsers, too? What are the rules for deciding if giving away a browser is good or evil?

It's pretty straightforward -- if an evil agent does it, the act is evil; otherwise, it's good.

It always saddens me to think of how many people want to see this principle enshrined in law.

Setting a standard for every browser to cost the end user nothing seems to have worked out pretty well for the Web and everyone on it.

IE3 was a fantastic browser at a time when the only real alternative (Netscape Navigator) had become a bloated piece of shit.

It wasn't until IE4's years-long stagnation that IE had what I would consider a negative impact on "keeping the internet back" and Netscape's spectacular pre-Firefox implosion had just as much to do with that as Microsoft's IE bundling did, since there was a good stretch with no really viable alternative browser that didn't suck even worse than IE.

And on the topic of Netscape's implosion, I'd argue that while Microsoft's business practices didn't do Netscape any favors, Netscape's complete failure as a company was 50% on Netscape itself executing poorly, 49% on apache totally killing the idea of "paid web server software market" and maybe 1% Microsoft's business practices... at best).

Also to be fair you also have to factor in the many ways in which Microsoft pushed the "internet" (and by that I am speaking mostly of the web) forward. One example: XMLHttpRequest ("Ajax"), prior to which the web was a very static "electronic pamphlet"-y place.

I'd also argue that not bundling IE with Windows would have held the internet (in terms of people being connected) back a lot more than bundling it did. At the very least IE is (still) the best, easiest way to download and install Chrome on a new Windows install.

Saying "IE sucks" in no way explains "the billions of damage he caused humanity" or "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years".

Internet Explorer 6's stagnation.

Microsoft is also the reason why people expect good browser technology to be essentially free and embedded in all things; the world as run by Netscape looks nigh-unto distopian in 2014 :(. They cared about CSS when Netscape didn't (who instead added a ton of proprietary extensions we now hate: the massive pile of presentation styling we now consider a dirge on HTML), and for that the W3C looked upon them very favorably. It also seems hard to blame them for letting IE6 stagnate when they were coming out of the anti-trust lawsuits, the ones where Netscape fought hard to defend their business model--which they lost. Microsoft is not a company that internally works on things because they are mission critical, but because they are fun and motivating to engineers. They backed CSS, invented AJAX, and forced JavaScript to be a multi-vendor standard rather than a competitive advantage of Netscape; they then had the gall to integrate it as an API and use it in their OS (something we now just assume any reasonable development environment will have), because they thought the web was the future. For more information, and some evidence, in case you don't remember all of this playing out at the time, I will refer you to this older comment thread :(. The world just isn't this black and white: none of these players come off very well; but if you want to measure impact to the world in dollars of agony, Microsoft's moves in the world of browser technology don't seem all that bad. (If you want to complain about Microsoft, complain about Office or DOS or something, not IE.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716596

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