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Comment by chao- | Hacker News Reader

To hear Brendan Eich tell it, Microsoft's mindset went beyond simply "We have a monopoly so we can do whatever we want." It was a conscious "The web isn't the future" attitude. From the JavaScript Jabber podcast:

"After IE6 they took the team down to a skeleton crew and they stopped fixing bugs. They had horrendous security bugs and page layout bugs and DOM bugs and networking bugs. And they just said, 'Ah, the web is over. We’re going to do Windows presentation foundation,' which became Silverlight. 'We're going to do .NET. The web, that was a passing fad, sort of like television.' So…"

Now whether or not Eich is the absolute authority or not on this, I can't say, but he certainly interacted with them enough to have a deeper perspective than the average, frustrated dev in 00's.

(Source: http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript...)

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I interned at Microsoft when they were trying to ramp up from from the skeleton crew. The impression I got was that this was part of it, but also that Microsoft was averse to innovating on IE after the US antitrust case.

Microsoft didn't need to do any "innovating." They just needed to adhere to existing and emerging standards. Also, Microsoft needs to seriously stop using that word "innovation,"because the more they talked about it, the less they actually did. It got to the point that Microsoft fooled themselves into thinking that everything they did was innovation.

And, while I don't have a source at hand (I should be asleep!), it's also worthwhile to know that the IE team that shipped 6 didn't have any idea it was about to ramped down — had they known that, they'd have pushed much harder to fix more bugs before shipping.

It boggles my mind that this can be a post-1998 worldview. I understand that they were late to the game, but late, then invested, and then flippant?

Or will a mobile world prove them right, but too early?

  >  I understand that they were late to the game, but late, then invested, and then flippant?

Yeah. At the time when the IE team was disbanded, Internet usage was still exploding in the US and all over the world.

There's just literally no way they could have looked at that and concluded that it was some kind of fad that had run its course. If Brendan Eich honestly believes Microsoft thought that, I'm glad he wound up not being CEO of Mozilla.

Instead, I think it's incredibly clear that Microsoft understood the web's power very well. Once they achieved near-total market share with IE6, they clearly made a conscious, strategic decision to retard the growth of the web by ceasing to improve their browser because they knew that the growth of the web would render one's operating system mostly irrelevant someday.

And it actually worked for a few years in the early 2000's. Sort of. Dragging their heels on IE6 did buy Microsoft some time; they just didn't manage to use it very well (thankfully).

Things stagnated on the client-side web for a while in the early 2000s (because anything you built still had to work on IE6) and Microsoft continued to incrementally improve Windows, Office, they started Silverlight, and their server-side dev tools inched ahead as well.

Maybe true, but the bits he's picking out are kinda wrong IMHO. WPF hasn't changed much since it was first done in the mid 00s, Microsoft didn't put the same improvement into developer productivity for WPF as they have for ASP.NET (Webforms -> ASP.NET MVC, vNext etc). WPF workflow is still painful despite it being around for nearly 10 years and Xaml as a concept being around longer.

But Silverlight has been retired. The original plan was for WPF to be separated into the Windows part and the web part. The web part failed miserably. It was yet another attempt to make a Microsoft only solution for a common problem.

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