Hacker News Reader

Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?!

What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update.

Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any good application in the ecosystem and bundling it.

But SV didn't learn the lesson and we are now in more abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones. And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.

View on HN

Reading leaked Windows source code from the 90s, you can see MS went to pains to ensure non-compliant borland code worked. See [1][2]

[2] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/11942/2702

[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

> And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.

Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves.

Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" - I have a feeling he would fire you on the spot.

They even now support Linux on their Azure platform - and that's not a it-will-run-but-you-are-on-your-own.

Now, I'm not saying Microsoft is a saint or that I would want to work for them. But considering they didn't take action against the mono or ReactOS projects makes them ok in my book (not that they would have any real legal case - but they could drag those projects through an expensive lawsuit which would just end up with a deal to cease development).

I was going to say the same. The move to open source .net is brilliant. I wonder if some enterprising company will try to convert .net into asm.js so we can run it in the browsers.

What do you reason would be the benefit of doing that?

Access to non-managed code browsers (Android/Apple).

That is plain stupid given that .NET can be compiled to native code.

It's not as if Microsoft voluntarily got nicer. They did every dirty thing they could to dominate the PC industry and simply failed. Now they're beginning to steer their leaky ship in a better direction, good for them. For me personally, I'll never be a fan of the company that selfishly held the web back with IE for a decade because they didn't want to compete. Sic semper tyrannis!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

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

What you don't understand is that Bill Gates is from the future. I don't wanna talk about time travel shit. Cause if we start talking about it, then we're gonna be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws. It doesn't matter. The point is, Gates grew up in a dystopian world and traveled back in time to divert money from the assholes that created it towards charitable enterprises to fix the parts of humanity that were breaking down. Only time will tell if this strategy will work, but we have all the time in the world (and then some), thanks to time travel.

This is an interesting post. It sounds believable to me.

I'd like to think that we will get to a more ethical future.

I partially agree. Much of MS' recent moves are admirable, but they're clearly revivals of sidetracked projects and desperation moves to stay relevant as desktop OS dominance alone is beginning to lose its grip.

I wouldn't be all that snide about them. However, I can't say I find their platforms particularly palatable in general.

I've said this before (and was downvoted naturally):

Microsoft's new Open Source strategy needs to be viewed with exactly the same amount of suspicion as IBM's and Oracle's.

It may just be a move to reduce their expenses, since they may get unpaid software contributions and testing (Oracle's CEO pretty much admitted this in an interview).

I view it as an attack on the LAMP stack. Mono with self-hosted HTTP throw OWIN seems like a killer option. Let's face it, C# is a much better language for development than Java.

Some of Borland's problems had nothing to do with Microsoft. A good example is Borland taking 6 months to rewrite Quattro in object-oriented code. They did this in the middle of a heated battle with Microsoft Excel, where both companies were releasing major new features every 6 months. As awesome as OOP is, it is not a user-visible feature. Being MIA for 6 months while engineers OOP'd the code may have cost them the battle. You can read some of this in this story (search for 'object oriented'): http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/29/business/the-executive-com...

Some of Borland's problems were indeed Microsoft's doing. OWL vs. MFC, for example. OWL was the first object-oriented library for Windows, but MFC eventually won because MFC was always first to support Windows features. OWL lagged behind because Borland did not have access to in-development versions of Windows.

Borland applications such as Quattro Pro also suffered because Borland did not have access to in-development features of Windows such as OLE 2.0, and because of Microsoft bundling productivity applications into an Office "suite".

"abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones"

While some of this is Apple and Android, much of the root of this problem lies in the carriers themselves, not the software makers. Carriers have a long standing history of building very high and tight walled gardens around their networks, the devices on those networks, and even the versions of software that run on those devices. It has actually gotten a ton better since the App and Play Stores have come around. By building those walled garden stores the Apple and Android have pulled a lot of the burden for developers from individual carriers to single platforms. I would much rather have to work with a single walled garden such as the App Store than have to deal with coming up with a version of software for each carrier.

all tech companies do some shady stuff. look how apple sought to bury Adobe because Jobs felt slighted, manufacturers having to install nets to stop factory workers from committing suicide, evading hundreds of billions in paying taxes through Irish tax evasion. Stopping competitors from getting products to market through questionable patents and an army of lawyers. Uber making false calls mess with Lyft's operations. Google approaching Facebook to fix wages, bullying suppliers while suppliers took it for hopes of future business only to find Google built up their own works, and their sitting on Apple's board while secretly developing their own is questionable at best.

I would bet that the skeletons in the closets of these tech companies are far more darker then what we find out about. i guess the short point is, usually the same people who point(ed) at the evils of microsft praise other companies who have done far worse.

This is an interesting post. It sounds believable to me.

I'd like to think that we will get to a more ethical future.

No, not all tech companies do illegal things. It's a false equivalence.

* Chinese manufacturers aren't really "Silicon Valley tech companies" and workers there committing suicide has more to do with Chinese culture and poor work practices than technology.

* Keeping money in Ireland is not a crime. The government set up really dumb tax laws, and companies responded rationally to them.

* Patents suck, but again, it's a government issue. The government sets up patent laws, and you have to abide by them. Some companies are more abusive about this than others, but they all have to follow the law.

* Uber making false calls was unethical, and possibly a crime. Uber does suck as a company but not all tech companies are Uber.

* Google didn't approach Facebook to fix wages. Steve Jobs did that. It was illegal and the government fined everyone involved quite a bit of money (although probably not as much as they should have).

* "Google" doesn't sit on Apple's board. Some people from Google used to sit on Apple's board. If there is a conflict of interest they are supposed to resign, and that's exactly what happened when Google started competing with Apple's iPhone.

* Google doesn't bully suppliers, Apple does that (sometimes). Google doesn't manufacture Android phones, they get other companies to do that for them. Yes, even that Nexus phones.

* Microsoft was convicted by the Department of Justice of anticompetitive practices. If I remember correctly there were felony charges. If you don't understand how seriously unethical they were in the 80s and 90s, you haven't been paying attention at all.

Apparently you didn't bother keeping up with the trial:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

It was over IE as well, OMG they included a browser. Laughable now days, right? I used Netscape at the time and never had any issues installing or running it, even when IE hit 95% of the market.

Um, wow, ok. Look, you also have to consider the information that was revealed during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, not just what the DoJ decided to actually pursue.

Oh, and there has been more than one lawsuit to keep up with. A lot more than one lawsuit:

http://groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20050101071006...

It's really hard to describe the full impact of what it was like to have everyone in the industry working under the constant fear of getting targeted by Microsoft for more than a decade, and the way that this shaped the market and technology as a whole. Summing it up as "LOL they bundled a browser" betrays a really massive ignorance.

Kids on HN don't understand what it was like when Microsoft was the only software company in town with a future. Kind of like Standard Oil back in the Rockefeller days. Apple was dying, Google and Facebook didn't exist, Netscape had its "air supply" cut off and Borland, Delphi, and IBM looked like they were headed for the trash can of history. It's like trying to explain the Soviet Union to someone who was born in the 1990s. It just seems like a bunch of old men with bad haircuts, how scary could that possibly be?

I remember the conversations people had back then. You had basically 3 business models if you were going to run a software company. It was something like:

1. Stay so small/niche that Microsoft won't notice or care about you.

2. Avoid selling software as your primary source of income. This is basically a variant of #1.

3. Try to get bought by Microsoft. Ha, just kidding! Everybody knows that Microsoft doesn't buy stuff that's 'Not Innovated Here'.

3. Gamble. Hope you corner your market and extract as much value as possible from that market before Microsoft figures out what you're doing and enters your market. Or (later) C&D's you over some patents they have.

The weird thing is that outside the Bay Area (in some parts of Canada, at least), I still see startups recruiting for a #1-like business model, more-or-less: "The best $SOCIAL_MEDIA iPhone app in $CITY" or whatever. They're not actually afraid of Microsoft anymore, but it's like the mentality didn't go away.

Lmao kids. I got my first computer in 1983, how about you kid?

Laughable. MS was terrified of competition so they always went after competitors. The only reason it was MS instead of IBM is IBM was scared of more government regulation on their business.

Apple could have easily had this market and more if they'd opened up.

Maybe you didn't work as a developer in the 80s. I used Borland, Watcom and many other vendors along with many other OSes as well. Magically in the mid 1990s you could even run something called Linux on your PC.

Elsewhere in this discussion, finally someone mentioned a very "interesting" trick: Microsoft threw an obscene amount of money at the chief architect of Delphi. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9713816

I don't think dirty tricks by Microsoft was the cause. Pricing was more of it.

Judging by the other replies to your post, apparently HN has forgotten, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com