3 ms·
I think the point of the word "dangerous" is a direct reference to the Microsoft of yore. For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read abou
by mistersquid 11y ago
I think the point of the word "dangerous" is a direct reference to the Microsoft of yore.
For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read about the history), Microsoft was legendary for "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." an internal credo that became known outside the company and came to represent the ruthlessness with which Microsoft flexed its muscle in new technology markets.
Microsoft was notorious for changing the way Windows works to stymie competitors, one of the most well known of these tactical maneuvers being the integration of IE into Windows which eventually killed Netscape. That particular bit of integration eventually led to their conviction under US anti-trust laws.
Microsoft's culture has since changed. Microsoft no longer seems as interested in blocking all competitors. They are building products that leverage standardized platforms and the present-day Microsoft even meaningfully contributes to open source projects and refrains from promoting incompatible work-alikes.
In other words, Microsoft is becoming once again a formidable company, this time with the that they tolerate (and increasingly collaborate with) other companies that develop technology to benefit users.
Microsoft is discovering that being successful does not mean shutting everyone else out and for this reason they are not "dangerous" in the sense they were in the 1990s when their efforts and "success" in many ways prevented the industry from advancing.
EDIT: Readability and style.
- dogma1138 11y agoNetscape killed itself, they lost the fight to Microsoft on several fronts, including the quality of the browser. Chrome and Firefox fair quite well against which was de-throned even tho it continued to be shipped as the default browsers on most machines with pre-installed Windows.
- RI_Swamp_Yankee 11y agoFirefox is Netscape. There's a reason you download it from Mozilla.org. It's an amazing demonstration of the power of open source to allow good software to exist and thrive beyond its original mission.
- dogma1138 11y agoNetscape kicked started Mozilla, the later versions of Netscape were built on top of Firefox not vise versa. The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser (Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla). Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty broken software. Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6 months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6. Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.