19 ms·

Microsoft Has It All—Almost (1985)

208 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

mschaef 9y ago
It's interesting to see this in the context of their later success, but one bit of trivia stood out: > Microsoft is now unleashing a barrage of programs, including ... Access, a communications package for the I.B.M. computer. This is the 'other' MS Access - the one that predates the database.
- bitwize 9y ago
  I've used it. It appears to have been designed more as a front end to the "online services" of the day, with presets for the big ones like CompuServe, rather than a generic RS232 terminal emulator program. The fact that it fared poorly on the VAX at work, or warez BBSes, may have doomed it.
- Nition 9y ago
  Has Microsoft been naming things confusingly forever, then? One recalls the Microsoft Surface from 2008 - A big touchsceen table.
nolok 9y ago
> But what is spoiling the party is that the company was eclipsed last year as the largest personal computer software concern by the Lotus Development Corporation, creator of the highly successful 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Lotus's revenues totaled $200 million for the 12 months ended June 30. Microsoft's revenues came to $140 million in that period. Between the fact that it was in '85 (long before the days of windows 95/98 and microsoft really "taking over the world"), the revenue total that wouldn't even register as a margin error for today's dominating tech companies, the fact that a deal with IBM meant they had "won it", or that their main competitor is a company so that they utterly destroyed a decade later ... What a blast from the past.
- mslot 9y ago
  > the fact that a deal with IBM meant they had "won it" The IBM deal meant that DOS was going to be the Operating System for IBM's Personal Computer and became the de facto OS for all IBM PC clones. That was the deal that made Microsoft and shaped the tech industry for a generation. Indeed they won it.
  - nolok 9y ago
    Oh I know that. I meant as a "how the role have reversed". I could see in today's world how if Watson was picked as Windows' assistant instead of Cortana, news articles would talk about how IBM had "won it" with that project.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - baldfat 9y ago
    Then we came to OS/2 and it's demise (Thought it got an update this year. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/5/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/half-... Man OS/2 Warp was going to be AWESOME and than the infighting killed the whole thing. :( In 1984 we also got IMB PCjr and that was IBM's home push and boy that lasted 13 months. IBM was just horrible in consumer computers. http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/ibmpcjr/ http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/ibmpcjr/
    - scholia 9y ago
      True ;-) > Man OS/2 Warp was going to be AWESOME and than the infighting killed the whole thing. :( OS/2 Warp was actually the IBM monopoly's last concerted attempt to kill little upstart Microsoft. One of IBM's senior managers at the time told me "We're going to burn Bill's butt." By that stage, it wasn't infighting, it was war. (The infighting was Microsoft's attempt to get IBM to accept Windows NT as OS/2 version 3.) As it happened, Microsoft had a very strong ally in Kirkland called ... IBM. Big Blue's PC division was interested in selling PCs and it was selling lots of PCs running Windows. PCs running OS/2 were virtually unsaleable. Eventually, Gerstner arrived and told the OS/2 guys they'd lost and they should just stop.
zekevermillion 9y ago
Windows ain't done 'til Lotus won't run! Just a little "friendly competition" in the words of 1985 NYT.
- mschaef 9y ago
  Lotus did a good job shooting itself in the foot. It's easy to second guess in hindsight, but it always amazed me that they didn't have any Windows story at all for their one major product, Lotus 1-2-3, until 1991 or 92. (And even then it was amazingly buggy.) (And they did have multiple text-mode PC versions, VMS, Unix, Improv for NeXTStep...)
  - pinewurst 9y ago
    It shouldn't be forgotten though that the original Lotus 1-2-3 was a masterpiece. Fast, easy to use, with a polished UI, a useful help system and tutorial. Almost all PC apps were amateur hour by comparison and that includes pre-Word MS.
    - mschaef 9y ago
      Absolutely - Versions 1 and 2 were brilliant. I remember watching my dad use it with the keyboard shortcuts and wondering how he navigated the menus without the arrows. Those slash commands wound up at the core of a nice little macro langauge in v1 that was heavily elaborated in v2. (I remember commands for custom menus, etc.) (...and it all worked on a 4.77MHz 8088.)
    - justherefortart 9y ago
      Word was a joke in the 80s/90s. Everyone used WordPerfect. By the end of the 90s though the MS Office addon had overtaken most places productivity software of choice. Primarily due to companies like Dell, Gateway 2000, AST, HP, Compaq, etc. including Office as an option when you purchased. I loved WP and 123. Begrudgingly switched to MS Office in 97.
      - mikestew 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
Bookmarked this to read when I / others doubt me. Very interesting and funny to look back with what we know today.
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Amazing book that goes up to 1994 or so is Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the microsoft Empire. It's writing and editing certainly leave a lot to be desired but from a historical standpoint about Microsoft, it's a fantastic read.
  - scholia 9y ago
    Gates by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews is a much better book. Bigger, better researched, better written, and a lot more accurate. (Paul Andrews worked for the Seattle Times and Microsoft was his beat. I guess he just had more and better contacts.) Hard Drive did well because it came out first and filled a big hole in the market. However, Gates was sufficiently better to become a best seller.
jasode 9y ago
>But selling software to consumers is different from selling highly technical operating systems directly to computer companies. To compete against sophisticated marketers like Lotus, The really young techies won't remember this since it was over 30 years ago but what Microsoft did during the 1980s in the software space was astounding. The 1970s Microsoft was originally a "programming languages" company. They sold MS BASIC and MS COBOL. In the 1980s, they added productivity apps like word processors and spreadsheets (Word and Excel). What's amazing is that they didn't acquire those from a competitor (like the later acquisitions of Spyglass for IE or Vermeer for MS Frontpage). Word & Excel were homegrown at Microsoft and Bill Gates hired Charles Simonyi to lead their development. They added operating systems like MS-DOS and later MS Windows & Window NT. MS-DOS was an acquisition but Windows NT was homegrown by hiring Dave Cutler. Nobody else replicated Microsoft's successful diversity in software. That included Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Computer Associates, Adobe, etc. That's 3 very different areas of software : programming + MS Office + operating systems. All 3 were huge profit machines. In the 1990s, they continued success with server-side software like SQL Server and MS Exchange. To give a modern analogy, imagine Jetbrains just selling programming IDEs like IntelliJ and PHPStorm. And then Samsung comes along and says, "we need an operating system for the millions of smartphones we're going to sell" so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben[1] to write the Android os for Samsung. And then Jetbrains decides that Android also needs a picture sharing app and hires Kevin Systrom[2] to develop Instagram. That absurd combination from one company is what Microsoft did in the 1980s and in that alternate universe, the Jetbrains owners would be multi-billionaires. Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. A comparable (and possibly more astounding diversification) in modern times would be Amazon's origins from selling books & CDs to selling AWS computation resources. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#History
- klipt 9y ago
  > Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. I think that's just that the market has changed. Google has programming languages, operating systems and office suites, and they're all more complicated than the offerings of 30 years ago, but given away for free (with advertising).
diminish 9y ago
> Microsoft was also hurt by its reputation for bringing products to market behind schedule and full of ''bugs'' or errors. In a letter in the latest issue of Macworld magazine, for instance, a reader gripes about finding ''15 bugs and 7 shortcomings'' in the initial Macintosh version of Microsoft Word. ''Word is typical untested Microsoft software,'' he said. Very interesting
non_sequitur 9y ago
"Microsoft and its 29-year-old chairman, William H. Gates, clearly want to be No. 1 again." Really amazing what he had done by 29. As someone older than that, I'm really starting to feel like I'm hitting the "older tier" of tech ages.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 9y ago
  The majority of tech companies that have acquired significant size, were founded by people in the 30s (or older). Gates is an extreme outlier. I made a large compilation list of famous founders a while back. You might be surprised at how not particularly young most of them are. I won't repost it here, but here's a link to that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477686
  - em500 9y ago
    But four out of the current big five were founded by people in their early/mid-20s (only exception is Bezos who just turned 30 when he founded Amazon).
- SteveBash 9y ago
  Billy's mommy had ties with IBM CEO John Opel, this is often overlooked but it's the key to MS success. Don't overestimate the philantropist , he always had a rich family.
  - telltruth 9y ago
    I've to say this is not very known... http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-h... She had been a regent at the University of Washington since 1975, the same year she became the first woman to serve as a director of First Interstate Bank and the first to serve as the president of the King County's United Way. She was later appointed to the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she became the first woman to lead it. Right Time, Right Place Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft. Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer. And this... http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/2005/12/bills_billions_.html http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/... Why did IBM even go to Redmond, WA in the first place? At the time, IBM president John Opel served on United Way's national board...as did Mrs. Gates. In 1980, when someone mentioned Microsoft to John Opel, he responded, "Oh, that's run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates' son." Behind the scenes, Mary Gates had spoken with John Opel about the new breed of small companies in the computer industry, which she felt were under-appreciated competitors of the larger firms with which IBM traditionally partnered.
pwdisswordfish2 9y ago
"Microsoft was also hurt by its reputation for bringing products to market behind schedule and full of ''bugs'' or errors. In a letter in the latest issue of Macworld magazine, for instance, a reader gripes about finding ''15 bugs and 7 shortcomings'' in the initial Macintosh version of Microsoft Word. ''Word is typical untested Microsoft software,'' he said." It sounds like even in 1985, some users had higher expectations for software. Their expectations were higher than Microsoft's suitable standards for 1985 end users. This only refers to "bugs" and "shortcomings". In 1985 security issues associated with remote network access were not something any user would think to complain about. The best was yet to come.
adventured 9y ago
For reference. Microsoft's growth history: 1980 | $8m sales (40 employees) 1981 | $17m sales 1982 | $24.4m sales (220 employees) 1983 | $55m sales 1984 | $97.4m sales 1985 | $140m sales 1986 | $197m sales 1987 | $345m sales 1988 | $590m sales 1989 | $804m sales 1990 | $1.18b sales | 5,635 employees 1991 | $1.84b sales 1992 | $2.76b sales 1993 | $3.78b sales | $953m profit 1994 | $4.7b sales | $1.1b profit 1995 | $6.1b sales | $1.45b profit 1996 | $8.67b sales | $2.19b profit | 20,561 employees 1997 | $11.4b sales | $3.45b profit 1998 | $14.5b sales | $4.5b profit 1999 | $19.7b sales | $7.78b profit 2000 | $22.9b sales | $9.4b profit
- scholia 9y ago
  It looks better as a graph ;-)
webreac 9y ago
I remember the agressiv commercial technics, the troll-like litigations and how easy it was to copy their software (no copy protection) compared to the concurrents. Before microsoft, software was expensive. Many people were programming their own games or software with the language of their computer (a mix of proprietary basic and assembly). After, everybody had pirated copies of Win3.1 and Office and were coding excel macros :-( For me, there was an explosion of creativity between 1983 and 1992 where people were empowered to program. After, programming was for "specialists". I have hated a lot Microsoft at that time.
- mikestew 9y ago
  how easy it was to copy their software (no copy protection) compared to the concurrents. That's an important point that I forgot about until you mentioned it: I bought Microsoft software because it was easy to copy, or more accurately, lacked copy protection. This was in the days of having to shove the original disk in the drive even if you had it copied to the hard drive. It'd be one thing if floppies were more reliable, but $DEITY help you if that master disk went bad, because Lotus would be...less than helpful. So I rewarded the "good guy" by buying their unprotected software. Hey, if they trust me enough to not copy-protect it, the least I can do is pay for a copy. And when Windows NT went out, I remember big debate about whether Microsoft could do enterprise software, given that all they'd really done to that point was put out applications and dev tools, and a cute little graphical shell that went on top of their cute little toy operating system.
shmerl 9y ago
About having it all: https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-1819564663 https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-18195...
grawprog 9y ago
"Microsoft was also hurt by its reputation for bringing products to market behind schedule and full of ''bugs'' or errors." I guess some things never change.
- scholia 9y ago
  The number of bugs found reflects the number of users and the range of equipment they are using. There are probably more bugs in most non-Microsoft applications, it's just that they don't have enough users to find them....

208 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

It's interesting to see this in the context of their later success, but one bit of trivia stood out: > Microsoft is now unleashing a barrage of programs, including ... Access, a communications package for the I.B.M. computer. This is the 'other' MS Access - the one that predates the database.

bitwize 9y ago
I've used it. It appears to have been designed more as a front end to the "online services" of the day, with presets for the big ones like CompuServe, rather than a generic RS232 terminal emulator program. The fact that it fared poorly on the VAX at work, or warez BBSes, may have doomed it.
Nition 9y ago
Has Microsoft been naming things confusingly forever, then? One recalls the Microsoft Surface from 2008 - A big touchsceen table.

nolok 9y ago

> But what is spoiling the party is that the company was eclipsed last year as the largest personal computer software concern by the Lotus Development Corporation, creator of the highly successful 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Lotus's revenues totaled $200 million for the 12 months ended June 30. Microsoft's revenues came to $140 million in that period. Between the fact that it was in '85 (long before the days of windows 95/98 and microsoft really "taking over the world"), the revenue total that wouldn't even register as a margin error for today's dominating tech companies, the fact that a deal with IBM meant they had "won it", or that their main competitor is a company so that they utterly destroyed a decade later ... What a blast from the past.

mslot 9y ago
> the fact that a deal with IBM meant they had "won it" The IBM deal meant that DOS was going to be the Operating System for IBM's Personal Computer and became the de facto OS for all IBM PC clones. That was the deal that made Microsoft and shaped the tech industry for a generation. Indeed they won it.
- nolok 9y ago
  Oh I know that. I meant as a "how the role have reversed". I could see in today's world how if Watson was picked as Windows' assistant instead of Cortana, news articles would talk about how IBM had "won it" with that project.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- baldfat 9y ago
  Then we came to OS/2 and it's demise (Thought it got an update this year. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/5/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/half-... Man OS/2 Warp was going to be AWESOME and than the infighting killed the whole thing. :( In 1984 we also got IMB PCjr and that was IBM's home push and boy that lasted 13 months. IBM was just horrible in consumer computers. http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/ibmpcjr/ http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/ibmpcjr/
  - scholia 9y ago
    True ;-) > Man OS/2 Warp was going to be AWESOME and than the infighting killed the whole thing. :( OS/2 Warp was actually the IBM monopoly's last concerted attempt to kill little upstart Microsoft. One of IBM's senior managers at the time told me "We're going to burn Bill's butt." By that stage, it wasn't infighting, it was war. (The infighting was Microsoft's attempt to get IBM to accept Windows NT as OS/2 version 3.) As it happened, Microsoft had a very strong ally in Kirkland called ... IBM. Big Blue's PC division was interested in selling PCs and it was selling lots of PCs running Windows. PCs running OS/2 were virtually unsaleable. Eventually, Gerstner arrived and told the OS/2 guys they'd lost and they should just stop.

zekevermillion 9y ago

Windows ain't done 'til Lotus won't run! Just a little "friendly competition" in the words of 1985 NYT.

mschaef 9y ago
Lotus did a good job shooting itself in the foot. It's easy to second guess in hindsight, but it always amazed me that they didn't have any Windows story at all for their one major product, Lotus 1-2-3, until 1991 or 92. (And even then it was amazingly buggy.) (And they did have multiple text-mode PC versions, VMS, Unix, Improv for NeXTStep...)
- pinewurst 9y ago
  It shouldn't be forgotten though that the original Lotus 1-2-3 was a masterpiece. Fast, easy to use, with a polished UI, a useful help system and tutorial. Almost all PC apps were amateur hour by comparison and that includes pre-Word MS.
  - mschaef 9y ago
    Absolutely - Versions 1 and 2 were brilliant. I remember watching my dad use it with the keyboard shortcuts and wondering how he navigated the menus without the arrows. Those slash commands wound up at the core of a nice little macro langauge in v1 that was heavily elaborated in v2. (I remember commands for custom menus, etc.) (...and it all worked on a 4.77MHz 8088.)
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    Word was a joke in the 80s/90s. Everyone used WordPerfect. By the end of the 90s though the MS Office addon had overtaken most places productivity software of choice. Primarily due to companies like Dell, Gateway 2000, AST, HP, Compaq, etc. including Office as an option when you purchased. I loved WP and 123. Begrudgingly switched to MS Office in 97.
    - mikestew 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

Bookmarked this to read when I / others doubt me. Very interesting and funny to look back with what we know today.

justherefortart 9y ago
Amazing book that goes up to 1994 or so is Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the microsoft Empire. It's writing and editing certainly leave a lot to be desired but from a historical standpoint about Microsoft, it's a fantastic read.
- scholia 9y ago
  Gates by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews is a much better book. Bigger, better researched, better written, and a lot more accurate. (Paul Andrews worked for the Seattle Times and Microsoft was his beat. I guess he just had more and better contacts.) Hard Drive did well because it came out first and filled a big hole in the market. However, Gates was sufficiently better to become a best seller.

jasode 9y ago

>But selling software to consumers is different from selling highly technical operating systems directly to computer companies. To compete against sophisticated marketers like Lotus, The really young techies won't remember this since it was over 30 years ago but what Microsoft did during the 1980s in the software space was astounding. The 1970s Microsoft was originally a "programming languages" company. They sold MS BASIC and MS COBOL. In the 1980s, they added productivity apps like word processors and spreadsheets (Word and Excel). What's amazing is that they didn't acquire those from a competitor (like the later acquisitions of Spyglass for IE or Vermeer for MS Frontpage). Word & Excel were homegrown at Microsoft and Bill Gates hired Charles Simonyi to lead their development. They added operating systems like MS-DOS and later MS Windows & Window NT. MS-DOS was an acquisition but Windows NT was homegrown by hiring Dave Cutler. Nobody else replicated Microsoft's successful diversity in software. That included Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Computer Associates, Adobe, etc. That's 3 very different areas of software : programming + MS Office + operating systems. All 3 were huge profit machines. In the 1990s, they continued success with server-side software like SQL Server and MS Exchange. To give a modern analogy, imagine Jetbrains just selling programming IDEs like IntelliJ and PHPStorm. And then Samsung comes along and says, "we need an operating system for the millions of smartphones we're going to sell" so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben[1] to write the Android os for Samsung. And then Jetbrains decides that Android also needs a picture sharing app and hires Kevin Systrom[2] to develop Instagram. That absurd combination from one company is what Microsoft did in the 1980s and in that alternate universe, the Jetbrains owners would be multi-billionaires. Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. A comparable (and possibly more astounding diversification) in modern times would be Amazon's origins from selling books & CDs to selling AWS computation resources. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#History

klipt 9y ago
> Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. I think that's just that the market has changed. Google has programming languages, operating systems and office suites, and they're all more complicated than the offerings of 30 years ago, but given away for free (with advertising).

diminish 9y ago

> Microsoft was also hurt by its reputation for bringing products to market behind schedule and full of ''bugs'' or errors. In a letter in the latest issue of Macworld magazine, for instance, a reader gripes about finding ''15 bugs and 7 shortcomings'' in the initial Macintosh version of Microsoft Word. ''Word is typical untested Microsoft software,'' he said. Very interesting

non_sequitur 9y ago

"Microsoft and its 29-year-old chairman, William H. Gates, clearly want to be No. 1 again." Really amazing what he had done by 29. As someone older than that, I'm really starting to feel like I'm hitting the "older tier" of tech ages.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
adventured 9y ago
The majority of tech companies that have acquired significant size, were founded by people in the 30s (or older). Gates is an extreme outlier. I made a large compilation list of famous founders a while back. You might be surprised at how not particularly young most of them are. I won't repost it here, but here's a link to that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477686
- em500 9y ago
  But four out of the current big five were founded by people in their early/mid-20s (only exception is Bezos who just turned 30 when he founded Amazon).
SteveBash 9y ago
Billy's mommy had ties with IBM CEO John Opel, this is often overlooked but it's the key to MS success. Don't overestimate the philantropist , he always had a rich family.
- telltruth 9y ago
  I've to say this is not very known... http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-h... She had been a regent at the University of Washington since 1975, the same year she became the first woman to serve as a director of First Interstate Bank and the first to serve as the president of the King County's United Way. She was later appointed to the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she became the first woman to lead it. Right Time, Right Place Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft. Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer. And this... http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/2005/12/bills_billions_.html http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/... Why did IBM even go to Redmond, WA in the first place? At the time, IBM president John Opel served on United Way's national board...as did Mrs. Gates. In 1980, when someone mentioned Microsoft to John Opel, he responded, "Oh, that's run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates' son." Behind the scenes, Mary Gates had spoken with John Opel about the new breed of small companies in the computer industry, which she felt were under-appreciated competitors of the larger firms with which IBM traditionally partnered.

pwdisswordfish2 9y ago

"Microsoft was also hurt by its reputation for bringing products to market behind schedule and full of ''bugs'' or errors. In a letter in the latest issue of Macworld magazine, for instance, a reader gripes about finding ''15 bugs and 7 shortcomings'' in the initial Macintosh version of Microsoft Word. ''Word is typical untested Microsoft software,'' he said." It sounds like even in 1985, some users had higher expectations for software. Their expectations were higher than Microsoft's suitable standards for 1985 end users. This only refers to "bugs" and "shortcomings". In 1985 security issues associated with remote network access were not something any user would think to complain about. The best was yet to come.

adventured 9y ago

scholia 9y ago
It looks better as a graph ;-)

webreac 9y ago

I remember the agressiv commercial technics, the troll-like litigations and how easy it was to copy their software (no copy protection) compared to the concurrents. Before microsoft, software was expensive. Many people were programming their own games or software with the language of their computer (a mix of proprietary basic and assembly). After, everybody had pirated copies of Win3.1 and Office and were coding excel macros :-( For me, there was an explosion of creativity between 1983 and 1992 where people were empowered to program. After, programming was for "specialists". I have hated a lot Microsoft at that time.

mikestew 9y ago
how easy it was to copy their software (no copy protection) compared to the concurrents. That's an important point that I forgot about until you mentioned it: I bought Microsoft software because it was easy to copy, or more accurately, lacked copy protection. This was in the days of having to shove the original disk in the drive even if you had it copied to the hard drive. It'd be one thing if floppies were more reliable, but $DEITY help you if that master disk went bad, because Lotus would be...less than helpful. So I rewarded the "good guy" by buying their unprotected software. Hey, if they trust me enough to not copy-protect it, the least I can do is pay for a copy. And when Windows NT went out, I remember big debate about whether Microsoft could do enterprise software, given that all they'd really done to that point was put out applications and dev tools, and a cute little graphical shell that went on top of their cute little toy operating system.

shmerl 9y ago

About having it all: https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-1819564663 https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-18195...

grawprog 9y ago

"Microsoft was also hurt by its reputation for bringing products to market behind schedule and full of ''bugs'' or errors." I guess some things never change.

scholia 9y ago
The number of bugs found reflects the number of users and the range of equipment they are using. There are probably more bugs in most non-Microsoft applications, it's just that they don't have enough users to find them....