3 ms·

Ditching Flight Simulator was one of the dumbest decisions Microsoft ever made. It's probably one of their best known games, with a hardcore user base.

by motters 16y ago

bl4k 16y ago
Somebody I know very well was making small talk with Steve Ballmer and asked "So why did you guys get rid of Ensemble Studios, I have lost hours of time with those games and loved them". Steves response was: "who?" Gives you an idea of how things are at Microsoft.
- techsupporter 16y ago
  The internal uproar when FS got dropped was deafening. I'm on several "social" distribution lists and at least 3/4ths of them had some kind of long thread wanting to know whose head the sender could chew off for making this "happen."
cstross 16y ago
Naah ... their dumbest move was circa-1987, when they sold their license to market a product based on System V UNIX called Xenix to a then little-known device driver shop run by a father-son duo called Larry and Doug Michels, in return for a stake in their company. Who subsequently used Xenix to grow their start-up, the Santa Cruz Operation, into a $200M/year multinational. (This was before the dark days in the late 90s when, having been spanked out of the desktop market, the board of SCO sold their IP and the company name to a linux startup from Utah called Caldera, who renamed themselves the SCO Group and went into the IP troll business. Thus indelibly blackening one of the names on my resume.) If M$ hadn't sold Xenix to SCO and focussed on OS/2 it's possible they'd have moved wholesale into UNIX circa 1988 with the advent of the ia32 architecture. And the whole history of desktop OS development through the late 80s and 90s would have been unrecognizable ... (Somewhere I have some old PC magazines, circa 1982-84, with advertisements by Microsoft promoting "UNIX -- the operating system of the future!")
- glhaynes 16y ago
  I wonder if they'd have done better with that route, though, or if they'd have ended up just another UNIX vendor (i.e. getting their lunch absolutely eaten by Linux et al).
  - cstross 16y ago
    The problem that stopped SCO going head-to-head with Microsoft back in the days of Windows 3.1 and OS/2 was licensing encumbrances. AIUI, every time they sold a copy of Open Desktop (the predecessor to SCO OpenServer) they had to shell out $200 to various licensees. Sun got around the problem (at least as of Solaris) by forking out $BIGNUM on a permanent license for SVR4. SCO stuck at SVR3.2 -- because by the time they knew they wanted an SVR4.x license, AT&T were wanting eye-wateringly huge license fees per copy shipped -- but did some white-room cloning work so that by 1994 or thereabouts just about the only AT&T SVR3.2 code remaining was the copyright declarations in the kernel headers: OpenServer was effectively an SVR4.2 clone. (A year or so later they actually bit the bullet and bought an SVR4.3 license ...) But rewind to 1990, in our time line. Until then, Microsoft were the junior partner in the IBM/Microsoft alliance. They'd promised to deliver a superior OS to MS-DOS, with a windowing system on top; the first couple of iterations of OS/2 were dismal, as were Windows 1 and Windows 2, but the plan was to collaborate on OS/2 2.x and then ship a next generation product, OS/2 3.0, aka "NT". As it happened, Microsoft gambled on NT while IBM stuck with OS/2, thinking that they still owned the market. But if we back up to 1987, before OS/2 1.0 shipped, the UNIX-on-PC codebase was clearly a better platform for a multi-tasking OS, and MS-DOS backward compatability could be supplied via VP-IX (if I'm remembering SCO's DOS-box's name properly). If we posit that Microsoft retained Xenix and decided to develop UNIX further, the only question is whether Bill would have coughed for an unlimited AT&T license, just as Sun did. And I think -- given MS's history of buying up the IP they needed in order to hit a marketing requirement (and remembering that I'm an outsider, so this opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it :) -- they might well have done so.

Ditching Flight Simulator was one of the dumbest decisions Microsoft ever made. It's probably one of their best known games, with a hardcore user base.

by motters 16y ago

Ditching Flight Simulator was one of the dumbest decisions Microsoft ever made. It's probably one of their best known games, with a hardcore user base.

bl4k 16y ago

Somebody I know very well was making small talk with Steve Ballmer and asked "So why did you guys get rid of Ensemble Studios, I have lost hours of time with those games and loved them". Steves response was: "who?" Gives you an idea of how things are at Microsoft.

techsupporter 16y ago
The internal uproar when FS got dropped was deafening. I'm on several "social" distribution lists and at least 3/4ths of them had some kind of long thread wanting to know whose head the sender could chew off for making this "happen."

cstross 16y ago

Naah ... their dumbest move was circa-1987, when they sold their license to market a product based on System V UNIX called Xenix to a then little-known device driver shop run by a father-son duo called Larry and Doug Michels, in return for a stake in their company. Who subsequently used Xenix to grow their start-up, the Santa Cruz Operation, into a $200M/year multinational. (This was before the dark days in the late 90s when, having been spanked out of the desktop market, the board of SCO sold their IP and the company name to a linux startup from Utah called Caldera, who renamed themselves the SCO Group and went into the IP troll business. Thus indelibly blackening one of the names on my resume.) If M$ hadn't sold Xenix to SCO and focussed on OS/2 it's possible they'd have moved wholesale into UNIX circa 1988 with the advent of the ia32 architecture. And the whole history of desktop OS development through the late 80s and 90s would have been unrecognizable ... (Somewhere I have some old PC magazines, circa 1982-84, with advertisements by Microsoft promoting "UNIX -- the operating system of the future!")

glhaynes 16y ago
I wonder if they'd have done better with that route, though, or if they'd have ended up just another UNIX vendor (i.e. getting their lunch absolutely eaten by Linux et al).
- cstross 16y ago
  The problem that stopped SCO going head-to-head with Microsoft back in the days of Windows 3.1 and OS/2 was licensing encumbrances. AIUI, every time they sold a copy of Open Desktop (the predecessor to SCO OpenServer) they had to shell out $200 to various licensees. Sun got around the problem (at least as of Solaris) by forking out $BIGNUM on a permanent license for SVR4. SCO stuck at SVR3.2 -- because by the time they knew they wanted an SVR4.x license, AT&T were wanting eye-wateringly huge license fees per copy shipped -- but did some white-room cloning work so that by 1994 or thereabouts just about the only AT&T SVR3.2 code remaining was the copyright declarations in the kernel headers: OpenServer was effectively an SVR4.2 clone. (A year or so later they actually bit the bullet and bought an SVR4.3 license ...) But rewind to 1990, in our time line. Until then, Microsoft were the junior partner in the IBM/Microsoft alliance. They'd promised to deliver a superior OS to MS-DOS, with a windowing system on top; the first couple of iterations of OS/2 were dismal, as were Windows 1 and Windows 2, but the plan was to collaborate on OS/2 2.x and then ship a next generation product, OS/2 3.0, aka "NT". As it happened, Microsoft gambled on NT while IBM stuck with OS/2, thinking that they still owned the market. But if we back up to 1987, before OS/2 1.0 shipped, the UNIX-on-PC codebase was clearly a better platform for a multi-tasking OS, and MS-DOS backward compatability could be supplied via VP-IX (if I'm remembering SCO's DOS-box's name properly). If we posit that Microsoft retained Xenix and decided to develop UNIX further, the only question is whether Bill would have coughed for an unlimited AT&T license, just as Sun did. And I think -- given MS's history of buying up the IP they needed in order to hit a marketing requirement (and remembering that I'm an outsider, so this opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it :) -- they might well have done so.