4 ms·

>Elon is a big Windows fan and pushed hard to run the whole shop on Microsoft tech wow - this is surprising to me and wasnt mentioned in the biography - any id

>Elon is a big Windows fan and pushed hard to run the whole shop on Microsoft tech wow - this is surprising to me and wasnt mentioned in the biography - any ideas why ?

gammatrigono 8y ago
Probably related to his use of Windows early on at home and at Zip2, PayPal, etc.
- dfox 8y ago
  I have heard in some youtube video that one of the first post-merger conflicts at paypal was about elon pushing for Windows NT (and presumably MSSQL) instead of Oracle (presumably on Solaris).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    In fairness: Competing with Oracle is one of the very few times when choosing Microsoft makes sense. That felt weird to type.
asaph 8y ago
This is discussed at length in the first chapter of Founders at Work. The chapter is written by Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal) and discusses his bitter feud with Elon Musk over Musk's desire to convert systems over to Windows. Interestingly Musk is never mentioned by name. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788 https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
- davidgerard 8y ago
  This was also in Eric Jackson's history of PayPal. Jackson was a marketing guy, so had no technical dog in the fight, but he wrote this particular fight up. Jackson was the guy who realised that PayPal and eBay had massive synergy and worked super hard to get PayPal in there. Eventually leading to eBay buying them out, and Musk and Thiel going from merely rich to actually billionaires.
abledon 8y ago
Yeah it was (Ashley Vance book), he chose Windows over Linux when developing PayPal back In the day because the tooling in Windows was far more advanced (visual studio IDE) due to the parallel games industry driving development on that platform
- glenneroo 8y ago
  Some of the known hardships of working in the games industry seems to pervade present-day Tesla and SpaceX, particularly working over-time to get things done "in time". The upshot of SpaceX (and maybe other Musk ventures) is that devs are at least building things slightly more tangible than just pure entertainment. Musk has even admitted as much that he prefers game developers. Maybe he see's the parallel for working overtime and uses this "perk" to his advantage? From an article from 2015[0]: > "We actually hire a lot of our best software engineers out of the gaming industry," said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, when Fast Company posed this question during the May 29 Dragon V2 unveiling. "In gaming there's a lot of smart engineering talent doing really complex things. [Compared to] a lot of the algorithms involved in massive multiplayer online games…a docking sequence [between spacecraft] is actually relatively straightforward. So I'd encourage people in the gaming industry to think about creating the next generation of spacecraft and rockets." [0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-spacex-at-a-video-game-conference-2015-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-spacex-at-a-video-gam...
rrcaptain 8y ago
Because it runs counter to the "epic nerd" persona Musk was trying to build with his authorized biography. Windows isn't cool right now.
- carlivar 8y ago
  When was it cool?
  - MPSimmons 8y ago
    When NT4's kernel was released and Linux was on 2.2, there was a good reason to choose Windows for stability - or at least, there were trade-offs that were acceptable up to Windows 2000. After that, it became a battle for libraries. If you're using C# or other dotNet, then you're on Windows (or Mono?!?), otherwise your platform is Linux. Both are reasonably capable of high service uptimes and solid performance. With Server Core and PowerShell, there's a lot more parity than my fellow Linux admins want to admit, but either is a viable choice for general IT services at this point. Note - I'm excluding licensing entirely from this, as well as infrastructure maintenance and control surfaces. Nobody likes DSC, and there are several superior config management solutions for Linux that don't have meaningful analogs on Windows.
    - carlivar 8y ago
      The thing that made NT4 still "super uncool" for me was needing to reboot when the IP address changed. Back at that time of NT4 & Linux 2.2, I'd argue Solaris was the best option.

>Elon is a big Windows fan and pushed hard to run the whole shop on Microsoft tech wow - this is surprising to me and wasnt mentioned in the biography - any ideas why ?

gammatrigono 8y ago

Probably related to his use of Windows early on at home and at Zip2, PayPal, etc.

dfox 8y ago
I have heard in some youtube video that one of the first post-merger conflicts at paypal was about elon pushing for Windows NT (and presumably MSSQL) instead of Oracle (presumably on Solaris).
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  In fairness: Competing with Oracle is one of the very few times when choosing Microsoft makes sense. That felt weird to type.

asaph 8y ago

This is discussed at length in the first chapter of Founders at Work. The chapter is written by Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal) and discusses his bitter feud with Elon Musk over Musk's desire to convert systems over to Windows. Interestingly Musk is never mentioned by name. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788 https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...

davidgerard 8y ago
This was also in Eric Jackson's history of PayPal. Jackson was a marketing guy, so had no technical dog in the fight, but he wrote this particular fight up. Jackson was the guy who realised that PayPal and eBay had massive synergy and worked super hard to get PayPal in there. Eventually leading to eBay buying them out, and Musk and Thiel going from merely rich to actually billionaires.

abledon 8y ago

Yeah it was (Ashley Vance book), he chose Windows over Linux when developing PayPal back In the day because the tooling in Windows was far more advanced (visual studio IDE) due to the parallel games industry driving development on that platform

glenneroo 8y ago
Some of the known hardships of working in the games industry seems to pervade present-day Tesla and SpaceX, particularly working over-time to get things done "in time". The upshot of SpaceX (and maybe other Musk ventures) is that devs are at least building things slightly more tangible than just pure entertainment. Musk has even admitted as much that he prefers game developers. Maybe he see's the parallel for working overtime and uses this "perk" to his advantage? From an article from 2015[0]: > "We actually hire a lot of our best software engineers out of the gaming industry," said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, when Fast Company posed this question during the May 29 Dragon V2 unveiling. "In gaming there's a lot of smart engineering talent doing really complex things. [Compared to] a lot of the algorithms involved in massive multiplayer online games…a docking sequence [between spacecraft] is actually relatively straightforward. So I'd encourage people in the gaming industry to think about creating the next generation of spacecraft and rockets." [0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-spacex-at-a-video-game-conference-2015-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-spacex-at-a-video-gam...

rrcaptain 8y ago

Because it runs counter to the "epic nerd" persona Musk was trying to build with his authorized biography. Windows isn't cool right now.

carlivar 8y ago
When was it cool?
- MPSimmons 8y ago
  When NT4's kernel was released and Linux was on 2.2, there was a good reason to choose Windows for stability - or at least, there were trade-offs that were acceptable up to Windows 2000. After that, it became a battle for libraries. If you're using C# or other dotNet, then you're on Windows (or Mono?!?), otherwise your platform is Linux. Both are reasonably capable of high service uptimes and solid performance. With Server Core and PowerShell, there's a lot more parity than my fellow Linux admins want to admit, but either is a viable choice for general IT services at this point. Note - I'm excluding licensing entirely from this, as well as infrastructure maintenance and control surfaces. Nobody likes DSC, and there are several superior config management solutions for Linux that don't have meaningful analogs on Windows.
  - carlivar 8y ago
    The thing that made NT4 still "super uncool" for me was needing to reboot when the IP address changed. Back at that time of NT4 & Linux 2.2, I'd argue Solaris was the best option.