4 ms·

90s and 00s Microsoft was successful in part because they were an incredibly stable platform to develop against. 10 year support goes a long way, and if you pa

90s and 00s Microsoft was successful in part because they were an incredibly stable platform to develop against. 10 year support goes a long way, and if you paid enough money you could email in your bugs and get custom hot fixes made for issues that annoyed you. Even their /bad/ technologies had long term support. If you built on top of shiny new thing and Microsoft dropped it in the next release, it was still going to get patches, bug fixes, and the documentation for it wasn't going to vanish from the world as if it never existed. Of course this was all before cloud services existed. Back then you'd pay for a product and you got software on a disk/CD and there was an expectation that it'd keep working. One thing that gets overlooked so frequently, by all companies, is that ongoing costs are ongoing. Whenever I see a new fitness tracker kickstarter advertising amazing cloud services for free, my first thought is that the costs from cloud services will eventually exceed the tiny profit that comes from selling physical consumer hardware. And a few years later another "It's been a great journey" message goes out as the company runs out of money. Obviously Google won't run out of $, but costs do add up. Doing the math on how to distribute funding to bundled cloud services is actually rather hard. You have to figure out for a given product / subscription, how much of that purchase price needs to be distributed to the various teams. That sort of attribution is not easy, and not properly allocating those funds to development resources can kill a product. e.g. someone buys a Chromebook, of course the OS team gets money, but the team making Google docs can argue they deserve a split, after all without them the Chromebooks would be somewhat useless. Analytics helps, but only to an extent.

shadowgovt 7y ago
You've hit the nail on the head. Google doesn't run out of money; what Google runs out of is the things money can't buy in the short run, and at their scale that's employee hours and (surprisingly) compute and storage bandwidth (because they're building infrastructure at such volume that they end up saturating supplies and literally can't get more hardware at a reasonable price-point to run all the services they want to run). Too much breadth of services cuts into how much load they can bear on services that are business-core or revenue-positive.
scarface74 7y ago
Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point. Microsoft maintained backwards compatibility because of a new operating system broke old code, companies wouldn’t upgrade and it made its money from operating systems. Apple doesn’t care as much about backwards compatibility because it doesn’t really care if you upgrade your operating system - especially on the Mac - or stick with your old one until you buy a new computer. It doesn’t make money on operating system upgrades.
- com2kid 7y ago
  > Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point. Microsoft put an insane amount of effort into documentation[1] and sample code. They ran developer training programs around the world and published an actual magazine. They funded the writing and publishing of countless[2] books for developers. They still run Channel 9, where they produce/publish long and short form technical content. If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from. [1] Each product team targeted at developers had a dedicated, non-trivial in size, full time documentation team. On top of that Microsoft would hire 3rd party software companies to start using early versions of new APIs and write large scale sample apps using those APIs. I worked on one of these samples apps, it was a complete end to end ordering system for a furniture store that included everything from a tablet pc app for the sales staff to use inputting customer orders, syncing to a database in the warehouse to get the order loaded on a truck, and the delivery driver had an application running to get a signature on delivery of the order. Since this was pre-cellphones everywhere, the truck driver's laptop stored data offline and when brought back to the warehouse it synchronized itself with SQL server using some features new to SQL server at the time. That was one of thousands of sample apps Microsoft made to show off its APIs. Compare this to the modern world where the cloud database provider billing you by the hour is going to throw out a couple basic hello world examples and that is about it. [2] Technically countable but a very large #
  - scarface74 7y ago
    If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from. There were no other platforms seriously in contention in the mid 90s and early 2000s. There was Apple circling the drain and Unix vendors were all over the place. In today’s world, if you are a major corporation that needs help you have all sorts of “partners” that will help you with your chosen platform, information on any API usage is all online. In the classic MacOS days in the 80s and early 90s, Apple had the multivolume “Inside Macintosh” series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Macintosh

shadowgovt 7y ago

You've hit the nail on the head. Google doesn't run out of money; what Google runs out of is the things money can't buy in the short run, and at their scale that's employee hours and (surprisingly) compute and storage bandwidth (because they're building infrastructure at such volume that they end up saturating supplies and literally can't get more hardware at a reasonable price-point to run all the services they want to run). Too much breadth of services cuts into how much load they can bear on services that are business-core or revenue-positive.

scarface74 7y ago

Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point. Microsoft maintained backwards compatibility because of a new operating system broke old code, companies wouldn’t upgrade and it made its money from operating systems. Apple doesn’t care as much about backwards compatibility because it doesn’t really care if you upgrade your operating system - especially on the Mac - or stick with your old one until you buy a new computer. It doesn’t make money on operating system upgrades.

com2kid 7y ago
> Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point. Microsoft put an insane amount of effort into documentation[1] and sample code. They ran developer training programs around the world and published an actual magazine. They funded the writing and publishing of countless[2] books for developers. They still run Channel 9, where they produce/publish long and short form technical content. If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from. [1] Each product team targeted at developers had a dedicated, non-trivial in size, full time documentation team. On top of that Microsoft would hire 3rd party software companies to start using early versions of new APIs and write large scale sample apps using those APIs. I worked on one of these samples apps, it was a complete end to end ordering system for a furniture store that included everything from a tablet pc app for the sales staff to use inputting customer orders, syncing to a database in the warehouse to get the order loaded on a truck, and the delivery driver had an application running to get a signature on delivery of the order. Since this was pre-cellphones everywhere, the truck driver's laptop stored data offline and when brought back to the warehouse it synchronized itself with SQL server using some features new to SQL server at the time. That was one of thousands of sample apps Microsoft made to show off its APIs. Compare this to the modern world where the cloud database provider billing you by the hour is going to throw out a couple basic hello world examples and that is about it. [2] Technically countable but a very large #
- scarface74 7y ago
  If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from. There were no other platforms seriously in contention in the mid 90s and early 2000s. There was Apple circling the drain and Unix vendors were all over the place. In today’s world, if you are a major corporation that needs help you have all sorts of “partners” that will help you with your chosen platform, information on any API usage is all online. In the classic MacOS days in the 80s and early 90s, Apple had the multivolume “Inside Macintosh” series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Macintosh