2 ms·

Could you spill the beans a little? I’m really curious about happened in the 90s with Microsoft that antagonized them so much (was born in 99, so I’ve only seen

• AceJohnny2 5y ago
  Microsoft as led by Bill Gates was an aggressive, anti-competitive entity. They crushed competitors with the motto "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", where they'd start to embrace an open standard, extend it with their own customizations, and use that to crush the competition. They tried to do it with Java, but Sun prevailed in a lawsuit against them. Before that they crushed word processor rival WordPerfect (though arguably, WP did not handle the migration to GUI properly), and spreadsheet rival Lotus 1-2-3 this way. They leveraged their control of the Platform (Windows) to control any software market they wanted, such as internet browsers, crushing Netscape, leading to an anti-trust lawsuit [1] that almost caused Microsoft to have to split up (arguably saved by Bush Jr. being elected to office). There was also the SCO lawsuit against Linux, but that was after Bill Gates stepped down from CEO, so it's at Steve Ballmer's feet. Needless to say, he (& Microsoft) accumulated so much ill will that it basically required a generation turnover (as you've demonstrated ;) ) to forget. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents