7 ms·

This quote is a bit rich: Nadella: In our case at Microsoft, I’ve always felt that, at least the definition of a platform is: if something bigger than the plat

This quote is a bit rich: Nadella: In our case at Microsoft, I’ve always felt that, at least the definition of a platform is: if something bigger than the platform can’t be born, then it’s not a platform. The web, it grew up on Windows. Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.” Yes, it was born on Windows, and you did everything in your power to strangle the web in its crib. And now, when it's convenient, you try to take credit for birthing it?

routerl 5y ago
Not to mention that MS were actually pretty late to the party. They didn't put any chips down on the growth of the web until win98, which could already be marketed as "web focused" because... the web was already huge. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about the above, since I'm going off childhood memories here.
- quanticle 5y ago
  Internet Explorer was first released on August 16, 1995 [1] for as part of the Microsoft Plus! pack for Windows 95. That said, IE 1 and 2 were pretty paltry efforts and Microsoft's attack against Netscape didn't really get going until IE 3, which came out in '96 [2]. As I understand it, this was also the first release of Internet Explorer that was packaged with the operating system, as it was shipped with the Windows 95 OSR2 service pack. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_3
- agloeregrets 5y ago
  You are correct. Their initial attempts were messy then too. By time the iMac G3 came around in late '98 the web was the #1 reason people were buying computers and Apple was marketing on how much easier their product was to setup for the web. Microsoft was truly remarkably bad at winning the race so they went off trying to shoehorn IE on Mac, which was a winning bet when the iMac became the #1 selling machine.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Around that time Gates made a speech that they were turning the company around to focus on the Internet. Unsaid was that they were quite late to the party. Before that you had to install TCP/IP separately on any non-Unix boxes. Personally I had been using the net for years at that point.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tpush 5y ago
Nadella's talking about how the web "grew up" on Windows; it's just rhetoric about how the dominant (client-side) portion of the web was facilitated through Windows.
- goalieca 5y ago
  >portion of the web was facilitated through Windows I'm old enough to have lived through ie6. They did everything they could to hold the web back a generation because they saw the future and it was web services and the open web doesn't exclusively run on windows.
  - admax88q 5y ago
    They did _almost_ everything in their power. They did not however, prevent you from downloading and installing netscape like Apple is currently doing with iOS. I believe that was Nadella's main point, which I don't disagree with. While they did attempt to embrace, extend, extinguish, the platform was fundamentally not locked down which still allowed the web to take over.
    - jakeva 5y ago
      > prevent you from downloading and installing netscape like Apple is currently doing with iOS. I don't know about netscape, but I currently use a browser other than Safari as my default browser. Unless you mean the underlying framework is WebKit?
      - zargon 5y ago
        A distinction without a difference.
      - 8note 5y ago
        Safari reskinned to look like Firefox is still safari in my opinion. Apple gets complete control over what a webpage can do, and chooses the features it supports to ensure the web cannot compete with the app store
hughrr 5y ago
Nadella’s true colours showing through. A few years back on here people were virtually giving the guy a metaphorical hand job about the new improved Microsoft. So reality is as I described : hubris and marketing resulting in nothing but stagnated excrement for everyone unfortunate enough to have to deal with them. Again. Same as the last executive positions there. If Microsoft hadn’t had their hands in our technology future we’d be further along and better off. All they have done is set our expectations low.
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  You seem to be bringing a lot of personal baggage with you in your comment. Maybe you should just not comment on Microsoft related posts.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    I’ve been a Microsoft developer, admin and architect for 30 years as well as a director of a gold partner and probably directly put tens of millions of dollars of revenue in their direction. Hell I even have met Bill back in the early 90s on a couple of occasions and got some books signed. I’ve also been on the end of having products pulled from under me causing massive rewrites of stable LOB applications, on the end of audits and bugs that are so abhorrent that their own internal division heads got involved at the time. What’s worst is I burned possibly tens of years of human lives on things which were directly their fault through absolute incompetence and negligence towards their customers or burning their entire roadmap for something new and shiny. So quite frankly I think I’m fairly qualified to tear them a new one when I see fit. Edit: as always I notice that the moment the US wakes up any critical posts about MSFT magically start plummeting. Reputation that important? Earn it!
  - hulitu 5y ago
    I love Microsoft. /s Is this better ?
vondur 5y ago
Ha. Mainstream Windows at the time didn’t even have TCP/IP software to connect to the internet. I think it came in a later revision of Windows 95. Windows 98 did have it installed though.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  95 shipped with a TCP/IP stack at launch but it wasn't checked for install by default. The big thing missing was IE 1.0 didn't ship with the OS initially, you had to get it via the Plus! pack until the later versions of 95. Came with pinball too though.
- satysin 5y ago
  Indeed. In fact it was J Allard's[0] 1994 memo "Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet" that caught the attention of Bill Gates. Before then it was clear many (most? everyone else?) at Microsoft didn't see the potential of the internet. It was his memo that lead to reshaping Microsoft's direction with Windows and the internet with the inclusion of TCP/IP in Windows 95. Allard went on to be a key member of the original Xbox launch team and Xbox Live. Unfortunately a lot of what he worked on post-Xbox was not as successful and he left Microsoft around a decade ago. Since then he hasn't been involved in much of note, or at least nothing to the same scale and impact as his earlier work. Although topping his internet memo and the launch of Xbox and Xbox Live is pretty hard to do to be fair :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Damn I wish I could be in offices at the time.
    - cpeterso 5y ago
      Steven Sinofsky (former President of Microsoft’s Windows Division) shares some behind the scenes stories about Microsoft and the internet on his blog: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/026-blue-suede-pumas https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/026-blue-s... https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/029-telling-the-untold-story https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/029-tellin...
ChrisLTD 5y ago
MS wanted the web tied to IE and Windows, but I don’t recall them trying to kill the web or positioning themselves to take a percentage of all web commerce.
- hughrr 5y ago
  There were a few attempts to kick out ActiveX based crap early on. This lead to crashing browsers and poor user experience so didn’t go far. Ultimately I think they saw it as a delivery mechanism for their technology which is a reasonable bet.
  - ChrisLTD 5y ago
    Right, but I’d argue that ActiveX was a hedge against the threat of cross-platform Java, not the web.
    - coldacid 5y ago
      ActiveX was more a counterpart to Java applets in particular, rather than "cross-platform Java" in general.
      - babypuncher 5y ago
        In the end, both technologies were awful and the web is a better place without them today.
        coldacid 5y ago
        Agreed!
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
No, it was not born on Windows. It was born to be platform-agnostic. But if it was born on any particular OS platform, that would probably be Unix. It was popularized on Windows, but that's not the same thing. But yes, Microsoft did everything in their power to, if not strangle the web, at least to turn it into a Microsoft walled garden.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
Last time I checked the history books, Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXTCube to create the web. The Web was born on NeXT (later Mac), not Windows.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Not only that but they were trying to get people on their own proprietary network (MSN, not to be confused with msn.com).
  - pavlov 5y ago
    Isn’t that proving Nadella’s point? Windows in 1994 was not the kind of walled garden where Microsoft could have forced users exclusively onto MSN. When the web turned out to be the winner, Microsoft had to adapt and build their own browser; they couldn’t just tighten the App Store screws like Apple would do in a similar situation on iOS.
    - enos_feedler 5y ago
      I dont think you can compare what Apple and Microsoft are doing at 2 completely different points in the evolution of the internet. When microsoft embraced the internet we didn’t have ubiquitous TCP/IP yet. It was essential. Today we have the bottom layers so what businesses choose to do on top is their, well, business.
- spijdar 5y ago
  There's some wiggle room here, depending on how you "count". The first HTTP client and server were certainly created as NeXT apps, and I love NeXTSTEP so I love mentioning this trivia, but the reality IMO is the web that people actually used in the 90s and the web that evolved into what we have now doesn't really resemble Tim Berners-Lee's vision for what he called "the web" or his client/server. So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.
wpietri 5y ago
It's even richer than you think. This is not true: > it was born on Windows It was born on the NeXT operating system. That was the Steve Jobs creation that Apple bought and used as the foundati0on for OS X. Here's the actual history: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web
- babypuncher 5y ago
  He said "grew up" not "born". He's talking about the client side of the early web existing almost entirely on Windows.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    I'm not sure what he you're referring to. But quanticle clearly said what I quoted. And Nadella said the same thing: "The web itself was born and grew up on Windows." https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22549007/microsoft-windows-11-satya-nadella-remarks-apple https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22549007/microsoft-window...
crazypython 5y ago
He said the web grew up on Windows. Internet Explorer invented XMLHttpRequest, paving the way for interactive web pages that can dynamically fetch data.
- nybble41 5y ago
  You can have web pages that dynamically fetch data without XMLHttpRequest. For example, one technique is to dynamically inject a <script> tag referencing the URL of a server-side CGI script which collects the data and sends it back encoded as a call to a JavaScript callback function to be executed on the client. It's not as clean, and it can only manage GET requests—so the URLs need to be unique to prevent caching—but it works.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marcodiego 5y ago
Windows was already dominant at the time. No other OS was as wide deployed, popular and known at the time. Most people I knew in the 90's had their first contact with the internet through a windows box. Microsoft may have been late to the party but, considering how they basically owned the client-side, they had time to recover. In just a few years IE ate 90%+ of the browser world.
- quanticle 5y ago
  Yes, but that doesn't alter the fact that Bill Gates saw the web as an existential risk for Microsoft, and did everything in his power to ensure that the web evolved in a way that would benefit Microsoft in general and Windows in particular. I find the second part of Nadella's quote to be especially ironic: Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.” That is, in fact, exactly what Microsoft tried to do. They tried to force their own proprietary standards on the web. It was only after they were slapped down by the Justice Department that they stopped engaging in anti-competitive behavior and created the space for alternative web browsers to grow. Even then, it was almost too late. How many decades did we wait for IE6 to finally die so that we could write web sites that would even pretend to conform to modern web standards?
  - gowld 5y ago
    That's not the same thing. Bad as it was, MS/IE never prevented websites from existing, or even partially-gated them by requiring them to get MS approval like console video games and iOS App Store.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Yes, but when IE also became dominant, then came exclusive extensions that, once widely used, broke the internet to everyone using other browsers.
cbsmith 5y ago
At best it was "born on Trumpet Winsock", and it definitely wasn't born on Trumpet Winsock.
Clubber 5y ago
He didn't say it was born on Windows, he said it grew up on windows. Per your quote: >In our case at Microsoft, I’ve always felt that, at least the definition of a platform is: if something bigger than the platform can’t be born, then it’s not a platform. The web, it grew up on Windows. Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.” That's hard to argue. AOL made it where Prodigy and Compuserve withered because it embraced the WWW on .... Windows. I would also agree that Microsoft didn't do much to have the web grow up on Windows; in fact they actively thwarted it in many ways including their embrace, extend extinguish strategy. They mistakenly believed that controlling the browser was the key to controlling the internet.
mdip 5y ago
I didn't catch that quote -- that's an amazingly dumb thing to say. It's so dumb that I'm inclined to believe it was a mistake, rather than something Nadella believes. Maybe the PR folks had a little too much say in that statement because more than a few BS meters exploded. Ignoring the statement for a moment, Nadella killed "Windows First" thinking. It took me a long time to believe they were actually doing it, but SQL server, and then Teams -- a component of office -- along with the fact that SQL works better in Linux than on Windows (embarrassingly so in frequent cases), Outlook 365 in Firefox works better on any OS than Outlook on Windows, .NET Foundation/open source .NET core going from "a sort-of .NET for those of you who insist on using non-Windows stuff, to working better for nearly everything than the "Full Framework"[0]. Had that same sentence been altered by one, easy to slip on, word it would have been far more accurate ("ignoring" facts rather than outright lying about them): "The web, it grew up with Windows" or along side Windows. Accurate would be "dragged Windows with it kicking and screaming at times" and "Windows as actively hostile toward the web" but I don't expect the best CEOs of the least important companies to be that honest. I'd love it, but it might not fly on Wall Street. Had Microsoft continued in its monopolistic behavior, it's arguable that MS tried to and possibly could have delayed the success of the Internet via its refusal to support internet protocols natively in the OS (Windows 95's earliest version lacked Internet Explorer, but also didn't include tooling -- IIRC -- to speak SLIP/PPP or anything outside of NetBIOS, including TCP/IP/UDP by default). The browser would could have done without the "kill Netscape at all costs" behavior, but even that produced tangible benefits at the end of the day. I can't pretend to read his mind, but I doubt he doesn't recognize the stupidity in that statement -- it's possible, but it would be contrary to what I've experienced. I'd love to know what Microsoft would have done with Nadella at the helm during that important time. I don't think what I know about Microsoft, today, would mean that they'd have embraced the open web back then. I'd take it as a strong positive if Nadella, today, believed he would have led Microsoft here all the way back then, but there's so much hindsight in that conclusion. Most major players at that time were looking to "lock in users, using the internet, somehow" at the time, that it wasn't an obvious, correct, choice that one could sell to shareholders at that time. None of those major players (save Oracle) made a hard turn at some point and look nothing like they do today, culture-wise (Oracle was negatively affected by it all but Larry Ellison's reality distortion field appears to be alive and well over there). In a lot of ways, the "locked in users" is the internet we have, today, but the companies from back then largely didn't become the winners in today's locked-in world (save Amazon). [0] See my other comment for the variety of things that Microsoft at least owes to Nadella's willingness to reshape internal culture in a way I wouldn't have expected would be possible.
gentleman11 5y ago
People keep fetishizing Nadella but he’s the reason there is so much tracking and online interference in windows now
morganvachon 5y ago
He said "grew up" as you quoted, then you said "it was born on Windows" which is untrue, and renders your entire point invalid. While I agree that Microsoft worked hard to hold back innovation on the Web in its early days, you are changing the words of a quote so you can then attack the quote, and that's not a good look.
abraxas 5y ago
In the nineties we came within an inch of having MS Internet. If IE with ActiveX had succeeded at displacing Javascript we would be condemned to having one corporation controlling all end user internet experience. We should count our lucky starts that they screwed up Windows Mobile so badly.
sjg007 5y ago
I agree and bill gates got it wrong in his information superhighway book “The Road Ahead”… They underestimated the internet entirely.
dfox 5y ago
In fact MS not only invented XHR (and the reason why is called that is because it originnaly was semi-documented internal Windows API), but they also invented bunch of HTML-native features that are currently being reintroduced into HTML5. And then there is the “JS frameworks” front-end crowd that will actively push back against doing anything non-trivial in native HTML5.

routerl 5y ago

Not to mention that MS were actually pretty late to the party. They didn't put any chips down on the growth of the web until win98, which could already be marketed as "web focused" because... the web was already huge. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about the above, since I'm going off childhood memories here.

quanticle 5y ago
Internet Explorer was first released on August 16, 1995 [1] for as part of the Microsoft Plus! pack for Windows 95. That said, IE 1 and 2 were pretty paltry efforts and Microsoft's attack against Netscape didn't really get going until IE 3, which came out in '96 [2]. As I understand it, this was also the first release of Internet Explorer that was packaged with the operating system, as it was shipped with the Windows 95 OSR2 service pack. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_3
agloeregrets 5y ago
You are correct. Their initial attempts were messy then too. By time the iMac G3 came around in late '98 the web was the #1 reason people were buying computers and Apple was marketing on how much easier their product was to setup for the web. Microsoft was truly remarkably bad at winning the race so they went off trying to shoehorn IE on Mac, which was a winning bet when the iMac became the #1 selling machine.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Around that time Gates made a speech that they were turning the company around to focus on the Internet. Unsaid was that they were quite late to the party. Before that you had to install TCP/IP separately on any non-Unix boxes. Personally I had been using the net for years at that point.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tpush 5y ago

Nadella's talking about how the web "grew up" on Windows; it's just rhetoric about how the dominant (client-side) portion of the web was facilitated through Windows.

goalieca 5y ago
>portion of the web was facilitated through Windows I'm old enough to have lived through ie6. They did everything they could to hold the web back a generation because they saw the future and it was web services and the open web doesn't exclusively run on windows.
- admax88q 5y ago
  They did _almost_ everything in their power. They did not however, prevent you from downloading and installing netscape like Apple is currently doing with iOS. I believe that was Nadella's main point, which I don't disagree with. While they did attempt to embrace, extend, extinguish, the platform was fundamentally not locked down which still allowed the web to take over.
  - jakeva 5y ago
    > prevent you from downloading and installing netscape like Apple is currently doing with iOS. I don't know about netscape, but I currently use a browser other than Safari as my default browser. Unless you mean the underlying framework is WebKit?
    - zargon 5y ago
      A distinction without a difference.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Safari reskinned to look like Firefox is still safari in my opinion. Apple gets complete control over what a webpage can do, and chooses the features it supports to ensure the web cannot compete with the app store

hughrr 5y ago

Nadella’s true colours showing through. A few years back on here people were virtually giving the guy a metaphorical hand job about the new improved Microsoft. So reality is as I described : hubris and marketing resulting in nothing but stagnated excrement for everyone unfortunate enough to have to deal with them. Again. Same as the last executive positions there. If Microsoft hadn’t had their hands in our technology future we’d be further along and better off. All they have done is set our expectations low.

jensensbutton 5y ago
You seem to be bringing a lot of personal baggage with you in your comment. Maybe you should just not comment on Microsoft related posts.
- hughrr 5y ago
  I’ve been a Microsoft developer, admin and architect for 30 years as well as a director of a gold partner and probably directly put tens of millions of dollars of revenue in their direction. Hell I even have met Bill back in the early 90s on a couple of occasions and got some books signed. I’ve also been on the end of having products pulled from under me causing massive rewrites of stable LOB applications, on the end of audits and bugs that are so abhorrent that their own internal division heads got involved at the time. What’s worst is I burned possibly tens of years of human lives on things which were directly their fault through absolute incompetence and negligence towards their customers or burning their entire roadmap for something new and shiny. So quite frankly I think I’m fairly qualified to tear them a new one when I see fit. Edit: as always I notice that the moment the US wakes up any critical posts about MSFT magically start plummeting. Reputation that important? Earn it!
- hulitu 5y ago
  I love Microsoft. /s Is this better ?

vondur 5y ago

Ha. Mainstream Windows at the time didn’t even have TCP/IP software to connect to the internet. I think it came in a later revision of Windows 95. Windows 98 did have it installed though.

zamadatix 5y ago
95 shipped with a TCP/IP stack at launch but it wasn't checked for install by default. The big thing missing was IE 1.0 didn't ship with the OS initially, you had to get it via the Plus! pack until the later versions of 95. Came with pinball too though.
satysin 5y ago
Indeed. In fact it was J Allard's[0] 1994 memo "Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet" that caught the attention of Bill Gates. Before then it was clear many (most? everyone else?) at Microsoft didn't see the potential of the internet. It was his memo that lead to reshaping Microsoft's direction with Windows and the internet with the inclusion of TCP/IP in Windows 95. Allard went on to be a key member of the original Xbox launch team and Xbox Live. Unfortunately a lot of what he worked on post-Xbox was not as successful and he left Microsoft around a decade ago. Since then he hasn't been involved in much of note, or at least nothing to the same scale and impact as his earlier work. Although topping his internet memo and the launch of Xbox and Xbox Live is pretty hard to do to be fair :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Damn I wish I could be in offices at the time.
  - cpeterso 5y ago
    Steven Sinofsky (former President of Microsoft’s Windows Division) shares some behind the scenes stories about Microsoft and the internet on his blog: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/026-blue-suede-pumas https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/026-blue-s... https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/029-telling-the-untold-story https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/029-tellin...

ChrisLTD 5y ago

MS wanted the web tied to IE and Windows, but I don’t recall them trying to kill the web or positioning themselves to take a percentage of all web commerce.

hughrr 5y ago
There were a few attempts to kick out ActiveX based crap early on. This lead to crashing browsers and poor user experience so didn’t go far. Ultimately I think they saw it as a delivery mechanism for their technology which is a reasonable bet.
- ChrisLTD 5y ago
  Right, but I’d argue that ActiveX was a hedge against the threat of cross-platform Java, not the web.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    ActiveX was more a counterpart to Java applets in particular, rather than "cross-platform Java" in general.
    - babypuncher 5y ago
      In the end, both technologies were awful and the web is a better place without them today.
      - coldacid 5y ago
        Agreed!

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

No, it was not born on Windows. It was born to be platform-agnostic. But if it was born on any particular OS platform, that would probably be Unix. It was popularized on Windows, but that's not the same thing. But yes, Microsoft did everything in their power to, if not strangle the web, at least to turn it into a Microsoft walled garden.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

Last time I checked the history books, Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXTCube to create the web. The Web was born on NeXT (later Mac), not Windows.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Not only that but they were trying to get people on their own proprietary network (MSN, not to be confused with msn.com).
- pavlov 5y ago
  Isn’t that proving Nadella’s point? Windows in 1994 was not the kind of walled garden where Microsoft could have forced users exclusively onto MSN. When the web turned out to be the winner, Microsoft had to adapt and build their own browser; they couldn’t just tighten the App Store screws like Apple would do in a similar situation on iOS.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    I dont think you can compare what Apple and Microsoft are doing at 2 completely different points in the evolution of the internet. When microsoft embraced the internet we didn’t have ubiquitous TCP/IP yet. It was essential. Today we have the bottom layers so what businesses choose to do on top is their, well, business.
spijdar 5y ago
There's some wiggle room here, depending on how you "count". The first HTTP client and server were certainly created as NeXT apps, and I love NeXTSTEP so I love mentioning this trivia, but the reality IMO is the web that people actually used in the 90s and the web that evolved into what we have now doesn't really resemble Tim Berners-Lee's vision for what he called "the web" or his client/server. So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.

wpietri 5y ago

It's even richer than you think. This is not true: > it was born on Windows It was born on the NeXT operating system. That was the Steve Jobs creation that Apple bought and used as the foundati0on for OS X. Here's the actual history: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

babypuncher 5y ago
He said "grew up" not "born". He's talking about the client side of the early web existing almost entirely on Windows.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I'm not sure what he you're referring to. But quanticle clearly said what I quoted. And Nadella said the same thing: "The web itself was born and grew up on Windows." https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22549007/microsoft-windows-11-satya-nadella-remarks-apple https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22549007/microsoft-window...

crazypython 5y ago

He said the web grew up on Windows. Internet Explorer invented XMLHttpRequest, paving the way for interactive web pages that can dynamically fetch data.

nybble41 5y ago
You can have web pages that dynamically fetch data without XMLHttpRequest. For example, one technique is to dynamically inject a <script> tag referencing the URL of a server-side CGI script which collects the data and sends it back encoded as a call to a JavaScript callback function to be executed on the client. It's not as clean, and it can only manage GET requests—so the URLs need to be unique to prevent caching—but it works.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marcodiego 5y ago

Windows was already dominant at the time. No other OS was as wide deployed, popular and known at the time. Most people I knew in the 90's had their first contact with the internet through a windows box. Microsoft may have been late to the party but, considering how they basically owned the client-side, they had time to recover. In just a few years IE ate 90%+ of the browser world.

quanticle 5y ago
Yes, but that doesn't alter the fact that Bill Gates saw the web as an existential risk for Microsoft, and did everything in his power to ensure that the web evolved in a way that would benefit Microsoft in general and Windows in particular. I find the second part of Nadella's quote to be especially ironic: Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.” That is, in fact, exactly what Microsoft tried to do. They tried to force their own proprietary standards on the web. It was only after they were slapped down by the Justice Department that they stopped engaging in anti-competitive behavior and created the space for alternative web browsers to grow. Even then, it was almost too late. How many decades did we wait for IE6 to finally die so that we could write web sites that would even pretend to conform to modern web standards?
- gowld 5y ago
  That's not the same thing. Bad as it was, MS/IE never prevented websites from existing, or even partially-gated them by requiring them to get MS approval like console video games and iOS App Store.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Yes, but when IE also became dominant, then came exclusive extensions that, once widely used, broke the internet to everyone using other browsers.

cbsmith 5y ago

At best it was "born on Trumpet Winsock", and it definitely wasn't born on Trumpet Winsock.

Clubber 5y ago

He didn't say it was born on Windows, he said it grew up on windows. Per your quote: >In our case at Microsoft, I’ve always felt that, at least the definition of a platform is: if something bigger than the platform can’t be born, then it’s not a platform. The web, it grew up on Windows. Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.” That's hard to argue. AOL made it where Prodigy and Compuserve withered because it embraced the WWW on .... Windows. I would also agree that Microsoft didn't do much to have the web grow up on Windows; in fact they actively thwarted it in many ways including their embrace, extend extinguish strategy. They mistakenly believed that controlling the browser was the key to controlling the internet.

mdip 5y ago

I didn't catch that quote -- that's an amazingly dumb thing to say. It's so dumb that I'm inclined to believe it was a mistake, rather than something Nadella believes. Maybe the PR folks had a little too much say in that statement because more than a few BS meters exploded. Ignoring the statement for a moment, Nadella killed "Windows First" thinking. It took me a long time to believe they were actually doing it, but SQL server, and then Teams -- a component of office -- along with the fact that SQL works better in Linux than on Windows (embarrassingly so in frequent cases), Outlook 365 in Firefox works better on any OS than Outlook on Windows, .NET Foundation/open source .NET core going from "a sort-of .NET for those of you who insist on using non-Windows stuff, to working better for nearly everything than the "Full Framework"[0]. Had that same sentence been altered by one, easy to slip on, word it would have been far more accurate ("ignoring" facts rather than outright lying about them): "The web, it grew up with Windows" or along side Windows. Accurate would be "dragged Windows with it kicking and screaming at times" and "Windows as actively hostile toward the web" but I don't expect the best CEOs of the least important companies to be that honest. I'd love it, but it might not fly on Wall Street. Had Microsoft continued in its monopolistic behavior, it's arguable that MS tried to and possibly could have delayed the success of the Internet via its refusal to support internet protocols natively in the OS (Windows 95's earliest version lacked Internet Explorer, but also didn't include tooling -- IIRC -- to speak SLIP/PPP or anything outside of NetBIOS, including TCP/IP/UDP by default). The browser would could have done without the "kill Netscape at all costs" behavior, but even that produced tangible benefits at the end of the day. I can't pretend to read his mind, but I doubt he doesn't recognize the stupidity in that statement -- it's possible, but it would be contrary to what I've experienced. I'd love to know what Microsoft would have done with Nadella at the helm during that important time. I don't think what I know about Microsoft, today, would mean that they'd have embraced the open web back then. I'd take it as a strong positive if Nadella, today, believed he would have led Microsoft here all the way back then, but there's so much hindsight in that conclusion. Most major players at that time were looking to "lock in users, using the internet, somehow" at the time, that it wasn't an obvious, correct, choice that one could sell to shareholders at that time. None of those major players (save Oracle) made a hard turn at some point and look nothing like they do today, culture-wise (Oracle was negatively affected by it all but Larry Ellison's reality distortion field appears to be alive and well over there). In a lot of ways, the "locked in users" is the internet we have, today, but the companies from back then largely didn't become the winners in today's locked-in world (save Amazon). [0] See my other comment for the variety of things that Microsoft at least owes to Nadella's willingness to reshape internal culture in a way I wouldn't have expected would be possible.

gentleman11 5y ago

People keep fetishizing Nadella but he’s the reason there is so much tracking and online interference in windows now

morganvachon 5y ago

He said "grew up" as you quoted, then you said "it was born on Windows" which is untrue, and renders your entire point invalid. While I agree that Microsoft worked hard to hold back innovation on the Web in its early days, you are changing the words of a quote so you can then attack the quote, and that's not a good look.

abraxas 5y ago

In the nineties we came within an inch of having MS Internet. If IE with ActiveX had succeeded at displacing Javascript we would be condemned to having one corporation controlling all end user internet experience. We should count our lucky starts that they screwed up Windows Mobile so badly.

sjg007 5y ago

I agree and bill gates got it wrong in his information superhighway book “The Road Ahead”… They underestimated the internet entirely.

dfox 5y ago

In fact MS not only invented XHR (and the reason why is called that is because it originnaly was semi-documented internal Windows API), but they also invented bunch of HTML-native features that are currently being reintroduced into HTML5. And then there is the “JS frameworks” front-end crowd that will actively push back against doing anything non-trivial in native HTML5.