5 ms·

None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"? And they're misleading at best. Netscape died because browsers became a part of

None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"? And they're misleading at best. Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system. That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality (see: every other OS). Just imagine shipping a computing device today without a browser! Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product. Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode. The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well. Java was never a Windows replacement. And as a platform it is doing just fine. Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. It's not like everyone is using Skype (which MS bought, not built, and long after the IM dust had settled). Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach. It requires professional knowledge to get email delivered these days.

selectodude 5y ago
>Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product. Dropbox, which has also been falling apart trying to become a product.
nitrogen 5y ago
None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"? They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser. That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality That's what BG said in his deposition, but MS was the only company who embedded IE into the OS to make ActiveDesktop and put VBScript and ActiveX into IE. Java was never a Windows replacement. AWT and Swing and browser applets were Windows replacements. Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. You're talking about things that happened ten years later. There was a time when one app would connect to every network. Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. MS Exchange dominates email.
- dralley 5y ago
  >They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser. All of those efforts failed miserably. They have nothing to do with the actual reasons why Netscape died, why Firefox is trending down, why Java never became dominant, why Open/LibreOffice never replaced MS Office, why open chat protocols were replaced by chat services from Google, Facebook, Discord and Slack, why Java applets never caught on, etc.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    All of those efforts failed miserably. The grandparent comment is right on the money with "You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor." MS bought at least 10-15 years of dominance with EEE, vaporware, and other anticompetitive practices. Just like Google killed RSS with Reader. Just like Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to avoid them potentially growing into replacements for Facebook. The goal was to kill or delay an upstart that would distract users away from their core products, not to produce a successful competitor to the upstart. Netscape Netscape no doubt had its own problems, but MS deeply embedding IE into Windows 98 was a huge part of them. Java Actually Java was pretty dominant. Interactive web was either Flash or Java. If it was for entertainment, it was Flash, if it was for work or computation, it was Java. Open/LibreOffice Have you forgotten WordPerfect?
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      WordPerfect lost to Word for the exact same reason Lotus 1-2-3 lost to Excel. They were extremely late to the transition to GUIs. By the time they had Windows versions, the world had already switched. Java was never widely deployed on the web. The only services that ever used applets in any meaningful way were a handful of Asia-only banks. Applets were stillborn for a large number of reasons, all of which you can blame on Sun. MS giving away IE for free torched Netscape's business model, but that seems like a strange objection - we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system. You're ignoring the actual EEE part. Microsoft didn't just include a browser, they included a browser that didn't follow standards and had a bunch of its own extensions. Then since Windows was the largest platform, lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls and other IE-specific features on websites, and users had to switch to IE even if they preferred a different browser. > Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product. Steve Jobs did the same thing. You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers to force developers into making native apps where Apple gets 30% of the developer's revenue and can exclude apps that compete with their own services. > Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode. The history of Office goes like this. There were many competitors and many users preferred the competitors, but Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems so that people would use Office instead. Then, once Office had the most market share and everybody was locked into it because all their documents were in its proprietary format, they used the revenues they denied to competitors to make Office better. Now you say, look how good it is! But how did it get there and why is nobody else? > The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well. now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets. > Java was never a Windows replacement. It wasn't supposed to be an operating system. It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems, which Microsoft successfully impaired. > Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. This is the one where they basically failed, because the network effect counterbalanced the leverage of the Windows monopoly. If your friends had ICQ then you installed ICQ even if you already had MSN Messenger installed as part of Windows. But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE. If they'd succeeded in getting MSN Messenger into a dominant market position then they could discontinue or cripple the non-Windows clients and lock people into Windows with it. > Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. Outlook.com has 400 million users. > And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach. Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach, by marking email from small email servers as spam even when it wasn't. Plausibly on purpose. And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange. Gmail did that by offering 1GB free storage back when that was expensive and subsidizing it with Google Search revenues.
letitbeirie 5y ago
> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system It's hard to decouple the fate of Netscape from their catastrophic decision to rewrite their entire codebase from scratch: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  That was the final nail in the coffin, but they had been pushed aside before that. Hence the final "hail mary."

selectodude 5y ago

>Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product. Dropbox, which has also been falling apart trying to become a product.

nitrogen 5y ago

None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"? They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser. That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality That's what BG said in his deposition, but MS was the only company who embedded IE into the OS to make ActiveDesktop and put VBScript and ActiveX into IE. Java was never a Windows replacement. AWT and Swing and browser applets were Windows replacements. Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. You're talking about things that happened ten years later. There was a time when one app would connect to every network. Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. MS Exchange dominates email.

dralley 5y ago
>They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser. All of those efforts failed miserably. They have nothing to do with the actual reasons why Netscape died, why Firefox is trending down, why Java never became dominant, why Open/LibreOffice never replaced MS Office, why open chat protocols were replaced by chat services from Google, Facebook, Discord and Slack, why Java applets never caught on, etc.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  All of those efforts failed miserably. The grandparent comment is right on the money with "You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor." MS bought at least 10-15 years of dominance with EEE, vaporware, and other anticompetitive practices. Just like Google killed RSS with Reader. Just like Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to avoid them potentially growing into replacements for Facebook. The goal was to kill or delay an upstart that would distract users away from their core products, not to produce a successful competitor to the upstart. Netscape Netscape no doubt had its own problems, but MS deeply embedding IE into Windows 98 was a huge part of them. Java Actually Java was pretty dominant. Interactive web was either Flash or Java. If it was for entertainment, it was Flash, if it was for work or computation, it was Java. Open/LibreOffice Have you forgotten WordPerfect?
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    WordPerfect lost to Word for the exact same reason Lotus 1-2-3 lost to Excel. They were extremely late to the transition to GUIs. By the time they had Windows versions, the world had already switched. Java was never widely deployed on the web. The only services that ever used applets in any meaningful way were a handful of Asia-only banks. Applets were stillborn for a large number of reasons, all of which you can blame on Sun. MS giving away IE for free torched Netscape's business model, but that seems like a strange objection - we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system. You're ignoring the actual EEE part. Microsoft didn't just include a browser, they included a browser that didn't follow standards and had a bunch of its own extensions. Then since Windows was the largest platform, lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls and other IE-specific features on websites, and users had to switch to IE even if they preferred a different browser. > Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product. Steve Jobs did the same thing. You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers to force developers into making native apps where Apple gets 30% of the developer's revenue and can exclude apps that compete with their own services. > Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode. The history of Office goes like this. There were many competitors and many users preferred the competitors, but Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems so that people would use Office instead. Then, once Office had the most market share and everybody was locked into it because all their documents were in its proprietary format, they used the revenues they denied to competitors to make Office better. Now you say, look how good it is! But how did it get there and why is nobody else? > The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well. now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets. > Java was never a Windows replacement. It wasn't supposed to be an operating system. It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems, which Microsoft successfully impaired. > Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. This is the one where they basically failed, because the network effect counterbalanced the leverage of the Windows monopoly. If your friends had ICQ then you installed ICQ even if you already had MSN Messenger installed as part of Windows. But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE. If they'd succeeded in getting MSN Messenger into a dominant market position then they could discontinue or cripple the non-Windows clients and lock people into Windows with it. > Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. Outlook.com has 400 million users. > And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach. Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach, by marking email from small email servers as spam even when it wasn't. Plausibly on purpose. And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange. Gmail did that by offering 1GB free storage back when that was expensive and subsidizing it with Google Search revenues.

letitbeirie 5y ago

> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system It's hard to decouple the fate of Netscape from their catastrophic decision to rewrite their entire codebase from scratch: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

mixmastamyk 5y ago
That was the final nail in the coffin, but they had been pushed aside before that. Hence the final "hail mary."