7 ms·

Microsoft had already established itself as the dominant market player in the early 90s. Bill Gates was the richest person in America by 1992 and the richest in

Microsoft had already established itself as the dominant market player in the early 90s. Bill Gates was the richest person in America by 1992 and the richest in the world by 1995. The 90s Java hype must really have been otherworldly to make him panic this much.

300bps 5y ago
The 90s Java hype must really have been otherworldly to make him panic this much. I think it is a certain personality type that has more than $50 million* in assets and still has this level of competitive edge. I think most people have a number that would drive them to relax a bit and just do whatever they wanted. I think for some people whatever they want though is to engage in cutthroat competition. * arbitrary number likely different for everyone
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  if anything, Gates-era Microsoft was known for being anti-competitive. What the very-wealthy want, I think, is power and control, and for the number to go up to stroke their egos.
EMRZ 5y ago
It was the battle for "the web" and the sun+netscape partnership was an actual menace to microsoft's activex and vbscript things. There is an espisode the Lex Fridman podcast with Brendan Eich where he talks a little about that specific time.[1] The "panic" was right imo (only in that specific area) i mean, there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > 0 microsoft on the web today Wdym? TS?
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    TS is just fancy JS. If it didn't exist, Flow, Haxe or Dart would just be in the same place (static types languages with JS-ish syntax that compile to JS).
    - epolanski 5y ago
      And if Java didn't exist we would have other tools as well. And yet Microsoft has by far the largest share of language adoption on the web, which likely applies to the tooling too.
      - Mikeb85 5y ago
        By far? You really think the majority of websites are using TS-generated JS? The majority of the web is Wordpress and PHP frameworks. TS has only become 'popular' rather recently, and there's still a TON of websites that are full-stack SSR with only modest amounts of JS. As for tooling, maybe. VS has always had a decent amount of mind-share. Even then though, I can see Jetbrains + Eclipse + Sublime + Emacs + Vim + others capturing at least 50% combined...
      - _-david-_ 5y ago
        Which languages and tooling are you talking about?
    - phillipcarter 5y ago
      > TS is just fancy JS. If it didn't exist, Flow, Haxe or Dart would just be in the same place "TS is just fancy JS" is like saying "Java is just fancy machine code" or something like that. It's a major software project with a much larger scope than simply slapping a few types on top of common JS constructs. More importantly, it's been an innovating force at the language and editor tooling levels for web developers worldwide. I think it's likely to be the most successful language that Microsoft has ever produced in the long run.
      - Mikeb85 5y ago
- epolanski 5y ago
  C#, TypeScript, Azure, Visual Studio, VSCode, GitHub, the npm package ecosystem, Microsoft Edge, having the de facto monopoly of several markets with office and its web integrations, Microsoft Teams suite for enterprise and I think I'm missing a lot more stuff. Claiming there's no Microsoft on the web seems far fetched when Microsoft de facto controls extremely large parts of producing modern web applications, deploying them and serving the tools necessary for businesses to coordinate. It may have lost share to competing applications or it missed the train exactly, but I cannot think of any other single company you can lock in your organization from management, production to deployment and even consumption on Microsoft own devices from Surfaces to Xbox.
  - oaiey 5y ago
    It is also key to understand that they are far more diverse than ever. Azure earns money independently, so does Office and Windows, XBox, etc. They do not rely on each other anymore. The only big part which is different is the former developer division. I do not think they earn the money themselves but are more a cost center to everyone else. But considering that everyone else is a giant company with a diverse set of developer needs, maybe that is just okay. Which again is interesting because the rest of the industry is also relying on this part of Microsoft.
    - runevault 5y ago
      Even if .NET is technically a cost center, the reduced cost they get from optimizing it making things like Bing faster probably still makes it indirectly a profit center by saving them so much money.
  - pornel 5y ago
    This is the "post-apocalyptic" Microsoft. These things are open-source and supporting Linux, which was unthinkable for Bill's Microsoft. MS used to call Linux cancer, and now they're running Linux servers for people. MS used to spread FUD that it's irresponsible and amateurish to expose source code of programs, and later they had to acquire GitHub and npm to stay relevant. Microsoft had to adapt, because the old Microsoft has lost. Remember MS was selling very expensive per-CPU licenses for servers to run IIS, ASP.Net, and SqlServer. Admin tasks that we use webapps for were supposed to be a combination of Office, Access, VBA, native Windows applications, and a dash of ActiveX.
- dagw 5y ago
  there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today. I've worked (as a consultant) on a number of 'boring' B2B web applications targeting 'boring' industries and one thing they all had in common was that they where all in on the Microsoft stack.
nend 5y ago
When you're at the top there's really only one direction left to go.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  MS mcap 1996: $100B MS mcap 2022: $2.4T
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I think what they were trying to say is that, to the kind of mind capable of being as ruthless in getting to the top as Gates was, the biggest anxiety they would have after making it to the top is that someone will come and take it from them.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      I mean, it's a rational position to want to defend the business you created or the market share you carved out. Every business has to do this to survive. The only problem is when a business resorts to unethical tactics. Gates seemed to go through a bit of a transition sometime after this (perhaps after the antitrust case), where he seemingly lost his uber competitiveness and then stepped down from CEO position.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Market cap during the Steve Ballmer CEO tenure would be a better comparison, as it was during this time that MS was fighting Blackberry, Nokia, Apple and Android on the mobile OS front. This was the battle that Gates was worrying about: the declining prospects of Windows as an application platform. Their stock exploded once Nadella came in, killed off DOA products like Windows RT and Windows Phone, and shifted the focus to Office 365 and Azure cloud where they had a deep enterprise advantage.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      Why? The email is from 1996. Gates wasn't worried about platforms that didn't exist in 1996.
hnfong 5y ago
You lose the developers, you lose the platform. That's what Bill Gates was thinking. Microsoft was "lucky" that: 1. JVM was too slow to run desktop apps on machines even in the early 2000s 2. Web and Javascript became so important that it reduced the impact of losing out on Java 3. Linux killed Sun Microsystems. Still, so much server infrastructure runs on Linux+JVM stacks that you could argue that it was a major reason Microsoft failed to gain dominance outside their desktop stronghold. Years later, their biggest existential threat in the form of Android was basically a modified Linux+JVM stack. People may think Bill was over-pessimistic, but looking back, their failure to kill off potential competitors like Java was one of the reasons Microsoft stagnated post-2000s.
3minus1 5y ago
> Bill Gates was the richest person...the 90s Java hype must really have been otherworldly to make him panic this much I kind of disagree with this line of reasoning. I think very successful people sometimes overestimate possible threats, and it may be one of the reasons for their success. I had this realization when watching the most dominant Age of Empires player stream once. I once struck by how paranoid he was about what the opponent might be doing, but it meant he was constantly prepared for worst-case scenarios. He seemed genuinely worried most of the game, rather than confident like I expected given his first-rank status.
- r3muxd 5y ago
  "He who strikes terror in others is himself continually in fear."
- quux 5y ago
  If you read Nathan Myhrvold's reply he says something very similar: "It is a new and uncomfortable feeling to be the incumbent rather than the challenger in one of these battles. However, we must not panic. The current perceptual battle is a long way distant from actual business and revenue issues, and we can't let perceptual issues cloud our thinking too much."
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
And now he's only the fourth richest. I'm sure a lot of billionaires would actually consider that drop to be something worth losing sleep over, as messed up as it is.

300bps 5y ago

The 90s Java hype must really have been otherworldly to make him panic this much. I think it is a certain personality type that has more than $50 million* in assets and still has this level of competitive edge. I think most people have a number that would drive them to relax a bit and just do whatever they wanted. I think for some people whatever they want though is to engage in cutthroat competition. * arbitrary number likely different for everyone

beaconstudios 5y ago
if anything, Gates-era Microsoft was known for being anti-competitive. What the very-wealthy want, I think, is power and control, and for the number to go up to stroke their egos.

EMRZ 5y ago

It was the battle for "the web" and the sun+netscape partnership was an actual menace to microsoft's activex and vbscript things. There is an espisode the Lex Fridman podcast with Brendan Eich where he talks a little about that specific time.[1] The "panic" was right imo (only in that specific area) i mean, there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE

whimsicalism 5y ago
> 0 microsoft on the web today Wdym? TS?
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  TS is just fancy JS. If it didn't exist, Flow, Haxe or Dart would just be in the same place (static types languages with JS-ish syntax that compile to JS).
  - epolanski 5y ago
    And if Java didn't exist we would have other tools as well. And yet Microsoft has by far the largest share of language adoption on the web, which likely applies to the tooling too.
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      By far? You really think the majority of websites are using TS-generated JS? The majority of the web is Wordpress and PHP frameworks. TS has only become 'popular' rather recently, and there's still a TON of websites that are full-stack SSR with only modest amounts of JS. As for tooling, maybe. VS has always had a decent amount of mind-share. Even then though, I can see Jetbrains + Eclipse + Sublime + Emacs + Vim + others capturing at least 50% combined...
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      Which languages and tooling are you talking about?
  - phillipcarter 5y ago
    > TS is just fancy JS. If it didn't exist, Flow, Haxe or Dart would just be in the same place "TS is just fancy JS" is like saying "Java is just fancy machine code" or something like that. It's a major software project with a much larger scope than simply slapping a few types on top of common JS constructs. More importantly, it's been an innovating force at the language and editor tooling levels for web developers worldwide. I think it's likely to be the most successful language that Microsoft has ever produced in the long run.
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
epolanski 5y ago
C#, TypeScript, Azure, Visual Studio, VSCode, GitHub, the npm package ecosystem, Microsoft Edge, having the de facto monopoly of several markets with office and its web integrations, Microsoft Teams suite for enterprise and I think I'm missing a lot more stuff. Claiming there's no Microsoft on the web seems far fetched when Microsoft de facto controls extremely large parts of producing modern web applications, deploying them and serving the tools necessary for businesses to coordinate. It may have lost share to competing applications or it missed the train exactly, but I cannot think of any other single company you can lock in your organization from management, production to deployment and even consumption on Microsoft own devices from Surfaces to Xbox.
- oaiey 5y ago
  It is also key to understand that they are far more diverse than ever. Azure earns money independently, so does Office and Windows, XBox, etc. They do not rely on each other anymore. The only big part which is different is the former developer division. I do not think they earn the money themselves but are more a cost center to everyone else. But considering that everyone else is a giant company with a diverse set of developer needs, maybe that is just okay. Which again is interesting because the rest of the industry is also relying on this part of Microsoft.
  - runevault 5y ago
    Even if .NET is technically a cost center, the reduced cost they get from optimizing it making things like Bing faster probably still makes it indirectly a profit center by saving them so much money.
- pornel 5y ago
  This is the "post-apocalyptic" Microsoft. These things are open-source and supporting Linux, which was unthinkable for Bill's Microsoft. MS used to call Linux cancer, and now they're running Linux servers for people. MS used to spread FUD that it's irresponsible and amateurish to expose source code of programs, and later they had to acquire GitHub and npm to stay relevant. Microsoft had to adapt, because the old Microsoft has lost. Remember MS was selling very expensive per-CPU licenses for servers to run IIS, ASP.Net, and SqlServer. Admin tasks that we use webapps for were supposed to be a combination of Office, Access, VBA, native Windows applications, and a dash of ActiveX.
dagw 5y ago
there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today. I've worked (as a consultant) on a number of 'boring' B2B web applications targeting 'boring' industries and one thing they all had in common was that they where all in on the Microsoft stack.

nend 5y ago

When you're at the top there's really only one direction left to go.

chrisco255 5y ago
MS mcap 1996: $100B MS mcap 2022: $2.4T
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I think what they were trying to say is that, to the kind of mind capable of being as ruthless in getting to the top as Gates was, the biggest anxiety they would have after making it to the top is that someone will come and take it from them.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    I mean, it's a rational position to want to defend the business you created or the market share you carved out. Every business has to do this to survive. The only problem is when a business resorts to unethical tactics. Gates seemed to go through a bit of a transition sometime after this (perhaps after the antitrust case), where he seemingly lost his uber competitiveness and then stepped down from CEO position.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Market cap during the Steve Ballmer CEO tenure would be a better comparison, as it was during this time that MS was fighting Blackberry, Nokia, Apple and Android on the mobile OS front. This was the battle that Gates was worrying about: the declining prospects of Windows as an application platform. Their stock exploded once Nadella came in, killed off DOA products like Windows RT and Windows Phone, and shifted the focus to Office 365 and Azure cloud where they had a deep enterprise advantage.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Why? The email is from 1996. Gates wasn't worried about platforms that didn't exist in 1996.

hnfong 5y ago

You lose the developers, you lose the platform. That's what Bill Gates was thinking. Microsoft was "lucky" that: 1. JVM was too slow to run desktop apps on machines even in the early 2000s 2. Web and Javascript became so important that it reduced the impact of losing out on Java 3. Linux killed Sun Microsystems. Still, so much server infrastructure runs on Linux+JVM stacks that you could argue that it was a major reason Microsoft failed to gain dominance outside their desktop stronghold. Years later, their biggest existential threat in the form of Android was basically a modified Linux+JVM stack. People may think Bill was over-pessimistic, but looking back, their failure to kill off potential competitors like Java was one of the reasons Microsoft stagnated post-2000s.

3minus1 5y ago

> Bill Gates was the richest person...the 90s Java hype must really have been otherworldly to make him panic this much I kind of disagree with this line of reasoning. I think very successful people sometimes overestimate possible threats, and it may be one of the reasons for their success. I had this realization when watching the most dominant Age of Empires player stream once. I once struck by how paranoid he was about what the opponent might be doing, but it meant he was constantly prepared for worst-case scenarios. He seemed genuinely worried most of the game, rather than confident like I expected given his first-rank status.

r3muxd 5y ago
"He who strikes terror in others is himself continually in fear."
quux 5y ago
If you read Nathan Myhrvold's reply he says something very similar: "It is a new and uncomfortable feeling to be the incumbent rather than the challenger in one of these battles. However, we must not panic. The current perceptual battle is a long way distant from actual business and revenue issues, and we can't let perceptual issues cloud our thinking too much."

TheCoelacanth 5y ago

And now he's only the fourth richest. I'm sure a lot of billionaires would actually consider that drop to be something worth losing sleep over, as messed up as it is.