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Every one of those cited companies crushed themselves first. Lotus followed the common pattern of burning out and losing their technical talent after they firs

Every one of those cited companies crushed themselves first. Lotus followed the common pattern of burning out and losing their technical talent after they first shipped, also made too large a bet on OS/2. Ashton-Tate did a little better maybe but also lost its ability to write software that worked, which was much more difficult back in those days. Borland and WordPerfect found it much more difficult than they expected to transition their products to Windows 3.x. The latter had too much pride in their collection of DOS printer drivers, but what really killed them was releasing something that passed the bar of not crashing, but would per a lawyer I worked with regularly drop all your tables and figures to the bottom of the document. Borland was slow to get their stuff working on Windows, was late to bundling an Office equivalent according to a marketing guy from there I once worked with, and had the bad portent of the edifice complex: http://www.krjda.com/Sites/BorlandInfo1.html http://www.krjda.com/Sites/BorlandInfo1.html To this day, well it's after they started going beyond their start in computer languages, their 808x C compiler for example blew away the competition when it finally launched, we ding Microsoft for their quality problems, but especially in the days Gates ran it one of the "secrets" of their success was writing software that basically worked, didn't crash on you etc. This makes it easy to beat competitors who lose that ability, or aren't as good at it.

GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
Borland made a bad business decision by trusting Microsoft to "play fair". For their flagship C++ IDE, they instrumented a version of the Windows headers to generate classes for their OO GUI framework. Microsoft then started to frequently change the Windows headers in ways that broken Borlands product. With no advance notice, every month or two MS would release an updated Windows SDK that broke Borlands tools.
jmclnx 4y ago
> Lotus followed the common pattern of burning out and losing their technical talent after they first shipped, also made too large a bet on OS/2. Actually, this bet was made because Microsoft told Lotus OS/2 is the future. They developed a very nice spreadsheet on OS/2, but we know how that ended. While Lotus was focusing on OS/2, M/S created their spreadsheet for Windows in secret and stole the market. Lotus did not have the resources to develop on 2 different platforms. This is from people I knew who were high up in Lotus. Another reason to never trust M/S now that they "like Linux". :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  I'm sure this is how the failures at Lotus explained what happened. My take on it is that Microsoft was at first enthusiastic enough about OS/2 but IBM doomed it, first and foremost through their "the PC AT is the last personal computer you'll have to buy" message to their customers, something they used to be able to do when they controlled a lot more of the business computer market and "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." Forcing OS/2 to run on the 286 was Not Even Wrong, for example in protected mode a 64KiB segment change incurred a hit of many cycles (40?), Intel did not understand how people used the 808x and only fixed that with the 386. But did your people "high up in Lotus" mention how the mid-life kicker for 1-2-3 using expanded memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory) was coded by people against orders who'd left the company by the time it was rediscovered and made into a product? That the Jazz office suite for the Macintosh was developed using assembly "for efficiency" but without a LAN or other means of close collaboration, every week people would hand in floppy disks for a complete build and thus a great deal of duplication made it very much less efficient? And in general how poorly that software development model worked? I see in Wikipedia "in Guy Kawasaki's book The Macintosh Way, Lotus Jazz was described as being so bad, 'even the people who pirated it returned it'." I was working in the Boston are in the 1980s and knew a lot of people who'd worked for Lotus or coworkers or friends of them, so I got takes from their very beginnings, which was a handful of people writing in close collaboration 1-2-3 in, yes, assembly language.
- scarface74 4y ago
  It was no “secret” that Microsoft would be writing Excel for Windows. It was already available on the Mac.
anamax 4y ago
One of the early deliverables from Microsoft Research was an efficient scheme for running big programs on 286 machines. That gave them a couple of years when Microsoft applications could do things on standard customer machines that their competitors couldn't do. That one deliverable was worth more than MR has cost up to this point.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  This sounds very cool, and I can imagine one way they might have done it: instrument a program probably including with the 286 in-circuit emulator like features, then link its code and data for maximum locality in 64 KiB chunks to minimize the segment switching hit. And/or make better use of the extra segment and maybe stack segment, compiler technology there. I'd imagine other compiler hacks would be useful, for example compare to today's bigger systems where the premium is on having as much in the most local caches as possible. Cleverness once you're in them is overwhelmed by the penalty of going to a more distant cache, memory, or taking a TLB miss. "Cache is the new RAM, RAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape." and all that.

GartzenDeHaes 4y ago

Borland made a bad business decision by trusting Microsoft to "play fair". For their flagship C++ IDE, they instrumented a version of the Windows headers to generate classes for their OO GUI framework. Microsoft then started to frequently change the Windows headers in ways that broken Borlands product. With no advance notice, every month or two MS would release an updated Windows SDK that broke Borlands tools.

jmclnx 4y ago

> Lotus followed the common pattern of burning out and losing their technical talent after they first shipped, also made too large a bet on OS/2. Actually, this bet was made because Microsoft told Lotus OS/2 is the future. They developed a very nice spreadsheet on OS/2, but we know how that ended. While Lotus was focusing on OS/2, M/S created their spreadsheet for Windows in secret and stole the market. Lotus did not have the resources to develop on 2 different platforms. This is from people I knew who were high up in Lotus. Another reason to never trust M/S now that they "like Linux". :)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
I'm sure this is how the failures at Lotus explained what happened. My take on it is that Microsoft was at first enthusiastic enough about OS/2 but IBM doomed it, first and foremost through their "the PC AT is the last personal computer you'll have to buy" message to their customers, something they used to be able to do when they controlled a lot more of the business computer market and "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." Forcing OS/2 to run on the 286 was Not Even Wrong, for example in protected mode a 64KiB segment change incurred a hit of many cycles (40?), Intel did not understand how people used the 808x and only fixed that with the 386. But did your people "high up in Lotus" mention how the mid-life kicker for 1-2-3 using expanded memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory) was coded by people against orders who'd left the company by the time it was rediscovered and made into a product? That the Jazz office suite for the Macintosh was developed using assembly "for efficiency" but without a LAN or other means of close collaboration, every week people would hand in floppy disks for a complete build and thus a great deal of duplication made it very much less efficient? And in general how poorly that software development model worked? I see in Wikipedia "in Guy Kawasaki's book The Macintosh Way, Lotus Jazz was described as being so bad, 'even the people who pirated it returned it'." I was working in the Boston are in the 1980s and knew a lot of people who'd worked for Lotus or coworkers or friends of them, so I got takes from their very beginnings, which was a handful of people writing in close collaboration 1-2-3 in, yes, assembly language.
scarface74 4y ago
It was no “secret” that Microsoft would be writing Excel for Windows. It was already available on the Mac.

anamax 4y ago

One of the early deliverables from Microsoft Research was an efficient scheme for running big programs on 286 machines. That gave them a couple of years when Microsoft applications could do things on standard customer machines that their competitors couldn't do. That one deliverable was worth more than MR has cost up to this point.

Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
This sounds very cool, and I can imagine one way they might have done it: instrument a program probably including with the 286 in-circuit emulator like features, then link its code and data for maximum locality in 64 KiB chunks to minimize the segment switching hit. And/or make better use of the extra segment and maybe stack segment, compiler technology there. I'd imagine other compiler hacks would be useful, for example compare to today's bigger systems where the premium is on having as much in the most local caches as possible. Cleverness once you're in them is overwhelmed by the penalty of going to a more distant cache, memory, or taking a TLB miss. "Cache is the new RAM, RAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape." and all that.