7 ms·

The Internet Tidal Wave (1995)

37 points by simonpure 4y ago

simonebrunozzi 4y ago
> May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” to all executive staff within Microsoft. Say what you want, but Bill Gates' vision of the internet was spot on. The drawback is that Microsoft used illicit and mostly unethical tactics to fend off competition (Netscape, etc) and gain and retain a certain market dominance, and this was done under Bill's scrutiny. It's really hard to find a saint, and Bill is not one. Besides this, I find Letters of Note to be an invaluable treasure trove of forgotten gems like this letter.
- autotune 4y ago
  Bill Gates of today is a very different person from the one who ruled over Microsoft back then. See Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
  - simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    Source? Do you know him personally?
    - autotune 4y ago
      You don’t see news about him trying buy a well known social network to destroy it or trying to use fruit to cure cancer. For one.
      - nailer 4y ago
        Sure but you don’t see anyone trying to do the former.
        autotune 4y ago
        Elon brings wrecking ball and mass layoffs causing mass exodus of social media site nailer: doesn't look like anything to me
        nailer 4y ago
        You seem to have forgotten what you wrote - here’s a link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503 If he’s trying to destroy twitter per your conspiracy allegation (remember how you wrote that?) he’s doing a poor job: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503
        autotune 4y ago
        Read a recent news article about how many advertisers have already pulled out and get back to me on that. Edit: here you go: https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-has-driven-away-half-twitters-top-100-advertisers https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-... You seem like a very confused individual.
        nailer 4y ago
        Done! Before we even had the conversation. Except from a credible source, rather than media matters. Guess how many pulled out at the point zero changes had been made? But obviously even some alternate timeline where they had, that wouldn’t really prove Elon is somehow secretly trying to destroy twitter, would it? Someone is indeed very confused here.
  - kxkdkdmxn 4y ago
    His PR is certainly a lot better, and there does exist a charitable foundation, sure, but a lot of foundations are just tax shelters, and just starting a charitable foundation doesn't absolve you of your sins or make you a good person, but it's great PR Unless you know Bill personally you're just commenting on the quality of his public persona 's public messaging, or your parasocial relationship with that persona Melinda Gates definitely still thinks Bill is worth divorcing, you know
    - autotune 4y ago
      That’s literally what everyone does every day with Musk. Not sure how Gates is any different here besides the fact that he is competent at said PR, as you say, and hasn’t done anything outright ridiculous to destroy his reputation.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Gates was a relative latecomer to see the 'net as a factor of importance. He wrote a book called 'The Road Ahead' [1] which exists in two forms [2] of which the first portrayed the 'net as a precursor to the real network of the future which would be embodied in proprietary networks like Microsoft Network (MSN). It was only a few weeks before the book would hit the shelves that he changes his mind and wrote the above memo, focusing Microsoft on the internet while demoting Microsoft Network - which was launched as a separate dial-up network in the style of Compuserve - to an internet service. [1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29 https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29 [2] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29?lang=en#Content_differences_between_hardback_and_trade_editions https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29?la...
  - Dracophoenix 4y ago
    In a way, Gates was right. Social media sites are basically the AOLs and CompuServes of today with the only difference being the protocol (POTS/PTSN vs HTTP)
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      He was right in the centralisation of certain services but wrong in his assumption that those services would be the gatekeepers to their user's total online experience. No matter how centralised the likes of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and the rest of them are they can not keep their users from simply going to their competitor's site or app since they're all hanging off the internet instead of behind their own access networks. This is a very important distinction, had Gates' vision succeeded we'd still be paying by the minute and kilobyte and there'd be a price on everything.
- bitwize 4y ago
  His vision wasn't too different from a lot of other pundits', and it came a year or two too late.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Right. People are acting as though 1995 is early, but it's like figuring out there will be another major European war on Christmas Day 1939. No shit, the Nazis have already conquered Poland. The Internet is the Third Network. Figuring this out in 1974/75 counts as clairvoyance since most of the technologies (e.g. TCP exists but IP takes until 1978) don't exist yet and nor does the terminology, although in hindsight things are coming together. Figuring it out in 1985 is still very impressive, by that point there's a significant TCP/IP network but it's unclear whether this North American idea triumphs - if you had confidence you could have made some smart investments and made yourself a lot of money. Figuring it out in 1995 is barely even noteworthy. "Eternal September" the point when there are constantly so many new people that it's always like the first weeks of a new year of university students on the Internet, began in 1993.
- twoodfin 4y ago
  What was unethical about how they beat Netscape? They were the first to realize that “browser technology” (as Gates repeatedly called it during his antitrust deposition) would be beneficial to consumers as part of the OS platform, and lo today you can’t find a consumer OS on any device that doesn’t embed its own web engine.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-fact https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... Search for "Netscape" if you're really interested.
    - twoodfin 4y ago
      That's not actually responsive to my question. If you read the FoF, it's very concerned with the fact that Microsoft passed up opportunities to charge for IE licenses in order to gain browser share at Netscape's expense. Yet barely a decade later, both Apple and Google took the same path. Again: What was unethical about giving away browser technology, inside Windows and outside of it? Or: When did giving away browser technology with your OS stop being unethical?
  - dboreham 4y ago
    Enjoy your "browser-device". Some people prefer their computer to be separable from the applications it runs.
nazgulsenpai 4y ago
>We need to establish distributed OLE as the protocol for Internet programming. Oh the horror!
AlbertCory 4y ago
"Letters of Note" would make a great Christmas present for almost anyone on your list. They almost certainly haven't heard of it, and it'll keep them captivated. Elvis writing to President Nixon asking to become a special Federal agent: who doesn't want to read that? I hosted Shaun at Google! Some of the attendees read a letter out loud. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM
dang 4y ago
Related: The Internet Tidal Wave [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455264 - Jan 2012 (1 comment) The Internet Tidal Wave (Gates, 1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899714 - Aug 2011 (10 comments) Pretty sure there have been other threads about this, if anyone wants to look...
ud0 4y ago
How was Gates able to predict the future with so much accuracy and yet still failed to capture the most value from it or better still establish itself as a core player on the internet like Google etc.
- tomrod 4y ago
  MS captured a lot of great revenue streams. Ballmer missed most of the opportunity but it's picked up steam in the last decade.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  When I was younger, there was only Internet Explorer and all online communication happened through MSN. Games ran on Windows or on consoles and that was about it. When MSN waned, Skype quickly became the de facto personal VoIP platform and at that point Microsoft had already acquired it. I was conceptually aware of Macs, but I didn't know anyone who had actually used one. I know this isn't the typical experience around here, but where I grew up, Microsoft was simply the only option. They lost it all years later when Blackberry, Google and later Apple started to become serious competition. They couldn't get Windows Phone to succeed (despite its superior underpinnings), they lost to Chromebooks in education, and they failed to keep Office competitive enough to make it as ubiquitous as it once was. I'm surprised Xbox is still around at this point. Gates had a vision and a keen eye for opportunities. When he was leaving, Microsoft was dealing with a failed products and unexpected competition. (Vista, iPhone, Zune) and after he was gone it took a while before MS got its vision back. The company tried to go a wild, new direction after fixing Vista and turning it into 7 by going all-in on Windows 8. Mobile, tablets, desktop, and console were all moving towards the same, unified ecosystem and design, something that brought Apple great success. On the Windows side, though, I think it's safe to say Windows 8 was universally disliked, tolerated at best. Windows Mobile died because of its many backwards incompatible releases despite the lacking ecosystem. It's interesting to imagine what the world would look like if Microsoft had managed to make Windows Phone a success. I think that had 90s-Gates been at the helm, Microsoft could've even beaten the iPad.
  - aswanson 4y ago
antiterra 4y ago
It’s interesting he keeps up the three character file extension convention of .htm even though he knew full well that it was .html on the vast majority of sites. I’d guess he was also aware of long file names in the upcoming debut of Win 95, but conscious of the fact previous Windows releases would remain prevalent for some time.
- wanderingstan 4y ago
  Yeah, Microsoft tried to make .htm a thing. IIRC, it was the default for all IIS and ASP pages for a long time.
js4ever 4y ago
"SGI has also been advertising their leadership on the Internet including servers and authoring tools. Their ads are very business focused. They are backing the 3D image standard, VRML, which will allow the Internet to support virtual reality type shopping, gaming, and socializing." Metaverse, 27 years too early
- agumonkey 4y ago
  It really was. A tad too complex, and too early to fit the cultural soil. VRML had reactive declarative idioms over 3d scene graph.. the current web is very similar but it was heavy and machines / browser weren't ready for that. In (2000s) college it was still a small chunk of one class, while today react/webgl is just a tutorial away for anyone to play with.
- nailer 4y ago
  Metaverse is (future thing that will succeed) (amount of years too early).
- agsamek 4y ago
  You meant 54 years too early, right? ;)
abraxas 4y ago
Most of you here who are under the age of 40 probably do not appreciate how we came within an inch of having the world run on a monopolized MSInternet(r) in the late nineties. Microsoft had its foothold in every aspect of consumer facing computing save for mobile computing with PDAs and such (it was rathern niche then and yet they soon attacked that space with Windows Mobile). The death of Netscape in the late nineties and the explosion in popularity of Internet Explorer was an imminent threat as Microsoft was ready to roll out their proprietary APIs such as OLE (rebranded as ActiveX) all over consumer facing internet. As the memo articulates in a few places, the goal was to embrace the formats and extend them with proprietary Microsft shit so they would not work or work poorly on non-Wintel platforms running Microsoft products. The academia was the last MS free stronghold because Sun still had a lot of foothold and from there emerged companies like Google who in the early days provided the last shred of hope and almost miraculously it kind of worked. Now Microsoft and ironically Google too continue to be threats to the open nature of the internet until the present day. Hopefully neither ever succeeds but I see a lot of younger people that scoff at Google's unfair practices give way too much credit of trust to Microsoft that is absolutely undeserved and unearned.

37 points by simonpure 4y ago

> May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” to all executive staff within Microsoft. Say what you want, but Bill Gates' vision of the internet was spot on. The drawback is that Microsoft used illicit and mostly unethical tactics to fend off competition (Netscape, etc) and gain and retain a certain market dominance, and this was done under Bill's scrutiny. It's really hard to find a saint, and Bill is not one. Besides this, I find Letters of Note to be an invaluable treasure trove of forgotten gems like this letter.

autotune 4y ago
Bill Gates of today is a very different person from the one who ruled over Microsoft back then. See Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  Source? Do you know him personally?
  - autotune 4y ago
    You don’t see news about him trying buy a well known social network to destroy it or trying to use fruit to cure cancer. For one.
    - nailer 4y ago
      Sure but you don’t see anyone trying to do the former.
      - autotune 4y ago
        Elon brings wrecking ball and mass layoffs causing mass exodus of social media site nailer: doesn't look like anything to me
        nailer 4y ago
        You seem to have forgotten what you wrote - here’s a link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503 If he’s trying to destroy twitter per your conspiracy allegation (remember how you wrote that?) he’s doing a poor job: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755503
        autotune 4y ago
        Read a recent news article about how many advertisers have already pulled out and get back to me on that. Edit: here you go: https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-has-driven-away-half-twitters-top-100-advertisers https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-... You seem like a very confused individual.
        nailer 4y ago
        Done! Before we even had the conversation. Except from a credible source, rather than media matters. Guess how many pulled out at the point zero changes had been made? But obviously even some alternate timeline where they had, that wouldn’t really prove Elon is somehow secretly trying to destroy twitter, would it? Someone is indeed very confused here.
- kxkdkdmxn 4y ago
  His PR is certainly a lot better, and there does exist a charitable foundation, sure, but a lot of foundations are just tax shelters, and just starting a charitable foundation doesn't absolve you of your sins or make you a good person, but it's great PR Unless you know Bill personally you're just commenting on the quality of his public persona 's public messaging, or your parasocial relationship with that persona Melinda Gates definitely still thinks Bill is worth divorcing, you know
  - autotune 4y ago
    That’s literally what everyone does every day with Musk. Not sure how Gates is any different here besides the fact that he is competent at said PR, as you say, and hasn’t done anything outright ridiculous to destroy his reputation.
the_third_wave 4y ago
Gates was a relative latecomer to see the 'net as a factor of importance. He wrote a book called 'The Road Ahead' [1] which exists in two forms [2] of which the first portrayed the 'net as a precursor to the real network of the future which would be embodied in proprietary networks like Microsoft Network (MSN). It was only a few weeks before the book would hit the shelves that he changes his mind and wrote the above memo, focusing Microsoft on the internet while demoting Microsoft Network - which was launched as a separate dial-up network in the style of Compuserve - to an internet service. [1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29 https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29 [2] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29?lang=en#Content_differences_between_hardback_and_trade_editions https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29?la...
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  In a way, Gates was right. Social media sites are basically the AOLs and CompuServes of today with the only difference being the protocol (POTS/PTSN vs HTTP)
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    He was right in the centralisation of certain services but wrong in his assumption that those services would be the gatekeepers to their user's total online experience. No matter how centralised the likes of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and the rest of them are they can not keep their users from simply going to their competitor's site or app since they're all hanging off the internet instead of behind their own access networks. This is a very important distinction, had Gates' vision succeeded we'd still be paying by the minute and kilobyte and there'd be a price on everything.
bitwize 4y ago
His vision wasn't too different from a lot of other pundits', and it came a year or two too late.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Right. People are acting as though 1995 is early, but it's like figuring out there will be another major European war on Christmas Day 1939. No shit, the Nazis have already conquered Poland. The Internet is the Third Network. Figuring this out in 1974/75 counts as clairvoyance since most of the technologies (e.g. TCP exists but IP takes until 1978) don't exist yet and nor does the terminology, although in hindsight things are coming together. Figuring it out in 1985 is still very impressive, by that point there's a significant TCP/IP network but it's unclear whether this North American idea triumphs - if you had confidence you could have made some smart investments and made yourself a lot of money. Figuring it out in 1995 is barely even noteworthy. "Eternal September" the point when there are constantly so many new people that it's always like the first weeks of a new year of university students on the Internet, began in 1993.
twoodfin 4y ago
What was unethical about how they beat Netscape? They were the first to realize that “browser technology” (as Gates repeatedly called it during his antitrust deposition) would be beneficial to consumers as part of the OS platform, and lo today you can’t find a consumer OS on any device that doesn’t embed its own web engine.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-fact https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... Search for "Netscape" if you're really interested.
  - twoodfin 4y ago
    That's not actually responsive to my question. If you read the FoF, it's very concerned with the fact that Microsoft passed up opportunities to charge for IE licenses in order to gain browser share at Netscape's expense. Yet barely a decade later, both Apple and Google took the same path. Again: What was unethical about giving away browser technology, inside Windows and outside of it? Or: When did giving away browser technology with your OS stop being unethical?
- dboreham 4y ago
  Enjoy your "browser-device". Some people prefer their computer to be separable from the applications it runs.

nazgulsenpai 4y ago

>We need to establish distributed OLE as the protocol for Internet programming. Oh the horror!

AlbertCory 4y ago

"Letters of Note" would make a great Christmas present for almost anyone on your list. They almost certainly haven't heard of it, and it'll keep them captivated. Elvis writing to President Nixon asking to become a special Federal agent: who doesn't want to read that? I hosted Shaun at Google! Some of the attendees read a letter out loud. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM

dang 4y ago

Related: The Internet Tidal Wave [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455264 - Jan 2012 (1 comment) The Internet Tidal Wave (Gates, 1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899714 - Aug 2011 (10 comments) Pretty sure there have been other threads about this, if anyone wants to look...

ud0 4y ago

How was Gates able to predict the future with so much accuracy and yet still failed to capture the most value from it or better still establish itself as a core player on the internet like Google etc.

tomrod 4y ago
MS captured a lot of great revenue streams. Ballmer missed most of the opportunity but it's picked up steam in the last decade.
jeroenhd 4y ago
When I was younger, there was only Internet Explorer and all online communication happened through MSN. Games ran on Windows or on consoles and that was about it. When MSN waned, Skype quickly became the de facto personal VoIP platform and at that point Microsoft had already acquired it. I was conceptually aware of Macs, but I didn't know anyone who had actually used one. I know this isn't the typical experience around here, but where I grew up, Microsoft was simply the only option. They lost it all years later when Blackberry, Google and later Apple started to become serious competition. They couldn't get Windows Phone to succeed (despite its superior underpinnings), they lost to Chromebooks in education, and they failed to keep Office competitive enough to make it as ubiquitous as it once was. I'm surprised Xbox is still around at this point. Gates had a vision and a keen eye for opportunities. When he was leaving, Microsoft was dealing with a failed products and unexpected competition. (Vista, iPhone, Zune) and after he was gone it took a while before MS got its vision back. The company tried to go a wild, new direction after fixing Vista and turning it into 7 by going all-in on Windows 8. Mobile, tablets, desktop, and console were all moving towards the same, unified ecosystem and design, something that brought Apple great success. On the Windows side, though, I think it's safe to say Windows 8 was universally disliked, tolerated at best. Windows Mobile died because of its many backwards incompatible releases despite the lacking ecosystem. It's interesting to imagine what the world would look like if Microsoft had managed to make Windows Phone a success. I think that had 90s-Gates been at the helm, Microsoft could've even beaten the iPad.
- aswanson 4y ago

antiterra 4y ago

It’s interesting he keeps up the three character file extension convention of .htm even though he knew full well that it was .html on the vast majority of sites. I’d guess he was also aware of long file names in the upcoming debut of Win 95, but conscious of the fact previous Windows releases would remain prevalent for some time.

wanderingstan 4y ago
Yeah, Microsoft tried to make .htm a thing. IIRC, it was the default for all IIS and ASP pages for a long time.

js4ever 4y ago

"SGI has also been advertising their leadership on the Internet including servers and authoring tools. Their ads are very business focused. They are backing the 3D image standard, VRML, which will allow the Internet to support virtual reality type shopping, gaming, and socializing." Metaverse, 27 years too early

agumonkey 4y ago
It really was. A tad too complex, and too early to fit the cultural soil. VRML had reactive declarative idioms over 3d scene graph.. the current web is very similar but it was heavy and machines / browser weren't ready for that. In (2000s) college it was still a small chunk of one class, while today react/webgl is just a tutorial away for anyone to play with.
nailer 4y ago
Metaverse is (future thing that will succeed) (amount of years too early).
agsamek 4y ago
You meant 54 years too early, right? ;)

abraxas 4y ago

Most of you here who are under the age of 40 probably do not appreciate how we came within an inch of having the world run on a monopolized MSInternet(r) in the late nineties. Microsoft had its foothold in every aspect of consumer facing computing save for mobile computing with PDAs and such (it was rathern niche then and yet they soon attacked that space with Windows Mobile). The death of Netscape in the late nineties and the explosion in popularity of Internet Explorer was an imminent threat as Microsoft was ready to roll out their proprietary APIs such as OLE (rebranded as ActiveX) all over consumer facing internet. As the memo articulates in a few places, the goal was to embrace the formats and extend them with proprietary Microsft shit so they would not work or work poorly on non-Wintel platforms running Microsoft products. The academia was the last MS free stronghold because Sun still had a lot of foothold and from there emerged companies like Google who in the early days provided the last shred of hope and almost miraculously it kind of worked. Now Microsoft and ironically Google too continue to be threats to the open nature of the internet until the present day. Hopefully neither ever succeeds but I see a lot of younger people that scoff at Google's unfair practices give way too much credit of trust to Microsoft that is absolutely undeserved and unearned.