4 ms·

It wasn't about the name obviously, Must was pushing grandiose plan of creating an Internet-based financial... everything really (bank, payments, investments, e

by octobus2021 3y ago

It wasn't about the name obviously, Must was pushing grandiose plan of creating an Internet-based financial... everything really (bank, payments, investments, etc etc). While Thiel, Levchin, and Co were pushing for much more modest (but also more realistic) business model of "payment over the email". In addition Musk also decided to do a complete rewrite of the entire Linux-based system with Windows and M$ dev stack (which obviously also required replacing the entire dev team). Once Thiel and his gang came to the board with the ultimatum, Musk was done.

psd1 3y ago
> ... complete rewrite ... with Windows ... Whaaa...? Remind me the timeframe, this would have been very early 2000s, right? Does anyone care to speculate on valid technical or business reasons for doing this? Could they perhaps have been battling flaky tcp/ip implementations or something?
- psd1 3y ago
  My app doesn't offer comment editing, but I asked as a kneejerk before searching (doh). It was for the toolchain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    > There were more smart programmers in the gaming industry than anywhere else. Having worked in the gaming industry... yeah, no. (This is a really common belief amongst non-engineers, tho.) > Microsoft had huge support libraries. So you could get a DLL that could do anything, but you couldn’t get—you couldn’t get Linux libraries that could do anything. Having read that amazing post-mortem of Microsoft's BSD->Windows migration for (parts of) Hotmail at around the same time... yeah, very no, certainly for web stuff circa 2000.
  - octobus2021 3y ago
    "...to be writing our front-end code in Microsoft C++ instead of Linux." deserves to be with "Opening Twitter timeline results in thousands of RPC calls" :-) I read "The Founders" and it quotes Musk stating "The stuff that was being done in video games was way more advanced than in any other field" as the reason to switch to rewrite the _front_end_ (the Web app) with Visual C++ and host it in Windows. So... yeah.

psd1 3y ago

> ... complete rewrite ... with Windows ... Whaaa...? Remind me the timeframe, this would have been very early 2000s, right? Does anyone care to speculate on valid technical or business reasons for doing this? Could they perhaps have been battling flaky tcp/ip implementations or something?

psd1 3y ago
My app doesn't offer comment editing, but I asked as a kneejerk before searching (doh). It was for the toolchain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > There were more smart programmers in the gaming industry than anywhere else. Having worked in the gaming industry... yeah, no. (This is a really common belief amongst non-engineers, tho.) > Microsoft had huge support libraries. So you could get a DLL that could do anything, but you couldn’t get—you couldn’t get Linux libraries that could do anything. Having read that amazing post-mortem of Microsoft's BSD->Windows migration for (parts of) Hotmail at around the same time... yeah, very no, certainly for web stuff circa 2000.
- octobus2021 3y ago
  "...to be writing our front-end code in Microsoft C++ instead of Linux." deserves to be with "Opening Twitter timeline results in thousands of RPC calls" :-) I read "The Founders" and it quotes Musk stating "The stuff that was being done in video games was way more advanced than in any other field" as the reason to switch to rewrite the _front_end_ (the Web app) with Visual C++ and host it in Windows. So... yeah.