7 ms·

Their fall from grace, at least when it comes to the tech community, has been quite a sight. Has any other big tech company seen such a change in opinion? I’m n

Their fall from grace, at least when it comes to the tech community, has been quite a sight. Has any other big tech company seen such a change in opinion? I’m not sure Microsoft was ever beloved and even though Apple might have lost some of its sheen, there are definitely a lot of fans left.

ghaff 3y ago
Microsoft was pretty loved back "in the day" (80s to 90s). Maybe not as much as an enterprise OS company but their developer support was pretty awesome before most people had access to "everything" via the Internet. I'm not sure anyone else really qualifies as a big very consumer-facing tech company in the modern sense from that era or before though, of course, there were many once popular companies like MySpace that just flamed out. Yahoo! might be an example.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  > developer support was pretty awesome It was truly amazing. MSDN on CDs.
- orev 3y ago
  Microsoft was one of the most hated companies by both IT people and users in the 80s - 90s. About the only thing people liked was the developer support (which I give them credit for; Visual Studio is great). Computers running their software needed daily reboots and quarterly re-installs. Every single thing they did was to force people to get locked-in to them. They single-handedly slowed web progress by close to a decade (IE11). Anti-competitive that eventually resulted in government prosecution. The only thing that was ever revered about them was Bill Gates, who was more loved by business schools as a case study in how to run an extremely aggressive company.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Though what didn't suck in the 80s/90s from a computer user experience perspective? Terminals connected to minicomputers--which is what I used at work through most of that period? DOS-based word processing and spreadsheets were pretty nice by comparson. Macs? They were fine in the mid-80s although I didn't use them in school unless my group was using them for some project. Unix workstations were getting pretty nice by the mid-90s but those weren't something for a home user.
    - jrochkind1 3y ago
      Amiga is famous for being loved by it's users in the 80s. I think Apple II users and Commodore 64 users kind of loved them too. But expectations were much lower then, computers were expected to be a thing for a 'hobbyist' to tinker with, and those who did generally did it because they loved it. (I still don't think what were then called "PCs" running MS-DOS or (beginning in 1985) Windows were as beloved as Amiga or Commodore 64 though, Microsoft-OS PCs were for "business", and nobody really loved them). (Macintosh was first sold in 1984, so mid-80s was the first Macintosh).
  - JonChesterfield 3y ago
    Visual studio was very not great around 2010. I especially hated the widespread divergence from language specifications and the choice to use a different compiler front end for GUI feedback vs generating code, so you'd get errors in one and not the other. My colleagues claimed it used to be worse.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Microsoft's developer experience was great. MSDN CDs were full of valuable info, utilities, and pre-release APIs you won't find elsewhere. MS Visual Studio was (and still is) an exemplar of well-though-out, super-powerful IDE. MS developer docs were pretty thorough. OTOH Microsoft software's operation experience was far from happy. Bugs, crashes, byzantine installation and update procedures were all the daily reality. To say the truth, few things were significantly better. And if they were (say, VMS, which was rock solid), they were also significantly more expensive. Commercial Unix wasn't a hugely better; I personally crashed Solaris software, and the OS proper once. Bizarre installation and update procedures applied to it equally well. MS started having a hit after a hit to its reputation in the tech community when it started to try to do something about the internet. They tried to muck with Web technologies so as to create its own silo, not compatible with Netscape's: custom HTML and CSS, JScript vs Javascript, etc. They also started to talk trash about competition, never a good sign. Eventually they won, partly via business pressure, partly via good technology, and many a web developer cursed the MSIE5 chokehold since then, for a decade at least. Windows 95 was a target of many techie jokes, but, to my mind, MS have done a tremendously successful rework of desktop experience and its visual language, which was and still is widely emulated as "the common standard". Writing an OS as a DOS extender was a cool hack, which allowed to launch DirectX, and make windows a prime gaming platform.
- medler 3y ago
  This is shocking for me to hear because it is the exact opposite of my experience/memory. I recall Microsoft briefly being the cool place for geniuses to work before it quickly became the big bad evil monopolist. Maybe this perception was exacerbated by my hanging out in more open-source-friendly corners of the internet. I know they’ve changed their tune on open source but it’s really hard for me to break from my 20+-year perception that they are the evil company that makes awful software.
- ocschwar 3y ago
  In the 90's and aughts there was very little love for Microsoft among IT professionals. It's a little embarrassing to think about right now when you realize that Microsoft has never poisoned a river or sent thugs with billy clubs to bust a union, and so all of us had bigger fish to fry. But there was never love.
  - brazzledazzle 3y ago
    I don't think you're wrong but it's also fair to say that Microsoft was actively trying to destroy Linux and open source in general. They were literally funding legal attacks open source software. They were also engaged in a ton of anti-competitive behavior. Gates was a very smart guy and was absolutely a ruthless corporate terminator which is easy to forget given how he acts and spends his time/money today. And the Microsoft of today still engages in questionable or shitty behavior but regulators are even softer now than they were then. So Teams gets bundled for free with 365 after Slack proves there's a market.
    - ocschwar 3y ago
      Teams does send me back down memory lane with a good old fashioned 2 minutes hate for Microsoft every day.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Microsoft represented an existential threat to many, many parts of the IT ecosystem every bit as real as dumping toxic waste into salmon breeding grounds.
  - chasd00 3y ago
    Microsoft was one of the most ruthless orgs in tech history. They destroyed anyone within eyesight of their goals with wild abandon. To this day I have a hard time trusting/believing anything coming out of that org. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to wake tomorrow to GitHub being accessible only from the most expensive visual studio license available (and required to be running on the most expensive Windows license available).
- appleflaxen 3y ago
  I think people loved their products but hated their monopolistic pricing.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    But that's what software cost. If you weren't paying Microsoft hundreds of dollars for a compiler you were paying Green Hills. Or you were paying a Unix vendor thousands of dollars for an operating system on expensive proprietary hardware. Etc.
JohnFen 3y ago
> I’m not sure Microsoft was ever beloved They were very beloved, back when they were a scrappy upstart in the 1970s.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  I was there, I don't remember anyone ever loving Microsoft. Perhaps that's because I was in the UK.
- brk 3y ago
  I don't think enough people were aware of Microsoft pre-1981 for there to have been any kind of strong opinion. From the point in time where Microsoft was well known, I don't recall any period of time where "beloved" would be even remotely accurate.
xnx 3y ago
Is there any reputable survey of the tech community on this matter? Amongst the general population, Google seems to be doing pretty well. #35 on this list https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation-america https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation...
dweekly 3y ago
IBM, Xerox, Bell Labs, DEC, Sun...
- paxys 3y ago
  All those companies were at best tolerated, never loved at the scale Google was.
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    I was only a child in that era but it seems to me that Sun is venerated with hindsight today, people tend to speak of their work very highly. If that's true, is it just a hindsight thing, or maybe a favourable comparison to today's giants?
lmm 3y ago
Yahoo is the only case I can think of. Most big tech companies (other than Apple) get hated when they're big.
zoomablemind 3y ago
I vaguely remember all those PageRank revisions, when some sites would get penalized for being slow or not well written. These days I'm not even sure if some sites are indeed gone or they just "fell off" Google search... It may have certainly been friendly to a lot of users, yet it did not ring friendly to a lot of useful content. Then also comes the geo segmentation. There was a time when quite a few results would be from foreign language sites or other countries. Sure, it created noise when the language was very much foreign, though later there often was a link to Google? translate. I guess there may still be a way to have all that in the mix, but, generally the results are being streamlined.
- jamesfinlayson 3y ago
  I tried searching for something obscure recently - I knew the exact phrase and was confident it was only on one site. Google gave me nothing so I almost assumed the site was dead until I tried DuckDuckGo. I assume Google purged it because it wasn't using SSL.
over_bridge 3y ago
Every publicly traded company will eventually go through this character arc. They scale as big as possible then the need for share price increases will make them increasingly exploitative and force them to offer lower value to users until they fall into disgrace and are replaced. Repeat once per generation, to infinity
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Any entity that obtains the throne is doomed to fall soon after. Happened to the Greeks, the Roman Empire, Imperial China, the British Empire, IBM, Intel and AMD back and forth, Toyota, Boeing, Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Facebook... Also presumably soon to happen for the United States, Nvidia, Mysterious Twitter X, TSMC, and others currently reigning as kings in their respective corners of the world. Note that falling doesn't mean they will disappear into the history books, but they will all fall sooner or later. If an entity wants to stick around into perpetuity, never go higher than #2 and maybe never go higher than #3 so when #1 falls you don't end up becoming the new #1 out of nowhere.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  There is no "need for share price increases" and none of this is necessary or inevitable. A publicly traded company can run at a steady pace and pay a nice dividend without the growth hacking and enshittification we see in tech. This is an industry problem.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    > A publicly traded company can run at a steady pace and pay a nice dividend without the growth hacking and enshittification And then some PE vultures do a hostile takeover and we're back to step 1.
whoIsYou 3y ago
if anything, people have a much much higher opinion of microsoft now than they did even just 5 years ago. the arc can change, when you have a good CEO like Satya
1970-01-01 3y ago
IBM. The original big tech company is now a shadow of a shell of itself compared to its glory days.

ghaff 3y ago

Microsoft was pretty loved back "in the day" (80s to 90s). Maybe not as much as an enterprise OS company but their developer support was pretty awesome before most people had access to "everything" via the Internet. I'm not sure anyone else really qualifies as a big very consumer-facing tech company in the modern sense from that era or before though, of course, there were many once popular companies like MySpace that just flamed out. Yahoo! might be an example.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
> developer support was pretty awesome It was truly amazing. MSDN on CDs.
orev 3y ago
Microsoft was one of the most hated companies by both IT people and users in the 80s - 90s. About the only thing people liked was the developer support (which I give them credit for; Visual Studio is great). Computers running their software needed daily reboots and quarterly re-installs. Every single thing they did was to force people to get locked-in to them. They single-handedly slowed web progress by close to a decade (IE11). Anti-competitive that eventually resulted in government prosecution. The only thing that was ever revered about them was Bill Gates, who was more loved by business schools as a case study in how to run an extremely aggressive company.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Though what didn't suck in the 80s/90s from a computer user experience perspective? Terminals connected to minicomputers--which is what I used at work through most of that period? DOS-based word processing and spreadsheets were pretty nice by comparson. Macs? They were fine in the mid-80s although I didn't use them in school unless my group was using them for some project. Unix workstations were getting pretty nice by the mid-90s but those weren't something for a home user.
  - jrochkind1 3y ago
    Amiga is famous for being loved by it's users in the 80s. I think Apple II users and Commodore 64 users kind of loved them too. But expectations were much lower then, computers were expected to be a thing for a 'hobbyist' to tinker with, and those who did generally did it because they loved it. (I still don't think what were then called "PCs" running MS-DOS or (beginning in 1985) Windows were as beloved as Amiga or Commodore 64 though, Microsoft-OS PCs were for "business", and nobody really loved them). (Macintosh was first sold in 1984, so mid-80s was the first Macintosh).
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Visual studio was very not great around 2010. I especially hated the widespread divergence from language specifications and the choice to use a different compiler front end for GUI feedback vs generating code, so you'd get errors in one and not the other. My colleagues claimed it used to be worse.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Microsoft's developer experience was great. MSDN CDs were full of valuable info, utilities, and pre-release APIs you won't find elsewhere. MS Visual Studio was (and still is) an exemplar of well-though-out, super-powerful IDE. MS developer docs were pretty thorough. OTOH Microsoft software's operation experience was far from happy. Bugs, crashes, byzantine installation and update procedures were all the daily reality. To say the truth, few things were significantly better. And if they were (say, VMS, which was rock solid), they were also significantly more expensive. Commercial Unix wasn't a hugely better; I personally crashed Solaris software, and the OS proper once. Bizarre installation and update procedures applied to it equally well. MS started having a hit after a hit to its reputation in the tech community when it started to try to do something about the internet. They tried to muck with Web technologies so as to create its own silo, not compatible with Netscape's: custom HTML and CSS, JScript vs Javascript, etc. They also started to talk trash about competition, never a good sign. Eventually they won, partly via business pressure, partly via good technology, and many a web developer cursed the MSIE5 chokehold since then, for a decade at least. Windows 95 was a target of many techie jokes, but, to my mind, MS have done a tremendously successful rework of desktop experience and its visual language, which was and still is widely emulated as "the common standard". Writing an OS as a DOS extender was a cool hack, which allowed to launch DirectX, and make windows a prime gaming platform.
medler 3y ago
This is shocking for me to hear because it is the exact opposite of my experience/memory. I recall Microsoft briefly being the cool place for geniuses to work before it quickly became the big bad evil monopolist. Maybe this perception was exacerbated by my hanging out in more open-source-friendly corners of the internet. I know they’ve changed their tune on open source but it’s really hard for me to break from my 20+-year perception that they are the evil company that makes awful software.
ocschwar 3y ago
In the 90's and aughts there was very little love for Microsoft among IT professionals. It's a little embarrassing to think about right now when you realize that Microsoft has never poisoned a river or sent thugs with billy clubs to bust a union, and so all of us had bigger fish to fry. But there was never love.
- brazzledazzle 3y ago
  I don't think you're wrong but it's also fair to say that Microsoft was actively trying to destroy Linux and open source in general. They were literally funding legal attacks open source software. They were also engaged in a ton of anti-competitive behavior. Gates was a very smart guy and was absolutely a ruthless corporate terminator which is easy to forget given how he acts and spends his time/money today. And the Microsoft of today still engages in questionable or shitty behavior but regulators are even softer now than they were then. So Teams gets bundled for free with 365 after Slack proves there's a market.
  - ocschwar 3y ago
    Teams does send me back down memory lane with a good old fashioned 2 minutes hate for Microsoft every day.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Microsoft represented an existential threat to many, many parts of the IT ecosystem every bit as real as dumping toxic waste into salmon breeding grounds.
- chasd00 3y ago
  Microsoft was one of the most ruthless orgs in tech history. They destroyed anyone within eyesight of their goals with wild abandon. To this day I have a hard time trusting/believing anything coming out of that org. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to wake tomorrow to GitHub being accessible only from the most expensive visual studio license available (and required to be running on the most expensive Windows license available).
appleflaxen 3y ago
I think people loved their products but hated their monopolistic pricing.
- ghaff 3y ago
  But that's what software cost. If you weren't paying Microsoft hundreds of dollars for a compiler you were paying Green Hills. Or you were paying a Unix vendor thousands of dollars for an operating system on expensive proprietary hardware. Etc.

JohnFen 3y ago

> I’m not sure Microsoft was ever beloved They were very beloved, back when they were a scrappy upstart in the 1970s.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
I was there, I don't remember anyone ever loving Microsoft. Perhaps that's because I was in the UK.
brk 3y ago
I don't think enough people were aware of Microsoft pre-1981 for there to have been any kind of strong opinion. From the point in time where Microsoft was well known, I don't recall any period of time where "beloved" would be even remotely accurate.

xnx 3y ago

Is there any reputable survey of the tech community on this matter? Amongst the general population, Google seems to be doing pretty well. #35 on this list https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation-america https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation...

dweekly 3y ago

IBM, Xerox, Bell Labs, DEC, Sun...

paxys 3y ago
All those companies were at best tolerated, never loved at the scale Google was.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  I was only a child in that era but it seems to me that Sun is venerated with hindsight today, people tend to speak of their work very highly. If that's true, is it just a hindsight thing, or maybe a favourable comparison to today's giants?

lmm 3y ago

Yahoo is the only case I can think of. Most big tech companies (other than Apple) get hated when they're big.

zoomablemind 3y ago

I vaguely remember all those PageRank revisions, when some sites would get penalized for being slow or not well written. These days I'm not even sure if some sites are indeed gone or they just "fell off" Google search... It may have certainly been friendly to a lot of users, yet it did not ring friendly to a lot of useful content. Then also comes the geo segmentation. There was a time when quite a few results would be from foreign language sites or other countries. Sure, it created noise when the language was very much foreign, though later there often was a link to Google? translate. I guess there may still be a way to have all that in the mix, but, generally the results are being streamlined.

jamesfinlayson 3y ago
I tried searching for something obscure recently - I knew the exact phrase and was confident it was only on one site. Google gave me nothing so I almost assumed the site was dead until I tried DuckDuckGo. I assume Google purged it because it wasn't using SSL.

over_bridge 3y ago

Every publicly traded company will eventually go through this character arc. They scale as big as possible then the need for share price increases will make them increasingly exploitative and force them to offer lower value to users until they fall into disgrace and are replaced. Repeat once per generation, to infinity

Dalewyn 3y ago
Any entity that obtains the throne is doomed to fall soon after. Happened to the Greeks, the Roman Empire, Imperial China, the British Empire, IBM, Intel and AMD back and forth, Toyota, Boeing, Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Facebook... Also presumably soon to happen for the United States, Nvidia, Mysterious Twitter X, TSMC, and others currently reigning as kings in their respective corners of the world. Note that falling doesn't mean they will disappear into the history books, but they will all fall sooner or later. If an entity wants to stick around into perpetuity, never go higher than #2 and maybe never go higher than #3 so when #1 falls you don't end up becoming the new #1 out of nowhere.
mvdtnz 3y ago
There is no "need for share price increases" and none of this is necessary or inevitable. A publicly traded company can run at a steady pace and pay a nice dividend without the growth hacking and enshittification we see in tech. This is an industry problem.
- pphysch 3y ago
  > A publicly traded company can run at a steady pace and pay a nice dividend without the growth hacking and enshittification And then some PE vultures do a hostile takeover and we're back to step 1.

whoIsYou 3y ago

if anything, people have a much much higher opinion of microsoft now than they did even just 5 years ago. the arc can change, when you have a good CEO like Satya

1970-01-01 3y ago

IBM. The original big tech company is now a shadow of a shell of itself compared to its glory days.