4 ms·

My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking.

by einr 2y ago

My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example. So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening. But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things. If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly. Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way. Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine? IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows. That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened. Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software. Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable. Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster. Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users. The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses. For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
- wvenable 2y ago
  > Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals. IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape. I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes. That's just the way things were.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    > Mac OS didn't have memory protection That's true, but that's not the only issue in system design. None were modern OSes. Most of the rest I think is BS. > IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape. Never heard that. What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser but Microsoft used their Windows monopoly, again, to spread IE - which the US government also convicted them for. > I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes. By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection?
    - wvenable 2y ago
      > What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser Netscape was SO bad that they literally threw away all the code to make Firefox. Before IE3, Internet Explorer was not really competitive but with IE3 you could fully use it place of Netscape and it was smaller, faster, and more stable (it was also mostly Spyglass Mosaic). IE4 began the integration with Windows, all of which sucked and nobody used but the browser itself remained solid. As a developer, IE was also way easier to develop for than Netscape and many things we now take for granted on the web were pioneered by Microsoft in IE. When the browser wars were on, IE was a really good browser and Netscape was stuck with a difficult code base. However, once Netscape was gone Microsoft simply stopped significantly updating IE. It remained almost completely stagnant until Chrome came along and it's from that period onwards that IE gets its bad reputation. I switched to Firefox at version 1.0 and still use it today. The thing is that Microsoft did, in fact, bundle IE with Windows to try and kill Netscape but that doesn't imply IE was bad at the time. That's the flaw in the logic and where a lot of negative revisionist history comes from. Ironically, today, it would be considered crazy to sell an OS or device without a browser being bundled. And Netscape may have collapsed under it's own weight eventually anyway. > By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection? By some automated script over cable internet.
mmooss 2y ago
> IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build. I've never heard that and IIRC, DR-DOS's owners sued successfully (or DoJ sued successfully). People certainly saw the errors.
- canucker2016 2y ago
  from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte. DR DOS publisher Digital Research released a patch named "business update" in 1992 to bypass the AARD code.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    I don't take Wikipedia as gospel, but that doesn't say what happened with earlier versions of Windows. And regardless, how did DR-DOS sue them if they weren't affected?
    - canucker2016 2y ago
      the check for dr-dos didn't exist except in that beta version of Windows. there were no media reports of dr-dos problems with windows before then. according to the wikipedia entry, the code was disabled but still shipped in windows.
      - mmooss 2y ago
        I think that repeats your GP comment? I have the same response - what are your subsequent thoughts?

by einr 2y ago

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago

It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows. That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened. Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software. Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable. Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster. Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users. The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses. For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.

wvenable 2y ago
> Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals. IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape. I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes. That's just the way things were.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > Mac OS didn't have memory protection That's true, but that's not the only issue in system design. None were modern OSes. Most of the rest I think is BS. > IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape. Never heard that. What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser but Microsoft used their Windows monopoly, again, to spread IE - which the US government also convicted them for. > I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes. By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection?
  - wvenable 2y ago
    > What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser Netscape was SO bad that they literally threw away all the code to make Firefox. Before IE3, Internet Explorer was not really competitive but with IE3 you could fully use it place of Netscape and it was smaller, faster, and more stable (it was also mostly Spyglass Mosaic). IE4 began the integration with Windows, all of which sucked and nobody used but the browser itself remained solid. As a developer, IE was also way easier to develop for than Netscape and many things we now take for granted on the web were pioneered by Microsoft in IE. When the browser wars were on, IE was a really good browser and Netscape was stuck with a difficult code base. However, once Netscape was gone Microsoft simply stopped significantly updating IE. It remained almost completely stagnant until Chrome came along and it's from that period onwards that IE gets its bad reputation. I switched to Firefox at version 1.0 and still use it today. The thing is that Microsoft did, in fact, bundle IE with Windows to try and kill Netscape but that doesn't imply IE was bad at the time. That's the flaw in the logic and where a lot of negative revisionist history comes from. Ironically, today, it would be considered crazy to sell an OS or device without a browser being bundled. And Netscape may have collapsed under it's own weight eventually anyway. > By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection? By some automated script over cable internet.

mmooss 2y ago

> IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build. I've never heard that and IIRC, DR-DOS's owners sued successfully (or DoJ sued successfully). People certainly saw the errors.

canucker2016 2y ago
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte. DR DOS publisher Digital Research released a patch named "business update" in 1992 to bypass the AARD code.
- mmooss 2y ago
  I don't take Wikipedia as gospel, but that doesn't say what happened with earlier versions of Windows. And regardless, how did DR-DOS sue them if they weren't affected?
  - canucker2016 2y ago
    the check for dr-dos didn't exist except in that beta version of Windows. there were no media reports of dr-dos problems with windows before then. according to the wikipedia entry, the code was disabled but still shipped in windows.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      I think that repeats your GP comment? I have the same response - what are your subsequent thoughts?