6 ms·

Why was Microsoft evil? Because back in the day they hired only the best and brightest nerds and geeks. They had the same type of 'IQ test' interviews that Go

by 11hour 13y ago

Why was Microsoft evil? Because back in the day they hired only the best and brightest nerds and geeks. They had the same type of 'IQ test' interviews that Google does now. A company needs some code janitors and code monkeys, and others, to go along with the top coders. Google are an "us vs them" company now not a "great products" company and that's why they do these things like downvoting rings that lack integrity. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and it's going to get a lot worse.

rbanffy 13y ago
> Why was Microsoft evil? Because back in the day they hired only the best and brightest nerds and geeks. No. Because they abused a monopoly position hurting competition, therefore artificially inflating prices and preventing the kind of progress we see now in non-PC segments that are not suffocated by them. Also, for extorting every Android handset maker with a bogus (and secret) list of patents.
- saurik 13y ago
  Google has a monopoly on search in the US due to some early advances (letting them kick Yahoo, altavista, and similar early competitors to the corner) that now seems to mostly be maintained by both having sequestered some content by unfair licensing discrimination (such as YouTube in this example) and generally by "we have more of the web cached and indexed than anyone else" (a race they have a many years head start on, and barring some disruptive advance is probably going to be true for a long while). They are now using the money they make advertising on that search system (if you check their Q10 they don't actually get much money from third party adsense websites: first party inventory dominates) in order to build large numbers of "engh, good enough but not great" services that are impossible to compete against because Google just gives them away for free or even operates them at a loss... it really isn't that different. They are even now starting to "bundle" things together with their search platform (G+) to directly leverage their position to propel other products. This is especially clear as what really screwed Microsoft was trying to make certain everyone had access to a web browser that could itself be used as an application platform rather than having to pay license fees to a company (Netscape, if this isn't clear) that had such a large web usage marketshare that they were able to run roughshod over the W3 (to the point where their mailing list sometimes described Microsoft as the open hero that will save them; Microsoft even was providing their DTDs for public review, which impressed the crowd). Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup, to hold back the original CSS attempts by being unwilling to implement them, and to add tons of proprietary features to their JavaScript engine that they considered a killer feature that others had to bug-for-bug emulate. I mean: I look at the situation and find it surprising that anyone wouldn't think it isn't the exact same story playing out a second (arguably, even a third) time ("you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian", etc.).
  - angersock 13y ago
    Do you have any links furthering your explanation about Netscape? Typically the story is told much, much differently, and your allegations pique my interest here very much.
    - dspillett 13y ago
      I think most of what he points out about Netscape's browser are down to a mix of frontier development (release now, fix later) and a measure of incompetence, rather than malice. Netscape did try to use their position as temporary de-facto standard to bully there way through, tough they were not very successful at it. * Releasing DTDs for review: the were very slow on this compared to MS. Some of that was abusing their position (as the incumbent de-facto standard they had some control, and keeping what they were doing internal for as long as they could forced competitors to either guess (resulting in conflicting behaviours some of which we still fight with today) or wait and implement late). Equally though I think some of it was just their business culture: they were not open by default, they did not want to release for comments until they considered it finished, and so forth. MS had little choice but to be open and play ball with the community: they'd have just been ignored for longer otherwise. * "Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup": That is the frontier development thing. "Hey!, Look at this!, Isn't it cool!". Everyone was doing it, you just remember Netscape for it more because the legacy of some of their experiments/toys is still with us day-to-day. * MS overtaking them on CSS support, particularly positioning, once it became a strong contender for the way to go was more to do with them struggling generally at the time. The application was being killed commercially by the free Internet Explorer which had at least got to the point of being "good enough" beyond being free, they were losing money server-side too due to competition there that they were not able to fight off, and the application itself had become somewhat complex and bug ridden (IIRC the 4.x series was chronically unstable, at least on Windows, until at least 4.0.8) so implementing anything new (and implementing it well) took more effort than they could afford to throw at it. Their alternative (layers) was implemented first and they paid the "jumped first, guessed the market wrong" price heavily: having to support their own idea for backwards compatibility and find time to implement the one that won more general acceptance. * Most of the problems with JS cause by Netscape are from its beginnings: it was rushed to market. Most of the rest were them trying to keep ahead of the slow standards process - everyone else was doing that too. > you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian Exactly. Well, almost. Netscape were far from perfect and did (try to) abuse their position a bit, but if my memory is accurate (which it often isn't that far back, so have salt pinches at the ready) most of what they did wrong was due to bad business, process, and design decisions and being unwilling to backtrack on technical decisions that didn't work out so well (for reasons of compatibility: they too kept maintaining/reimplementing their old bugs so as to not alienate people with code relying on them) rather then concentrated deliberate malice.
untog 13y ago
Would love to see some evidence that backs any part of that up. I'll wait. If Google has widespread rings of employees dedicated to flagging anti-Google stories on Hacker News, do you honestly think that not one single person would have exposed it by now? That all people involved- including ex employees, most likely- would never talk?
- CloudNine 13y ago
  The more likely explanation is that Google fans and Microsoft haters are doign the flagging. Even the other story about Microsoft's response is getting flagged and is far down the front page for its points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889 What's your explanation for this constant flagging of Microsoft related stories or anti-Google ones? Read through this thread for examples for many more stories getting flagged off the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716010 HN rankings graph showing abnormal and sudden dips. http://hnrankings.info/5715168/ http://hnrankings.info/5715168/ HN rankings graph showing low rank for a long time inspite of a lot of upvotes. http://hnrankings.info/5715889/ http://hnrankings.info/5715889/
  - ok_craig 13y ago
    Maybe people who are actually just average HN users don't find those stories to really be worth reading as much as other stories. Occam's razor, you know. Not everything is a conspiracy.
    - recoiledsnake 13y ago
      Note that the complaint is not about lack of upvotes, it's about people going out of their way to use their flagging powers which is meant only for spam links.
      - ok_craig 13y ago
        How do you tell if something's flagged?
aptwebapps 13y ago
Don't make me relieve my callow youth and go on about the evils of 'M$'. ;) The ire directed at Microsoft back in the day was due to their ruthless business practices and their attack on Linux. Whether employees of theirs ever indulged in things like astroturfing was irrelevant because their official actions were so upsetting.

by 11hour 13y ago

rbanffy 13y ago

> Why was Microsoft evil? Because back in the day they hired only the best and brightest nerds and geeks. No. Because they abused a monopoly position hurting competition, therefore artificially inflating prices and preventing the kind of progress we see now in non-PC segments that are not suffocated by them. Also, for extorting every Android handset maker with a bogus (and secret) list of patents.

saurik 13y ago
Google has a monopoly on search in the US due to some early advances (letting them kick Yahoo, altavista, and similar early competitors to the corner) that now seems to mostly be maintained by both having sequestered some content by unfair licensing discrimination (such as YouTube in this example) and generally by "we have more of the web cached and indexed than anyone else" (a race they have a many years head start on, and barring some disruptive advance is probably going to be true for a long while). They are now using the money they make advertising on that search system (if you check their Q10 they don't actually get much money from third party adsense websites: first party inventory dominates) in order to build large numbers of "engh, good enough but not great" services that are impossible to compete against because Google just gives them away for free or even operates them at a loss... it really isn't that different. They are even now starting to "bundle" things together with their search platform (G+) to directly leverage their position to propel other products. This is especially clear as what really screwed Microsoft was trying to make certain everyone had access to a web browser that could itself be used as an application platform rather than having to pay license fees to a company (Netscape, if this isn't clear) that had such a large web usage marketshare that they were able to run roughshod over the W3 (to the point where their mailing list sometimes described Microsoft as the open hero that will save them; Microsoft even was providing their DTDs for public review, which impressed the crowd). Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup, to hold back the original CSS attempts by being unwilling to implement them, and to add tons of proprietary features to their JavaScript engine that they considered a killer feature that others had to bug-for-bug emulate. I mean: I look at the situation and find it surprising that anyone wouldn't think it isn't the exact same story playing out a second (arguably, even a third) time ("you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian", etc.).
- angersock 13y ago
  Do you have any links furthering your explanation about Netscape? Typically the story is told much, much differently, and your allegations pique my interest here very much.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    I think most of what he points out about Netscape's browser are down to a mix of frontier development (release now, fix later) and a measure of incompetence, rather than malice. Netscape did try to use their position as temporary de-facto standard to bully there way through, tough they were not very successful at it. * Releasing DTDs for review: the were very slow on this compared to MS. Some of that was abusing their position (as the incumbent de-facto standard they had some control, and keeping what they were doing internal for as long as they could forced competitors to either guess (resulting in conflicting behaviours some of which we still fight with today) or wait and implement late). Equally though I think some of it was just their business culture: they were not open by default, they did not want to release for comments until they considered it finished, and so forth. MS had little choice but to be open and play ball with the community: they'd have just been ignored for longer otherwise. * "Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup": That is the frontier development thing. "Hey!, Look at this!, Isn't it cool!". Everyone was doing it, you just remember Netscape for it more because the legacy of some of their experiments/toys is still with us day-to-day. * MS overtaking them on CSS support, particularly positioning, once it became a strong contender for the way to go was more to do with them struggling generally at the time. The application was being killed commercially by the free Internet Explorer which had at least got to the point of being "good enough" beyond being free, they were losing money server-side too due to competition there that they were not able to fight off, and the application itself had become somewhat complex and bug ridden (IIRC the 4.x series was chronically unstable, at least on Windows, until at least 4.0.8) so implementing anything new (and implementing it well) took more effort than they could afford to throw at it. Their alternative (layers) was implemented first and they paid the "jumped first, guessed the market wrong" price heavily: having to support their own idea for backwards compatibility and find time to implement the one that won more general acceptance. * Most of the problems with JS cause by Netscape are from its beginnings: it was rushed to market. Most of the rest were them trying to keep ahead of the slow standards process - everyone else was doing that too. > you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian Exactly. Well, almost. Netscape were far from perfect and did (try to) abuse their position a bit, but if my memory is accurate (which it often isn't that far back, so have salt pinches at the ready) most of what they did wrong was due to bad business, process, and design decisions and being unwilling to backtrack on technical decisions that didn't work out so well (for reasons of compatibility: they too kept maintaining/reimplementing their old bugs so as to not alienate people with code relying on them) rather then concentrated deliberate malice.

untog 13y ago

Would love to see some evidence that backs any part of that up. I'll wait. If Google has widespread rings of employees dedicated to flagging anti-Google stories on Hacker News, do you honestly think that not one single person would have exposed it by now? That all people involved- including ex employees, most likely- would never talk?

CloudNine 13y ago
The more likely explanation is that Google fans and Microsoft haters are doign the flagging. Even the other story about Microsoft's response is getting flagged and is far down the front page for its points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889 What's your explanation for this constant flagging of Microsoft related stories or anti-Google ones? Read through this thread for examples for many more stories getting flagged off the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716010 HN rankings graph showing abnormal and sudden dips. http://hnrankings.info/5715168/ http://hnrankings.info/5715168/ HN rankings graph showing low rank for a long time inspite of a lot of upvotes. http://hnrankings.info/5715889/ http://hnrankings.info/5715889/
- ok_craig 13y ago
  Maybe people who are actually just average HN users don't find those stories to really be worth reading as much as other stories. Occam's razor, you know. Not everything is a conspiracy.
  - recoiledsnake 13y ago
    Note that the complaint is not about lack of upvotes, it's about people going out of their way to use their flagging powers which is meant only for spam links.
    - ok_craig 13y ago
      How do you tell if something's flagged?

aptwebapps 13y ago

Don't make me relieve my callow youth and go on about the evils of 'M$'. ;) The ire directed at Microsoft back in the day was due to their ruthless business practices and their attack on Linux. Whether employees of theirs ever indulged in things like astroturfing was irrelevant because their official actions were so upsetting.