4 ms·

> the damn hard work, risks, and clever strategies used in growing Microsoft. Why are these only positive adjectives? You could have included unethical, antico

• progn 13y ago
  > included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal Oh, like Uber and AirBnb?
  • icebraining 13y ago
    I don't see how is Uber unethical or anticompetitive. Refusing to play by the rules created by the taxi lobbies is not anticompetitive.
  • enko 13y ago
    A little too much snark for my taste but this is fundamentally a good point. The same people who would rail against MS's rule-bending are very likely to be the same ones cheering on regulatory disobedience in startups, and frankly the latter's is often far more unambiguous. Good food for thought there, thanks.
    • e40 13y ago
      regulatory disobedience in startups is not the same thing as anti-competitive practices.
    • judk 13y ago
      I don't know. Folks who suffered under MS in the 90s have a sour taste for anticompetitive behavior and criticise Uber/AirBnB. The folks who know BillG as a malaria guy, or who cheered MS back then, are the ones who tolerate the ends by all means.
• ksk 13y ago
  >Why are these only positive adjectives? You could have included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal just as well Because those things were not as important to Microsoft's success as anti-ms people would like to think.
  • Tmmrn 13y ago
    Well, now we'll never know.
    • ksk 13y ago
      What are you confused about?
• Permit 13y ago
  Maybe it's because I was born in 1990 and wasn't old enough at the time, but I can't understand how shipping IE with Windows lead to antitrust litigation. The closed systems that we're seeing on mobile seem much, much worse. Reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/1118/ http://xkcd.com/1118/
  • DanBC 13y ago
    > but I can't understand how shipping IE with Windows lead to antitrust litigation. It was a bit more than just shipping it with Windows. IE was built into the OS. It was hard to remove, and the rendering popped up in unexpected places. People would view their email in Outlook Express. The advice at the time was "you're safe from viruses if you don't open the email", but people didn't understand the the preview pane of OE was opening the email for them, and infecting their machine. I agree that the closed systems we're seeing now are worse. I hate all the lock-in that's happening at the moment.
    • flomo 13y ago
      The technology and 'integration' issues were mostly a side-show. The actual crime was forcing PC OEMs and ISPs to ship only Internet Explorer, which "cut off Netscape's air supply".
  • Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
    MS had a motto back in the day "embrace, extend, destroy" which was said to sum up their approach to standards and technologies they didn't control. First MS would adopt the standard (embrace), then they'd start adding to it in ways which were useful but not available outside the MS products using the standard. Because they were so big their reach meant that these extensions would often become widely adopted and once this happened you effectively had to be running the appropriate MS software to have whatever it was work properly. At which point the standard / technology ceased to be any threat to MS as while they may not control the paper standard, they controlled the vast majority of how it was being used in the real world. The fear was that with IE being the defacto standard browser for 90% of machines, MS could have potentially take control of HTML and the other web standards and damaged or destroyed the open web.