13 ms·

Seeing comments like this “I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman http://www.hanselman.co

by OWaz 12y ago

Seeing comments like this “I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

jacquesm 12y ago
- Stacker - Netscape - SCO And many others besides. Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation. This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world. Your silly linked blog post by a Microsoft employee tries to wipe all that under the carpet. For the record, I'm not exactly 25, used to be a MS developer and user and have decided that their ethics are not fit for my taste, feel free to disagree.
- us0r 12y ago
  Your M.O. is to shit on anything Microsoft. Microsoft, Google, Apple and every other F500 company has engaged in "institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level" yet I don't recall seeing you in other threads.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    You're way out of line. I dislike Google and Apple right about as much as I dislike Microsoft, the only difference there is that they seem to have a lesser string of convictions behind their names (for now, give them some time). If you really took the time to go through my posting history you'd see that I'm pretty evenhanded. Of the big companies I use google where I can't avoid it, don't have a facebook account, there is one apple product in this house (a 2007 issue iMac which I keep running for testing purposes), my phone is an ancient (and indestructible) Nokia and I have an active twitter handle. That's about it. So no, my M.O. is not exactly to just shit on anything Microsoft, it's just that Microsoft was - and is - worse than most. See: patents, intellectual ventures (you didn't really believe that MS didn't have a hand in that?), subversion of various legal proceedings against MS and even after being convicted using their lobbying power and business muscle to avoid their punishment. That's probably a record for any tech company, feel free to list examples of worse behavior in the software world if you're aware of any.
    - yuhong 12y ago
      I personally focus on fixing them. I was glad when Vic Gundotra was fired, and I think even Facebook is better than the old days.
- pron 12y ago
  True, but companies change. I was, too, a MS fan turned hater, but I'm willing to give them another chance -- look how far Bill Gates has come. I certainly prefer them over Big Brother Google. EDIT: In fact, I prefer the old-guard companies like MS and Oracle to Google's and Facebook's new guard. The old guard is easy to figure out: they're out for profit. The new guard is a lot tricker: sure they're out for profit, too, but usually in a roundabout way that involves subterfuge, baiting people with "free" stuff, spying on their customers and their acquaintances, and various propaganda made to convince people they're working in their best interest.
- tlb 12y ago
  I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset. It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your choice.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system. I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this comment. > It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included Does it? I see the browser as an application, not as part of the OS. And I feel that as a user of an operating system you should have a choice what browser you run and what browser gets installed on top of the OS after that has finished installing. All these cross-layer links are good for nothing.
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      > Does it? Yes. You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser? Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc). Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        FTP? Wget? Xmodem? Does it even matter? It's not as if downloading a piece of software without a browser is an impossibility. About 99% of the software on the machine I write this on has been downloaded using something called a package manager and the boot CD that started the process was downloaded as a torrent. No browser required. > Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years. You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free. People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  Much like countries, it doesn't necessarily make sense to treat companies like people when it comes to reputation. You shouldn't hold a grudge against a country forever, many of the people inside of it may have disagreed with its actions and more importantly the leadership could be completely different now. Similalrly, if most of the employees at Microsoft today are different than in the 90s and the leadership is completely different, then what really has the reputation, their article of incorporation? Mind you, for all I know most of Microsoft is still "old Microsoft", I'm just saying it can't really be as simple as attributing actions of the past to whatever happens to be there today.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    This is absolutely true but even in the present Microsoft has anything but clean hands: http://euobserver.com/political/125868 http://euobserver.com/political/125868 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466540/software/munich-reverses-course-may-ditch-linux-for-microsoft.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466540/software/munich-... And on and on.
    - freehunter 12y ago
      >"a bribery scandal involving distributors selling Microsoft products" I'm not sure Best Buy reflects that poorly on Microsoft. >"They reportedly have raised over $5.5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, Yahoo, American Express, Adobe, SAP, Nvidia, and eBay, plus investment firms such as Stanford, Hewlett Foundation, Mayo Clinic, and Charles River Ventures." Again, doesn't reflect that poorly on Microsoft. >Munich reverses course, may ditch Linux for Microsoft Is a software sales company supposed to not sell software? That's what they do. How does that reflect poorly on them?
    - deeviant 12y ago
      Right, but would own an Apple product? That's terrible, they exploit horrible treatment of rightless Chinese wage-slaves. Would you use a google product? They are double-faced went in come to net neutrality, only putting their weight on points that promote their own benefit. They also buy up tons of extremely innovative start-ups, then suffocate them under the weight of their glacial bureaucracy and pedantic squabbling. I could go on all day.
- glibgil 12y ago
  That's not why we call them incorporated. 'Body' or 'corpus' are synonyms for 'organization'. They are called corporations because the embody some coordinated effort, not because someone realized "hey, this organization seems to have a personality. I'll call it a corporation."
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    No, 'incorporated' is another way of saying something is a legal entity independent of those that create it. But since corporations tend to assume a lot of the traits of the people that run them and are given significant subsets of the rights normally afforded to real-life human beings the line between corporate identities and persons can blur to the point where we are allowed to ascribe (some) personal traits to corporations.
    - glibgil 12y ago
      The reason they are called corporations is language and vocabulary. The word is like body, as in the body politic. The etymology of corporation is Latin compare "combine in one body" or "persons united in a body for some purpose". That is why we have the word. Everything you added is modern and irrelevant to the question of why we use this word.
  - eruditely 12y ago
    http://szabo.best.vwh.net/jointstock.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/jointstock.html "The modern joint-stock corporation has many sources in medieval Europe. First among these was corporate law itself. Although the era is commonly referred to as "feudalism," for the hierarchy of individually owned "fiefs" of land and control of serfs as fixtures of that land, large amounts of wealth in Europe were actually controlled by corporate entities. Chief among these were church lands, the corporate entities being dioceses, religious orders and the Roman Church itself. These entities controlled a substantial fraction of the land in Western Europe. Furthermore cities (with varying degrees of political independence), merchant guilds, craft guilds, and many charitable entities (such as hospitals) were legal "corporations," i.e. artificial and perpetual legal persons under law. Some basic issues in corporate law (for example, when are officers individually liable for acts of the corporation, and when the corporation is liable for acts of its agents) had already been solved in canon law and urban law long before the joint-stock corporation." and more on the "Origins of the Joint-Stock Company"
- mahouse 12y ago
  Netscape killed itself.
- yarou 12y ago
  >This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world. Welcome to American corporate culture :) You have to keep in mind that Microsoft had a monopoly for a very long time. While their actions may, in your world view, be "criminal", as a corporation Microsoft was acting completely rationally. As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders. You also have to keep in mind the historical context: back then, there was no such thing as "social responsibility".
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders. I keep hearing that but I don't actually believe that is true. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-myth-of-maximizing-shareholder-value/2014/02/11/00cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-m...
    - yarou 12y ago
      Perhaps obligation is a poor word choice. I meant it more in the sense of the invisible hand and rationality. As a rational actor, Microsoft was maximizing their utility, given whatever their utility function/curve is.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        By that reason we should all go into the drugs trade. I don't buy that for a second. Rational actors are not normally driven to illegal behavior unless someone makes a decision to that effect saying 'damn the consequences, let's commit this crime'. That's a very dangerous line to cross. It came within a whisker of getting Microsoft to be broken up and I can't believe that they would have taken that risk if they knew that was a possible consequence. And I firmly believe they should have been broken up, that would have sent a strong signal that anti-competitive behavior is not acceptable. Instead, now we have a bigger mess.
  - 12y ago
- com2kid 12y ago
  I'm just a low level drone here at MS, and I obviously am not involved in any important decisions, but I'd like to add that all the above things happened back when the current generation that works here was growing up. We were all on Slashdot, being outraged and angry 13 year olds. Except now my generation works here, and I think the changes (such as all the ones announced today!) are a good sign of that. At least since after I went through puberty (I'm not that young!) Microsoft has been acting pretty damn chill. I guess my main complaint is that people yell at us for sins that were committed by, quite literally, a previous generation.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I would not hold it against you that you make a living with MS, that said in the present they do plenty of stuff that they really shouldn't. So it's not just the previous generation, the current one is also anything but clean.
    - Sir_Blake 12y ago
      What exactly are they doing today that you don't agree with?
      - BuckRogers 12y ago
        I'll answer that. No more than any other for-profit enterprise.
      - nileshtrivedi 12y ago
        Patent threats and lawsuits against Android OEMs. Sabotaging the office document standard process at ISO. Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems. Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine. among other things.
    - jasonlotito 12y ago
      One could say the same about companies and organizations that you admit to supporting as well. So, if all choices are bad choices, what are you left with?
- yuhong 12y ago
  My personal favorite is the OS/2 2.0 fiasco.
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  Netscape cut their own throat. Blaming Microsoft was just whining. Software patents, including Stacker's, are far more destructive to innovation than anything Microsoft could ever do on its own. SCO, well... OK, there's no way to spin that as anything but evil.
- tzs 12y ago
  > - Netscape If you are referring to Microsoft's bundling of IE, that did not kill Netscape. It just buried the rotting corpse. Before IE was bundled with Windows, it was sold in stores as a boxed product, right next to Netscape's boxed product. Going head to head in retail software stores (Egghead, CompUSA), IE massively outsold Netscape. This is what killed Netscape. The reason IE outsold Netscape at retail was simple--it was a much better browser. Netscape introduced a lot of proprietary tags, which Microsoft included in IE. Microsoft also introduced proprietary tags, which Netscape often ignored. For the end user, the result was simple: IE correctly rendered more pages than Netscape. It was also better on resource usage, if I remember correctly, which was a much bigger deal then than it is now.
  - chiph 12y ago
    All those "Best on IE" and "Best viewed on Netscape" image buttons from back in the day... I thought I had forgotten about them, but you had to drag them up from the depths... ;)
    - megablast 12y ago
      > I thought I had forgotten about them You thought you had forgotten about something? How does that work.
      - chiph 12y ago
        I forget. Maybe it'll come to me.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    Computer manufacturers were told that they could not buy Windows for their computers if they intended to factory-install Netscape. That's not consumer choice, that is the definition of criminally leveraging a monopoly in one market to dominate another.
- quotemstr 12y ago
  Companies don't have agencies or personalities. People do. You're aware that a huge portion of the people responsible for the shenanigans of previous decades have left the company, right? Give the current crew credit.
- vcjohnson 12y ago
  While I can tolerate most of your post, Hanselman's blog is not silly. Well it is, but not in the disparaging way you mean.
smacktoward 12y ago
I like Hanselman's blog a lot, but I found that post pretty disappointing. The reason there are a lot of people running around saying "Microsoft killed my pappy!" is because Microsoft actually did kill a lot of people's pappies, back in the day. When someone comes into town and shoots your pappy, it's not something you forget or forgive easily. The burden is on Microsoft to prove that they're not the same company as they were back then, not on the people they wronged to get over it.
- freehunter 12y ago
  At this point there is literally nothing Microsoft can do to win these people over. They've done everything they could do short of porting the Windows UI to Linux (and even then... this and Powershell brings it pretty close). They're a huge contributor to open source, they support Linux pretty heavily on Azure, they open sourced their .NET as seen here, they listened to their customers on Windows 10, they're doing great things in mobile, putting out great hardware in the Surface line, pushing IE forward to match their competitors and the changing web, and that's just getting started. So no, at this point it is on the Microsoft haters to get over it. And if you can't get over it, then just ignore it. As someone who works partially in the Windows world and thus is interested in Microsoft news, I'm tired of Microsoft news being flagged off the front page constantly. I'm tired of seeing something about Windows and the comments being filled with people hating on Windows 8 for bullshit rather than good discussion about the article. I'm tired of seeing great news like this and have people say "yeah but in 1994 they...". That was 20 years ago. Fucking get over it. Microsoft sure has. If Microsoft is still doing things wrong, it's completely overshadowed by their detractors constantly shutting down legitimate discussions with their insane rambling about the past.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > That was 20 years ago. Fucking get over it. Microsoft sure has. Some stuff from 2014, maybe that will help you to see that Microsoft has definitely not 'gotten over it': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596869 And that's just a very limited list.
bad_user 12y ago
I've also been pretty unforgiving about things that Microsoft did in the past to crush competing web browsers, competing standards like OpenGL or ODF, Linux or open-source in general. And sorry, but I do not agree with that article by Hanselman. Thing is, I treat companies like I treat people. Legally speaking, isn't that what they want, in the US anyway? So if you violate my trust, it's goodbye until I see serious amends being made. However I must say that with this move I'm finally ready to forgive Microsoft. I've always seen .NET as a platform created for achieving lock-in with Windows, the ECMA standard (while better than Java's JCP, which is a farce) I've seen as an attempt to paint a turd and Mono, while a wonderful effort, I've never seen as good enough. Open-sourcing .NET is a wonderful move, because now we've got a credible alternative to the JVM and this move couldn't come with better timing, given the dickish moves by Sun/Oracle against Apache Harmony and Android's Dalvik / ART. And don't get me wrong, compared to other people I do not have double standards in this regard. I've been a Google fanboy for years, but my eyes are wide open now and I'm making moves to escape their lock-in ;-)
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  > I treat companies like I treat people I would say this is a really bad strategy. According to unwritten HN rules, I should now start explaining why I think there are differences between a company and a person, and why they should be treated differently thereof. But I won't. :)
  - bad_user 12y ago
    Why? Do you disagree with the concept of voting with your wallet? How else can you get companies to listen to your needs? And my needs as a developer and a user are simple - I need my privacy, an open web and a healthy open-source ecosystem. And I'll vote with my wallet and I'll bitch against any company that has a problem with that - and I'll also encourage alternatives that cater to my needs. The world would be a much better place if all people behaved like this IMHO - oh, so are the shareholders a company's top priority? Not my problem.
    - Retra 12y ago
adl 12y ago
Sometimes is justified, never say never, but it will take short of a miracle for me to trust Internet Explorer in any way, shape or form after setting back the Open Web for years (I know that IE 11 is way better, but to little, to late) Now saying that, I think that an Open Source .NET stack is a wonderful thing! I like C# a lot.
orbitur 12y ago
No one else seems to be complaining about it, so it may just be me: Your link just drops me at the front page of his blog. Searching for it through Google leads to a result, but clicking on that link also takes me to the front page. Is there a mirror?
- OWaz 12y ago
  Here you go: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SoH4dHM98pwJ:www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SoH4dHM... On the Google search result next to the url is a tiny dropdown arrow. You can click that arrow and select Cached.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
snowwrestler 12y ago
The post says Microsoft was convicted of anti-trust for "for bundling a browser in the operating system that couldn't be uninstalled or easily replaced." That is not true. Microsoft was convicted because they told 3rd party computer manufacturers that they could not purchase Windows if they intended to install any additional browsers. Not only is that illegal, but it demonstrably harmed innovation in web browsers for years. I don't believe Microsoft killed my pappy, and I use MS software every single day. But I also don't believe in minimizing or misrepresenting the facts of the past.
daveloyall 12y ago
Hanselman is suggesting that we should just say Aww, shucks! and give Microsoft a big hug? He has so completely missed the deadly point that he's accidentally echoed it in his own post: Tons of people feel that Microsoft killed their Pappy. Nadella's actions tell me one thing: the free software movement has threatened their bottom line. This is not the time to back down, it's not the time to forgive and forget. This is the time to review the Halloween Documents!
- alkonaut 12y ago
  It's not mainly that free software threats their bottom line, it's rather that mobile and cloud is the future, and traditionally their bottom line was of course server and desktop. So they are being very aggressive in the cloud and mobile area which is understandable. But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made. Cloud and mobile is about scale. They want thousands of cloud apps and mobile apps to be made. They can give their tools away and make money on tablets and azure. Azure runs Linux! So making the tools free is a natural step in becoming a service company. Making them cross platform is natural since Microsoft now sells cross platform services. No one thinks Microsoft isn't only concerned with their bottom line. It's not a charity. But that's not to say this is some kind of greedy trap. It's probably a good move for both devs and microsoft.
  - martijn_himself 12y ago
    Good points. Except: >But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with >which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made .NET was never the tool where Photoshop and Call of Duty was made, but a significant amount of mobile apps and games nowadays are made using Xamarin and Unity, tools that run on top of Mono, a cross-platform implementation of .NET. If anything the Microsoft announcement brings Mono and .NET closer together. And I think you will find that a significant (if not majority) proportion of megacorps do run their intranets on SharePoint. SharePoint is and has been customisable using .NET libraries and tools.
johansch 12y ago
http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-senior-leaders/ http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-senior-leaders/ How many of the "non-criminal new microsoft generation" do you see there? My guesstimate: 33%
yuhong 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281319 This is partly what inspired me to write a wishlist for Satya in the first place.
bsimpson 12y ago
Many people who hate Microsoft do it as a pavlonian response to years upon years of fighting against crappy Microsoft products. People who'd like to spend 90% of their time creating instead spend 25% creating, 30% watering it down enough to be easily "cross platform", and 45% of their time figuring out why-the-fuck-it-doesn't-work-in-Internet-Explorer. This is the same browser where merely calling console.log threw an error until surprisingly recently. I met a bunch of the IE folks at CES 2012, and I honestly believe their trying to be better web citizens. They are still slower than I'd like, but IE isn't quite terrible anymore. I have friends who work at various browser vendors, and I don't sense any lingering ill-will towards IE. That said, I certainly understand why some people are slow to get excited about Microsoft. You don't have to be middle-aged to have personally experienced the bad side of Microsoft.
- nickik 12y ago
  The problem with this argument is that even if there were multible open source platforms you have "cross platform" problems. Any deversity will result in extra work. So you can either have the one thing to rule them all, or you will have to spend time on doing it for everything. I admit that IE was shit and it did cost a lot of time. But how about we get over it? They admitied that IE was shitty and now they are doing much better. There are products from other company that used to be shit, now they are better and people dont still hate on that. Also, dont think im a idialist who does not remember the past, I was optimizing for IE6 not all that long ago.
sjm 12y ago
From that post, interesting foreshadowing discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181029
Shorel 12y ago
The modern pappies are Microsoft own technologies. You invest heavily in them, and then they are abandoned. I seem to remember they even tried to make obsolete the Win32 API. Their strongest asset.

by OWaz 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago

- Stacker - Netscape - SCO And many others besides. Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation. This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world. Your silly linked blog post by a Microsoft employee tries to wipe all that under the carpet. For the record, I'm not exactly 25, used to be a MS developer and user and have decided that their ethics are not fit for my taste, feel free to disagree.

us0r 12y ago
Your M.O. is to shit on anything Microsoft. Microsoft, Google, Apple and every other F500 company has engaged in "institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level" yet I don't recall seeing you in other threads.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  You're way out of line. I dislike Google and Apple right about as much as I dislike Microsoft, the only difference there is that they seem to have a lesser string of convictions behind their names (for now, give them some time). If you really took the time to go through my posting history you'd see that I'm pretty evenhanded. Of the big companies I use google where I can't avoid it, don't have a facebook account, there is one apple product in this house (a 2007 issue iMac which I keep running for testing purposes), my phone is an ancient (and indestructible) Nokia and I have an active twitter handle. That's about it. So no, my M.O. is not exactly to just shit on anything Microsoft, it's just that Microsoft was - and is - worse than most. See: patents, intellectual ventures (you didn't really believe that MS didn't have a hand in that?), subversion of various legal proceedings against MS and even after being convicted using their lobbying power and business muscle to avoid their punishment. That's probably a record for any tech company, feel free to list examples of worse behavior in the software world if you're aware of any.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    I personally focus on fixing them. I was glad when Vic Gundotra was fired, and I think even Facebook is better than the old days.
pron 12y ago
True, but companies change. I was, too, a MS fan turned hater, but I'm willing to give them another chance -- look how far Bill Gates has come. I certainly prefer them over Big Brother Google. EDIT: In fact, I prefer the old-guard companies like MS and Oracle to Google's and Facebook's new guard. The old guard is easy to figure out: they're out for profit. The new guard is a lot tricker: sure they're out for profit, too, but usually in a roundabout way that involves subterfuge, baiting people with "free" stuff, spying on their customers and their acquaintances, and various propaganda made to convince people they're working in their best interest.
tlb 12y ago
I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset. It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your choice.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system. I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this comment. > It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included Does it? I see the browser as an application, not as part of the OS. And I feel that as a user of an operating system you should have a choice what browser you run and what browser gets installed on top of the OS after that has finished installing. All these cross-layer links are good for nothing.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    > Does it? Yes. You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser? Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc). Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      FTP? Wget? Xmodem? Does it even matter? It's not as if downloading a piece of software without a browser is an impossibility. About 99% of the software on the machine I write this on has been downloaded using something called a package manager and the boot CD that started the process was downloaded as a torrent. No browser required. > Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years. You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free. People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.
tolmasky 12y ago
Much like countries, it doesn't necessarily make sense to treat companies like people when it comes to reputation. You shouldn't hold a grudge against a country forever, many of the people inside of it may have disagreed with its actions and more importantly the leadership could be completely different now. Similalrly, if most of the employees at Microsoft today are different than in the 90s and the leadership is completely different, then what really has the reputation, their article of incorporation? Mind you, for all I know most of Microsoft is still "old Microsoft", I'm just saying it can't really be as simple as attributing actions of the past to whatever happens to be there today.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  This is absolutely true but even in the present Microsoft has anything but clean hands: http://euobserver.com/political/125868 http://euobserver.com/political/125868 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466540/software/munich-reverses-course-may-ditch-linux-for-microsoft.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466540/software/munich-... And on and on.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    >"a bribery scandal involving distributors selling Microsoft products" I'm not sure Best Buy reflects that poorly on Microsoft. >"They reportedly have raised over $5.5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, Yahoo, American Express, Adobe, SAP, Nvidia, and eBay, plus investment firms such as Stanford, Hewlett Foundation, Mayo Clinic, and Charles River Ventures." Again, doesn't reflect that poorly on Microsoft. >Munich reverses course, may ditch Linux for Microsoft Is a software sales company supposed to not sell software? That's what they do. How does that reflect poorly on them?
  - deeviant 12y ago
    Right, but would own an Apple product? That's terrible, they exploit horrible treatment of rightless Chinese wage-slaves. Would you use a google product? They are double-faced went in come to net neutrality, only putting their weight on points that promote their own benefit. They also buy up tons of extremely innovative start-ups, then suffocate them under the weight of their glacial bureaucracy and pedantic squabbling. I could go on all day.
glibgil 12y ago
That's not why we call them incorporated. 'Body' or 'corpus' are synonyms for 'organization'. They are called corporations because the embody some coordinated effort, not because someone realized "hey, this organization seems to have a personality. I'll call it a corporation."
- jacquesm 12y ago
  No, 'incorporated' is another way of saying something is a legal entity independent of those that create it. But since corporations tend to assume a lot of the traits of the people that run them and are given significant subsets of the rights normally afforded to real-life human beings the line between corporate identities and persons can blur to the point where we are allowed to ascribe (some) personal traits to corporations.
  - glibgil 12y ago
    The reason they are called corporations is language and vocabulary. The word is like body, as in the body politic. The etymology of corporation is Latin compare "combine in one body" or "persons united in a body for some purpose". That is why we have the word. Everything you added is modern and irrelevant to the question of why we use this word.
- eruditely 12y ago
  http://szabo.best.vwh.net/jointstock.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/jointstock.html "The modern joint-stock corporation has many sources in medieval Europe. First among these was corporate law itself. Although the era is commonly referred to as "feudalism," for the hierarchy of individually owned "fiefs" of land and control of serfs as fixtures of that land, large amounts of wealth in Europe were actually controlled by corporate entities. Chief among these were church lands, the corporate entities being dioceses, religious orders and the Roman Church itself. These entities controlled a substantial fraction of the land in Western Europe. Furthermore cities (with varying degrees of political independence), merchant guilds, craft guilds, and many charitable entities (such as hospitals) were legal "corporations," i.e. artificial and perpetual legal persons under law. Some basic issues in corporate law (for example, when are officers individually liable for acts of the corporation, and when the corporation is liable for acts of its agents) had already been solved in canon law and urban law long before the joint-stock corporation." and more on the "Origins of the Joint-Stock Company"
mahouse 12y ago
Netscape killed itself.
yarou 12y ago
>This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world. Welcome to American corporate culture :) You have to keep in mind that Microsoft had a monopoly for a very long time. While their actions may, in your world view, be "criminal", as a corporation Microsoft was acting completely rationally. As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders. You also have to keep in mind the historical context: back then, there was no such thing as "social responsibility".
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders. I keep hearing that but I don't actually believe that is true. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-myth-of-maximizing-shareholder-value/2014/02/11/00cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-m...
  - yarou 12y ago
    Perhaps obligation is a poor word choice. I meant it more in the sense of the invisible hand and rationality. As a rational actor, Microsoft was maximizing their utility, given whatever their utility function/curve is.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      By that reason we should all go into the drugs trade. I don't buy that for a second. Rational actors are not normally driven to illegal behavior unless someone makes a decision to that effect saying 'damn the consequences, let's commit this crime'. That's a very dangerous line to cross. It came within a whisker of getting Microsoft to be broken up and I can't believe that they would have taken that risk if they knew that was a possible consequence. And I firmly believe they should have been broken up, that would have sent a strong signal that anti-competitive behavior is not acceptable. Instead, now we have a bigger mess.
- 12y ago
com2kid 12y ago
I'm just a low level drone here at MS, and I obviously am not involved in any important decisions, but I'd like to add that all the above things happened back when the current generation that works here was growing up. We were all on Slashdot, being outraged and angry 13 year olds. Except now my generation works here, and I think the changes (such as all the ones announced today!) are a good sign of that. At least since after I went through puberty (I'm not that young!) Microsoft has been acting pretty damn chill. I guess my main complaint is that people yell at us for sins that were committed by, quite literally, a previous generation.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I would not hold it against you that you make a living with MS, that said in the present they do plenty of stuff that they really shouldn't. So it's not just the previous generation, the current one is also anything but clean.
  - Sir_Blake 12y ago
    What exactly are they doing today that you don't agree with?
    - BuckRogers 12y ago
      I'll answer that. No more than any other for-profit enterprise.
    - nileshtrivedi 12y ago
      Patent threats and lawsuits against Android OEMs. Sabotaging the office document standard process at ISO. Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems. Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine. among other things.
  - jasonlotito 12y ago
    One could say the same about companies and organizations that you admit to supporting as well. So, if all choices are bad choices, what are you left with?
yuhong 12y ago
My personal favorite is the OS/2 2.0 fiasco.
CamperBob2 12y ago
Netscape cut their own throat. Blaming Microsoft was just whining. Software patents, including Stacker's, are far more destructive to innovation than anything Microsoft could ever do on its own. SCO, well... OK, there's no way to spin that as anything but evil.
tzs 12y ago
> - Netscape If you are referring to Microsoft's bundling of IE, that did not kill Netscape. It just buried the rotting corpse. Before IE was bundled with Windows, it was sold in stores as a boxed product, right next to Netscape's boxed product. Going head to head in retail software stores (Egghead, CompUSA), IE massively outsold Netscape. This is what killed Netscape. The reason IE outsold Netscape at retail was simple--it was a much better browser. Netscape introduced a lot of proprietary tags, which Microsoft included in IE. Microsoft also introduced proprietary tags, which Netscape often ignored. For the end user, the result was simple: IE correctly rendered more pages than Netscape. It was also better on resource usage, if I remember correctly, which was a much bigger deal then than it is now.
- chiph 12y ago
  All those "Best on IE" and "Best viewed on Netscape" image buttons from back in the day... I thought I had forgotten about them, but you had to drag them up from the depths... ;)
  - megablast 12y ago
    > I thought I had forgotten about them You thought you had forgotten about something? How does that work.
    - chiph 12y ago
      I forget. Maybe it'll come to me.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Computer manufacturers were told that they could not buy Windows for their computers if they intended to factory-install Netscape. That's not consumer choice, that is the definition of criminally leveraging a monopoly in one market to dominate another.
quotemstr 12y ago
Companies don't have agencies or personalities. People do. You're aware that a huge portion of the people responsible for the shenanigans of previous decades have left the company, right? Give the current crew credit.
vcjohnson 12y ago
While I can tolerate most of your post, Hanselman's blog is not silly. Well it is, but not in the disparaging way you mean.

smacktoward 12y ago

I like Hanselman's blog a lot, but I found that post pretty disappointing. The reason there are a lot of people running around saying "Microsoft killed my pappy!" is because Microsoft actually did kill a lot of people's pappies, back in the day. When someone comes into town and shoots your pappy, it's not something you forget or forgive easily. The burden is on Microsoft to prove that they're not the same company as they were back then, not on the people they wronged to get over it.

freehunter 12y ago
At this point there is literally nothing Microsoft can do to win these people over. They've done everything they could do short of porting the Windows UI to Linux (and even then... this and Powershell brings it pretty close). They're a huge contributor to open source, they support Linux pretty heavily on Azure, they open sourced their .NET as seen here, they listened to their customers on Windows 10, they're doing great things in mobile, putting out great hardware in the Surface line, pushing IE forward to match their competitors and the changing web, and that's just getting started. So no, at this point it is on the Microsoft haters to get over it. And if you can't get over it, then just ignore it. As someone who works partially in the Windows world and thus is interested in Microsoft news, I'm tired of Microsoft news being flagged off the front page constantly. I'm tired of seeing something about Windows and the comments being filled with people hating on Windows 8 for bullshit rather than good discussion about the article. I'm tired of seeing great news like this and have people say "yeah but in 1994 they...". That was 20 years ago. Fucking get over it. Microsoft sure has. If Microsoft is still doing things wrong, it's completely overshadowed by their detractors constantly shutting down legitimate discussions with their insane rambling about the past.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > That was 20 years ago. Fucking get over it. Microsoft sure has. Some stuff from 2014, maybe that will help you to see that Microsoft has definitely not 'gotten over it': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596869 And that's just a very limited list.

bad_user 12y ago

I've also been pretty unforgiving about things that Microsoft did in the past to crush competing web browsers, competing standards like OpenGL or ODF, Linux or open-source in general. And sorry, but I do not agree with that article by Hanselman. Thing is, I treat companies like I treat people. Legally speaking, isn't that what they want, in the US anyway? So if you violate my trust, it's goodbye until I see serious amends being made. However I must say that with this move I'm finally ready to forgive Microsoft. I've always seen .NET as a platform created for achieving lock-in with Windows, the ECMA standard (while better than Java's JCP, which is a farce) I've seen as an attempt to paint a turd and Mono, while a wonderful effort, I've never seen as good enough. Open-sourcing .NET is a wonderful move, because now we've got a credible alternative to the JVM and this move couldn't come with better timing, given the dickish moves by Sun/Oracle against Apache Harmony and Android's Dalvik / ART. And don't get me wrong, compared to other people I do not have double standards in this regard. I've been a Google fanboy for years, but my eyes are wide open now and I'm making moves to escape their lock-in ;-)

sz4kerto 12y ago
> I treat companies like I treat people I would say this is a really bad strategy. According to unwritten HN rules, I should now start explaining why I think there are differences between a company and a person, and why they should be treated differently thereof. But I won't. :)
- bad_user 12y ago
  Why? Do you disagree with the concept of voting with your wallet? How else can you get companies to listen to your needs? And my needs as a developer and a user are simple - I need my privacy, an open web and a healthy open-source ecosystem. And I'll vote with my wallet and I'll bitch against any company that has a problem with that - and I'll also encourage alternatives that cater to my needs. The world would be a much better place if all people behaved like this IMHO - oh, so are the shareholders a company's top priority? Not my problem.
  - Retra 12y ago

adl 12y ago

Sometimes is justified, never say never, but it will take short of a miracle for me to trust Internet Explorer in any way, shape or form after setting back the Open Web for years (I know that IE 11 is way better, but to little, to late) Now saying that, I think that an Open Source .NET stack is a wonderful thing! I like C# a lot.

orbitur 12y ago

No one else seems to be complaining about it, so it may just be me: Your link just drops me at the front page of his blog. Searching for it through Google leads to a result, but clicking on that link also takes me to the front page. Is there a mirror?

OWaz 12y ago
Here you go: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SoH4dHM98pwJ:www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SoH4dHM... On the Google search result next to the url is a tiny dropdown arrow. You can click that arrow and select Cached.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

snowwrestler 12y ago

The post says Microsoft was convicted of anti-trust for "for bundling a browser in the operating system that couldn't be uninstalled or easily replaced." That is not true. Microsoft was convicted because they told 3rd party computer manufacturers that they could not purchase Windows if they intended to install any additional browsers. Not only is that illegal, but it demonstrably harmed innovation in web browsers for years. I don't believe Microsoft killed my pappy, and I use MS software every single day. But I also don't believe in minimizing or misrepresenting the facts of the past.

daveloyall 12y ago

Hanselman is suggesting that we should just say Aww, shucks! and give Microsoft a big hug? He has so completely missed the deadly point that he's accidentally echoed it in his own post: Tons of people feel that Microsoft killed their Pappy. Nadella's actions tell me one thing: the free software movement has threatened their bottom line. This is not the time to back down, it's not the time to forgive and forget. This is the time to review the Halloween Documents!

alkonaut 12y ago
It's not mainly that free software threats their bottom line, it's rather that mobile and cloud is the future, and traditionally their bottom line was of course server and desktop. So they are being very aggressive in the cloud and mobile area which is understandable. But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made. Cloud and mobile is about scale. They want thousands of cloud apps and mobile apps to be made. They can give their tools away and make money on tablets and azure. Azure runs Linux! So making the tools free is a natural step in becoming a service company. Making them cross platform is natural since Microsoft now sells cross platform services. No one thinks Microsoft isn't only concerned with their bottom line. It's not a charity. But that's not to say this is some kind of greedy trap. It's probably a good move for both devs and microsoft.
- martijn_himself 12y ago
  Good points. Except: >But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with >which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made .NET was never the tool where Photoshop and Call of Duty was made, but a significant amount of mobile apps and games nowadays are made using Xamarin and Unity, tools that run on top of Mono, a cross-platform implementation of .NET. If anything the Microsoft announcement brings Mono and .NET closer together. And I think you will find that a significant (if not majority) proportion of megacorps do run their intranets on SharePoint. SharePoint is and has been customisable using .NET libraries and tools.

johansch 12y ago

http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-senior-leaders/ http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-senior-leaders/ How many of the "non-criminal new microsoft generation" do you see there? My guesstimate: 33%

yuhong 12y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281319 This is partly what inspired me to write a wishlist for Satya in the first place.

bsimpson 12y ago

Many people who hate Microsoft do it as a pavlonian response to years upon years of fighting against crappy Microsoft products. People who'd like to spend 90% of their time creating instead spend 25% creating, 30% watering it down enough to be easily "cross platform", and 45% of their time figuring out why-the-fuck-it-doesn't-work-in-Internet-Explorer. This is the same browser where merely calling console.log threw an error until surprisingly recently. I met a bunch of the IE folks at CES 2012, and I honestly believe their trying to be better web citizens. They are still slower than I'd like, but IE isn't quite terrible anymore. I have friends who work at various browser vendors, and I don't sense any lingering ill-will towards IE. That said, I certainly understand why some people are slow to get excited about Microsoft. You don't have to be middle-aged to have personally experienced the bad side of Microsoft.

nickik 12y ago
The problem with this argument is that even if there were multible open source platforms you have "cross platform" problems. Any deversity will result in extra work. So you can either have the one thing to rule them all, or you will have to spend time on doing it for everything. I admit that IE was shit and it did cost a lot of time. But how about we get over it? They admitied that IE was shitty and now they are doing much better. There are products from other company that used to be shit, now they are better and people dont still hate on that. Also, dont think im a idialist who does not remember the past, I was optimizing for IE6 not all that long ago.

sjm 12y ago

From that post, interesting foreshadowing discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181029

Shorel 12y ago

The modern pappies are Microsoft own technologies. You invest heavily in them, and then they are abandoned. I seem to remember they even tried to make obsolete the Win32 API. Their strongest asset.