4 ms·

Just neglecting to continue to develop a piece of software isn't exactly "inflicting billions of damage" on "humanity". Letting IE stagnate was a dumb move, but

by neilc 12y ago

Just neglecting to continue to develop a piece of software isn't exactly "inflicting billions of damage" on "humanity". Letting IE stagnate was a dumb move, but it's not like MS had a moral imperative to constantly improve it. Shame on the marketplace if it took a while for a feasible competitor to emerge.

mattmanser 12y ago
Perhaps you're too young, but you don't seem to understand what MS did. They drove the competitor (Netscape) out of business by giving away their browser. There's no way for the market to correct for that or "a feasible competitor to emerge". It amazes me that someone who's only 5 years younger than me and even has a CS degree is so completely out of touch with recent computer history. I understand why, everything changes so fast, but you cannot understand what MS did if you weren't there. Their callous destruction of Netscape stopped an era of rapid innovation in internet technologies, HTML & js simply stagnated for almost 6-7 years afterwards, before it had been iterating rapidly. It is now back to iterating like it did, these last 2-3 years and the WHATWG, it really feels like things are back on track again, though some really, really important things are still taking a while (like observables, which are super important for GUI driven apps).
- SamReidHughes 12y ago
  I, for one, am happy not having to pay for my web browser.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  And yet most software today is free. Yes, I was on the internet in that era. And no, I never did understand what was so awful about giving away software. All the software I write today I give away, too :-)
- mwfunk 12y ago
  I guess I just don't see a direct correlation between what happened with MS in the late '90s and how web technologies have evolved (or not evolved) after that. Who's to say things wouldn't have been as bad (or worse) without IE? It's an imponderable, we'll never know the answer. You are extrapolating it out to a scenario where IE didn't exist, and Netscape, the standards organizations, and all the other key players were harmonious stewards of some sort of golden age. I'm not saying that I support anything that Microsoft did in the '90s, rather that it is totally plausible to me that the players in the no-IE parallel universe were perfectly capable of screwing things up just as badly or worse. Since it's extrapolation, what's plausible to us says more about how we feel about the different players than anything else.
  - matwood 12y ago
    I agree with you. Netscape (4.0 iirc) was a horrible piece of software. MS originally went off on its own with IE because the standards bodies were so slow. It wasn't embrace and extend so much as it was ship working software. XML/XSL transformer in the browser, IE had that. Invention of AJAX, yep, IE also. The problem was the combination of IE6 (at the time, the best browser out there) and MS business tactics simply crushed everyone else. At that point MS decided to work on other things and let IE waste.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Then Firefox amd Safari arose, and it didn't really work out well for Microsoft. I mean, I see that as Microsoft's mistake, not them setting the market back. And what if microsoft did keep pushing on IE at the time? Things might have been worse off now for it.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    It wasn't so much IE in itself but the IE/Frontpage/ActiveX trinity they managed to make synonymous with enterprise for a while. It was a nasty time to work in the Internet space, especially for a web developer. They did a lot of other strange things as well. I know Microsoft people showed up to at least one IETF working group pretending to be interested in doing standards work, only to return later having patented key points of the standard, saying they weren't interested anymore. So IE was just a small part of that famous strategy, even if it was a central piece. But the bundling was never much of an issue unless you were a direct competitor. The only reason that's what people remember is the court case was widely reported in media at the time.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  Aren't Mozilla and Google giving away their browsers, too? What are the rules for deciding if giving away a browser is good or evil?
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    It's pretty straightforward -- if an evil agent does it, the act is evil; otherwise, it's good. It always saddens me to think of how many people want to see this principle enshrined in law.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  I'm 41 and lived through this era and totally disagree with the idea that Microsoft killed Netscape (I don't disagree that Microsoft wanted Netscape dead, I just firmly believe Netscape was doomed anyway). But if anyone killed Netscape by giving away free software it was the Apache project since for a while selling web server software was a viable business, while OTOH there's really no historical data to support the fact that selling web browser licenses was ever going to be an economically successful strategy outside of niche markets like Opera. And whether or not Microsoft directly killed Netscape or not, I'd argue that the web would not be nearly the ubiquitous technology it is today if web browser software typically cost money, which means that by standardizing web browser software as free Microsoft did the entire web industry (if not netscape) a great service, really.
  - 4ydx 12y ago
    They released a free browser and then didn't innovate. You can paint the picture however you like for yourself, but I distinctly remember what it was like to try to develop anything in javascript for IE. It was beyond horrible. In their defence they did come up with Ajax which has been a boon of course.
- robertlagrant 12y ago
  Setting a standard for every browser to cost the end user nothing seems to have worked out pretty well for the Web and everyone on it.

by neilc 12y ago

mattmanser 12y ago

Perhaps you're too young, but you don't seem to understand what MS did. They drove the competitor (Netscape) out of business by giving away their browser. There's no way for the market to correct for that or "a feasible competitor to emerge". It amazes me that someone who's only 5 years younger than me and even has a CS degree is so completely out of touch with recent computer history. I understand why, everything changes so fast, but you cannot understand what MS did if you weren't there. Their callous destruction of Netscape stopped an era of rapid innovation in internet technologies, HTML & js simply stagnated for almost 6-7 years afterwards, before it had been iterating rapidly. It is now back to iterating like it did, these last 2-3 years and the WHATWG, it really feels like things are back on track again, though some really, really important things are still taking a while (like observables, which are super important for GUI driven apps).

SamReidHughes 12y ago
I, for one, am happy not having to pay for my web browser.
WalterBright 12y ago
And yet most software today is free. Yes, I was on the internet in that era. And no, I never did understand what was so awful about giving away software. All the software I write today I give away, too :-)
mwfunk 12y ago
I guess I just don't see a direct correlation between what happened with MS in the late '90s and how web technologies have evolved (or not evolved) after that. Who's to say things wouldn't have been as bad (or worse) without IE? It's an imponderable, we'll never know the answer. You are extrapolating it out to a scenario where IE didn't exist, and Netscape, the standards organizations, and all the other key players were harmonious stewards of some sort of golden age. I'm not saying that I support anything that Microsoft did in the '90s, rather that it is totally plausible to me that the players in the no-IE parallel universe were perfectly capable of screwing things up just as badly or worse. Since it's extrapolation, what's plausible to us says more about how we feel about the different players than anything else.
- matwood 12y ago
  I agree with you. Netscape (4.0 iirc) was a horrible piece of software. MS originally went off on its own with IE because the standards bodies were so slow. It wasn't embrace and extend so much as it was ship working software. XML/XSL transformer in the browser, IE had that. Invention of AJAX, yep, IE also. The problem was the combination of IE6 (at the time, the best browser out there) and MS business tactics simply crushed everyone else. At that point MS decided to work on other things and let IE waste.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Then Firefox amd Safari arose, and it didn't really work out well for Microsoft. I mean, I see that as Microsoft's mistake, not them setting the market back. And what if microsoft did keep pushing on IE at the time? Things might have been worse off now for it.
- xorcist 12y ago
  It wasn't so much IE in itself but the IE/Frontpage/ActiveX trinity they managed to make synonymous with enterprise for a while. It was a nasty time to work in the Internet space, especially for a web developer. They did a lot of other strange things as well. I know Microsoft people showed up to at least one IETF working group pretending to be interested in doing standards work, only to return later having patented key points of the standard, saying they weren't interested anymore. So IE was just a small part of that famous strategy, even if it was a central piece. But the bundling was never much of an issue unless you were a direct competitor. The only reason that's what people remember is the court case was widely reported in media at the time.
DonHopkins 12y ago
Aren't Mozilla and Google giving away their browsers, too? What are the rules for deciding if giving away a browser is good or evil?
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  It's pretty straightforward -- if an evil agent does it, the act is evil; otherwise, it's good. It always saddens me to think of how many people want to see this principle enshrined in law.
georgemcbay 12y ago
I'm 41 and lived through this era and totally disagree with the idea that Microsoft killed Netscape (I don't disagree that Microsoft wanted Netscape dead, I just firmly believe Netscape was doomed anyway). But if anyone killed Netscape by giving away free software it was the Apache project since for a while selling web server software was a viable business, while OTOH there's really no historical data to support the fact that selling web browser licenses was ever going to be an economically successful strategy outside of niche markets like Opera. And whether or not Microsoft directly killed Netscape or not, I'd argue that the web would not be nearly the ubiquitous technology it is today if web browser software typically cost money, which means that by standardizing web browser software as free Microsoft did the entire web industry (if not netscape) a great service, really.
- 4ydx 12y ago
  They released a free browser and then didn't innovate. You can paint the picture however you like for yourself, but I distinctly remember what it was like to try to develop anything in javascript for IE. It was beyond horrible. In their defence they did come up with Ajax which has been a boon of course.
robertlagrant 12y ago
Setting a standard for every browser to cost the end user nothing seems to have worked out pretty well for the Web and everyone on it.