I wonder how many people throwing opinions around this were "of age" in the early-to-mid 90s and thus remember what an unstoppable behemoth Microsoft was.
This was a time when they had 95%+ of the desktop OS share and you basically couldn't run a home computer with Windows. This was the early days of Linux (IIRC in ~1994 I downloaded SLS running Linux 0.99.x onto ~30 floppy drives over a 2400 baud modem!). Macs were an expensive niche product. Personal computing just wasn't possible without Microsoft.
Microsoft very much used this position to kill Netscape as they saw the Internet as an existential threat (fearing Netscape would be the new OS). They tried to subvert Java (the threat of "write once run anywhere" being a threat to the Windows lock-in) and partially succeeded. It was at this time that the DoJ stepped in.
I can't overemphasize the perception the tech community had of Microsoft then. Windows was rapidly evolving. Windows 95 was, I believe, a major turning point for the company (and where it achieved at least technical superiority over MacOS having preemptive multitasking and dynamic memory management). Microsoft really had an aura of invincibility.
We are not in this situation today. Apple seems unable to do no wrong (in the marketplace; there are what are still fringe elements criticizing them for any number of things) but don't have the market position Microsoft did.
In fact, Microsoft doesn't have the position Microsoft did in the 90s. At this point I believe we have viable alternatives to personal computing between mobile devices, Macs (you can get a Mac Mini for $600), netbooks and--dare I say it--even Chromebooks (you'll note that I left Linux off that list as I believe it will never be a viable mainstream desktop OS and of course I know it powers Android/ChromeOS).
I certainly don't see an issue (yet) with Apple blocking alternative browsers. Don't like it? Buy an Android. Or a Windows Phone 7. Or a Blackberry (OK, I couldn't keep a straight face with that last one).
Windows and Office are the geese that lay the golden eggs in Microsoft. Everything is beholden to them. As an organization, Microsoft seems terrified they'll die and as we've seen time and time again it's that fear and that switch from innovation to defending your turf that ultimately leads to the death of companies.
I believe the whole Metro API browser thing is just more evidence of Microsoft's stagnation. Let them I say. It'll probably, at least in some small way, hasten either their demise or them attempting to turn the boat around before they go off the cliff.
EDIT: yes Netscape was complicit in its own destruction. I used Netscape up until version 3. By Netscape 4 on a 486DX4/100 at least, IE4 was significantly better and faster and I never switched back (not until Firefox 1.5/2 years later).
Netscape eroded at both ends (IMHO). At one end obviously was Microsoft giving away the equivalent to their consumer product for free (as well as bundling it with the OS, making it harder to use non-IE browsers and so on). At the other end was actually Apache. The Apache Webserver I believe it incredibly difficult to build their server software platform (anyone else remember Netscape's Web servers?).
It wasn't until the rise of search engine advertising some years later that Microsoft's hold could be broken, it being the only thing that makes Firefox and Chrome possible.
As an aside to all those who are anti-ads: how exactly would non-OS browsers exist without advertising?
I was around and remember it well. Even if some of the HN community missed the OS wars, they've probably dealt with the consequences of Microsoft's OS monopoly - after killing Netscape, Microsoft allowed Internet Explorer to completely stagnate. More than 5 years passed between the release of IE6 and IE7. Anyone who spent late nights/weekends in the last half decade trying to get some web page to render properly in IE 6 has Microsoft's monopoly to thank for it. I don't love Apple's policies. But so far, they haven't been nearly as harmful.
> Microsoft allowed Internet Explorer to completely stagnate
IIRC, after the legal madness, there were some major shakeups. Not least of which included the entire IE team being settlement-forced into other positions in the company (many went on to what would become WPF, which should be obvious if you've ever seen XAML). I don't envy the post-IE6 group, having to take a huge codebase, maintain backwards compatability, and staff an _entirely_ new team.
But, take that with a grain of salt, as I was in DevDiv at the time this happened. I certainly had some peers who had been part of the legal wrangling and were under mandatory document retention the entire time they worked for me.
There might have been a team but it seems like all that team was created to do was to maintain the IE6 codebase. That is pretty much stagnated development. At the time Microsoft was essentially giving web developers the middle finger because really, what were our alternatives?
Why did IE7 ever get released? Simple, because of Phoenix, aka Firebird, aka Firefox, aka competition. Without that I doubt Microsoft would have ever updated IE or bothered to rewrite IEs rendering engine (which didn't work well until maybe IE9). If not for the new competition into the browser field we would probably still be asking them to fix alpha transparency in PNG files.
So what I'm getting at is, they could have started IE7 anytime they wanted to after IE6 shipped with XP. Stagnation because of team shakeup is just an excuse. I doubt IE7 would have taken that long if Firefox was released right when XP came out.
AFAIK they did add user features during that time like a pop-up blocker (look at the Longhorn 4000 builds and XP SP2). But the rendering engine and most of the other things that matter to web developers was I think left unchanged except for minor bugfixes.
I was around during the time period you're talking about and in my personal experience, Microsoft had plenty of help in killing Netscape from Netscape itself.
I switched to MSIE3 not because of bundling or FUD but because it was a much better browser.
Microsoft has been a bad actor at times when it comes to business practices, but I think a lot of people overestimate how much that helped them and underestimate how much competitor mistakes helped them. Netscape Navigator post-2.0 was a piece of garbage until Firefox rolled around.
I agree - netscape had a big hand in their own implosion. Their codebases had gotten away from them and they had problems managing well after all that growth and hype.
It also didn't help that they went around doing lots of press about how they were going to completely replace the OS layer and kill microsoft when they had basically zero code along those lines.
Sure they had the vision, but it painted a huge (even larger) bullseye on their back while they were busy sinking in their own quicksand.
Nevertheless, it is rare if ever that a company retained a significant market share for a product once Microsoft decided to kill it by forcibly bundling the same functionality with their 95% monopoly product, Windows.
Microsoft acted stupidly too. Mr. G didn't understand the internet until years after everyone else. MSIE was a piece of junk. The decision to integrate it deeply into the operating system was a security disaster of epic proportions.
The difference between Microsoft and their competitors was that they had unlimited money in the bank and could ship whatever they wanted on 95% of new machines whenever they wanted. Consequently, Microsoft could screw up just as often or even more often than other companies. Most new products only get one chance in the market, but Microsoft products always got a second chance, or a third chance, or however many chances it takes for the competition to give up.
IE3 was the first good browser from Microsoft, but I didn't consider it that much better. It was just good enough not to miss Netscape (much) if you made the switch.
I do remember MS of the mid 90s and it's aura of invincibility, but in retrospect it sure looks like that aura was illusory (or highly temporary, which is really the same thing). Even apart from the antitrust suits it seems clear in hindsight, partly due to the examples that you mention, that the market was widening beyond MS's reach.
People might not fear Microsoft like they used too, but they still have the knockout punch in them. If you're their competition, never let your guard down with them.
> If you're their competition, never let your guard down with them
I would upvote you a couple more times if I could. And, since you used a fistfight metaphor, allow me to remind you they never entered one without having their brass knuckles ready.
I highly disagree - especially in the browser area, it took many years to break Internet Explorer's total dominance, and the browser is what mattered most to consumers as the Internet became used by more and more everyday people. IE 4/5/6 was a golden era for Microsoft and many corporations are still stuck on IE6 as a base. Fortunately the consumer market is no longer dominated by IE; now that we have at least 4 major browser platforms across all OS's (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) many websites have to be somewhat standards compliant.
My only issue with your comments was here: "I certainly don't see an issue (yet) with Apple blocking alternative browsers. Don't like it? Buy an Android. Or a Windows Phone 7. Or a Blackberry (OK, I couldn't keep a straight face with that last one)." Back in the "good old days" that same argument was used "Don't like MSFT's practises? Buy an Apple, Linux, Unix box" etc This is how companies end up in a monopolistic type of situation. I) They exclude competition from their platform and then b) They use fantastic business model execution to achieve a dominant market share for their platform. It takes both to hit that suffocating point. You should be vigilant against both. It's a frog boiling in water type of event.
> I certainly don't see an issue (yet) with Apple blocking alternative browsers. Don't like it? Buy an Android. Or a Windows Phone 7. Or a Blackberry
You are clearly looking at phones. The tablet market is actually pretty unbalanced right now. If Windows 8 fails to shake it up AND tablets manage to keep their momentum, it could actually get ugly, especially with Apple eyeing the education market.
> you'll note that I left Linux off that list as I believe it will never be a viable mainstream desktop OS and of course I know it powers Android/ChromeOS
Why not? The main issues for Linux in this field are QA of releases, and support from third-party application vendors for a small subset of programs. Those aren't unsolvable problems. Even today Linux may be a superior solution to both OS X and Windows for certain people, especially people who lack attachment to a specific OS (i.e., newbies rather than power users).
Surely you must realize that this is the same argument people have been making for close to 15 years, and not much has changed. So that should answer your question about the OPs point.
The main reason most people use Windows is that Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba make it incredibly hard to buy a computer without it. Go to HP's site now and see if you can get a notebook with Linux preinstalled.
Most people would be perfectly happy with a Linux machine (I can tell you my mother is) and had hardware manufacturers given even some slight support (instead of building dozens of models seemingly designed to be Linux-proof) it would be much more popular.
The sad truth is that most people are not even aware their computers run an operating system. They believe Windows is an integral part of the machines.
The problem is that we, Linux enthusiasts, never managed to interest Microsoft's 5 most important clients (the aforementioned PC makers) on the full-featured, rock-solid, fast and stable desktop and server environment we were giving away for free.
> never managed to interest Microsoft's 5 most important clients (the aforementioned PC makers) on the full-featured, rock-solid, fast and stable desktop
Because it is neither rock-solid nor stable. It changes too much, too often, in an irregluar, unpredictable pattern, so major software makers refuse to target it. Without software, you dont get users, and without users, hardware makers wont bother to preinstall, etc.
Linux will be able to win big when they start putting a stronger emphases on backward compatibility and start supporting releases for 10 years, like Microsoft does, so that users dont have to reinstall distros every 6 months just to be able to install a new version of s single app.
I said "stable", not "stale". If you want unchanging, bundle with Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS (or ink a deal with Red Hat).
> Without software, you dont get users, and without users, hardware makers wont bother to preinstall
Apart from games, I don't see this dearth of software. While I agree some users have very specific needs, most users would be perfectly happy with a browser.
> users dont have to reinstall distros every 6 months just to be able to install a new version of s single app.
Unless you live in the dark ages, keeping a Linux machine up to date across major OS releases is, usually, a breeze. I'd not be surprised if, in a couple major kernel revisions, not even a reboot is needed during the process.
> Because it is neither rock-solid nor stable. It changes too much, too often, in an irregluar, unpredictable pattern
Perhaps you are watching Ubuntu, which does do this. Others are rock-solid and super stable. Slackware comes to mind, Debian is another. Lenny only went out of life a couple of months ago.
I see Linux enthusiasts talking about how their parents are happy with their Linux distro all the time -- that's not an argument for desktop Linux though. Nobody's saying Linux isn't good at browsing the web and checking mail and writing the occasional document.
I don't believe it's the same argument. A lot has changed in 15 years for Linux. It still has a tiny market share, yeah, but it's more accessible and approachable than ever. I think it comes down to making sure Linux delivers the same amount of polish as Windows and OS X instead of any fundamental change that's required.
Not to say I buy into the year of the Linux desktop stuff - I'm expecting it to be a gradual change as Linux gets better and more people start to use it. OEMs preinstalling Linux on PCs definitely helps, too, which they've already been starting to do.
Microsoft has definitely earned their hatred in both the consumer and development communities. They rode their monopoly as far as they could, and they are going to pay for it very dearly. Literally noone I have met in the past 10 years is developing Windows software anymore. Sure, some people use .Net to develop web applications, but it sure seems that nobody develops Windows-only software. So Microsoft, has already lost, and they are on borrowed time. Mobile and Web won, they lost, and it's only a matter of time before this dinosaur finally goes away, like everyone wants them to.
That sounds like a function of the people you've met tbh. Looking at job postings around these parts, the most widespread platform remains .NET.
Whilst the non-existent adoption amongst startups doesn't necessarily bode well for MSFT's future, there is still a huge amount of .NET development going on worldwide.
I like to think that my job of writing software with .NET to control deep sea robots is interesting. How many ruby/python developers could you say the same thing about though? I mean, most web apps are simple CRUD things, which are not interesting or cutting edge. That's an invariant across all programmers.
No kidding. I mean, I don't work on deep sea robots, but I really dig making games with .NET and find it awfully interesting.
If you read HN enough, you'll find that rbanffy's posts generally seem to come from a worldview where credit due to Microsoft, or even to those who use Microsoft products, is close to untenable. In other fora I've seen similar people referred to as ABMers - Anything But Microsoft. I mean, I'm pretty much a Linux/Unix guy (Macs and Linux alike), but I use .NET because it's the most portable option worth working with for my stuff. It's good for that. Sometimes even--gasp--Microsoft comes up with something worthwhile, and outside of the universes perpetuated by folks like rbanffy, many Microsoft products are even liked.
The thing about adoption in start ups is that Visual Studio 2010 Pro is so expensive. If Microsoft really wants to stay relevant they have to release Pro for free. They have to compete on price with the Eclipse or VIM/command line world. Until then, they will slowly die off. (The express versions are a joke, don't even get me started).
You only pay for licenses over 4 OS and 2 SQL Server (or outright new ones) after graduating BizSpark. 2 SQL Servers (OS licenses are chump change by comparison) go a loooong way* too, as you're presumably scaling up rather than out.
Through the grapevine I hear the "review" process (for more free licenses at graduation) is extraordinarily accommodating, though I'd guess if you're spinning up a box per customer or something insane you'd get denied.
Lots of people get this wrong, I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't carved this correction into a mountain somewhere...
May i ask what's a joke about VS Express? IMO they are very much capable. At least for windows forms and web-applications, never tried the c++ version. In fact it beats any other IDE i've tried anyway.
Only thing i really miss from pro is plugins, version control-integration and code contracts, the last being a thing that probably justifies a price tag anyway.
You can't unit test with them out of the box. To get unit test integration is a rather large effort. If you want to carve a project into a web layer and into the business assembly, you have to jump between editors (web and C#). These two make the tools rather worthless for anything complex and web based.
Now their WinForms ability might be great, but there are few start ups out there at are actually doing anything with desktop development.
I don't want Microsoft to go away: what they are doing with Asp.net MVC is absolutely amazing and is catching up with the Ruby on Rails framework.
Their focus has to switch from software to web and mobile, like everybody else (Apple for example), and I think they are doing it well, late, but well.
> Microsoft has definitely earned their hatred in both the consumer and development communities.
Mostly from clueless people. Link baiters. And fools who get off on blaming and attacking others (it's a group/mob thing).
The other 5%-10% is valid criticism.
> Literally noone I have met in the past 10 years is developing Windows software anymore.
You're living in your own cornered off world.
Microsoft has 90% of the desktop market, rave reviews of their new mobile platform, 60 billion in the bank, absolutely fantastic developer tools that are not matched by anything else, full integration in the stack.
> absolutely fantastic developer tools that are not matched by anything else
I bought Windows 2000 and MSVC 2003 with the first money I ever made through terrible teenager webdev. I was a huge VS fan until I first touched an iBook G4, and even now, I really wish I found a reason to get a Lumia 800. Windows 7 is georgous for consumers.
Still, after five years on Apple and Unix, I find it absolutely impossible to go back to Windows development. And it's definitely a group thing, none of my friends really knows how to work on Windows either. They appreciate what Microsoft is doing lately, but they shrug and stay in their corner of the computing universe.
I think you underestimate the brain drain (= SANE people) out of the Microsoft camp, especially during the Vista years.
>I believe the whole Metro API browser thing is just more evidence of Microsoft's stagnation.
I don't see that. They realize the crap that's thrown at them for malware on Windows and pre-emptively want to cut that off for Windows RT, like Apple did in iOS(see Android for contrast).
Not to mention battery life concerns because the apps with the APIs can always run in the background. Once the door is opened for Firefox, Microsoft cannot shut it for any other third party which wants to make an alleged "browser".
Expecting users to make the call about what's malware and what's not has proved to be naive at best.
This was a time when they had 95%+ of the desktop OS share and you basically couldn't run a home computer with Windows. This was the early days of Linux (IIRC in ~1994 I downloaded SLS running Linux 0.99.x onto ~30 floppy drives over a 2400 baud modem!). Macs were an expensive niche product. Personal computing just wasn't possible without Microsoft.
Microsoft very much used this position to kill Netscape as they saw the Internet as an existential threat (fearing Netscape would be the new OS). They tried to subvert Java (the threat of "write once run anywhere" being a threat to the Windows lock-in) and partially succeeded. It was at this time that the DoJ stepped in.
I can't overemphasize the perception the tech community had of Microsoft then. Windows was rapidly evolving. Windows 95 was, I believe, a major turning point for the company (and where it achieved at least technical superiority over MacOS having preemptive multitasking and dynamic memory management). Microsoft really had an aura of invincibility.
We are not in this situation today. Apple seems unable to do no wrong (in the marketplace; there are what are still fringe elements criticizing them for any number of things) but don't have the market position Microsoft did.
In fact, Microsoft doesn't have the position Microsoft did in the 90s. At this point I believe we have viable alternatives to personal computing between mobile devices, Macs (you can get a Mac Mini for $600), netbooks and--dare I say it--even Chromebooks (you'll note that I left Linux off that list as I believe it will never be a viable mainstream desktop OS and of course I know it powers Android/ChromeOS).
I certainly don't see an issue (yet) with Apple blocking alternative browsers. Don't like it? Buy an Android. Or a Windows Phone 7. Or a Blackberry (OK, I couldn't keep a straight face with that last one).
Windows and Office are the geese that lay the golden eggs in Microsoft. Everything is beholden to them. As an organization, Microsoft seems terrified they'll die and as we've seen time and time again it's that fear and that switch from innovation to defending your turf that ultimately leads to the death of companies.
I believe the whole Metro API browser thing is just more evidence of Microsoft's stagnation. Let them I say. It'll probably, at least in some small way, hasten either their demise or them attempting to turn the boat around before they go off the cliff.
EDIT: yes Netscape was complicit in its own destruction. I used Netscape up until version 3. By Netscape 4 on a 486DX4/100 at least, IE4 was significantly better and faster and I never switched back (not until Firefox 1.5/2 years later).
Netscape eroded at both ends (IMHO). At one end obviously was Microsoft giving away the equivalent to their consumer product for free (as well as bundling it with the OS, making it harder to use non-IE browsers and so on). At the other end was actually Apache. The Apache Webserver I believe it incredibly difficult to build their server software platform (anyone else remember Netscape's Web servers?).
It wasn't until the rise of search engine advertising some years later that Microsoft's hold could be broken, it being the only thing that makes Firefox and Chrome possible.
As an aside to all those who are anti-ads: how exactly would non-OS browsers exist without advertising?