[HN Gopher] The Internet Tidal Wave (1995)
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The Internet Tidal Wave (1995)
Author : simonpure
Score : 30 points
Date : 2022-11-26 01:26 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lettersofnote.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lettersofnote.com)
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled "The Internet
| Tidal Wave," to all executive staff within Microsoft.
|
| Say what you want, but Bill Gates' vision of the internet was
| spot on.
|
| The drawback is that Microsoft used illicit and mostly unethical
| tactics to fend off competition (Netscape, etc) and gain and
| retain a certain market dominance, and this was done under Bill's
| scrutiny.
|
| It's really hard to find a saint, and Bill is not one.
|
| Besides this, I find Letters of Note to be an invaluable treasure
| trove of forgotten gems like this letter.
| bitwize wrote:
| His vision wasn't too different from a lot of other pundits',
| and it came a year or two too late.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Right. People are acting as though 1995 is early, but it's
| like figuring out there will be another major European war on
| Christmas Day 1939. No shit, the Nazis have already conquered
| Poland.
|
| The Internet is the Third Network. Figuring this out in
| 1974/75 counts as clairvoyance since most of the technologies
| (e.g. TCP exists but IP takes until 1978) don't exist yet and
| nor does the terminology, although in hindsight things are
| coming together. Figuring it out in 1985 is still very
| impressive, by that point there's a significant TCP/IP
| network but it's unclear whether this North American idea
| triumphs - if you had confidence you could have made some
| smart investments and made yourself a lot of money. Figuring
| it out in 1995 is barely even noteworthy. "Eternal September"
| the point when there are constantly so many new people that
| it's _always_ like the first weeks of a new year of
| university students on the Internet, began in 1993.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Gates was a relative latecomer to see the 'net as a factor of
| importance. He wrote a book called 'The Road Ahead' [1] which
| exists in two forms [2] of which the first portrayed the 'net
| as a precursor to the _real_ network of the future which would
| be embodied in proprietary networks like Microsoft Network
| (MSN). It was only a few weeks before the book would hit the
| shelves that he changes his mind and wrote the above memo,
| focusing Microsoft on the internet while demoting Microsoft
| Network - which was launched as a separate dial-up network in
| the style of Compuserve - to an internet service.
|
| [1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29
|
| [2]
| https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29?la...
| autotune wrote:
| Bill Gates of today is a very different person from the one who
| ruled over Microsoft back then. See Bill and Melinda Gates
| Foundation.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Source? Do you know him personally?
| autotune wrote:
| You don't see news about him trying buy a well known social
| network to destroy it or trying to use fruit to cure
| cancer. For one.
| nailer wrote:
| Sure but you don't see anyone trying to do the former.
| autotune wrote:
| _Elon brings wrecking ball and mass layoffs causing mass
| exodus of social media site_
|
| _nailer: doesn 't look like anything to me_
| kxkdkdmxn wrote:
| His PR is certainly a lot better, and there does exist a
| charitable foundation, sure, but a lot of foundations are
| just tax shelters, and just starting a charitable foundation
| doesn't absolve you of your sins or make you a good person,
| but it's great PR
|
| Unless you know Bill personally you're just commenting on the
| quality of his public persona 's public messaging, or your
| parasocial relationship with that persona
|
| Melinda Gates definitely still thinks Bill is worth
| divorcing, you know
| autotune wrote:
| That's literally what everyone does every day with Musk.
| Not sure how Gates is any different here besides the fact
| that he is competent at said PR, as you say, and hasn't
| done anything outright ridiculous to destroy his
| reputation.
| twoodfin wrote:
| What was unethical about how they beat Netscape? They were the
| first to realize that "browser technology" (as Gates repeatedly
| called it during his antitrust deposition) would be beneficial
| to consumers as part of the OS platform, and lo today you can't
| find a consumer OS on any device that doesn't embed its own web
| engine.
| dboreham wrote:
| Enjoy your "browser-device". Some people prefer their
| computer to be separable from the applications it runs.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-
| findings-f...
|
| Search for "Netscape" if you're really interested.
| ud0 wrote:
| How was Gates able to predict the future with so much accuracy
| and yet still failed to capture the most value from it or better
| still establish itself as a core player on the internet like
| Google etc.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| When I was younger, there was only Internet Explorer and all
| online communication happened through MSN. Games ran on Windows
| or on consoles and that was about it. When MSN waned, Skype
| quickly became the de facto personal VoIP platform and at that
| point Microsoft had already acquired it.
|
| I was conceptually aware of Macs, but I didn't know anyone who
| had actually used one. I know this isn't the typical experience
| around here, but where I grew up, Microsoft was simply the only
| option.
|
| They lost it all years later when Blackberry, Google and later
| Apple started to become serious competition. They couldn't get
| Windows Phone to succeed (despite its superior underpinnings),
| they lost to Chromebooks in education, and they failed to keep
| Office competitive enough to make it as ubiquitous as it once
| was. I'm surprised Xbox is still around at this point.
|
| Gates had a vision and a keen eye for opportunities. When he
| was leaving, Microsoft was dealing with a failed products and
| unexpected competition. (Vista, iPhone, Zune) and after he was
| gone it took a while before MS got its vision back. The company
| tried to go a wild, new direction after fixing Vista and
| turning it into 7 by going all-in on Windows 8. Mobile,
| tablets, desktop, and console were all moving towards the same,
| unified ecosystem and design, something that brought Apple
| great success. On the Windows side, though, I think it's safe
| to say Windows 8 was universally disliked, tolerated at best.
| Windows Mobile died because of its many backwards incompatible
| releases despite the lacking ecosystem.
|
| It's interesting to imagine what the world would look like if
| Microsoft had managed to make Windows Phone a success. I think
| that had 90s-Gates been at the helm, Microsoft could've even
| beaten the iPad.
| aswanson wrote:
| I don't think gates won't have made a difference against
| Apple during that period. Apple's taste and aesthetics were
| just too much to overcome in the post-pc era.
| peacelilly wrote:
| You conflate seeing the future, and wanting to improve it.
| Microsoft very likely tried to subvert the future. See the
| Halloween Documents:
| http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The DOJ.
|
| The DOJ scrutiny basically knee-capped Microsoft.
|
| Later companies learned the lesson and have spent a lot of
| money on lobbying and otherwise cozying up to Washington.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Being first in race is very costly.
| dboreham wrote:
| > knee-capped Microsoft
|
| In what way?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| They certainly tried, and attracted the attention of the
| Department of Justice in the process. See the Microsoft
| antitrust trial.
|
| Internet Explorer was a dominant browser for a while. It came
| bundled with Windows, and Gates thought they'd use it to
| embrace and extend the Web, like they'd done with everything up
| to then. Netscape's browser share quickly went to zero.
|
| There were other browsers, though, and the end result of the
| legal actions was that MS had to allow you a choice. The
| Internet public was not as compliant with Gates' designs as the
| PC public had been, and "web standards" became something they
| had to live with, rather than being able to set them.
| tomrod wrote:
| MS captured a lot of great revenue streams. Ballmer missed most
| of the opportunity but it's picked up steam in the last decade.
| nailer wrote:
| They did. Microsoft has the dominant consumer OS, the doninant
| browser, the instant dominant messaging platform, the dominant
| online email platform, some of the best tools for building web
| pages, and defeated palm to become the dominant mobile internet
| platform. Steve Balmer threw everything away.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| >We need to establish distributed OLE as the protocol for
| Internet programming.
|
| Oh the horror!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Letters of Note" would make a great Christmas present for almost
| anyone on your list. They almost certainly haven't heard of it,
| and it'll keep them captivated.
|
| Elvis writing to President Nixon asking to become a special
| Federal agent: who doesn't want to read that?
|
| I hosted Shaun at Google! Some of the attendees read a letter out
| loud.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM
| antiterra wrote:
| It's interesting he keeps up the three character file extension
| convention of .htm even though he knew full well that it was
| .html on the vast majority of sites. I'd guess he was also aware
| of long file names in the upcoming debut of Win 95, but conscious
| of the fact previous Windows releases would remain prevalent for
| some time.
| abraxas wrote:
| Most of you here who are under the age of 40 probably do not
| appreciate how we came within an inch of having the world run on
| a monopolized MSInternet(r) in the late nineties. Microsoft had
| its foothold in every aspect of consumer facing computing save
| for mobile computing with PDAs and such (it was rathern niche
| then and yet they soon attacked that space with Windows Mobile).
|
| The death of Netscape in the late nineties and the explosion in
| popularity of Internet Explorer was an imminent threat as
| Microsoft was ready to roll out their proprietary APIs such as
| OLE (rebranded as ActiveX) all over consumer facing internet. As
| the memo articulates in a few places, the goal was to embrace the
| formats and extend them with proprietary Microsft shit so they
| would not work or work poorly on non-Wintel platforms running
| Microsoft products.
|
| The academia was the last MS free stronghold because Sun still
| had a lot of foothold and from there emerged companies like
| Google who in the early days provided the last shred of hope and
| almost miraculously it kind of worked. Now Microsoft and
| ironically Google too continue to be threats to the open nature
| of the internet until the present day. Hopefully neither ever
| succeeds but I see a lot of younger people that scoff at Google's
| unfair practices give way too much credit of trust to Microsoft
| that is absolutely undeserved and unearned.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Internet Tidal Wave [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455264 - Jan 2012 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Internet Tidal Wave (Gates, 1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899714 - Aug 2011 (10
| comments)
|
| Pretty sure there have been other threads about this, if anyone
| wants to look...
| js4ever wrote:
| "SGI has also been advertising their leadership on the Internet
| including servers and authoring tools. Their ads are very
| business focused. They are backing the 3D image standard, VRML,
| which will allow the Internet to support virtual reality type
| shopping, gaming, and socializing."
|
| Metaverse, 27 years too early
| agumonkey wrote:
| It really was. A tad too complex, and too early to fit the
| cultural soil. VRML had reactive declarative idioms over 3d
| scene graph.. the current web is very similar but it was heavy
| and machines / browser weren't ready for that.
|
| In (2000s) college it was still a small chunk of one class,
| while today react/webgl is just a tutorial away for anyone to
| play with.
| nailer wrote:
| Metaverse is (future thing that will succeed) (amount of years
| too early).
| agsamek wrote:
| You meant 54 years too early, right? ;)
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