[HN Gopher] Microsoft employees recall their early years
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Microsoft employees recall their early years
Author : rmason
Score : 153 points
Date : 2025-03-31 20:31 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seattletimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seattletimes.com)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| https://archive.ph/WIAoq
| lvl155 wrote:
| What's cool about MSFT and APPLE is that there will never be
| another company like those two. They are true trailblazers in so
| many ways.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Amazon? Google? Meta? Tencent? etc etc etc
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Google is an ad company that can't make another significant
| product to save its life.
|
| Meta under Zuckerberg has been able to stay relevant. But FB
| is already seen as being for old people.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Apple and Microsoft (as well as companies like Commodore)
| were there for personal computing's birth. Amazon, Google and
| Meta came far later and didn't invent their respective
| industries.
| 9rx wrote:
| HP sold what they called a "personal computer" in the
| 1960s, well before Apple and Microsoft came around. It
| wasn't exactly what we consider to be a personal computer
| nowadays, but MySpace wasn't exactly what we consider
| social media to be today either. I'm not sure these things
| happen in discrete steps like you seem to imply. There is a
| clear continuum. I think it is quite fair to say, for
| example, that Meta help define its industry like Microsoft
| and Apple helped define theirs.
|
| There will never be exact replicas of Apple and Microsoft
| again, but there undoubtedly will be many companies in the
| future that we will eventually look back upon in the same
| way.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You are confusing the first personal computer with the
| rise of personal computing. Inventing a product isn't
| very useful if you don't invent the product market as
| well.
| 9rx wrote:
| Huh? The entire comment is about that rise. Did you stop
| reading after the first few words?
| pests wrote:
| Amazon did quite literally invent their respective
| industries - AWS and the cloud?
| breadwinner wrote:
| That's absurd. Trailblazer means a pioneer; an innovator. Apple
| is one. Microsoft isn't. Microsoft is known for copying ideas,
| not for innovating. If there is one thing that hasn't changed
| in 50 years, it is the fact that they don't innovate. Take
| their recent products: Teams is a copy of Slack. Loop is a copy
| of Notion. This has been going on throughout their history.
| .NET is a copy of Java. Windows is a copy of MacOS. Excel is a
| copy of Visicalc and Lotus 123, Word is a copy of WordStar and
| WordPerfect, PowerPoint a copy of Harvard Graphics and Aldus
| Persuasion, and Access a copy of dBASE and FoxPro.
|
| What about Microsoft makes them not innovate? To innovate you
| have to hire smart developers and let them do what they love
| doing. This will result in some waste, as only some of the
| ideas will be successful financially. But the ones that succeed
| will be innovative. Microsoft doesn't do that. They hire good
| developers and assign them to a Program Manager who gives them
| a fully nailed-down spec for what to build. Inevitably the
| Program Manager (who are often business people) will find
| financially successful products to clone. This rarely results
| in waste as the product they are cloning has already created a
| market, Microsoft only needs to take the market from the
| innovator, which they do by bundling the product with either
| Office or Windows.
| dchuk wrote:
| While I don't disagree that Microsoft isn't necessarily the
| most innovative, Apple is absolutely the most successful
| example of "first mover advantage" not actually being an
| advantage, and second movers can often be the actual winners.
| Literally every product they have launched in the last few
| decades has had the category already defined, they just came
| in with so much more polish and elegance (and sharp
| marketing) that they just repeatedly obliterate and take over
| the category as if they invented it.
|
| I'll never forget when they dedicated a minute or two in a
| keynote a few years ago to how they improved the volume
| indicator visual overlay in iOS to be less obtrusive like
| they talked to god himself to figure this out, when Android
| had that style for years...it was brilliant marketing.
|
| I say all of this as a die hard Apple guy.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| RE ....Microsoft isn't necessarily the most innovative....
| Did you know Microsoft copied the idea of product
| activation from a PATENT and got fined about $300M USD for
| stealing the IP. Google the words Microsoft's fine for
| copying product activation idea, Ric Richardson for all the
| details .....
| kristopolous wrote:
| WSL2 is pretty nice as is powershell. Also I haven't done
| windows development in years but I miss windbg - still don't
| have anything like it on linux. Also you probably use vscode
| and people like typescript. playwright and omniparse are
| pretty useful as well.
|
| And unlike with a lot of companies, they often continue to
| invest and move their acquisitions forward, such as github.
|
| Microsoft 2025 isn't the same bastard from 1992.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > And unlike with a lot of companies, they often continue
| to invest and move their acquisitions forward, such as
| github.
|
| Which helps them win in the enterprise. Not just their
| acquisitions, but if MS puts out a tech you can be
| confidently sure they are going to support it for a long
| time. There's been a few examples contrary to that -
| Silverlight and their UI frameworks they can't seem to get
| a handle on, but everything else they've put out exists
| long-term, and is generally backwards compatible.
|
| There aren't many others that offer that level of
| stability. We tend to value new and shiny, but non-tech
| companies don't they want boring and stable, which is why
| Microsoft won there. Hell, you can still run a lot of apps
| from the Windows 3.11 era on Windows 11 with minimal fuss.
| The same can't be said for most other platforms.
|
| Microsoft tech isn't necessarily sexy or exciting, but it
| checks boxes and is supported for a LONG time, and for a
| closed source OS, Windows is surprisingly open and
| configurable (well, used to be anyway - that seems to be
| going away with 11+)
| UberFly wrote:
| Absurd comment. Microsoft forged the desktop space into what
| it is today. You clearly don't like them but their
| contributions and market decisions quickly outpaced Apple and
| everyone else in the 1990s. They created the dominant PC
| experience that remains to this day by a large margin.
| zvrba wrote:
| Check out work by Microsoft research. Examples: Z3 solver,
| project Orleans.
| linguae wrote:
| I'm no Microsoft fanboy, but Microsoft Excel was very
| innovative for being one of the first _graphical_
| spreadsheets, originally written for the classic Mac OS in
| the mid-1980s before it was available for Windows. It was
| Excel, not Word or PowerPoint, that fueled the popularity of
| Microsoft Office in the 1990s, though admittedly I lament the
| decline of WordPerfect and other word processors. Sure, Excel
| might not have been the _most_ innovative graphical
| spreadsheet; that award goes to Lotus Improv for the NeXT
| computer. However, Excel was a leap ahead of DOS-based
| spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3.
|
| There are other innovative Microsoft products. Visual Basic
| was a very nice rapid GUI development environment in the
| 1990s. Windows 95's interface was the result of a lot of
| research done on the user experience, and the result was a
| GUI that not only has persisted (with many modifications, of
| course) for about 30 years, but has inspired other desktops
| such as various Linux desktops, and in some ways even
| influenced later Mac operating systems.
|
| Let's also not forget Microsoft Research, which has produced
| a lot of interesting work in operating systems and
| programming language research.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While I agree that Microsoft Excel is a contender for the
| best Microsoft product ever, I do not see how one can claim
| that it was a more "graphical" spreadsheet that MS-DOS
| Lotus 1-2-3, except if by "graphical" you just mean that it
| was a native Windows application, so you did not have to
| exit Windows and revert to MS-DOS for having the best user
| experience, like you would have needed with MS-DOS Lotus
| 1-2-3 (whose drivers for various hardware graphics devices
| would not have worked well or at all under Windows
| emulation).
|
| When Windows 95 has made MS-DOS obsolete, Excel had the
| huge advantage of being a native Windows application, so I
| have switched like everybody else from Lotus 1-2-3 to
| Microsoft Excel, because switching between Windows and MS-
| DOS was unpleasant and inconvenient, and because the new
| Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows did not have any of the advantages
| of Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, while being inferior as a
| Windows program to MS Excel.
|
| Even if I have switched to Excel, for supporting the
| general Windows features, like nice TrueType fonts and
| being able to use great amounts of memory in a faster way,
| due to direct access instead of using extended/expanded
| memory, at that time Excel did not have any spreadsheet-
| specific feature, graphic or otherwise, that was better
| than Lotus 1-2-3.
|
| Despite strongly preferring Windows 95 to MS-DOS, I have
| always regretted a few MS-DOS programs that had a much
| better user interface than any Windows program that I have
| ever seen.
|
| One of those was Lotus 1-2-3. Learning to use MS-DOS Lotus
| 1-2-3 was significantly more difficult than learning MS
| Excel, but once you were an expert the speed of doing any
| spreadsheet operations using keyboard shortcuts was many
| times greater than what is possible in Excel with a mouse-
| based UI, or even with the Excel keyboard shortcuts, which
| are much less efficient.
|
| While the early Excel was extremely easy to use, that is no
| longer true about modern Excel or MS Office. Even if I had
| used for many decades MS Excel and several other
| spreadsheet applications, when I open now the recent
| versions of MS Word or MS Excel, I am no longer able to
| find most of the commands that I need and that I know that
| they must exist, except after a long random search through
| various menus, because those no longer have a hierarchical
| structure whose principles of organization I can discern.
| This is completely different from older versions of Excel,
| where one needed no help and no manuals to easily find any
| required command.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| By that measure iOS and Android are copies of Windows Mobile,
| no?
| lvl155 wrote:
| That's fair. For Microsoft, I think they trailblazed on how
| to be a global tech monopoly. The dotcom companies (ie
| Amazon, Google, etc) all followed those footprints to
| dominate.
| p_ing wrote:
| You're conflating innovation with discovery/invention.
| Innovation isn't simply "think of/create something new", it
| includes incremental changes to something, leveraging an
| existing thing in a new way, etc.
|
| .NET is certainly not "a copy" of Java, it's just Java done
| correctly ;-)
| breadwinner wrote:
| Incorrectly. Wherever they deviated from Java they messed
| up. See exceptions, for example:
| https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-
| ex...
| p_ing wrote:
| "Incorrect" okay, based on a brand-new-to-C# developer's
| experience. Sure.
|
| "The Trouble with Checked Exceptions" -
| https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-
| exc...
| Cpoll wrote:
| In the linked article, Hejlsberg considers adding a new
| checked exception a breaking change (true), but adding a
| new thrown exception to not be, because "in a lot of
| cases, people don't care." I think this is obviously open
| to debate.
|
| You're conflating "incorrect" with "mistake," no one is
| saying the C# team _forgot_ to add checked exceptions.
| breadwinner wrote:
| I have a lot of respect for Anders Hejlsberg. But that
| doesn't mean he is never wrong. Hejlsberg doesn't think
| anyone would want to recover from exceptions. "There's a
| bottom level exception handler around their message loop.
| That handler is just going to bring up a dialog that says
| what went wrong and continue." Okaayyy... I think we know
| a bit more about exception handling than that today!
| Real-world applications often need more sophisticated
| exception handling strategies.
| p_ing wrote:
| "Something went wrong."
|
| <insert correlation id>
|
| [no option to continue]
|
| Those are our error messages of today.
|
| And yes, even the brightest can be wrong from time to
| time or frequently
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _Those are our error messages of today._
|
| Is that in your .NET code? Time to switch to Java!
| neonsunset wrote:
| Surely you're not arguing in favour of checked
| exceptions, which are widely regarded by Java programmers
| as a mistake, are you? (not sure but I _think_ I saw you
| argue in favour of that previously before getting quickly
| pointed out all the issues with checked exceptions)
|
| In either case I encourage you to try out .NET before
| making a statement, there's a good chance it will
| pleasantly surprise you.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| >What's cool about the Dutch East India Company and Standard
| Oil is that there will never be another company like those two.
| They are true trailblazers in so many ways.
| evidencetamper wrote:
| What do you mean by that? I don't understand the comparison,
| but would like to. Is it about monopoly?
| pickdan wrote:
| It's just a joke about the ridiculousness that large
| economy dominating companies can't possibly be replaced and
| will last forever. Thus, instead of modern companies they
| give the example of two titans of vintage corporate might
| (one from several centuries ago and one more recent, just a
| century ago) are used instead. Ah, Hubris.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| There are so few books on early Microsoft, and they're all so
| fascinating. One I like is Microsoft: First Generation. One I
| think is humorous, but not that informative, is Barbarians Led by
| Bill Gates.
| ozarker wrote:
| I read Hard Drive by James Wallace and Jim Erickson a couple
| years ago. It was written between Windows 3.1 and 95. Super
| interesting to read Microsoft history from the perspective of
| that time period. I loved it.
| kristopolous wrote:
| try Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World. By
| Charles H. Ferguson from 1993. The author is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ferguson_(filmmaker) this
| one
| piokoch wrote:
| Maybe after all the whole story is not that fascinating?
|
| Bill was coming from the wealthy family, his mum was IBM VP and
| gave his son a contract to sell operating system, even though
| there were better alternatives on the market. Ye good ol' story
| about corporate corruption that gave us such amazing products
| like Internet Explorer 6, Windows 98 Millenium Edition or
| Windows Vista.
|
| We could've lived in a so much better World if we didn't have
| to deal for years with crappy Microsoft operating system and
| other MS products.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Bill Gates's mom and the chairman of IBM were on the
| executive committee of the same charity, the United Way.
|
| from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-
| gates-64-... She was later appointed to
| the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she became
| the first woman to lead it. Right Time, Right Place
| Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is
| believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a
| crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a
| fellow committee member who was the chairman of the
| International Business Machines Corporation, the business
| that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft. Mr. Opel,
| by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M.
| executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring
| Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an
| operating system for its first personal computer.
| grork wrote:
| Hard Drive, ostensibly about Bill Gates, was a great read when
| I was a kid. I recommend 'Microserfs' from Douglas Coupland as
| a fictional (but grounded) homage to the work in the 90s.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Microserfs is pretty fun, though the details are fictional.
| What stuck in my mind is that they spent so much effort clawing
| their way to the top, and when they were there, they didn't
| know what to do anymore and lost their way. Microsoft was a
| mess for 15 years or so.
| bustling-noose wrote:
| While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows
| anymore, I think Windows defines the brand much like how iPhone
| and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the
| revenue not all of it.
|
| What I am curious about is what happens when the original product
| that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality.
| Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the
| last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing
| problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are
| significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably
| started with search.
|
| Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as
| Google search imo.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Google's product is ads and GCP is an insignificant player in
| the cloud space. When I was at AWS ProServe, we never took GCP
| as a serious competitor.
|
| GSuite still hasn't made any inroads into the enterprise of
| governments where the money is.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Google Cloud revenues were $48B in 2024 vs $109B for AWS.
| It's silly to call that insignificant.
| trentlott wrote:
| But if we represent it as a percentage we can pretend it's
| relatively not a big deal and minimize their stranglehold
| on society.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| GCP has a stranglehold on society?
|
| Everyone who uses Chrome on Windows, Macs, and iPhones
| makes a choice to use it. Everyone who uses Google makes
| a choice.
| asteroidburger wrote:
| Doesn't that include Google Workspace though? Sure, a
| dollar is a dollar, but presumably a huge chunk of that
| money is Workspace, meaning it's not going towards raw
| compute.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform
|
| _Google Cloud Platform is a part of Google Cloud, which
| includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud
| infrastructure, as well as Google Workspace (G Suite),
| enterprise versions of Android and ChromeOS, and
| application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine
| learning and enterprise mapping services. Since at least
| 2022,[9] Google 's official materials have stated that
| "Google Cloud" is the new name for "Google Cloud Platform,"
| which may cause naming confusion._
|
| (Yes it's a Wikipedia link. But if you go to the article it
| includes citations)
|
| Microsoft does _not_ include Office sales with its Azure
| revenue.
| mc3301 wrote:
| How is iPhone headings towards a similar fate?
| MPSFounder wrote:
| The iphone has lacked innovation under Cook. Last 3
| iterations (since 13) have been virtually identical. Also,
| the failure of Apple Intelligence (oversold promise) has
| seriously hurt the brand. I am an avid iphone user, and will
| likely continue to be for the next 3 years. But innovation is
| suffering. Anecdotally, the least talented ML engineers are
| currently at Apple (the best engineers I know in the field
| are at Google and OpenAI). I don't expect Apple to be
| innovating much in that regard, given a lack of talent (just
| look at Siri for instance).
| rahkiin wrote:
| It does what I need it to do.
|
| As opposed to Google Search which does what I need it to do
| (and could do before) less and less
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> It does what I need it to do. _
|
| The thing is, Apple of Steve Jobs was more than just a
| "does the job" kind of product company, which was IBM's
| and Microsoft's place. It was sort of magical and ahead
| of the curve on many innovative things that would
| revolutionize and set industry trends.
|
| Now under Tim Cook it feels stale and boring, kind of
| like your grandads khaki pants, does the job but we've
| seen it already several times, give us something new and
| revolutionary not incremental upgrades to the same things
| from 10+ years ago.
|
| Apple of today resembles more the Dell/Compaq of the
| early 2000s, focused on milking the user lock-in effects
| and optimizing the supply chain to increase margins
| except wrapped in flashy presentations, but just as
| soulless and dead inside as those.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> has seriously hurt the brand_
|
| You're forgetting the Apple Vision Pro flop.
| serial_dev wrote:
| If it ain't broke, don't fix it?
|
| I am a former Android user, but the quality of apps on iOS
| is just so much better. The apps "just work", and the
| integration with Mac, iPad, and watch is just simply so far
| ahead of anything Android offered, even if people think
| there is no innovation. IMO, it's so much better and the
| whole mobile space is stagnating, I think they will be fine
| even if they add features 3 years later.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I'm just upset they don't make small phones anymore, but I
| don't think that's relevant to their revenue.
| ska wrote:
| Didn't they just release a small-ish one ?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The 16e is still a lot bigger than the 13 Mini. Even the
| Mini series is much bigger than the 5 or 1st SE.
|
| I have a bit of hope that if they ever make a foldable
| phone, it'll be small when folded.
| firefax wrote:
| >The iphone has lacked innovation under Cook. Last 3
| iterations (since 13) have been virtually identical.
|
| Why do things need "innovated" constantly? Why keep making
| the phone slimmer rather than replace the battery with
| something more efficient, maybe add back the headphone
| port?
|
| The original iPhone was a great leap forward, UX wise, but
| much like with a pickup truck at a certain point you'd
| expect minor tweaks with the yearly models.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| I agree they don't need to (and I believe their software
| needs lots of work, so stagnant hardware while they work
| on software should be fine). But, lack of innovation
| drives consumer fatigue, which hurts the brand (other
| companies will innovate and eat your customers).
| firefax wrote:
| >lack of innovation drives consumer fatigue, which hurts
| the brand (other companies will innovate and eat your
| customers).
|
| But is adding features no one wants that sometimes
| degrade the user experience "innovation"?
|
| I agree if they don't think about what consumers want and
| make updates they could get overtaken, but I don't think
| anyone is gonna jump to Android because they can get a
| 2MM smaller chassis --- the opposite, they might want an
| "innovative" phone with a removable and swappable
| battery, multiple SIMs, FM tuner, and a few other
| features that aren't "shiny" but the iPhone lacks.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Apple has some serious talent working on this stuff but
| they aren't willing to rip apart user privacy to do things
| quickly like other companies.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > the failure of Apple Intelligence (oversold promise) has
| seriously hurt the brand
|
| If this is true, is the dominance of the iPhone faded in
| any of their primary markets? Also: If the brand was so
| damaged, what brands are people moving towards?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I'm a mostly-satisfied iPhone 13 mini user, but I'm
| considering moving back to Android for my next device. No
| one reason is the deal-breaker, but it's just a pile-up of
| stuff:
|
| - My main compute platforms are now Linux and Windows, but
| even when I had a MacBook, I didn't really benefit much
| from whatever integration there was between the two.
|
| - I tried and did not like Apple Watch, and I'm upset at
| Apple's treatment of other wearable makers like Fitbit and
| now Pebble.
|
| - I'm frustrated that my iPhone 13 is still not USB-C when
| basically everything else I carry around _is_.
|
| - I don't like how the Epic/Apple case went, and I wish
| Apple had been made to allow competing stores on their
| devices (the EU got this one right).
|
| - With Apple having discontinued the "mini" models,
| physical size is no longer a differentiator-- the Galaxy
| series phones are basically indistinguishable from modern
| iPhone models.
| art0rz wrote:
| The only people losing faith in Google (search) are power users
| such as us. Regular users haven't noticed the decline, and
| search may even have improved for them. We are not Google
| Search's target audience. We need to stop pretending all
| products are built for the power user niche.
| surajrmal wrote:
| I'm a so called power user and don't really understand why
| everyone says it's worse. Google is better than ever. The
| problem I've seen is folks using older techniques for
| searching that don't really make sense anymore.
| tuyiown wrote:
| I don't see how exact search string can lose its sense. But
| it does yield "no results", more often than before even if
| the string has to be publicly available somewhere, in a
| source I could make sense of.
|
| I can see how google can be seen as better in some ways,
| but brushing all case where it's worse as irrelevant looks
| like an easy shortcut to shut down complains without caring
| if they might be legit.
| ido wrote:
| What are the newer searching techniques that make more
| sense?
| owebmaster wrote:
| > I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching
| that don't really make sense anymore.
|
| Like typing what you want to search in the search input and
| hit enter?
| jajko wrote:
| My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly
| chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent
| sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right
| terms that google search would understand, not overdo it,
| avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for
| so long it became victim of its own success. It just has
| momentum but thats waning.
|
| Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck
| them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to
| something else but right now its night and day even for
| common folks. Who cares knows it.
|
| Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum
| cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in
| google search like nytimes with their paid very selective
| biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user
| reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs
| cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short
| sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.
| alister wrote:
| > _we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner_
|
| For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer
| Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider
| unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians
| and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the
| products they test and they don't take gifts or
| manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising.
| They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants,
| and have been in existence for 89 years.
|
| Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and
| Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14
| manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that
| robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting
| the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth
| subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.
|
| https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-
| cleaners/r...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I love this response, and I agree 100% with your
| suggestion, but, isn't it obvious? They didn't want to
| pay for high quality information. Instead, they needed to
| wade through rubbish "unpaid"/"free" search results. Or
| in their own words: "Spent an hour battling shitty seoed
| crap sites in google search".
| croissants wrote:
| +1 for Consumer Reports. They're not expensive either,
| something like $5 per month. If they keep you from buying
| a bad fridge, it pays for itself!
|
| Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit
| embarrassing though, since they used a California
| standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush
| at.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Most people I know are now using deepseek. I don't even have
| to show them a filtered ad-free web, anymore (that most
| didn't even notice the lack of cruft).
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Regular users have absolutely noticed the decline. A number
| of people I know have mentioned it to me unprompted. None of
| them are power users or even particularly tech-oriented.
| kenjackson wrote:
| A lot of non-power users are complementing Google search with
| ChatGPT. The main reason is that it will give an answer to
| more specific questions. Like "what are some quotes famous
| athletes have said about Usain Bolt".
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Like "what are some quotes famous athletes have said
| about Usain Bolt".
|
| What a strange counterexample. When I try _exactly_ that
| search in Google, I get a nice list of quotes from "AI
| Overview" in the results.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I thought they were talking about the traditional blue
| links Google search results, not the AI returned results.
| Then sure -- ChatGPT, Gemini, etc... I put them all in
| the same bucket as complementary. Interestingtly though,
| I don't get the AI Overview on mobile, so there I'd have
| to explicitly go to an LLM focused interface.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| The flagship product may no longer be the main revenue driver,
| but it still defines the brand in people's minds
| pjmlp wrote:
| Still, from all computing platforms that I have used since my
| humble Timex 2068 in 1986, Windows is where I have most fun,
| despite all the ongoing issues.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows
| anymore
|
| It's hasn't been for 25+ years (more than 50% of Microsoft
| existence). 1998 Revenue Breakdown
| ------------------------------------------- $7.04B
| Productivity Apps $6.28B Windows $4.72B OEM
| $1.94B Consumer
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar00/mdna.htm
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Productivity Apps
|
| MS Office? > OEM
|
| Combination of Windows and MS Office licenses purchased by
| OEMs? > Consumer
|
| What is this? People who buy shink-wrapped software at retail
| stores?
| unregistereddev wrote:
| Productivity apps would be MS Office, yes, as well as
| separately-purchased licenses for Publisher (and I'm sure
| there were several other apps at the time). I do not know
| whether this category would include Visual C++ or Visual
| Basic licenses, but I suspect it did.
|
| I think you are correct on the OEM vs Consumer split. Long-
| forgotten memory: For awhile people would resell OEM
| software licenses online. OEM software licenses could only
| be sold as a bundle with PC hardware. But that limitation
| did not specify /what/ PC hardware or that it had to be an
| entire working system. So resellers would collect outdated
| 1MB SIMM memory cards or other small, cheap, outdated
| components and package them with the CDROM.
| paxys wrote:
| > how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be
| part of the revenue not all of it
|
| iPhone defines Apple, and that is justified considering the
| single product makes up 55% of the company's revenue.
| RajT88 wrote:
| When I first heard that, I thought it was an insane factoid.
|
| But then I realized that slowly over time, iPhones grew to
| get into the price range of full-on computers. And also, even
| the cheaper iPhones add in up sales when you sell over a
| billion of them.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Funny that they changed their name from 'Micro-Soft' to
| Microsoft.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| No Microsoft, no Half-Life.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| I remember exactly that moment I first saw a Windows 95 bootup.
|
| First the new _animated_ boot splash with the ms-logo, then the
| elegant start up piano sound, the amazing new start button with a
| menu with so perfectly organized applications, settings and a run
| input. It was like stepping into the future.
|
| Windows 3.11 and dos 6.22 was normal yesterday, it worked, was
| cool and had all the stuff I loved to do - but after this day
| they felt dated and ancient.
|
| Such moments are rare. Microsoft rocked so hard
| exe34 wrote:
| > First the new _animated_ boot splash with the ms-logo, then
| the elegant start up piano sound, the amazing new start button
| with a menu with so perfectly organized applications, settings
| and a run input. It was like stepping into the future.
|
| Sadly that future is now behind us. Nowadays I struggle to
| figure out what is a button, excuse me, clickable.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I have similar vivid memories. I saw win 95 first in my room
| mate's PC. I was completely blown away, like "what sorcery is
| this" level of mind blown.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It was like stepping into the future.
|
| More like stepping into the past with things that the Mac,
| Amiga and NeXT machines could do out-of-the-box in the late
| 1980s and early 1990s. I mean, 8.3 file names? Seriously? Who
| thought that these could be "user friendly"?
| bboreham wrote:
| Windows 95 allowed long file names with arbitrary dots.
|
| The path length (including full folder path and the file
| name) was limited to 260 characters.
| nelblu wrote:
| One of my favourite memories of Windows 95 was -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc. It felt absolutely
| futuristic watching a video from a CD at that time.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| It's interesting that Microsoft was founded almost exactly a year
| before Apple (April 1st, 1976). I can't imagine Apple will miss
| the opportunity to make a big deal out of it.
| Taniwha wrote:
| When I was at uni in NZ (mid 70s) me and my friends wrote a
| compiler for 6800s (an algol subset, it fit in 2k), we wrote it
| with copyrights for "uSoft" (that's a greek mu), in retrospect it
| was an obvious name at the time.
|
| Later we discovered some other guys using the same name in the US
| (also with a mu) they had a basic interpreter, how lame! (we had
| a compiler) however we really didn't understand the advantages of
| being born in the right place .....
|
| I really wish we'd incorporated, we could have sold the name for
| some silly amount of money
| jll29 wrote:
| Not just "incorporated", you would also have to have ported it
| to various computers that were sold (as MSFT did - and that
| Bill Gates' parents were lawyers with IBM contacts helped a
| lot).
|
| NZ is a fantastic country, but is relatively remote from larger
| markets, and its own population isn't large enough for the
| economics of scale to apply only locally. So even if you had
| tried, you may have failed. As you rightly say, power of
| location. On the other hand, now, due to globalization, things
| are possible there, too - for example, the app market is not
| limited geographically.
|
| BTW, you should consider uploading your old compiler's code on
| GitHub if you still have it; there is increased interest in
| "software archeology" now, given that so many emulators have
| been built.
| Taniwha wrote:
| I was more talking about owning the name in NZ (and maybe Oz)
|
| The software source was on cards (developed on a simulator on
| a uni mainframe, much like Microsoft were developing their
| code), sadly the cards were left behind when I moved to the
| US a decade later
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| That's such a great story and such a classic case of being just
| ahead of the curve but in the wrong corner of the world.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I worked in a digital technology company in Wellington in the
| 90s and one of our key technologies that we sold was a hosted
| form on a secure (remember, this is the era that https was
| not common) website to collect credit card payments. We were
| a proto Stripe in the year 1999 but totally in the wrong
| place in the world to take advantage of it.
| ska wrote:
| May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of
| companies that failed to get traction and died during the
| dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful
| 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in
| infrastructure I suspect.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Windows Recall
| rollcat wrote:
| It's also almost 50 years since "An Open Letter to Hobbyists"[1].
| It's amazing that in the last 30+ years, the "hobbyists" managed
| to turn the entire software industry by 180deg, and that
| Microsoft themselves are reliant on that work.
|
| Bill even specifically mentions musicians. By 1976, when blues
| was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call
| "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record,
| and there was no shame or stigma around it. Art builds on art,
| and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the
| process[2].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
|
| [2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
| anon_e-moose wrote:
| > Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most
| important part of the process[2].
|
| > [2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
|
| Nice try ChatGPT stealing from studio ghibli and Scarlett
| Johansson are still two egregious examples of what can kill
| artist's motivations. Why create or publish if credit is not
| given?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Downvote for low quality "nice try".
| rollcat wrote:
| True, virtually all companies harvesting LLM training
| datasets don't bother honouring even the most permissive
| licenses, like MIT or BSD - Microsoft leading the pack with
| Github and Copilot.
|
| You're right to point out that the tide is shifting again.
| Perhaps at the end of this bubble, society and/or the
| behemoth companies will recognise the value and help build a
| more sustainable future for artists and creators. I'm
| cautiously optimistic.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands
| would play what we now call "covers", credit each original
| writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or
| stigma around it.
|
| I do enjoy some Led Zeppelin, and I often enjoy the artists
| they didn't credit, even more.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial
| licenses, because other hobbists don't pay them, and there are
| bills to pay.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial
| licenses
|
| It seems to be specifically the "hobbyists" that are also
| taking VC investment money for their "hobby project". It's
| pretty clear what's driving these decisions: VC's are not
| okay with a bootstrapped, penny-pinching business focusing on
| specialized support or custom development (which is the
| successful RedHat model), they want an early chance at really
| outsized returns.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Back in the day that letter was relevant we used to sell
| little tools via ads on magazines like BYTE, Dr Dobbs
| Journal and co, occasionally get nice money out of it.
|
| Also in the early BSD/Linux days, there were distributors
| like Walnut Creek, Amiga had Fish Disks, and so forth, some
| money could eventually go back to tool writers.
|
| It isn't only about VC money.
| qoez wrote:
| Devils advocate: Imagine how much richer developers would have
| been today if software wasn't copied as much as it is today.
| Companies would have to pay developers to write it (we probably
| wouldn't have as much overall growth but devs would be richer).
| AI also wouldn't have been able to replace us if it was more
| secretive and proprietary.
| azemetre wrote:
| Imagine how much public good can be done if the government
| had public software works project that did not need to rely
| on advertising to be useful while serving everyone (not just
| a boardroom of millionaires).
| sunrisegeek wrote:
| Crazy to think how Microsoft went from a small startup to one of
| the biggest companies in the world. Wonder what the next 50 years
| will look like.
| stu2184 wrote:
| Actual Code
| https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| What struck me most in this piece wasn't just the milestones or
| big product moments, but how human the journey was. From someone
| getting hired off a newsletter in a Honda Civic to negotiating
| with the Rolling Stones, or building a global business with zero
| prior international experience. It's a reminder that behind all
| the megacorp mythology, these were regular people taking huge
| risks.
| 0xEF wrote:
| "Remember when things were not insanely bloated and we all knew
| what we were collectively doing?" they all said, a wistful tear
| developing in each of their eyes, nobody daring to release theirs
| first.
|
| Nah, Happy Anniversary, Microsoft. As much as we do not get
| along, you did do _some_ good in the world.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/0...
|
| This development environment looks interesting:why two shelves?
|
| Also the place look like a cheap airline cabin. I thought all
| MSFT employees have their own offices back then. Maybe it's
| because that's the lab?
| muststopmyths wrote:
| The caption says 1995, so this is most definitely one of the
| test labs. We used to have rows of shelves with PCs in various
| hardware configurations that were tested with daily builds.
|
| Everyone did have their own offices in the early-mid 90s. By
| the late 90s we were sharing, depending on seniority (years in
| the company, not title, which was refreshing).
| kevstev wrote:
| This picture without context gave me QA or build lab type
| vibes, and the caption in the story confirmed that. They had to
| test on all kinds of configurations and hardware, so this makes
| sense- tbh I am surprised its this small. Remote tools didn't
| really exist in those days, and even if they did, they are
| unlikely to work if the OS is having issues. So you run a test,
| find an issue, and if its hard to reproduce you might just have
| to bring the dev into the lab to get on the box to understand
| what happened.
|
| It looks very similar to a QA Lab at a place I worked at in the
| early 2000s. They essentially commandeered a larger conference
| room and there were just (cpu) boxes everywhere.
| grork wrote:
| This is a build or test lab, not the offices of developers. I
| visited multiple times in the period mentioned for the picture,
| and saw multiple of these. The one I saw most often was the NT
| build lab. When I started there in the mid-2000s, these labs
| were still used, although the build labs were a little less
| densely packed thanks to remote tools.
| artursapek wrote:
| Yep looks like the build lab described in the book
| Showstopper. I think there were even photos of this room in
| there.
| nocarrier wrote:
| I loved how the Windows 95 install CD had Weezer's Buddy Holly
| video on it. I remember finding it and thinking it was so cool
| they did that.
| mtmail wrote:
| And the trailer to Rob Roy. (Why do I even remember this??)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8YJGwn9Y8
| warmandsoft wrote:
| [...] "Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge.
| They are a company with vicious, predatory, anti-competitive
| business practices, and always have been. They also happen to
| make terrible products, and always have. I do not use any
| Microsoft products, and neither should you." - Jamie Zawinski
|
| https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-windows.html
| unclad5968 wrote:
| That guy hates MS because they included a web browser with
| their OS? Then he complains about being sent porn when he asks
| people to stop redistribution of his permissively licensed
| project while he shows me a hairy scrotum.
|
| Seems a little irrational.
| weard_beard wrote:
| Stress is a minor form of torture.
|
| Torture itself is irrational, but so are the things that
| humans will do or say when subjected to it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghczTVgav0
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