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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this! Almost an entire subgroup of millennials think of microsoft as some cuddly bear. They do not realize how their machinations were so strong you could not buy a PC without Windows. PC OEMs could not sell you a PC without Windows. Or how they almost took over the web with their browser and proprietary JavaScript “extensions”.

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Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s. Anyone who survived the '90s who didn't internalize those lessons deserves what they got, but I do fear there is a generation which doesn't appreciate just how lucky they are to be able to build an entire career dependent only on OSS platforms.

> Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s

Not sure what this is a reference to. Microsoft STILL supports running VB6/COM/C++/etc from the 1990s today. Only Visual J++ disappeared, but a court of law required that. I'd go so far as to claim that their success is in no small part because their backwards compatibility game is top notch.

IE6 was a nightmare, but that wasn't "pulling the rug" rather just being lazy and not developing the browser at all (because it competed with their proprietary platform -- Win32). Once Microsoft deploys something and developers start using it, typically they support it "forever" (even IE compatibility modes remain to support IE5/6 code).

While I really appreciate their efforts on backwards compatibility support, they also have/had a horrible track record of supporting anything outside windows for more than 2 versions then dropping it entirely.

You mean like how much my knowledge of BackboneJS is paying off in 2019?

or Prototype... ;-)

I remember... I still have very little trust for anything MS comes up with or buys that supports something other than Windows, or in the case of Office, MacOS. Every single application they have for non-windows hasn't made it two releases after. .Net Core at least seems to be holding strong, and I do appreciate it.

I tend to prefer software that works everywhere I do. I use Windows, Linux and Mac on a daily basis. Though haven't done desktop Linux in close to a decade at this point (next desktop will likely change that).

On the flip side, I actually appreciate that MS has done a number of apps with web and electron focus. VS Code shows you can do a well performing editor in a browser, I almost didn't even try it after atom and brackets. That it's on all three, I really appreciate. WTF the Teams app isn't available on Linux irks me to no end. The Azure SQL Studio is also progressing nicely. I also happen to like the relative ease of using Azure's services, but it's more than I'm going to pay on hobby projects.

I was born in the mid 90's and didn't start programming until college, so I missed out on all the 'evil Microsoft' fun and am probably missing something - but I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it. But for example - Mac's and i-Devices's all come bundled with Safari, why doesn't Apple also have this bad rep?

> I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it.

The root issue was that Microsoft preinstalled the (free) Internet Explorer at a time when other web browsers were commercial. Netscape Navigator in particular was free for personal use, but Netscape wanted a fee for business use.

That was the original sin of the monopoly: Microsoft used its dominance in the operating system market to take over the browser market at a stroke. They compounded on this with "embrace, extend, and extinguish" practices, where they would introduce and maintain IE-only web extensions to the detriment of existing and upcoming standards.

You still see the modern legacy of this with Internet Explorer 'compatibility mode' hacks, since it turned out that Microsoft itself became stuck in its own morass.

Yeah as an enterprise web developer, I definitely have met my share of frustrating requirements to support ancient versions of IE. But that's definitely an interesting choice that I don't think I fault Microsoft for making - if you own the platform, why not extend your control into other popular apps running on the platform (word processors, databases, browsers, etc.). Pretty logical step to make imo, though their underhanded tactics were probably also to blame for the US Supreme Court monopoly case.

As someone who was around for the "evil Microsoft" era, I am also frustrated by this.

There's no reason Apple should be allowed to force Safari exclusively on iOS. We had an entire anti-trust decision about this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... It should be bog-standard-illegal, and Apple deserves an equally bad rep for this.

I think what you're saying here is analogous to "Al Capone? That was before my time, but wasn't he the guy who fibbed a bit on his tax return? Don't a lot of people do that?"

There is that. There is a lot of other things that put them in the bad monopoly category.

* Using secret API calls to make sure their software ran faster than the competition. If you had a database server or spreadsheet application you could had a myriad of choices in the early 90s but the fastest, stablest one was always from Microsoft.

* OEMs could not change the default browser. Even when given money to install an alternative the default OOB browser was required to be IE.

Early Macs had no browser at all and at <5% of the PC universe they had no monopoly status. Before Safari Apple used MSIE as the first browser. Firefox and Webkit weren't ported over until ~2005. And long before the Apple App store the only application on iOS1 and 2 was the browser. It didn't have apps as we know it today. It would be hard to prevent them from including the browser since it shipped with the device day 1.

I see, I knew a bit about the browser wars and the some of the shady stuff there, but I didn't realize they sabotaged stability of competitor programs. Thanks for explaining it

Sort of off-topic, but it's unlikely to be "millennials" as such. They grew up during the "Micro$oft" era. It's probably what the news would call "generation Z".

At some point "millennials" became slang for "Kids These Days" and just sort of stuck. It's weird.

It's probably like how millennials and younger generations are just calling everyone older than them a "boomer".

No, I chose those words specifically. Considering millennials spans 21-37 y.o. Some of them would have been in diapers when Microsoft was taken to court. The tail end would have grown up during the Microsoft era, but missed the destructive, pre-monopoly ruling Microsoft that the olds warn about.

Your range for milleneals is much wider than I've heard. The absolute youngest milleneals by the ranges I've heard are around 24-25.

81-96 is the range I've seen [0]. The youngest would be ~3-4 when they were taken to anti-trust court.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials#Date_and_age_range...

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