Windows: The next killer application on the internet (1994) [pdf]
sriramk.com
sriramk.com
Microsoft moved aggressively to integrate internet client capabilities, mainly web client capabilities, directly into the desktop. This is what lead to many of Microsoft's regulatory problems because doing so integrated Internet Explorer components deeply into the operating system, which was seen as anticompetitive bundling. That issue aside, it also lead to windows long running internet security issues because it meant core operating system services were directly exposed to external networks, with minimal security protections.
As I remember, they moved aggressively but only after failing to anticipate or even make significant early reactions to the "world wide web", which allowed Netscape Navigator to rapidly take the majority share of what should have been made obvious by the Mosaic browser. Microsoft would take years to respond.
And when they responded it wasn't really with the aim of making better products, but with aggressive (and possibly anti competitive) sales strategies and by introducing deliberate incompatibilities and proprietary features.
I think the very consumer oriented nature of MS made them the enemy number one in mainstream nerd culture, but this behavior is nothing new or different about Microsoft. Large corporations in general I believe are ill suited to "innovate" and that can't be fixed. Not just ill-suited actually but they actually stifle it. Despite everyone claiming they want innovation, when the rubber hits the road they actually don't. It's easy to sell small incremental improvements in performance or cost or features. It's hard to sell something that will obsolete a corporation's most profitable product, or make a VP's business redundant, or kill the sales strategy that the CEO's team has spent a decade perfecting.
It's not even innovation per se, simply reacting to something new well after the writing is on the wall and nobody can deny it is a challenge for an organization. Everyone from executives down to managers and even individual workers have their own fiefdoms that they protect so even things that would be quite clearly in the best interests of the business can be difficult to achieve. Intel is a great example of this with their server group protecting Itanium and holding their territory against the PC group, which resulted in the small upstart AMD defining the 64-bit extension to x86. And then not long afterwards, their PC group defended their turf against their mobile division which resulted in them completely failing in the smartphone market which has arguably almost entirely driven the woes they face today with TSMC overtaking their manufacturing capability and ARM Ltd, Apple, Amazon etc rivaling their high performance CPU design and server products.
(Sorry that rant ended up way off topic and doesn't really address what you wrote, I don't think you're wrong, just clarifying that Microsoft was aggressive in strategy but not in technology development or adoption)
Outside of e-mail, the non-browser Internet applications were on their way out by the mid-90s. Mosaic put the first nail in their coffin and then Navigator hammered in a few more.
Graphical web browsing was just a richer experience than what Gopher offered. Netscape's support for Gopher, and like FTP, just made it a web-like experience. WAIS was essentially dead by the mid-90s.
Navigator obviated the need for myriad applications to access a bunch of different servers. It didn't help that as graphical browsers were gaining traction UMN decided to charge license fees for their gopher implementation while several early web servers were FOSS or at least freely licensed.
In 1995 if you wanted to start some Internet service there was no reason to do so on Gopher, WAIS, or some bespoke protocol. The web covered those services' capabilities and added a lot more, especially with HTTP 1.1. So I'd content the browser as a universal client for Internet services was pretty evident soon after Mosaic's release and a foregone conclusion with the release of Navigator.
In 1990 IRC had average of 12 users :) (but other chat programs were used before IRC) . True FTP, other chats, MUDs, email, etc. were widely used/available.
Note that the web is older than Gopherspace with the first gopher site appearing in mid-1991.
While looking up that last fact, I see that there was heavy interest in gopher by colleges and universities. Maybe our experiences differ because you were in college then?
Well, except games.
Once they killed Netscape, they literally disbanded the IE team. They also did anti-competitive shit like buy and slow-roll Hotmail to protect the golden goose. (enterprise EAs of windows and office + oem licensing.)
They are doing the same thing today with identity and security for enterprises.
Chrome is Google’s attempt at a first party solution stack. It’s weird though as chrome is owned by different teams in Google than other user facing products.
Tied to Windows, mind you.
Unless you count reframed Chromium as "other browser", the equivalent of using Microsoft's IE-based WebBrowser component back in the day.
I really don't see much of a difference.
Not that that was a bad thing though. As mentioned it is a really bad idea to auto download code off some random website and execute it. Naive we all were back then...
Microsoft isn’t run by dumb people.
I find that dubious. Do you have any sources for that?
First link on a google search confirms all this
https://www.quora.com/What-strategic-thinking-persuaded-Micr...
The concepts had great potential, but they were either too early and removed (not enough resources to spare back then to put HTML everywhere), or kept in much the same state and never really expanded on
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545152
As an addition to this, it's worth remembering that the retail version of Windows 95 did not enable TCP/IP out of the box. While it was included, you had to separately install it yourself. The default protocol was originally NetBEUI:
There was also talk of replacing most of the file system with a database, something which they played with for years and then discarded.
Besides that: Is my intuition correct that they barely innovated in user-facing features after the early 2000s? Yeah, they broke everyone's workflows once or twice, but nothing about the way things work seems to really have changed, especially not in ways seen before elsewhere.
The first and biggest problem is that different types of files have metadata they consider to be important. Author and editor information useful for collaborative editing in a Word document is immaterial to a static raster image saved with a lossy codec. So your database ends up with dozens to hundreds of schemas to store metadata. You still need to serialized and deserialize metadata on files going out or coming in. If some unrelated application (not the authoring application) went and edited the database, which metadata for that file is canonical? The world may never know.
If you're building some metadata management database that's also storing binary blobs on addressed blocks on a disk, you might as well use a traditional file system and have a read-only database on top.
That way the file system stores bytes. An application unrelated to authoring can safely shuffle those bytes over the Internet. It's up to an authoring/editing application to store appropriate metadata.
The files themselves always have the canonical metadata and the read-only database for finding/organizing the files can just update when it's notified of a change in the file.
The database can focus on database things and the file system can make sure bytes go where they need to be. This also gives the flexibility to swap out either the file system or database at any time. This is the way Windows and macOS went and how many Linux DEs work.
Still think it would have been a great idea. Of course it was being planned for Linux too as ReiserFS but then he went off killing his wife and that was the end of that.
Not sure why MS ever dropped the idea of WinFS. It has merit IMO.
It doesn’t work if you have more than a few documents and it isn’t what users want. Users want to be able to organise their documents in folders.
I agree folders are still great to have but I don't think the idea of a database-driven filesystem precludes that. It will just add more organisation options, not take any away.
If you’re going to make a drastic move like switching the filesystem paradigm you need some really convincing arguments to sell it. More than ‘some organisation options’.
Thanks I'll read up on it.
By some means I got OSR2 and the USB ports showed up in the Device Manager but it I had to wait a few years before I even owned a USB device to use with them.
These days people just ship 50+mb worth of chromium goo with every application instead, but Windows definitely lead the way there and did so very early.
* The University of Georgia offers a graphical tour of their greenhouses on a Botany department server
this all seems very familiar (IE, media players, and now Edge/WSL/VSCode)
Extend ...
It's quite obvious where they're doing it. VSCode doesn't support some Microsoft extensions if you don't use the official builds (which are proprietary, contain telemetry and nagware) and doesn't have the official extension store.
Take the software that's open and run. They haven't changed. They WILL try to fuck you over.
The people running to Gitlab were overreacting when they did, but may eventually be proven right too. Microsoft has shown it hasn't really abandoned its tendency to back-stab its users and itself.
Thank you Microsoft. I will not touch your appalling software, whilst happily enjoying a paradigm shift in Haskell dev workflows.
>> Embrace
>> Extend
>> Innovate
Hah!
I remember those days, and for a while it seemed that Microsoft was going to pull it off. Windows everywhere, other systems locked out by proprietary protocols.
Edit: sure, I was paranoid, but I think Microsoft really was out to kill (metaphorically) everybody who didn't fall into line.
So the browser was objectively awful, but platforms like AOL could not keep up with the demand growth for dial-up. They also had some issues with scale, which the browser did not, because all it did was read static files. So everybody got on $5.99 EarthLink instead of $29.99 AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy. The other part of it was the 1994(?) CDA, which was effective only at killing AOL with law suits, and completely impotent against thousands of random web hosts.
So now the browser is dominant no matter how awful because nobody can develop software for the internet when they’re going to get fined because somebody uses it for adult material. Microsoft had some attempts at internet-native applications like ActiveX and their own Java, but then the decision was made to force everything internet into the browser to compete against Netscape, and focus the server on http components on IIS to compete against Apache.
I think Microsoft could have gotten to “Stage 3: Windows on the internet” if they just ignored the browser and focused on their client/server application developers. As it was, they wasted two decades on the browser and gave the “apps” market to iOS/android.
But, okay, step back and ask what they were really after. It was the advertising business on MSN.com, which was the default home page on IE, and 95% of users left it like that, while yahoo was the default for Netscape. As MSN was losing out to google, Microsoft’s ad business execs tried to salvage their business unit by purchasing resale ad spots on TheFaceBook.com in a $240M deal. This was also the time when browsers would regularly fail and kill everything you were doing, and so the final nail in Microsoft’s internet portal/banner ad ambitions was the release of google chrome, which simply isolated failures by running each tab in a new process.
Put in that perspective, it seems they could have just provided a service to desktop app developers to use their ad network, like iAds. DoubleClick had some things like this, but it was a pain, and you really had to jump through hoops to get your app approved for native banner spots versus web site banners. Seems like Microsoft developers were really screaming for solutions here that they could have provided. App Store too.
So, I do t think they lost the internet browser wars. I think they just abandoned their base to try and copy Netscape and yahoo.