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Comment by acegopher | Hacker News Reader

This was true of Microsoft in the 1990's. Just ask Gary Kildall among others.

My personal brush with this was in a startup I was at 3 years before RFC 2616 (HTTP compression). We had developed a client proxy and server that would not only compress HTML pages but also bundle in a zip file all the images (TCP connection ramp up time was a thing) and it dramatically sped up page load on what was then a slow internet.

Microsoft came sniffing, on the pretense they were interested in buying our company or at least licensing. But then they ghosted us, and if I recall correctly, those features ended up in IIS and Internet Explorer as proprietary extensions, when Microsoft was trying to embrace and extend the web to beat Netscape.

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I should say it was 3 years before RFC 2068 (2616 superseded).

When Microsoft came out with their extension, and then it eventually ended up in HTTP/1.1 (or at least some version of it), we pivoted to a primarily client-side product that offered read-ahead caching, metasearch (could perform a query on multiple search engines like Hotbot, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. -- this was pre-Google) and save and integrate the results. It would also then rerun those queries periodically and highlight new results, and you could save or bookmark.

We also used that search technology in a product that would monitor trademark use, which companies used to keep track of where and how their trademarks or brand names were being used. We never made enough to keep that side of the business running, while the web consulting/development side grew and grew. These were pre-2000 days when businesses were wanting to "get online".

Would you be able to share any more details on the startup - privacy allowing?

What tech were you using on the client (Windows 3.x/95?)/server-side?

Did WebTV/MSN TV do anything of this?

(Fascinated with early HTTP/web optimization tech because of my part in creating the much later Opera Mini - launched mid 2005.)

Sure thing! I was on the client-side, and joined in 1995, when there was already a version 1 of the compression/connection piece. I started work and was lead on the search product.

If I remember correctly, we were developing on Windows 3.1 with Microsoft Visual C/C++ 7.0 to start and then moved to Windows 95 and Visual C++. We used Microsoft Foundation Classes, as well as Rogue Wave libraries (tools.h++ I believe).

We were funded by some guys who had made a lot of money in government software contracts (we were near a major Airforce base).

Here is a Google folder link with some scans of contemporaneous ads and press coverage:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzleZlz4NcDSMDc0VTBp...

Brilliant, thanks!

(For future readers: The product name was Blaze Web Performance Pack, offered by Datalytics Inc, Dayton, Ohio. They used the domain speeditup.com in some ads.)

An oldie but goodie: https://www.davar.net/HUMOR/STORIES/MS-CUISN.HTM

Thanks for this gem. Websites like this, packed full of content, make me feel young and curious again.

You can tell it's going to be golden just from the way the URL is setup!

This happens with any sufficiently large platform. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon all offer large platforms and the developers develop a "feature" on that platform. They might come up with the same idea independently, or more likely the big one steals the small one's lunch. And the "scouting interview" happens at every level, even the smallest players dangle nice offers to goad some useful info from candidates.

Sometimes the features are obvious though. I remember developers complaining when Android got a built in flashlight toggle making almost every flashlight app redundant - and thank God for that, this is a legitimate feature of the platform.

I can't read the full article but on one hand Apple poached employees which sounds legal on the face of it. On the other hand the patents for the technology that Apple filed were not legitimate [0] according to the courts. So the issue here seems to be more that the patent review process is weak and requires a lengthy and expensive court case to clarify. Something a small company may not afford.

This isn't "just" that Apple&Co are abusing smaller players and copying products or features. The problem is systemic because Apple&Co bought and paid for the entire framework in which everyone else operates. Your elected officials, legislators, laws, rules, regulations, and courts are tailored for Apple&Co, or at the very least are heavily favoring them with very few exceptions. Until that's treated everything else is a symptom. Decades ago the kiss of death from the company I was in came from IBM. Same story, less resources to fight it in court.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/court-says-med-t...

> I can't read the full article but on one hand Apple poached employees which sounds legal on the face of it. On the other hand the patents for the technology that Apple filed were not legitimate [0] according to the courts. So the issue here seems to be more that the patent review process is weak and requires a lengthy and expensive court case to clarify. Something a small company may not afford.

It's also something else that I find pretty bad business conduct: Apple, Google, Microsoft - they all love to have someone else (i.e. venture capital) bear the cost of proving that a piece of technology actually will work out and is technically feasible, and then incorporate it into their product. Even if it's a legit acquihire or acquisition, the VCs are stuck with the bills for the failed attempts.

On the flip side, often the acquihires are ways for VCs to get a soft landing for a company that isn't working and return a little capital. There are reasons that venture capitalists maintain close relationships with acquisition decision makers a big tech companies.

Source: in the VC industry

People often think VC companies are either 0% or 100% unicorn; quite a few of them are somewhere in the "this probably almost could have been a viable business if it didn't have so many demands on profit" (there's a term for this, lifestyle business? I forget.) Acquihire can be a wonderful exit for those, as the VC can basically get back some or all of the money poured in, the people in the company get a job, and sometimes the product even survives as a feature.

> Apple, Google, Microsoft - they all love to have someone else (i.e. venture capital) bear the cost of proving that a piece of technology actually will work out and is technically feasible, and then incorporate it into their product

It isn't just them. All large companies do this. They constantly watch the little players and anytime one of them does something interesting that seems like it is working they buy the company - this is in fact something venture capitalists count one: it is one of the easiest exist strategies they have.

Most big companies also play venture capitalists themselves: they are constantly looking for startups to invest in, with the idea that if that company produces something useful they will buy the company completely, if not they have carefully limited their losses.

Right but I can't imagine this is something you can change as long as the other participants are willing to take that risk. For VCs this is like playing a lot of roulette tables at once for a potential big pay day. A single player like the article's Masimo Corp doesn't have the luxury of multiple roulette tables so they are far more exposed.

Letting someone else go first doesn't have to be bad practice, someone always goes first and the others follow. Different players have different risk appetites and this can lead to healthy competition. Unless it's abusing a position of power. Look at Amazon when they use knowledge about products and sales that are normally not public to launch their competitors, or Apple here taking over the engineering team legally but then stealing the tech probably assuming the chips will fall their way.

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