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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

- Stacker

- Netscape

- SCO

And many others besides.

Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation.

This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world. Your silly linked blog post by a Microsoft employee tries to wipe all that under the carpet. For the record, I'm not exactly 25, used to be a MS developer and user and have decided that their ethics are not fit for my taste, feel free to disagree.

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Much like countries, it doesn't necessarily make sense to treat companies like people when it comes to reputation. You shouldn't hold a grudge against a country forever, many of the people inside of it may have disagreed with its actions and more importantly the leadership could be completely different now. Similalrly, if most of the employees at Microsoft today are different than in the 90s and the leadership is completely different, then what really has the reputation, their article of incorporation? Mind you, for all I know most of Microsoft is still "old Microsoft", I'm just saying it can't really be as simple as attributing actions of the past to whatever happens to be there today.

This is absolutely true but even in the present Microsoft has anything but clean hands:

http://euobserver.com/political/125868

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466540/software/munich-...

And on and on.

Right, but would own an Apple product? That's terrible, they exploit horrible treatment of rightless Chinese wage-slaves.

Would you use a google product? They are double-faced went in come to net neutrality, only putting their weight on points that promote their own benefit. They also buy up tons of extremely innovative start-ups, then suffocate them under the weight of their glacial bureaucracy and pedantic squabbling.

I could go on all day.

I'm sure you could go on all day but this thread is about microsoft. Apple's products are not welcome here because of their walled garden approach and Google has done far worse than making a faux-pas in the net neutrality debate. Agreed on the buying up innovative start-ups and then killing them off, that's really bad and acqui-hires are hurting all start-ups.

Im curious, can you really get by without MS, Google and Apple? No LLVM based products for you? No Webkit? No CUPS? No V8? If you do use some of these projects, where's the difference from an Open Sourced .NET?

I get by without MS and Apple just fine (as I wrote elsewhere, I do still have an elderly Mac here that is sometimes used for compatibility testing but I don't even remember when I started it up last and it currently isn't even plugged in).

As for Google, that's the hard one to avoid. Adsense/Adwords is easy, youtube is hard (plenty of video content is only available on youtube), google search is still better than duckduckgo (and I'm really sorry about that, but I'm rooting for Gabriel to achieve parity some day even if that's an uphill battle), and I use Google docs for a few spreadsheets that I need to be able to access remotely.

My mail is on my own server, web stuff is classical 'LAMP', I don't use webkit, don't use V8 and I don't think I have an instance of CUPS here that is actually configured to do real work but it's possible that I'm missing a machine clever enough to auto-configue.

Other hardware is Dell, Synology (which has CUPS on board but it's not in use) and a variety of smaller fry.

It's really not all that hard to keep the big companies out of your life, one of these days I'll find a way to get rid of google completely. The most frequently used closed source product I have is Varicad (but they have a nasty little gotcha that I recently found out about so they're on the way out) and another is adobe acrobat reader (the linux version). Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box.

> Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box.

With NVIDIA drivers you probably have at least some LLVM compiled components (or will have, once their transition has been completed in future generations), but I give you that one. As a GPGPU developer for example, you probably soon can't get around LLVM anymore and I expect its influence to grow in the Linux world, as it has become the default choice to build new OSS compiler / language projects around.

I'm using DDG myself btw. - Google is the main one I'd like to get away from, but as you wrote it's very hard. At least DDG with "g!" prefix makes me anonymous to them.

What I still find very hard to replace is Skype and/or Hangout - I'm not aware of an OSS solution that works on all platforms and that I can easily set up with all kinds of peers (including non computer literate). Even Hangout is way too complicated, even for aged computer scientists I've found. And I'm really using all of it - VoIP, video conferencing, Skype-Out, screen sharing, messaging. This is the main thing I'd like to replace since we're handing out so much control to this tool.

Isn't LLVM used in nvidia drivers for compiling shaders at runtime? GLSL needs compiling, and I thought everyone typically used LLVM for this?

I don't know much about OpenGL and can't confirm it from a quick google [1], but I could well imagine it if that JIT was either recently introduced by NVIDIA or ported over already - LLVM seems to be their company policy for anything compiler related now.

[1] http://http.developer.nvidia.com/Cg/cgc.html

Hmm, yes I can. Gcc, gecko, cups predates apple, spidermonkey...

While you can, it's not always that simple. Say you want to make a Qt application with a web frame - Qt-Webkit seems to be the most mature for that matter. Spidermonkey seems to be quite a bit behind V8 in terms of performance, tooling and framework support (Node.js ecosystem) as well, so I'm not sure it's a real alternative today. Do you use it for production level serverside-javascript systems?

Also, do you only use older CUPS versions because Apple pays its development for a while now?

What in the third reference was intended to show unclean hands?

MS coincidentially moved their headquarters to Muenchen.

http://www.eversheds.com/global/en/what/articles/index.page?...

Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with Muenchen switching back to MS.

It is not decided, if Muenchen switches back or not. Afaik they just want to evaluate the IT systems.

1. Regarding the 1st link - Speaking from experience, if you do business in certain (primarily third-world) countries, bribery is the norm. It's as natural there as lobbying is in the US.

2. Regarding the 2nd link - MS has no control over IV's business, unless you have evidence otherwise. And that too, it's "unclean" only to the extent that you believe patents are evil, which is unfortunately an all-too-common view around here.

3. Regarding the 3rd link - see 1.

Even with a complete changing of personnel, factors (eg. business model) could necessitate certain behaviours. For example, every person inside present day Google could be replaced, but the behaviour of learning more about their users in order to more precisely target them with advertising wouldn't change unless they actively tried to reinvent the company. That said, I do think Microsoft are actively trying to reinvent themselves.

> Much like countries, it doesn't necessarily make sense to treat companies like people when it comes to reputation. You shouldn't hold a grudge against a country forever, many of the people inside of it may have disagreed with its actions and more importantly the leadership could be completely different now.

Sure, but it really depends on what and how much. Microsoft made their fortune by being ethically bankrupt and breaking the law. If the Mafia decided to reform today and go legit, it would be a long hard slough before anybody would actually trust them. And if they kept extortion as a side business, it would make it very hard to believe anything they have to say, regardless of the amount of money they give to charity.

"Microsoft made their fortune by being ethically bankrupt and breaking the law". Much like most of todays rich countries including US, EU, Russia and China.

I recognise the sense in what you're saying, but I tend towards treating corporations much like I treat people with regard to reputation. The reason for that is that I want companies to have to think seriously about how it will hurt them long-term before they trade off that reputation.

I don't want it to be an optimal business strategy to be evil to maximise growth, and then become nice once evil no longer pays off. Holding a grudge longer than might seem strictly logical is my way of pushing in that direction :-).

I'm just a low level drone here at MS, and I obviously am not involved in any important decisions, but I'd like to add that all the above things happened back when the current generation that works here was growing up. We were all on Slashdot, being outraged and angry 13 year olds. Except now my generation works here, and I think the changes (such as all the ones announced today!) are a good sign of that.

At least since after I went through puberty (I'm not that young!) Microsoft has been acting pretty damn chill.

I guess my main complaint is that people yell at us for sins that were committed by, quite literally, a previous generation.

I would not hold it against you that you make a living with MS, that said in the present they do plenty of stuff that they really shouldn't. So it's not just the previous generation, the current one is also anything but clean.

What exactly are they doing today that you don't agree with?

I'll answer that. No more than any other for-profit enterprise.

Patent threats and lawsuits against Android OEMs. Sabotaging the office document standard process at ISO. Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems. Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine.

among other things.

One could say the same about companies and organizations that you admit to supporting as well.

So, if all choices are bad choices, what are you left with?

Untainted open source. There's plenty of it.

I know this opens a whole distracting side debate, but I incude Microsoft's campaign of sueing Android OEMs using [what I consider to be] a secret list of dodgy patents to be a continuation of their past evil behavior. I know there are a bunch of ways that can be debated and it's not my intention to start that debate, I just want to make the point that this view that it's all in the past that you are airing is something a significant number of people would dispute.

@com2kid Microsoft defined what computers are capable of. Let me clarify: most people heard Microsoft's version of reality first--and they were amazed!

We all were. Computers have changed life for all of us. But computers aren't what they could have been...

Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity.

Some people use computers to save lives, right? How many more lives might have been saved over the past couple of decades if MS hadn't held features--ideas! concepts!--back again and again to enforce planned obsolescence? How many times did they obfuscate a communication protocol to maintain market dominance?

I appreciate that some current MS employees aren't responsible for what happened before they were hired on.

I hope you appreciate the magnitude of those past sins. There are reasons people yell!

> Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity.

I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly.

> How many more lives might have been saved over the past couple of decades if MS hadn't held features--ideas! concepts!--back again and again to enforce planned obsolescence?

Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?

If you want to talk about Microsoft's "past sins", I believe data trumps anecdotes: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498

If you have any solid data (rather than oft-repeated anecdotes) that MS inhibited innovation on a large scale, I'd like to see it.

People certainly yell for reasons, but those reasons are often very poorly informed.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/

> I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly.

Yes, these new trends are worrisome. But it's not the first time!

I firmly believe that we'd all be better off if THIS guy had been the one to introduce computers to the common man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf4EMN6-XA

To this day, Microsoft is putting computers in schools--but not LOGO, not free software, not unix, not lisp, not crates of disposable m68ks and bread boards... Nope, they are putting products in front of new generations eyeballs.

Data can trump anecdotes, and it should when a culture believes they are doing the right thing but things are still going poorly and nobody understands why--at those times, by all means, collect some data and analyze it!

But when "everybody knows" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it!

The whole planet got 0wned by MS before many of us here were born--certainly before most of us were competent. So this is what we've got, this is where we are.

Big picture: Where do we go from here? Immediate situation: don't become part of a new generation of MS fanboys. We don't need that.

The first link is an interesting tale of technical gamesmanship, but I don't see much bad about Microsoft in there. Other than the author's manager's empty threat to sue him, which is more of an individual case. I haven't heard of Microsoft suing employees are frequently as, say, Amazon actually does.

As for the Halloween documents, come on, 1) you're going to cite ESR, really? and 2) that boils down to "they said something bad about my religion / OS of choice". Marketing strategy commonly involves belittling your competitors. I laughed along at the Mac vs PC ads, even though I knew most of them were simply hyperbole.

> But when "everybody knows" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it!

1) Just like "everyone knew" the earth is flat?

2) "Everyone knows" Microsoft is "doing something wrong" only if you don't step out of the HN / Silicon Valley bubble. You and PG and thousands others might think MS is "irrelevant" and "dead" and "evil" and "produces crappy software", but it's trivially disproved by noting that it has consistently been in the top-5 brands worldwide by many different rankings (google it) for many years.

We may not need MS fanboys, but we sure has hell don't need MS haters who base their beliefs on incorrect information.

1a) I've cited ESR, really!

1b and 2b) I think you've made my point. So are we going to tell the rest of the world, or let them dangle?

> Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?

Are you joking? I'll just give you one example: IE 6 and its complete disregard for open standards, end-user security and its lack of change put the web in stasis for years. At first, it didn't make much difference that we had Firefox because developers still made their pages only compatible with Microsoft's non-compliant browser, which was understandable as most people used it. Since IE lost ground the web has become a much more open and welcoming space for experimentation and advancement of its technologies. And that's undeniable.

1. Letting IE stagnate is different from holding back "ideas! concepts!" because Firefox (free software) and Opera were still around to pick up the slack. Sure, it caused (and still does) a lot of pain to web developers to make cross-browser compatible webpages, but that's not the same as "holding back ideas".

2. Note also that vendor prefixes always were and are still a thing, so it's not just IE that had "non-compliant" features. Adding non-compliant features and then working them into the standards seems to be the natural way web technologies advance.

Especially with Opera in mind, I recall many new features being added to browsers regardless of IE's stagnation. Sure, they were not widely used because the then-dominant IE didn't have them, but that didn't prevent Opera and Firefox from adding them. So, unless you conflate "experimentation and advancement" with "widespread adoption", I would disagree that IE held back experimentation and advancement of web technologies.

> Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?

1. It's not just that the held back. It's not even primarily that they held back. It is that they taught countless CEOs that Excel was the state of the art way to think.

I don't believe that the best tools are widgets. I believe that the best tools are programming environments. When I really need to get some facts straight, I turn to my trusty shell and unix family of processing tools. When my boss has the same need, she turns to Excel. WTF? Sure, you can do some reasoning with that tool... "But for BETTER reasoning, upgrade to Excel 95!"

2. Even if some old ideas were never completely lost, they were unknown to most people. If it hadn't been for some crotchety old neck beards, we wouldn't be having this conversation... And some of them had to completely dedicate their lives to preserving the idea that computers are not a product, they are a gift to humanity.

Patent threats and lawsuits against Android OEMs.

Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine.

Sabotaging the office document standard process at ISO.

Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems.

Supporting software patents.

All these happened within last 5 years (and continue to happen).

"Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems."

huh? I'm not MS lover but can you prove this ?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financial-crime/10260730/...

http://techrights.org/2009/05/10/lobbyists-bribes-vs-free-sw...

Frankly speaking when it comes to corruption, MS cannot beat HP and IBM here. The IBM case is a big one, investigated currently by most elitary anticorruption Police unit in Poland. See articles below.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...

> Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine.

Microsoft requires that x86 UEFI machines be unlockable by end users.

In comparison, Apple has locked down various aspects of their desktop machines for years.

I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape.

Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset.

It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your choice.

> I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape.

Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system.

I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this comment.

> It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included

Does it?

I see the browser as an application, not as part of the OS. And I feel that as a user of an operating system you should have a choice what browser you run and what browser gets installed on top of the OS after that has finished installing. All these cross-layer links are good for nothing.

> Does it?

Yes.

You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser?

Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc).

Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.

FTP? Wget? Xmodem? Does it even matter? It's not as if downloading a piece of software without a browser is an impossibility. About 99% of the software on the machine I write this on has been downloaded using something called a package manager and the boot CD that started the process was downloaded as a torrent. No browser required.

> Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.

You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free.

People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.

I think the world is probably a worse place if every computer user was given a command prompt and asked to use wget over FTP to get themselves a web browser. Or worse, if they had to go to Best Buy to buy one on DVD. Like, I can and will make a joke about having to try and put the DVD into the smartphone, but seriously, that sounds worse for pretty much everybody.

Ok. So let's standardize on Firefox (or Opera), get rid of all the others by default and let users enable IE/Firefox/Safari and so on if and when they desire to do so.

And all three heavyweight gorilla IT companies could support FF/Opera with a clean conscience by donating (just like google does already, points for them).

Personally I feel this is not worth the effort. Though this reminds me of Apple's attempt to push users to use Safari, which I agree is a bad idea.

And googles attempts to get people to switch to chrome. That button really got on my nerves. As if it should matter to google what browser I use to view a website. Oh, wait, it does.

I think most of that targeted IE users.

Could be. I never used IE during that period though and I saw that button more than any other content on google properties.

Wrong. Every Window manager has been shipping with a browser, that includes Windows and Apple but also Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, anything with Gnome/KDE/XFCE.

But there (still!) are plenty of people who start with an empty distro and gradually build up, and installing a browser happens just like any other package installation: through the package manager.

I know people who are pissed because Microsoft bundled in their own TCP/IP stack, which killed the companies that were selling TCP/IP stacks for Windows.

When I ask them "can you imagine any OS delivered today without that bundled in?" they change the subject.

Network support has been an OS feature since before Microsoft even existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

Yes, there are people that probably would have preferred Peter Tattam's company to be bought by MS. (It was shareware, see thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875). But it definitely wasn't an obligation.

Very few would argue that an OS has to have a browser to be functional. Just like very few would argue that all networking should be done in a user space process not part of the operating system.

An OS doesn't have to have a file browser either, yet no one cried antitrust when Windows 95 bundled Windows Explorer instead of forcing people to buy Norton Commander.

This whole argument is kind of silly anyways since it's leaving out intent, which is a very important contextual part of evaluating the action of a person or entity. Seeing emails showing MS trying to deliberately get web developers hooked on a "more standards-compliant" IE and then locking those same devs in is a much different thing than MS honestly wanting people to have a decent default software base to go with Windows, even if both strategies end up in practice with "IE 4 preinstalled".

Same logic presumably applies to any kind of non-system application, then. Your OS shouldn't come with any particular choice of network client tool - wget (hey! Some of us prefer curl!), ssh, dig. Microsoft's inclusion of notepad.exe in windows is obviously unfair to open source and commercial competitors in the text editing space - and the fact that basically any windows standard text editor control is an instance of the notepad editing UI below the surface is precisely the kind of cross-layer mixing you object to.

I think the line starts to blur as soon as your software uses API calls that are only known to you, the OS vendor, when you use your market muscle in the OS field to attempt to dominate or crowd out competitors in established fields and so on. I don't think anybody would read what I wrote as an objection to the presence of notepad.exe with the windows distribution and I note that that presence never stopped anybody from releasing more capable text editors, in fact I believe microsoft ships such a product themselves at a premium.

The problem with them including IE with windows was that IE wasn't following standards. The idea was to force the server market to tend towards IIS instead of other servers. Netscape cared because they made their real money from server software.

And this is really important to remember. For a good time in the 2000s I worked on software that only worked in IE because the "tech people" thought that "Windows Integrated Authentication", where you would just automatically be logged into a web app if you used IE + IIS as the server, was more secure.

It was a nightmare of coupling, and it's one of the reasons that IE was so hard to get rid of in the enterprise.

This is actually the greatest fumble in the history of Antitrust in my opinion.

Yes, it's become clear that a web browser should be bundled in the OS, and even as I said at the time, when I was a teenager, you need a shitty web browser to download a good one, or at least it's a big help.

What Microsoft did, and is admitted in a book, is to leverage the Windows monopoly to strengthen the Office monopoly, which had impact on every educational institution, law firm, local, state, and national legislature and locked up a ton of public domain work in a file format that only an expensive program that doesn't run on all computers can read.

Eventually that was steamrolled over by Congress demanding an open format, though interoperability is still pretty piss poor.

Of course, all of the DOJ's resources to show Microsoft who's boss were wasted on a silly fight over whether you can bundle a web browser. If you read Ben Horowitz' "The hard thing about hard things", it's not even the browser that sunk Netscape, it's IIS - their bread and butter was the server.

In light of the fact that our phones and televisions now ship with web browsers, and likely most of us are not paying for web servers, it seems clear that Netscape's business model was not going to last.

So yeah, fuck Microsoft.

Curious, considering office was available on mac since epoch, both office and windows got simultaneously the monopoly status, got never bundled with Windows, how is this true?

It's not the "what" they did to Netscape (releasing a free browser), it's the illegal "why" they did it (to break the cross-platform web).

As the government wrote in a trial brief:

"In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document indicates that the plan was not simply to blunt Java/browser cross-platform momentum, but to destroy the cross-platform threat entirely, with the 'Strategic Objective' described as to 'Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#...

This is the strategy an MS exec described as "embrace, extend, extinguish":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

The "embrace" part is particularly gross. IIRC, the court found that Microsoft deliberately misled developers to make them think that apps developed with MS-JVM would work cross-platform, when really it was designed to prevent that. They lied to developers to trick us into wasting our time, to destroy cross-platform technologies that threatened their monopoly.

Want to make it practical? There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff. We're building the future as fast as we can, but you and I and Bill Gates will all get to see less of that future before we die, because Microsoft set out to break the web and it took a whole lot of time to fix it.

Of course that was going on 20 years ago now. Microsoft probably has interns now who were born after IE came out. I realized recently that I'm not mad about this stuff anymore. But it's not a history we should forget or repeat.

I was just thinking of "embrace, extend, extinguish" when reading through the class-action about Apple routing texts over its own network, so people switching away from Apple would think that Android's texts were broken.

> There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff.

This is the issue that pisses me off more than anything. There must be hundreds of man-years of development effort wasted on stupid things Microsoft did. Not because they didn't know better, that's forgivable, but they did to screw over the competition. It goes back to MS-DOS intentionally trying to screw over DR-DOS and continues up to now with document format standards.

I'm actually glad they did what they did to Netscape. Without Netscape dying, we would never have Firefox. I would argue that OSS as it is today would not exist without Netscape dying.

I remember how Opera was affected by this too.

Releasing IE for free did not kill Netscape, because Netscape was negotiating with computer OEM manufacturers for them to buy bulk licenses and factory-install Netscape.

This is exactly how Windows is sold through OEMs, and like Windows, the effect is that the consumer gets the software "for free" (since it is included in the total price of the computer). So: Netscape and IE would have both come with every new computer.

Microsoft told OEMs that, in effect, they could not buy Windows if they intended to install Netscape on it. That is illegal tying, and is what killed Netscape, as it cut off a major potential source of new revenue.

> - Netscape

If you are referring to Microsoft's bundling of IE, that did not kill Netscape. It just buried the rotting corpse.

Before IE was bundled with Windows, it was sold in stores as a boxed product, right next to Netscape's boxed product. Going head to head in retail software stores (Egghead, CompUSA), IE massively outsold Netscape. This is what killed Netscape.

The reason IE outsold Netscape at retail was simple--it was a much better browser. Netscape introduced a lot of proprietary tags, which Microsoft included in IE. Microsoft also introduced proprietary tags, which Netscape often ignored. For the end user, the result was simple: IE correctly rendered more pages than Netscape. It was also better on resource usage, if I remember correctly, which was a much bigger deal then than it is now.

All those "Best on IE" and "Best viewed on Netscape" image buttons from back in the day... I thought I had forgotten about them, but you had to drag them up from the depths... ;)

> I thought I had forgotten about them

You thought you had forgotten about something? How does that work.

I forget. Maybe it'll come to me.

Computer manufacturers were told that they could not buy Windows for their computers if they intended to factory-install Netscape. That's not consumer choice, that is the definition of criminally leveraging a monopoly in one market to dominate another.

True, but companies change. I was, too, a MS fan turned hater, but I'm willing to give them another chance -- look how far Bill Gates has come. I certainly prefer them over Big Brother Google.

EDIT: In fact, I prefer the old-guard companies like MS and Oracle to Google's and Facebook's new guard. The old guard is easy to figure out: they're out for profit. The new guard is a lot tricker: sure they're out for profit, too, but usually in a roundabout way that involves subterfuge, baiting people with "free" stuff, spying on their customers and their acquaintances, and various propaganda made to convince people they're working in their best interest.

Netscape cut their own throat. Blaming Microsoft was just whining.

Software patents, including Stacker's, are far more destructive to innovation than anything Microsoft could ever do on its own.

SCO, well... OK, there's no way to spin that as anything but evil.

Companies don't have agencies or personalities. People do. You're aware that a huge portion of the people responsible for the shenanigans of previous decades have left the company, right? Give the current crew credit.

While I can tolerate most of your post, Hanselman's blog is not silly. Well it is, but not in the disparaging way you mean.

Netscape killed itself.

That's not why we call them incorporated. 'Body' or 'corpus' are synonyms for 'organization'. They are called corporations because the embody some coordinated effort, not because someone realized "hey, this organization seems to have a personality. I'll call it a corporation."

No, 'incorporated' is another way of saying something is a legal entity independent of those that create it.

But since corporations tend to assume a lot of the traits of the people that run them and are given significant subsets of the rights normally afforded to real-life human beings the line between corporate identities and persons can blur to the point where we are allowed to ascribe (some) personal traits to corporations.

The reason they are called corporations is language and vocabulary. The word is like body, as in the body politic. The etymology of corporation is Latin compare "combine in one body" or "persons united in a body for some purpose". That is why we have the word. Everything you added is modern and irrelevant to the question of why we use this word.

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/jointstock.html

"The modern joint-stock corporation has many sources in medieval Europe. First among these was corporate law itself. Although the era is commonly referred to as "feudalism," for the hierarchy of individually owned "fiefs" of land and control of serfs as fixtures of that land, large amounts of wealth in Europe were actually controlled by corporate entities. Chief among these were church lands, the corporate entities being dioceses, religious orders and the Roman Church itself. These entities controlled a substantial fraction of the land in Western Europe. Furthermore cities (with varying degrees of political independence), merchant guilds, craft guilds, and many charitable entities (such as hospitals) were legal "corporations," i.e. artificial and perpetual legal persons under law. Some basic issues in corporate law (for example, when are officers individually liable for acts of the corporation, and when the corporation is liable for acts of its agents) had already been solved in canon law and urban law long before the joint-stock corporation."

and more on the "Origins of the Joint-Stock Company"

My personal favorite is the OS/2 2.0 fiasco.

>This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world.

Welcome to American corporate culture :)

You have to keep in mind that Microsoft had a monopoly for a very long time. While their actions may, in your world view, be "criminal", as a corporation Microsoft was acting completely rationally. As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders. You also have to keep in mind the historical context: back then, there was no such thing as "social responsibility".

> As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders.

I keep hearing that but I don't actually believe that is true.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-m...

Perhaps obligation is a poor word choice. I meant it more in the sense of the invisible hand and rationality. As a rational actor, Microsoft was maximizing their utility, given whatever their utility function/curve is.

By that reason we should all go into the drugs trade. I don't buy that for a second. Rational actors are not normally driven to illegal behavior unless someone makes a decision to that effect saying 'damn the consequences, let's commit this crime'. That's a very dangerous line to cross. It came within a whisker of getting Microsoft to be broken up and I can't believe that they would have taken that risk if they knew that was a possible consequence. And I firmly believe they should have been broken up, that would have sent a strong signal that anti-competitive behavior is not acceptable. Instead, now we have a bigger mess.

Maximizing shareholder value would also include, I suppose, keeping the company reputation good enough so that talented people would still want to work with them and their products. That's not what happened here. I too was a Microsoft enthusiast once, but their bad behavior made me turn my back on them. Jacques and myself are certainly not alone in that decision.

In theory, yes, and these days reputation plays an extremely important role because of the massive amounts of network effects social media and the like provide. I was never a fan of Microsoft because they historically shipped substandard products. (I remember the days of windows 3.1 on my p2)

My post was merely trying to indicate that what Microsoft did in a monopoly position is not in any way unique or special. Every monopoly will behave in this manner, because corporations are rational actors.

Either that, or there is something about this theory that is usually the sociopaths who end up in top managerial positions.

If you aren't allowed to criticize a company because "as a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders," then that means their profitability calculation no longer has to include bad PR, because nothing will be bad PR once someone like you points out that the corporation had to do it--it's all very circular.

> As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders.

I wish for a world where this utterly dishonest lame duck trope stops appearing as frequently as it does.

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