Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996) • Hacker News Board

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#51

Post by bmelton » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 4:26 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #40

adventured wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser was ultimately mid-level on the list of grievances the DOJ had with Microsoft. That's why MS can bundle IE and Edge with the operating system today and nobody cares, including the US government. If all Microsoft had done is bundled a free browser with the OS, it would have never stood up in court in terms of anti-trust prosecution. It would have been a laughable case. What the DOJ got them on, was restrai…

>That's why MS can bundle IE and Edge with the operating system today and nobody cares, including the US government. No, the only reason MS is suddenly bundling more, including Anti-Virus, is because the judgement expired in 2011. >If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more powerful than the US Government, Or from a realpolitik stance, if Netscape has more friends with the Clintons than you…

That is incorrect. Microsoft has always been allowed to bundle things, except for the brief period between the original verdict and the appeal.

Bundling was the surface issue, but the antitrust violation was their undue exercise of monopoly power by refusing to let vendors bundle non-Microsoft software and using their Windows-compatible certification program as the stick to that particular carrot.

From Wikipedia on the settlement: "The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who will have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[24] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future."

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#52

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 4:29 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #40

adventured wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser was ultimately mid-level on the list of grievances the DOJ had with Microsoft. That's why MS can bundle IE and Edge with the operating system today and nobody cares, including the US government. If all Microsoft had done is bundled a free browser with the OS, it would have never stood up in court in terms of anti-trust prosecution. It would have been a laughable case. What the DOJ got them on, was restrai…

>That's why MS can bundle IE and Edge with the operating system today and nobody cares, including the US government. No, the only reason MS is suddenly bundling more, including Anti-Virus, is because the judgement expired in 2011. >If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more powerful than the US Government, Or from a realpolitik stance, if Netscape has more friends with the Clintons than you…

> Or from a realpolitik stance, if Netscape has more friends with the Clintons than you do (which they did), you're going to have a bad time. A lot of "careers" were made at the DoJ over this asinine case, that changed nothing for the better.

Its kind of amusing that you point to such a "realpolitik" explanation and yet would leave out that the reason it changed almost nothing at all (for better or worse) was that the Bush Administration, which was more MS friendly, came to office at the end of the case, and the Bush Justice Department abandoned any effort toward imposing any significant sanctions.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#53

Post by alextgordon » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #31

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its crazy that even today diehards defend the DOJ's insane war on MS in the 90s. Do you guys really want to pay for browsers or every single thing in a OS ala carte? MS was in the right here (the browser is just part of the OS) and the judgement just empowered OEMs to go apeshit with crapware and bundling, helping make the MS experience a lot crappier than it should be.

People I think defend it in the same way as prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion: we'll take what we can get. In the context of things like the "Halloween memos", funding the SCO controversy, and various other bits of anti-interoperability work people were just grateful for an impairment of the platform monopolist. Nowadays Apple has a policy of banning all other web browsers and even program interpreters from its p…

Apple doesn't ban web browsers, they couldn't give a rat's arse about that. They ban PROT_EXEC.

Apple's position is essentially that iOS already has a perfectly good JavaScript engine (JavaScriptCore) and the security risks of allowing apps to use mprotect/mmap far outweigh the benefits of allowing other JS engines.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#54

Post by jstoiko » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

rconti wrote: post #35

"... the site I just showed you will help Chrysler sell cars, because it distributes information to customers far better than Chrysler’s dealers can." almost 20 years later, and nothing has changed. I'm trying to buy a specific car, and the Internet knows everything, dealers know nothing. The salespeople and dealers know less about the cars on their lots than the consumers do. The consumers know about new models befo…

You're putting the finger on the problem, this is a motivation problem. Dealers are incentivized to sell not to inform.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#55

Post by oqnet » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

almightysmudge wrote: post #13

I have absolutely no love for the man, but he had some amazing visions of the future back then.

You don't have to have love, but you've got to give him some respect. I feel the same way.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#56

Post by noComment » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #30

MCRed wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, tech journalism has only gotten worse in the past 20 years. As bad as it was then-- there was no surprise that reporters didn't understand technology-- now they think they do, which is worse.

Most amusing were the wild predictions and unbridled blind enthusiasm. How they might explain why webvan would be the next juggernaut, for example. Not sure they did a story on webvan in particular, but in general very frothy reporting.

I miss webvan! Still have some of their branded delivery boxes..

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#57

Post by stevehawk » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 4:59 PM UTC

nbevans wrote: post #39

rconti wrote: post #35

"... the site I just showed you will help Chrysler sell cars, because it distributes information to customers far better than Chrysler’s dealers can." almost 20 years later, and nothing has changed. I'm trying to buy a specific car, and the Internet knows everything, dealers know nothing. The salespeople and dealers know less about the cars on their lots than the consumers do. The consumers know about new models befo…

Tesla is trying to change that by getting rid of dealerships.

Tesla isn't trying to get rid of dealerships. They're just trying to remove the legal requirement of dealerships for small auto manufacturers.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#58

Post by digi_owl » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #29

Gotta love those timescales! I don't know what you can build in 4 hours but the Fedex (even in 1996) certainly is somewhat hyperbolic! "For example, it took Federal Express four months to build its Web site – using WebObjects, you could build that same site in four hours."

Jobs, hyberbole, perish the thought...

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#59

Post by digi_owl » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #21

mmphosis wrote: post #12

It's 1996 and they're tossing around the term "apps."

I seem to remember it being commonly used at the time (and earlier) as a shortened form of "applications". I don't think Jobs invented the term. :)

It was more common in the Apple camp however, and ended up "mainstream" with the iPhone.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#60

Post by digi_owl » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 7:11 PM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #24

bluedino wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years later with Chromebooks this finally happened.

No, it happened four years later with the iMac. At the time of the article, you had trouble getting a computer with a TCP/IP stack on it out of the box. The NeXT machines did, and Macs did, but most people had windows and didn't even have TCP/IP, IIRC The iMac was the first internet connected out of the box machine.

Windows 95 had TCP/IP support, but didn't enable it by default on network cards etc.