> No longer the Goliath it once was—in large part because of the ascendance of companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple made possible by a settlement Microsoft signed Hahaha, haha, ha. I'll just stop you right there, Dan Goodin. Microsoft is several times the goliath they were at their Windows monopoly / anti-trust days peak. If you had to pick the company that will be the most profitable tech company five years fr…
> Larry and Sergey are entirely responsible for that mess.
Java was very innovative at the time, with byte code and JIT, a more clear OO design relative to C++, embeddable safetly sandboxed web apps, memory safety in a "professional" language, cross platform binaries (in a non scripting language) etc. The mid 90's was a long time ago. What was exciting then is not exciting now.
Everything that you mentioned was already available at the time in other languages. This is not innovation.
But to what extent was it available in a polished package?
For example, everything in rust was available in other languages, i would still say it was innovative because it brought all that together into a polished package that made the right tradeoffs for mainstream usage.
This was written by someone who has no idea what a deposition is about, or is intentionally misrepresenting it. The USG's depositions were PR stunts, filmed on purpose to make Gates look bad. If you've ever been deposed (and I have), then you know that Gates' approach was close to optimal when dealing with lawyers. Bill's biggest mistake was having a terrible attitude and bad posture when answering questions. He made…
Could you please expand on WHY posture/tone/etc are important? W
Do you have counter arguments to what was said in the thread or are you just projecting your own bias? It is pretty well known what kind of shitty things MS did to get where it is, if someone sprinkles insults on top of it on twitter does not make it less true.
"Shattered" the law is pretty questionable. MS (Feel like i should write M$ for /. nostalgia) had some underhanded bussiness tactics, no doubt (some of which probably werent even illegal, just scummy), but im not sure shattered the law is a reasonable description. That's something i would reserve more for organized crime. Microsoft never extorted people, planted listening devices, hired hitman, etc. The rabbit hole o…
The difference is that the mafia has never managed to extort and murder and then be told they did nothing wrong by law enforcement. The mafia also never attempted to make the law say they did nothing wrong (outside of small scale bribery or threats). "Shattered" is more appropriate here because Microsoft did (and does) try to get favorable legal treatment that extends outsides the bounds of what the law intended on a national level with far reaching implications of what others can also get away with.
This was written by someone who has no idea what a deposition is about, or is intentionally misrepresenting it. The USG's depositions were PR stunts, filmed on purpose to make Gates look bad. If you've ever been deposed (and I have), then you know that Gates' approach was close to optimal when dealing with lawyers. Bill's biggest mistake was having a terrible attitude and bad posture when answering questions. He made…
Could you please expand on WHY posture/tone/etc are important? W
If it's a written deposition, it's not. If it's taped, well, you see articles like this being written about Gates being an extreme dickhead.
Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation, yet when innovation came in the form of Java, the first thing Gates did (as proven by evidence) was to seek a way to destroy it. (because he was a man-child annoyed because he didn’t invent it, and couldn’t find a way to compete honestly). So he did what big bully’s do, he crushed Sun and got all his big boy friends to help. What a inspiration.
>Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation,
"Innovation" when used by Gates in this context means "profits."
And I think Bill's dislike for Java was only because it was a threat to the Windows OS monopoly. The appeal of Java, as I recall, was that you could run the same application on multiple platforms.
Q: Okay. Let me ask you to look at Trial Exhibit 560. This is a message from you to Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Chase with a copy to Mr. Maritz and some other people also given copies dated August 15, 1997 at 4:07 p.m. on the subject of IBM and Netscape; correct?
A: Uh-huh
Q: BY MR. BOIES: And you type in here Importance: High."
A: No.
Q: No?
A: No, I didn't type that.
Q: Who typed in "High"?
A: A computer.
Q: A computer. Why did the computer type in "High"?
A: It's an attribute of the e-mail.
Q: And who set the attribute of the e-mail?
A: Usually the sender sends that attribute.
Q: Who is the sender here, Mr. Gates?
A: In this case it appears I'm the sender.
Gates wasn't splitting hairs there, though. "Concerned about" could mean "concerned about as potential competitors we need to pay attention to", "concerned about as potential competitors who might gain more market share than us", "concerned about as potential competitors we might need to stifle", "concerned about as a potential danger to our browser monopoly", "concerned about as potential competitors who might devel…
> Gates wasn't splitting hairs there, though. "Concerned about" could mean... That's why I think he should have taken his own interpersonal and forced that through. Which browser was he concerned about? Internet Explorer. Why? Because it's their product - in the browser space, that one is literally his main concern. Evoking a "That's not what i meant" response comes across rather differently than the wordplay shown h…
The question cleverly prevented that - it said "non-Microsoft browsers"
I don't agree with the article at all. I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that. Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire? Now if Microsoft had restricted users from in…
I agree. Microsoft's strongest argument was that the features of an "OS" are fluid, ever-evolving, and un-definable. OS'es were all text-based, until one day they weren't and the GUI dominated. Win 95 had no Winsock or TCP/IP stack built-in, 98 did. File Explorer. Start Button. And as you say, the presence of MS Paint and the Calculator and Solitaire show that exact inclusions/exclusions are arbitrary. MS could have argued that it was it's responsibility -- obligation even -- to add new features and abilities to its OSes. Force the govt to "prove" that a browser is definitely an application and somehow cannot be a core part of the OS (otherwise there's no "bundling"). They wouldn't have been able to do that.
I don't agree with the article at all. I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that. Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire? Now if Microsoft had restricted users from in…
> For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire? There was a reason it was browsers. At the time there was rather a lot of software written against the Win32 API and nothing else. It was a moat. You needed that software, so you needed Windows. The web threatened to bridge the moat -- if people write web applications for Netscape, and Netscape runs on not on…
That's a pretty poor argument for govt intervention. Why? Because all of that Windows-only stuff existed, and the market ultimately rejected it. ActiveX controls? Yeah I remember those. Same with Java applets, Flash, Silverlight. The government didn't need to get involved in getting rid of any of these.