25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
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Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#2I remember the news (think it was on Techcrunch) when MS disbanded the IE team. Even from far away it seemed like such a clear as day stupid decision. IE 6 was a buggy mess and everyone knew and hated it. And then they just ... walked away.
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#3Here it is on Thread Reader:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426587396343099397.html
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#4> Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.
Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few millions today, but that's some price.
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#5[deleted]
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#6Ah the introduction of flat toolbars and the subsequent race to copy it (in MFC):
https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/controls/toolbar/flattoolbar/ar...
Good times!
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#7> Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it thought “we won.” (...) Years later, Internet Explorer would plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web developers.
Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget how good earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a punchline, but there really was something to it; IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support.
Abandoning it after they "won" was really a testament to the hubris of 90s-era Microsoft.
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#8From Hadi Partovi's thread:
"The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!
"Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it."
Unfortunately these extreme work hours seems to be prevalent in our industry. Steve Jobs' "90 hours a week and loving it!" T-shirt from the early 1980's is a legend, and I remember reading about the history of the Apple Newton and how the very long work hours spent on that project broke up families and even led an engineer to suicide (https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream...). When I was a graduate student, I've seen people boast about their 90-hour work weeks. Thankfully I've been fortunate to work at places where it's okay to work a normal 40-hour week, but I've heard of places where working long hours is not only the norm, it's encouraged. I understand being passionate; sometimes I stay up very late working on side projects. But when work conflicts with health and with family, something has to give.
I would love to hear stories of products that were successful and where the engineers and other people who contributed to that success were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#9I don't think people indoctrinated in tech culture can understand just how weird something like this reads. All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me. I can't imagine ruining my family for a paycheck so I could say I developed the 3rd version of MS' web browser.
Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0
#10I don't think people indoctrinated in tech culture can understand just how weird something like this reads. All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me. I can't imagine ruining my…
That's a fair point.
Funny how without these efforts the web and technologies pretty much the entire world used over the last two decades would probably have been very, very different - I'm not judging better or worse.
In fact Microsoft as a company might not even be relevant anymore without what these folks did. Sun, Netscape and Corel might rule the IT world today.