11–20 of 269 posts
What happened to Borland Delphi? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-ha...
Why has C prevailed over Pascal? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-ha...
What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update.
Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any good application in the ecosystem and bundling it.
But SV didn't learn the lesson and we are now in more abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones. And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.
Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?! What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update. Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any g…
Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves.
Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" - I have a feeling he would fire you on the spot.
They even now support Linux on their Azure platform - and that's not a it-will-run-but-you-are-on-your-own.
Now, I'm not saying Microsoft is a saint or that I would want to work for them. But considering they didn't take action against the mono or ReactOS projects makes them ok in my book (not that they would have any real legal case - but they could drag those projects through an expensive lawsuit which would just end up with a deal to cease development).
They stopped selling $49.95 compilers with IDEs and tried to be an enterprise company. People still buy IDEs and compilers. If they had kept doing what they were doing and improving their products, they would have been fine. Instead, they wanted the big money and it didn't happen.
Compilers used to be something you paid money for. It took a while, but open source and I would say gcc in particular killed that. It's funny how gcc was around for a long time, but it was only in the 2000s that cash cow compilers started dying. I think that coincides a bit with Linux and OS X becoming popular for developers. For example, it wasn't until 2005 that Microsoft started providing a VS express SKU. You see…
But the really magical thing about open source is that it never dies. And there is always someone willing to look at the code and fix a bug, or add a feature. And if you had a new architecture and no budget you could not afford the NRE charge of a big compiler company to build a code generator for you. And so it got incrementally better. Bit by bit. And the better it got, the more useful it was, and the more useful it was the more people used it, and then at some point it crossed the point where the economics of using a free compiler and dedicating some staff to fixing the problems you had made more sense than buying a compiler and waiting for the compiler company to fix bugs.
It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.