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Microsoft Coffee

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Re: Microsoft Coffee

#391

Post by thr0w__4w4y »

atdrummond wrote: post #356
emrah wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would you be laughed out of the room for this. Sounds like your friends were a piece of work.

It was the day of “my cousin told me if you did this combo you could get Ermac in Mortal Kombat!” I.E. we were dumb kids who would make things up to impress our friends. They weren’t trying to be mean, they were just incredulous.

I don't know if you're old enough to have played (or heard of) "Adventure" on the Atari 2600. In 8th grade (this would have been around 1980 for me?) one kid (Tom Koester, yes Tom I'm calling you out) told me about some purple dragon that could be unlocked if moved the sword to one specific pixel location on the screen. I burned many weekends trying to unlock that before I decided he'd taken me for a ride. He wasn't known for that kind of prank so I bought it fully.

Re: Microsoft Coffee

#392

Post by AceJohnny2 »

amansidhant wrote: post #376
cbozeman wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Or maybe I'm 25 years younger in a corporate environment that has thoroughly taken control of this kind of thing.) You're 25 years younger in a corporate environment that has thoroughly taken control of this kind of thing. > BillG said, in effect, that the prank was not in good taste, and that it made Microsoft look stupid rather than clever - especially as a catch-up to Sun Microsystems. He was pissed because, wh…

Could you spill the beans a little? I’m really curious about happened in the 90s with Microsoft that antagonized them so much (was born in 99, so I’ve only seen the Bill Gates who’s saving lives in Africa)

Microsoft as led by Bill Gates was an aggressive, anti-competitive entity.

They crushed competitors with the motto "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", where they'd start to embrace an open standard, extend it with their own customizations, and use that to crush the competition.

They tried to do it with Java, but Sun prevailed in a lawsuit against them.

Before that they crushed word processor rival WordPerfect (though arguably, WP did not handle the migration to GUI properly), and spreadsheet rival Lotus 1-2-3 this way. They leveraged their control of the Platform (Windows) to control any software market they wanted, such as internet browsers, crushing Netscape, leading to an anti-trust lawsuit [1] that almost caused Microsoft to have to split up (arguably saved by Bush Jr. being elected to office).

There was also the SCO lawsuit against Linux, but that was after Bill Gates stepped down from CEO, so it's at Steve Ballmer's feet.

Needless to say, he (& Microsoft) accumulated so much ill will that it basically required a generation turnover (as you've demonstrated ;) ) to forget.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

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