
Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL - dang
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
======
yoamro
This passage hits pretty hard in terms of company culture. I think this is
what Peter Thiel meant by "dont fuck up the culture" to Airbnb.

"Those were the years of Microsoft’s long, slow decline, which continues to
this day. The number of things wrong with the company was extraordinary, but
they can be summed up by the word bureaucracy. Early on at Microsoft—and even
later, when we first started Messenger—you could just do things. You had a
good idea, you ran it by your boss, you tried it, and if it worked, in it
went. After a while, you had to run everything by a hundred people, and at
some point the ball would get dropped—and you’d never hear back."

~~~
bcbrown
A decent portion of the bureaucracy is scar tissue from the antitrust case.
Another big chunk (at least in Windows-land) is the commitment to backwards
compatibility over new functionality. The third chunk was compliance with
governmental requirements for purchasing by the federal government. There's
things like "any software the feds buy must have Foo", and that's a really big
deal for Microsoft, who set up a whole group to ensure that everything has
Foo.

It was pretty painful. A feature I was involved with got nixed by the
Compliance team due to concerns around backwards compatibility. They had no
incentive to say Yes, either, since that would mean more work for them.

~~~
mapgrep
But some of it was just math -- a large company with many teams that need to
coordinate slows things down. I like this anecdote from a Microsoft engineer
about how it took a year to design a really crappy shutdown menu with nine
(nine!) options.

It turns out there 43 different people who had a voice in the feature, which
was hashed out over a series of grinding meetings involving teams responsible
for kernel, shell, Tablet PC, Longhorn, and (drumroll please) "Windows Mobile
PC User Experience"."

"In Windows, the [repository] node I was working on was 4 levels removed from
the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and
unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1
and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that
for it to reach the other nodes."

[http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-
shutdown-c...](http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-
crapfest.html)

~~~
gioele
> "In Windows, the [repository] node I was working on was 4 levels removed
> from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and
> unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between
> 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of
> that for it to reach the other nodes."

Does it take less time for a patch to the graphic system (for example) to
trickle up to the Linus' tree? And to end up in an LTS distro?

~~~
bazzargh
Depends what it is, but commonly - no. There's been research on this:

[http://mcis.polymtl.ca/publications/2013/msr_jojo.pdf](http://mcis.polymtl.ca/publications/2013/msr_jojo.pdf)

 _What percentage of submitted patches has been integrated successfully, and
how much time did it take? Around 33% of patches are accepted. Reviewing time
has been dropping down to 1–3 months, while integration time steadily has been
increasing towards 1–3 months, bringing the total time to 3–6 months._

That's based on 8 years of data.

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evmar
IIRC at one point the AIM server started doing a challenge: "send me N bytes
at offset X of the aim.exe binary". I recall the open-source AIM clients
themselves set up a service that would return substrings of the binary so that
their open-source clients could continue to login without needing to ship a
copy of the binary.

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everettForth
Legally speaking, couldn't AOL have created some kind of TOS which required
people to only connect to the servers with their own clients?

Sure, people would still ignore the TOS, but a big company like Microsoft
would comply or risk a lawsuit.

~~~
tempestn
That's certainly how things would work today. At the time the law regarding
connecting to another party's servers was significantly less settled. (Not
that it's entirely settled now.)

------
Eyas
Pretty interesting reading about the MSFT-AOL interop issues. I was also under
the impression Messenger was closed/proprietary, correct?

As an unrelated note, this part is weird: "Microsoft’s Vista operating system,
which needed to be restarted almost from scratch in order to ship three years
late, came because it was written in a new language of Microsoft’s own design,
called C#, that did not offer sufficient micromanagement to make Vista run
quickly enough" ... not sure what he's talking about there. Anyone?

~~~
slipstream-
Pre-reset Longhorn had a lot of explorer in C#. That explorer leaked memory,
I'm sure someone on BetaArchive has said why at some point, but I can't
remember. I'm thinking something to do with the sidebar for some reason.

------
slipstream-
I was pointed to this a couple of days ago, and half of it was behind a
paywall. So be warned. I've already saved the page as a pdf, just in case.

~~~
bsimpson
The paywall was really hostile too. I might have tipped 50c or $1 or whatever
to read the rest of the article, but I have very little incentive to subscribe
to a magazine I've never heard of to finish reading.

If there was a "Buy with 1-click on Amazon ($0.50)" button, I would have
clicked it.

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tempestn
Today AOL would just threaten a CFAA lawsuit and interop would quietly
disappear.

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robinduckett
I'm pretty sure I read this last week and it wasn't behind a paywall. Maybe
just me. I (along with another developer) spent some time developing an MSN
client in VB6 (and later, JS/HTML in Mozilla XULRunner) and quite frankly, it
felt like a losing battle trying to keep up with the protocol changes. By the
time we were ready to release our MSNP7 version, MSNP9 was out and they were
revoking access to earlier versions.

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sehugg
Here's some more detail [1] on the buffer overflow AOL was allegedly
exploiting to validate their AIM client. Probably wouldn't fly these days.

[1]
[http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/security/aim/index.htm](http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/security/aim/index.htm)

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ndespres
"Handling shutdown was a pain, making sure the windows closed down neatly and
all the program’s resources were cleaned up properly without the program
crashing."

Which must be why this program always refused to simply exit, preferring to
minimize itself to the system tray instead!

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lkd
> Despite Microsoft’s purchase of Skype, Messenger is still going today, a
> little Methuselah wandering in the Microsoft product mausoleum.

Not exactly. Messenger has been End-of-Lifed except on Windows 2000 (in all
territories) and in China (on all platforms). On any other platform or
territory, your login is refused and you're told to upgrade to Skype.

~~~
rpgmaker
You can still third party MSN clients and there's fix going around to make the
official MSN client work again.

~~~
peterkelly
> there's fix going around to make the official MSN client work again

I just love the irony of this situation

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DanBlake
Flagging this as it is behind a paywall.

