One of the carefully orchestrated PR articles at the height of the investigations into Microsoft. Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of public discussion about the company.
One of my all-time favorite bullshit claims is the "Gates always flies coach when he is traveling on business." and the hilariously ridiculous "Experienced fliers into and out of Seattle know to scan the cabin for a man with a blanket over his head—that’s Bill Gates, taking a nap."
Total bullshit; even then, no-airline would have Bill Gates check in as an economy passenger and not instantly upgrade him and move mere mortals well away from him. The article even talks about Gate's temper just before the coach claim - no-one would risk their career or livelihood by failing to treat him with super-special billionaire status.
People did run into Bill at the airport eating a burger like anyone else. The couple of times I saw him he didn't appear to have any visible security people.
> Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of public discussion about the company.
The company had been around what, 15 years, by then? They weren't newbies at business, and could afford the best PR people.
"Email is not a good way to get mad at someone since you can’t interact. You can send friendly messages very easily since those are harder to misinterpret." LOL
Reminds me of when Wired Magazine decided to include the hyphen in their house style [0]. Prior to that they were hip and cool and spelled it as “email”.
I'm too young to have imagined thinking about Bill Gates the way we think about Zuckerberg today but reading this, it occurs to me that people must have.
Gates was widely revered by the public as primarily a positive wunderkind business genius until the later half of the 1990s, when he became particularly richer than everyone else, Microsoft became increasingly powerful, and the robber baron image took over. In the early days he didn't have to survive an era of everything-public as Zuckerberg did (there are no leaked chat logs from when Gates was 19 et al).
At 30, most people in the US still didn't know who Gates was (maybe they had heard his name once), much less know anything of consequence about him. Today, if Zuckerberg does or says anything embarrassing, tomorrow hundreds of millions of people will see the headlines and read about it on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
Gates and Microsoft got to ride rather quietly to the top of the tech universe until the mid 1990s. Tech just wasn't nearly so important circa 1980-1990 (vs comparing Microsoft or Apple to GM or McDonalds or Coca Cola today).
This definitely makes sense - my knowledge of that time period is much more relevant to internet/hacker culture, and much about the views of the general public.
Hah, no, don't get me wrong - Facebook sucks, the Zuck sucks. Full stop. As much as I dislike what Microsoft has done, Facebook is far worse.
But I've seen less art of Zuckerberg drawn as a demon coming for your software - though that may just be a difference between the internet now and what I've seen of the internet in the past.
High-Period Microsoft looked like it was on track to utterly own the desktop and, therefore, consumer and small business computing world to the point it would be able to keep any non-Microsoft-approved software from existing. (Hardware and software, with Winmodems pointing the way to hardware that only works with Microsoft drivers, not to mention BIOS makers basically giving up and turning their code into first-stage bootloaders for MS Windows.) It killed Netscape and turned IE6 into a millstone around the Web's neck, showing what Microsoft could do to anything it didn't deem sufficiently profitable at the moment. Later, in the early 2000s, Palladium (Trusted Computing Platform) was seen by the most pessimistic as the end of the line for non-Microsoft OSes on commodity hardware: The hardware would only boot encrypted OSes, MS would hold the keys, the government would prosecute anyone cracking the code as a terrorist. Good game, scrub.
The Halloween Documents were only the start of Microsoft's attacks on Open Source in general and Linux in specific; it arguably funded SCO during that company's lawsuit against Linux, IBM's support for Linux, and basic common sense, by buying Linux and Unix licenses from SCO and introducing SCO to BayStar Capital. That isn't so much at arm's length as at finger's length. Around the same time, Ballmer said the Linux kernel was Communism, said it infringed Microsoft's intellectual property, and a bit later called Linux cancer. He also used the "viral license" insult, proving that big companies are sufficiently stymied by the GPL to dislike it. You kinda lose plausible deniability when you call something cancer and then give money to the company trying to sue it out of existence.
But that's Ballmer. Gates all by himself was seen, at least by people who didn't just view him as a Funny Rich Nerd, as a sharp operator at the very least who did nasty things to competitors and had no scruples about doing questionably legal things to win. Jobs without the Cult Of Mac, in other words.
I commented on this before, but I’m surprised Microsoft screwed up mobile as thoroughly as they did.
They could have dominated, but instead they all but gave away the personal computing space to Apple and Google, and had to pivot the company to cloud computing instead.
Microsoft was late to the Internet, too. Gates didn't decide to really jump in with both feet until 1995, which... OK, not hugely late, but not exactly leading the trend, either:
Which posits that Google did unto Microsoft what Microsoft did unto Digital Research: Locked it out of important apps, like a YouTube app. Plus, Android already had a more vibrant ecosystem in general. Again, Microsoft was a bit slow, but this time, it cost them.
Linux IS communism. Excellent developers are humans too, they want a beach mansion in Naples and West Palm Beach, with a 45ft boat and the whole 9.
Linux offers them a mod role in some obscure online forum and a pat on their back. That formula doesn't work regardless of what Ballmer said or the legal actions.
You make it sound like Linux failed to be on 95% of desktops because of what Ballmer said, which is the same as thinking that the USSR/DDR collapsed because Reagan said "Tear down this wall!"
Microsoft signed off incredible amounts of quality of life for the consumer and minted many thoudands of millionaires among its employees, whereas they destroyed the ambitions of many other paper millionaires who should have known better, they should have understood that software is a winner take all business and should have cashed out when they could. Unless you are one of them, then I cannot possibly see how people can see Microsoft and claim that it's cancerous.
Microsoft is the most consumer friendly company ever. They know billions of people are pirating their OS+Office and let them rob them blind while they recoup such lost revenues by increasing the bill on sales to Fortune500 companies and governments. Which is something extremely elegant that goes to mimic the organization of society in the West : free market Capitalism with redistributive features.
Wow, what a time warp that article was. I see many parallels between Zuck’s Metaverse and Bill’s information highway. You can try to predict what the future devices will look like, if the idea is already there, but it’s not cohesive enough to make a winning strategy.
Bill didn't invent the 'information superhighway'. That term was coined by Al Gore in the late 70s. By the early 90s it was a pervasive 'meme' used to obliquely refer to the sum of all the available electronic information services. Its cultural currency and relevancy went to zero once everyone had an instantiation of a computer network they could access be it AOL, MSN, or the wider internet.
Zuck tried to create the Metaverse out of whole cloth. The thesis is just keep doing what we're already doing, wasting time online, but let's add in some augmented reality and VR headsets!
The 1990s had two big things: The Web and cable TV. The smart money was on convergence, which meant that the Web would merge with cable TV and create something entirely new. This happened, kinda, but not in the way people back then imagined; as it turns out, "Cable TV" + "The Internet" = "The Internet" so "Convergence" is just doing everything over an Internet connection.
It really is wild to me (with the unquestioned gift of hindsight) that all of these companies saw these massive developments in CPUs, fiber optics, etc. and their immediate reaction was solely a lust for the future in the form of video on demand specifically.
Kinda like an inverted form of that alleged Henry Ford quote, if you asked a corporation what they thought the future was then they would say a better TV.
Bill Gates was prescient about many things we are living with right now - video-on-demand, online shopping, "wallet PCs" (smartphones), voice recognition, "social interfaces" (Siri, Alexa). I recommend his book The Road Ahead (1995).
it's an amazing testament to bill gates's cluelessness that this entire 12000 word article about writing email over the internet, when the www was already three years old, doesn't mention the word 'internet' even once
nor, obviously, 'html', 'web', 'www', 'gopher', or 'ftp'
Not cluelessness. The thing is that Gates was trying to build his own, walled garden, version of the internet - MSN.
These days people think MSN is a content network, but it started out as a physical, dialup network, a competitor with AOL or CompuServe. Gates didn’t talk about internet technology not because he was clueless, but because he was trying to compete with it.
msn launched in august 01995 and this article is from 01993 (albeit december 01993)
maybe msn was in development but this was years before bill's famous fire alarm 'internet tidal wave' email about how the company was totally fucking up by missing out on the internet
it has a paragraph about msn that kind of supports your point that it was intended to be a compuserve-like thing at the time
> MSN. The merger of the On-line business and Internet business creates a major challenge for MSN. It can’t just be the place to find Microsoft information on the Internet. It has to have scale and reputation that it is the best way to take advantage of the Internet because of the value added. A lot of the content we have been attracting to MSN will be available in equal or better form on the Internet so we need to consider focusing on areas where we can provide something that will go beyond what the Internet will offer over the next few years. Our plan to promote Blackbird broadly takes away one element that would have been unique to MSN. We need to strengthen the relationship between MSN and Exchange/Cairo for mail, security and directory. We need to determine a set of services that MSN leads in – money transfer, directory, and search engines. Our high-end server offerings may require a specific relationship with MSN.
Offtopic, but putting zeros in front of years is obnoxious. I just spent several seconds trying to parse those numbers as full dates with missing digits/delimiters in various formats.
If your goal is to aggravate readers, then mission accomplished.
Well, MSN launched in August 95 and the tidal wave memo was from May 95.
My recollection from the time was that (a) it was clear that this was intended to be an “embrace and extend” play by MS, against the whole internet (!!) and (b) the tidal wave memo was taken to be acceptance that this previously successful strategy was too late. So MS shut down MSN and repurposed the name.
Gates seemed to believe that he could beat the WWW and he set out to do so. He considered it competition, so he didn’t mention it in interviews.
On a similar note I always found it odd that the 1996 copy of Encarta completely omitted any mention of http on it's article for the internet. I thought it was just the material being a bit old or out of touch. I suppose that was also partly because IE4 wasn't part of the OS yet so "the web" wasn't truly ubiquitous within MS quite yet.
"Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" has a good overview of the internal power struggle over their online stagey at this juncture. They largely resisted the wider internet because it was already developed and based around Unix tools and open standards. They saw no commercial value.
reading the tidal wave memo i linked, it sounds like microsoft just didn't take software seriously unless it was a commercial product
in the 'server' category the competitors they were talking about for http servers were bsd (which i think means bsd/os from bsdi, because they're talking about it as if it were a company), sun, netscape, lotus, novell, and at&t
linux, freebsd, and ncsa httpd were not even on their radar, even though yahoo was, and yahoo was mostly running on freebsd at that point iirc
let me remind you that we're talking about may 01995, not 01992. in the first netcraft server survey that july https://news.netcraft.com/archives/1996/08/01/the_first_year... they found 57% of the 18957 web servers were running ncsa httpd and 20% were running cern httpd. apache had started a few months ago and was only running on 658 servers at that point so it's not surprising it wasn't on their radar
i had friends and family who'd been running linux since 01992 and who had used it to set up isps and email setups and stuff, its capabilities were leaps and bounds ahead of microsoft's products at the time if you could get it working
It's very interesting looking back at historical software/communication, and realizing how wrong we have been about so many things, and realizing how wrong we likely are about many others.
Security only makes sense in the context of the technology available to an attacker _at that time_, so I don't think he was wrong. The same way I'm not wrong to say X25519 ECDH is secure even though it's very unlikely we'd still be using it in the year 2100.
True, but wasn't email transmitted unencrypted over the wire back then? That seems like a pretty big leap to call secure even when adjusting for the technology available to attackers at that time.
It was transmitted unencrypted, along with traffic for many other protocols. I have not read the article, but the 1993 note implies this was a time when rsh, telnet, and ftp were still in common use. I don't disagree with you that it's a big leap to call it secure, but my point is I reckon he was not alone making that leap back then.
No, nobody thought email was secure at the time, that statement stood out to me as well. It’s just an example of marketing bullshit, as is the whole article.
One of my all-time favorite bullshit claims is the "Gates always flies coach when he is traveling on business." and the hilariously ridiculous "Experienced fliers into and out of Seattle know to scan the cabin for a man with a blanket over his head—that’s Bill Gates, taking a nap."
Total bullshit; even then, no-airline would have Bill Gates check in as an economy passenger and not instantly upgrade him and move mere mortals well away from him. The article even talks about Gate's temper just before the coach claim - no-one would risk their career or livelihood by failing to treat him with super-special billionaire status.