Actually, Microsoft is generating a tons of CSS test cases, which more of an objective measure than the checkbox marketing which usually is used by browser vendors.
No, "cross browser" accurately describes what people want. Nearly always, when some internet nerd starts whining about "standards-compliance", they no clue what the standards actually are, and what they really mean is "Make it work like Firefox".
Realistically, there are hundreds of "standards" which no browser supports, and there are numerous de facto unofficial standards which people expect to work. (Prime example of the latter is transparent PNGs.) "Cross-browser" accurately describes this set of common pratices.
The important thing to understand is that promotions aren't about the past, you owe me, I deserve it, etc etc. They are about the future and what potential at the company you have. I've found that as long as you are positioning the conversation that way, there is almost no harm in asking for more money.
And yeah, grow a pair. You will never get paid any more than what you ask for.
The issue was integrating windows 98 with I.E. in such a way that it was not possible to use one without the other - literally you couldn't uninstall IE as windows would STOP WORKING if you did.
No, that wasn't the real issue at all. Only in a very myopic view which sees the world in terms of DLLs did any of that matter at all, and in the end Microsoft was not prevented from bundling software in a matter they see fit.
The actual crime was Microsoft using its contracts with OEMs and ISPs to prevent competing browsers from being bundled. That is, it was entirely in the legal and business realm, not technology.
Since we're arguing by anecdote, there's people in my neighborhood who have been holding a weekly "estate sale" for the last two years. They're clearly running an antique business out of their garage, shouldn't they be paying taxes?
As a practical matter the IRS doesn't care about your garage sales, either online or off. Anyone who has bothered using eBay in the last 10 years knows that the place is dominated by small businesses selling new items. And there's no reason these people should have a tax advantage over their competitors just because they're operating under the semi-anonymity of eBay.
The Microsoft of old would have done that and more -- added a variety of extensions to Exchange that only work with Microsoft phones; 'accidentally' broken things with exchange updates that break or significantly degrade performance for iPhones and Blackberries (sure, people will complain to the IT department, but what are you going to do, switch from Exchange?), etc. etc.
Current day Microsoft has been slapped around enough by the EU over antitrust issues that they don't dare pull that sort of shit anymore. Free MS from their anti-trust shackles, however, and they would very quickly move in a dominate the phone market if they cared to.
The Microsoft of old was also insanely paranoid that someone else was going to do to them what they did to IBM. They would have started a crash touch-phone program the minute they heard a rumor about the iPhone, rather than sitting around for years with their thumbs up their asses.
Microsoft's current position in this space has very little to do with anti-trust, and everything to do with the company being retarded.
When MS started selling Word it was a poor imitation of Wordperfect
See I knew someone would chime in with this totally bogus accusation. I will surmise you've never actually used either WordPerfect or WordStar, as their modes of operation were totally different than Word.
Also, for such a long correction to the original post, you completely neglected the fact that Microsoft dominated PC development tools long before they started selling MS-DOS.
The root post may have been overly simplified, but it is essentially correct that Word & Excel were Microsoft's first real breakthrough products, and their application division was far more profitable than operating systems for a long time.
Software nerds suck at marketing. The "Open Source" branding effort uses term which doesn't even mean what it implies, and has a completely different meaning in other contexts (open source intelligence). And plus, it's a common term and can't be trademarked anyway. So every discussion always turns into a endless squabble about definitions, which is exactly the opposite of what they should be achieving.
Of course the alternative, "Free Software" is even worse. Especially because they tend to use as an excuse to bore your brain out with the old "no, free as in libre" speech.
And don't even get me started about "FOSS". I fucking read slashdot and had no idea what that meant for the longest time.
IBM did have hardware patents on the PC. However they were under a US Government anti-trust consent decree which forced them to cheaply licence hardware technology to clone manufacturers.
It wasn't just the spam, Usenet survived the spam onslaught of the 1990s. What put the final dagger in Usenet was the unstoppable kooks and trolls which infest the place. Seriously, the quality of discussion there just sucks, its flaming and stalking 24x7. Usenet killed Usenet.
Both spam and trolling are symptomatic of central problem of Usenet -- most people just do not want to participate in unmoderated forums. If someone had come up with a moderation option for Usenet that actually worked maybe it had a chance at survival.
Guess I'd remembered that backassward. And agreed that it was probably the relationship relational model that was really killing performance. Every successor social network has a much simpler 'friendship' graph than Friendster did.
The main reason Friendster died-off was because it couldn't scale up. After it hit a certain level of popularity, you couldn't even visit the site without it spewing MySQL errors or hanging for a minute on every page load. Meanwhile, they launched some half-baked plan to rewrite the whole thing in Java, while people were bailing from the site out of frustration.
The other interesting thing about Friendster was the "friend-of-a-friend" privacy model. Which means if you weren't somehow connected to the active userbase, it did seem like a ghost town. That sort of model has its advantages, but it did limit network effects and probably accelerated the hipster effect of becoming too popular.
For one thing, the things simply will not be a CPU hog the way Flash was.
That is the most ridiculous assumption in this whole debate.
First of all, a big reason Flash hogs CPU is mainly because the designers who use it simply are not good coders. Give them some HTML5 design tool and 8 layers of libraries and you'll get the same CPU hogging code.
Second, if you want to see HTML5 hog your CPU, check out the MS HTML5 demos? Most of this stuff would be done trivially in Flash but absolutely kills any current browser.
It may have made sense considering that many city routers would be in park buildings or other remote places with poor physical security. The ballsy part was ignoring the "what if I was run over by a bus?" rule and then playing politics with the passwords.
Plus, the tech culture in the Bay Area tends to cultivate workaholics who are dedicated to their job, or at least their project. A jury duty summons invokes thoughts of: "I don't have time for this! I have responsibilities/a deadline/a team/a project/some really cool bit of code I'm wrapped up in".
I was on a jury in San Francisco, and the court seemed completely prepared for any yuppie excuse-making. 10 out of 12 who ended up in the jury were educated professionals (and the only one who got a delay was a TV reporter working on a story). Only two members were the stereotypical little old ladies with nothing better to do.
Also I don't know what about this case required any real "tech savvy" -- pretty much everyone understands the concept of passwords.
Sure its possible to do with anything, but VB6 was designed to be COM glue; the internal datatypes are COM, and there's a huge library of add-ons and doodads which integrate with MS Office apps.
You can't really blame the guy for using what was (and always will be) considered the best tool for that kind of job.
Yes, ActiveX was not used as widely as Slashdot assumes, in my experience. And where it was used, it was more like some VB dev packaged his app on a web page versus something integrated into a site.
ActiveX also still works in IE8, so that ain't the problem.
Of course, not every IE-specific site emerged from the wellspring in November 2001, many were evolutions of previous "IE-only" sites.
Sure laziness was a factor, as was a misplaced trust that MS would retain back-compatibility. But cursing corporate developers because they didn't target no-name browsers with 1% marketshares is ridiculous.
Are you saying Opera wasn't a good browser?
Yes, I will go on record to say that Opera 6 was not a good browser. Did it even support dynamic HTML? In my recollection, it was closer to Netscape 3 in terms of features.
As I said in another post, there really wasn't any "compatible alternatives" when these applications were created, the competition (Netscape) was even more "intentionally incompatible" than IE was.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Microsoft is generating a tons of CSS test cases, which more of an objective measure than the checkbox marketing which usually is used by browser vendors.
No, "cross browser" accurately describes what people want. Nearly always, when some internet nerd starts whining about "standards-compliance", they no clue what the standards actually are, and what they really mean is "Make it work like Firefox".
Realistically, there are hundreds of "standards" which no browser supports, and there are numerous de facto unofficial standards which people expect to work. (Prime example of the latter is transparent PNGs.) "Cross-browser" accurately describes this set of common pratices.
The important thing to understand is that promotions aren't about the past, you owe me, I deserve it, etc etc. They are about the future and what potential at the company you have. I've found that as long as you are positioning the conversation that way, there is almost no harm in asking for more money.
And yeah, grow a pair. You will never get paid any more than what you ask for.
"Critical for Ads" my ass. Advertisers have worked almost exclusively without analytics until about a decade ago.
This isn't true. The analytics were just widely inaccurate and often fraudulent.
The issue was integrating windows 98 with I.E. in such a way that it was not possible to use one without the other - literally you couldn't uninstall IE as windows would STOP WORKING if you did.
No, that wasn't the real issue at all. Only in a very myopic view which sees the world in terms of DLLs did any of that matter at all, and in the end Microsoft was not prevented from bundling software in a matter they see fit.
The actual crime was Microsoft using its contracts with OEMs and ISPs to prevent competing browsers from being bundled. That is, it was entirely in the legal and business realm, not technology.
Since we're arguing by anecdote, there's people in my neighborhood who have been holding a weekly "estate sale" for the last two years. They're clearly running an antique business out of their garage, shouldn't they be paying taxes?
As a practical matter the IRS doesn't care about your garage sales, either online or off. Anyone who has bothered using eBay in the last 10 years knows that the place is dominated by small businesses selling new items. And there's no reason these people should have a tax advantage over their competitors just because they're operating under the semi-anonymity of eBay.
The Microsoft of old would have done that and more -- added a variety of extensions to Exchange that only work with Microsoft phones; 'accidentally' broken things with exchange updates that break or significantly degrade performance for iPhones and Blackberries (sure, people will complain to the IT department, but what are you going to do, switch from Exchange?), etc. etc.
Current day Microsoft has been slapped around enough by the EU over antitrust issues that they don't dare pull that sort of shit anymore. Free MS from their anti-trust shackles, however, and they would very quickly move in a dominate the phone market if they cared to.
The Microsoft of old was also insanely paranoid that someone else was going to do to them what they did to IBM. They would have started a crash touch-phone program the minute they heard a rumor about the iPhone, rather than sitting around for years with their thumbs up their asses.
Microsoft's current position in this space has very little to do with anti-trust, and everything to do with the company being retarded.
When MS started selling Word it was a poor imitation of Wordperfect
See I knew someone would chime in with this totally bogus accusation. I will surmise you've never actually used either WordPerfect or WordStar, as their modes of operation were totally different than Word.
Also, for such a long correction to the original post, you completely neglected the fact that Microsoft dominated PC development tools long before they started selling MS-DOS.
The root post may have been overly simplified, but it is essentially correct that Word & Excel were Microsoft's first real breakthrough products, and their application division was far more profitable than operating systems for a long time.
Software nerds suck at marketing. The "Open Source" branding effort uses term which doesn't even mean what it implies, and has a completely different meaning in other contexts (open source intelligence). And plus, it's a common term and can't be trademarked anyway. So every discussion always turns into a endless squabble about definitions, which is exactly the opposite of what they should be achieving.
Of course the alternative, "Free Software" is even worse. Especially because they tend to use as an excuse to bore your brain out with the old "no, free as in libre" speech.
And don't even get me started about "FOSS". I fucking read slashdot and had no idea what that meant for the longest time.
IBM did have hardware patents on the PC. However they were under a US Government anti-trust consent decree which forced them to cheaply licence hardware technology to clone manufacturers.
It wasn't just the spam, Usenet survived the spam onslaught of the 1990s. What put the final dagger in Usenet was the unstoppable kooks and trolls which infest the place. Seriously, the quality of discussion there just sucks, its flaming and stalking 24x7. Usenet killed Usenet.
Both spam and trolling are symptomatic of central problem of Usenet -- most people just do not want to participate in unmoderated forums. If someone had come up with a moderation option for Usenet that actually worked maybe it had a chance at survival.
Guess I'd remembered that backassward. And agreed that it was probably the relationship relational model that was really killing performance. Every successor social network has a much simpler 'friendship' graph than Friendster did.
The main reason Friendster died-off was because it couldn't scale up. After it hit a certain level of popularity, you couldn't even visit the site without it spewing MySQL errors or hanging for a minute on every page load. Meanwhile, they launched some half-baked plan to rewrite the whole thing in Java, while people were bailing from the site out of frustration.
The other interesting thing about Friendster was the "friend-of-a-friend" privacy model. Which means if you weren't somehow connected to the active userbase, it did seem like a ghost town. That sort of model has its advantages, but it did limit network effects and probably accelerated the hipster effect of becoming too popular.
For one thing, the things simply will not be a CPU hog the way Flash was.
That is the most ridiculous assumption in this whole debate.
First of all, a big reason Flash hogs CPU is mainly because the designers who use it simply are not good coders. Give them some HTML5 design tool and 8 layers of libraries and you'll get the same CPU hogging code.
Second, if you want to see HTML5 hog your CPU, check out the MS HTML5 demos? Most of this stuff would be done trivially in Flash but absolutely kills any current browser.
What flash-based site only serves bog-standard video? They all have overlays and other interactivity.
It is a preemptive move against Google's VP8 in particular and open source in general.
Problem with this competitive analysis is that MS's tools supported H.264 long before Firefox/Chrome supported any video whatsoever.
If anything, this is the obituary for MS's own proprietary strategy with VC-1.
It may have made sense considering that many city routers would be in park buildings or other remote places with poor physical security. The ballsy part was ignoring the "what if I was run over by a bus?" rule and then playing politics with the passwords.
Plus, the tech culture in the Bay Area tends to cultivate workaholics who are dedicated to their job, or at least their project. A jury duty summons invokes thoughts of: "I don't have time for this! I have responsibilities/a deadline/a team/a project/some really cool bit of code I'm wrapped up in".
I was on a jury in San Francisco, and the court seemed completely prepared for any yuppie excuse-making. 10 out of 12 who ended up in the jury were educated professionals (and the only one who got a delay was a TV reporter working on a story). Only two members were the stereotypical little old ladies with nothing better to do.
Also I don't know what about this case required any real "tech savvy" -- pretty much everyone understands the concept of passwords.
Yeah, I've been dancing too. I pushed a number of projects into supporting el-crapo early versions of Mozilla, and its nice to be vindicated.
However I also realize that nobody probably noticed or cared until 5 years after the fact.
Sure its possible to do with anything, but VB6 was designed to be COM glue; the internal datatypes are COM, and there's a huge library of add-ons and doodads which integrate with MS Office apps.
You can't really blame the guy for using what was (and always will be) considered the best tool for that kind of job.
mainframes ... I can't wait until some enterprising company creates a product which "screen-scrapes" IE6 webpages and translates them into modern HTML.
Yes, ActiveX was not used as widely as Slashdot assumes, in my experience. And where it was used, it was more like some VB dev packaged his app on a web page versus something integrated into a site.
ActiveX also still works in IE8, so that ain't the problem.
Of course, not every IE-specific site emerged from the wellspring in November 2001, many were evolutions of previous "IE-only" sites.
Sure laziness was a factor, as was a misplaced trust that MS would retain back-compatibility. But cursing corporate developers because they didn't target no-name browsers with 1% marketshares is ridiculous.
Are you saying Opera wasn't a good browser?
Yes, I will go on record to say that Opera 6 was not a good browser. Did it even support dynamic HTML? In my recollection, it was closer to Netscape 3 in terms of features.
Google Chrome Frame -- it allows web developers to stick a modern engine into IE on a site-by-site basis.
As I said in another post, there really wasn't any "compatible alternatives" when these applications were created, the competition (Netscape) was even more "intentionally incompatible" than IE was.