Blindness: I was in a Microsoft VP’s office when he said he was downsizing the IE effort because “the browser is done”, enterprise users were satisfied, and consumers don’t generate significant Windows revenue. I think that was IE6.
Paranoia: I was present for many early-00s decisions where a Microsoft exec weakened the ability to write rich applications in the browser to avoid devaluing Win32. So they were at least scared of the idea of a “browser OS” in the abstract.
Although...at the same time, Office was pushing for browser application capabilities, which is where we got XHR, which is a big reason browser applications became practical. Sometimes you’d never guess Office and Windows were the same company.
Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products.
That's why you'll find you'll be able to do something in Office, but other Microsoft programs won't. Or vice versa.
Like Notepad and Internet Explorer are pretty much just containers for certain Windows controls. Controls Office don't use. They roll their own. Or at least, used to. Wouldn't surprise me to find out that Office had their own browser rendering engine that didn't rely on anything in IE.
I'm not sure what the situation is now, but for a long time Outlook used MS Word, not MSIE, to render HTML email messages. Word is a terrible web browser, so that made it next to impossible to design templates for things like email newsletters that would look & behave sensibly in Outlook.
For people that aren’t in the know: the MSO engine is basically a very incomplete and quite buggy implementation of the HTML 3.2 specification. From where I stand, it looks like the entire thing is a binary blob that essentially hasn’t been touched at all for over twenty years. Literally.
Microsoft switching back to MSO breathed new life into an entire industry of people with esoteric, hard-won knowledge about the eldritch affairs of HTML for email. Without it, HTML for email would not be such a disaster. (Sure, there are other awful email clients, but Outlook is by far the most terrible that is used much these days. If it had tightened its game, other bad clients would have been much more like to fix theirs too.)
Outlook renders HTML for email but doesn't use IE.
This, of course, was a very smart decision even though Outlook's rendering of HTML is terrible.
That's probably because unlike most Microsoft products, Office is cross-platform and has to support multiple operating systems, including MacOS, iOS, and Android.
The Office team did a couple of session at CppCon about how they refactored the code.
"CppCon 2014: Zaika Antoun "Microsoft w/ C++ to Deliver Office Across Different Platforms"
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Share...
The latest office for Mac looks quite a bit like the windows version now (for once) so it’s not too surprising.
Well you literally had Mozilla telling everyone they could that the browser is going to be the OS in that era. Microsoft was certainly paying attention.
As an aside, we run a business management app called Bx (https://usebx.com/app) and have recently started making some money. We're putting aside some cash to fund the development of a feature-rich, cross-platform spreadsheet app (I wished OpenOffice Calc would suffice, but it simply doesn't, and is unstable at times), so that we can finally ditch the Windows VMs we run!
Something about Microsoft's historical ethos makes me abhor development on their platform, and targeting their browser is a nightmare in its own right (with Safari a close second).
Basically, I'm not happy with the status quo that we have no real alternative to Excel on Linux.
Its like dwarf fortress or bloomberg terminals - when you are digging through what you thought was cruft, you'll suddenly find an entire project/application worth of material to handle a feature you never thought you would use.
Except that feature is used by someone else everyday.
But we have a very long tail of people who contribute less often.
You can see the commit frequency here: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/
Come hang out on the libreoffice-dev IRC channel if you have more questions
A grid of cells is the easy part. Compatibility is hard.
Better to create an open ecosystem that people adopt for that very reason - that it is open. In the early days, Excel would actually obfuscate its output, making it extremely difficult to parse. Now things are a bit better, but you're still trying to hit a moving target.
If we have an open format, and a corresponding high-quality, open application ecosystem, I can see many corporates making the switch. Not easy, but I can see a future without total dependence on Excel.
Excel never obfuscated their save code. I've seen it in person. They did just memcpy their data structures, which was the most efficient way to save on tiny machines of the day. Lotus did that too.
I've also seen and helped implement the Open Document spec. This is not a simple problem and you are doing yourself a disservice by blinding yourself to the scale of the task.
If you want to make an impact and don't have Google level budgets then leveraging OpenOffice is the only sane approach.
We don't have Google level budgets, but I think we can do something worthwhile with what we have. Might take a while, but I'm confident we will manage something good in the budget we are hoping to allocate to the task.
However the code is literally a memcpy of a struct that is used internally. Not being designed for others to easily read isn't obfuscation. FWIW the XML formats designed for that purpose still fail horribly on that front.
Anyways I've worked on spreadsheets for 10 years. File compatibility is the hard part and the rest is easy by comparison (but still pretty hard).
[0]: https://www.winehq.org/announce/3.0 [1]: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...
Many firms and people need Windows software, MS Office is just one example.
You want to edit pictures, Photoshop only runs on Windows and OSX. You want to build things, AutoCAD only runs on Windows. You want to produce music, Cubase only runs on Windows and OSX.
Adobe/Autodesk/Steinberg software is just better than alternatives.
You can’t use Photoshop filters / Autocad addons / VST instruments with non-native apps. At least not reliably.
You can’t reliably exchange documents unless you use original software.
> There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-steve-ballmer-tho...
[0] https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2...
I wonder what the maximum penetration was for Windows OSes on phones.
"...my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune."
What's a Zune? /s
If Microsoft had the other 85%, they'd be in a good position.
they can ignore the 85% if they want. The 85% of the market will ignore them back in turn.
Apple makes good products, but they arent without frustrations or limitations, and you'd better accept these if you want what you do get from apple products.
You know that the engineering will be in the top ~90%, for example. What is the 10% or so that apple fails on WRT to engineering; accessories, flexibility/upgradability, vendor-lock-in on software. All of which simply lead you to spend more money on supporting having apple products.
Accessories: How much money have you spent on chargers, cables, headphones, cases, screen-protectors, screen repairs?
Flexibility/upgradability: Want more storage/ram? Buy the next model - no upgrades.
Software: Fewer OSS options for software/apps.
There are certain things I like about apple, and certain things I hate. But the primary thing I hate is that you cant do much without paying a premium...
#buildbridgesnotwalls
Apples investors do not expect them to grow much more unlike Google or Facebook which both act as monopolies in both the smartphone and online markets. I'm sure apple knows what it wants but it sure doesn't show any abition to take over the world with their products.
People forget that they effectively do have most of that 85%. Every Android installation kicks back some money to Microsoft in the form of patent royalties.
Market share doesn’t lead to profit.
If by "basically accurate," you mean "not accurate at all."
It's a long way from 2% to 45%. Not many companies get to underestimate their competition's potential marketshare by a factor of 22 and survive.
It's the think starlord got at the end of guardians of the galaxy 2.
Still, at least it didn't suffer like the ipod -- it had No wireless and Less space than a Nomad. It was "Lame".
The Zune was a litany of poor decisions, but that word choice must have been the worst.
Though, I also found the word "squircle†" amusing, and still use it when the opportunity arises. The Zune was the first time I'd heard it used outside of math nerds trying to out-nerd each other.
Addition: Which part, if any, are the downvoters objecting to? From the people I have talked to in the industry that is exactly what happened and why a lot of companies got out of it.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/05/iphone-with-28-of-u-s-s...
Some other fun ones to mention:
didn't let you copy/paste text (for the first 2 years of iPhone), didn't let you record video, and didn't let you make a selfie while looking at the screen. (no front-facing camera)
To be fair no smartphone did in the first couple years.
didn't let you copy/paste text (for the first 2 years of iPhone)
I got the iphone right after this shipped just by chance, and I couldn't understand how anyone lived without it. Also the had just added the "task switcher" carousel and the precursor to the control center, both features I used heavily and was surprised to learn didn't exist just a few months prior.
I bought the first iphone on the day it came out and I believe most phones did not have 3G at the time, almost all didn't have GPS (no real use case as navigation apps didn't really exist for phones), and most just had crappy App Stores.
> iPhone first came out it wasn't very good
Unequivocally false! It did everything a normal phone did fine. However, it did something no other phone came close to offering and it singly handley made it the best mobile device. It had an astoundingly intuitive and fast UX for browsing the web combined with an unlimited data plan. That's why I convinced my parents to drive me to the apple store so I could buy it despite the high price (they had to reduce the price by 200$ soon after because it was so freaking high (400-500$ for a phone in 2007)). The phone and app stuff was all moot. I wanted to be able to browse the web just as well as I did on a computer anywhere and everywhere and the iphone was what completely revolutionized that.
Sprint had been advertising its “Vision network” since at least 2005.
“Sprint Navigation” powered by Telemachus was a J2ME app that was an add on service in 2005.
(The timeline varied a lot by your country - I saw the iPhone available a year later than N95)
Bill Gates and patent troll Nathan Myrvhold wrote a while book unironically displaying their utter lack of vision about the industry. Their while business is a mix of making bland weak copies of more popular software to run on their decades old Windows entrenchment, Xbox, and a few nice keyboard and mice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_b...
Steve Jobs may have had some bad qualities (many of them irrationally amplified in the "Jobs-bad-Woz-good" revisionist history SV jealousy echo chamber), but he was one hell of a futurist.
For the record: I believe Jobs definitely deserves the credit, I'm just observing the mud that has been slung his way.
I perhaps unfairly read negative connotations in your use of "revisionist", but I see nothing wrong with adding Jobs' uglier side to the historical record. It doesn't change what he accomplished, and it's something we can learn from. I do question the idea that Woz has been irrationally overemphasized. By the time the iPod was dominant, and a year before the iPhone, Woz felt so left out of the historical record that he published his autobiography to set the record straight, particularly about the misconception that Jobs himself invented/built the Apple I and ][ machine. Even then, Woz gives clear credit to Jobs for having the entrepreneurial sense and vision to make Apple a company, whereas Woz was perfectly content to work at HP for all his days.
After the iPhone, Woz became even more a part of Apple's ancient, forgotten history. He was a bit character in the Jobs' movies came out, and AFAIK, no movie yet has been made about Woz's life.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/sep/01/daughter-stev...
As for Jobs, I was thinking more of his technical abilities. The Woz-worshippers putting him on a pedestal seem to feel it simultaneously necessary to denigrate Mr. Jobs' technical side.
Jobs knew a hell of a lot about computers. More than I, or anyone I've met, ever will. It's clear reading old interviews with him that he knew his stuff, all the way down to the circuit level. But these days the conventional wisdom is that Woz built everything and Jobs was the equivalent of P.T. Barnum.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Did he personally know how to program 68000 assembler? Maybe some, or maybe not. But did he know how the chip worked? Absolutely. And more importantly, he picked the right kind of smart people and let them (largely) do their thing. And he did something that rarely happens these days — he gave them personal credit for their technical achievements.
When I read his biography a few years ago, it reduced my respect for him. But these days, reading archives of first-hand documents and interviews, I have more respect for him than before.
He was in a meeting where they were talking about Amazon Web Services, which had just launched. He said an IBM executive called it "stupid" and asked, "Who would ever pay for a server with a credit card?"
This blew my mind, because now that AWS is crushing IBM's cloud offerings, the answer to his question is tons of people.
Both are extremely bad reactions at face value but also show how clueless the company can be (at least if you believe it is indicative of the company's mindset)
https://www.cnet.com/pictures/microsofts-funeral-for-the-iph...
Anyway, even if it had been Blackberry and WebOs, it would still have been pretty awful.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
- Microsoft should have known this but they had made too much money for too long.
Lets not forget Google said the surface line was a disaster too.. They all poke at each other
The 399 go is a step in the right direction.
BUT, i do wish we had a legit 7" that wasn't a Chinese malware knockoff or a really outdated Samsung or Android 5.0 devie. The 7-8" formfacter is such huge utility for pilots, GPS navigation and ebook reading. Shame even apple doesn't update the ipad mini anymore :(
The "just works" aspect is extremely useful for non-expert users.
If a trend in the industry is towards limiting upgradeability, in the direction of rent-seeking by first subscriptions, soldering everything onto mainboard, limiting connections, later perhaps rental fee for equipment like it is with car leasing, a trend which I consider insane, can't I object to it? Chromebooks are basically a prime example of this trend, while regular notebooks didn't embrace it fully yet, but are getting there as well. Can't a company with arguably the best predictive platform in the world model and foresee the effect on environment, or is it just profit and mindshare that matters these days?
That said, I currently use a laptop that's seriously underpowered (by choice when I bought the thing ~7 years ago) with 4GB of RAM running Fedora and it does everything I need -- never once have I found I wasn't able to compile whatever random code I happen to be playing with at the moment. If ever I had to do serious dev work (like, it was my job) I'd need a better laptop but for the tinkering I do it works out just fine...though I did have to give up on Blender hacking a while back because of OpenGL versioning issues and I can't afford to buy a fancy new machine. That might not be an issue anymore, haven't checked on the OpenGL compatibility in quite a while TBH.
I actually used to hack on Blender with a 2GB netbook (also running Fedora) before I got my current "beast" so those things aren't completely worthless as you would suggest.
He laughed. He said it was a joke. He made it very clear that he didn't understand what Google was even thinking. And that stuck such a sour chord on me. Here's a company well known to be hiring the brightest people in the world, and they've announced a direct competitor to what you're doing... and you're laughing? It was like seeing an experienced chess player playing against a rumored-to-be-brilliant child prodigy and laughing at the stupid move the child was making.
I spent the next summer working on the ChromeOS team.