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A comment on “I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996). Parent comment

Re:“I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996) by rchaud on Thursday January 06, 2022 @11:19AM (#29825483)
Market cap during the Steve Ballmer CEO tenure would be a better comparison, as it was during this time that MS was fighting Blackberry, Nokia, Apple and Android on the mobile OS front. This was the battle that Gates was worrying about: the declining prospects of Windows as an application platform.

Their stock exploded once Nadella came in, killed off DOA products like Windows RT and Windows Phone, and shifted the focus to Office 365 and Azure cloud where they had a deep enterprise advantage.

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Re:“I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996) by chrisco255 on Thursday January 06, 2022 @11:48AM (#29825929)
Why? The email is from 1996. Gates wasn't worried about platforms that didn't exist in 1996.
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Re:“I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996) by rchaud on Thursday January 06, 2022 @01:47PM (#29827967)
The consumer web absolutely existed in '96. Gates was worried that Java could become the defacto choice for authoring web applications. Microsoft didn't have much of a foothold there at the time.
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