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Re:My First BillG Review (2006) by ncmncm on Thursday September 15, 2022 @05:46AM (#32849399)
Even moreso: Microsoft actively retarded development in the field.

Before Microsoft, if it didn't work, you sent it back and demanded a refund. Crashing was plenty reason to demand and get a refund.

It was Microsoft that got people to blame themselves when things didn't work ("did you try rebooting?") and never, ever offering a refund. Microsoft got people used to "defragmenting" their disks. (Nobody has ever needed to defrag a Linux filesystem.)

Remember when it came out that Windows 95 would crash all by itself if left running for, what, 39 days? Nobody had ever got it to work for that long. Before Microsoft, a crash meant you had to reboot, and that meant a product failure. After, crashing didn't even have a name, and I was shocked to learn that "crashing" now meant you had to reinstall the OS, which everybody just did regularly, in case it might fix something.

So, no: Bill Gates provided strictly negative value for his $billions.

Re:My First BillG Review (2006) by colordrops on Thursday September 15, 2022 @12:25PM (#32854382)
I suffered through all that!

You just reminded me about how IE was designed to prevent the internet from growing. What a wart of a company. Held back the software world for 20 years.

Re:My First BillG Review (2006) by ncmncm on Thursday September 15, 2022 @01:28PM (#32855462)
Hundreds of millions did! MS apologists always astonish me.

Even extreme IE bugginess was to try to defend their installed-app business.