Microsoft has had a monopoly on office software since the 90s. They illegally leveraged this monopoly to try to destroy competition in other areas. Most infamously, they destroyed Netscape to try to kill competition in the early Internet space. That resulted in a trial for illegally abusing their monopoly which they lost. Then George W. Bush was elected president, and somehow Microsoft effectively got off with essentially no punishment. Admittedly though, part of that was that the judge in the case was so outraged at some of the stuff Microsoft pulled (submitting falsified evidence, having Bill Gates lie under oath repeatedly) that he talked about it in public when he shouldn’t, which opened a door for Microsoft to try to weasel out of the loss.
The “evil” in Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” was widely viewed as being Microsoft. Google was an Internet company in an age where Microsoft was on trial for using their power to make everything about the Internet shitty so that they could control it. In the early days of Google, people weren’t even allowed to use Microsoft software, including Windows, without a special dispensation from the higher-ups. Microsoft effectively avoided any kind of punishment for their abuse of their monopoly, but it distracted them and made them cautious, so they weren’t able to crush Google before it could get going. Before anybody chimes in about how Google is evil, first read up in what Microsoft did. Google might be a bit shady, but where Google got its monopoly by spending hundreds of billions to make its search engine the default, Microsoft used tactics to destroy potential competitors and drive them out of business.
If the US (and the world) had effective enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws, Word would actually have to compete on its own merits. But, because it’s a monopoly, Microsoft can just sit back and keep collecting rent.
Microsoft hurt Netscape, but it was AOL that killed it. At the height of the dotcom bubble, Wall street handed AOL more money than they knew what to do with so AOL bought Netscape. Of course they didn’t have any idea what to do with it (they still kept putting IE on the discs they mailed out to people even when they owned Netscape) and it eventually withered away and died.
The people that ran Netscape correctly predicted it would go this way, but it was a ridiculous amount of money AOL was offering. Luckily they made releasing the code as open source as part of the deal.
No, your revisionist history is wrong. By the time AOL acquired it, Microsoft’s damage had already been done. Its stock price had fallen 50% from its peak value.
The reason AOL didn’t know what to do with Netscape is that it was no longer a viable business due to the interference from Microsoft. Up until Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer for free as part of the OS, the plan for Netscape was to charge for the browser. That was perfectly normal. People charged for every piece of software up until then. But, when they had to compete with Microsoft’s price of free, they had no real business model anymore.
That’s the whole reason that Microsoft was charged with violating antitrust law. They leveraged their operating system monopoly to enter a new business and destroy their main competitor. Even with their falsifying evidence and Bill Gates lying on the stand, it was an open and shut case.
Eh, I was around in that time. Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.
After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0 and it was basically as bloated as Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t until PhoenixFirebird Firefox project that pulled out a browser (and they later pulled out the email client and other things from that monolith) that IE had real competition.
But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier? Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover and there really wasn’t a real answer for IE until Firefox. Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator was worse than IE if you didn’t want a browser that took more than 20 seconds to start up and use up all your memory just in case you might want to use an HTML editor.
Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time it became the outdated garbage we know it as today, but before that it was Netscape that wasn’t improving their product with similar results.
With technology, people tend to do revisionist history by preferring the better story without regards to the actual quality of the tech. But the reality was IE was actually better than Netscape Communicator (says a lot about how bad Communicator was) just like VHS was actually better than Betamax. Just doesn’t make as good a story when it’s about people using a tech that was better instead of the story being about people using inferior tech because of shenanigans.
Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.
Netscape Communicator came out in mid 1997. By that time, Netscape was already doomed because of Microsoft’s illegal bundling.
Netscape’s IPO was in early August of 1995. It opened at $28 per share, and closed at $75 per share on that first day. The browser they were selling at that point was Netscape Navigator, and it was by far the best one available. 2 weeks later Microsoft introduced the first version of Internet Explorer. It was terrible, but it was free. Microsoft kept shoving IE in people’s faces for years, making it the default, bundling it with Windows, and doing everything it could to sabotage Netscape’s business.
Microsoft was able to do this because they were able to subsidize the massive losses for R&D on Internet Explorer and IIS by taking money from their monopoly on operating systems. Netscape didn’t have another business, and it’s very difficult to compete with “free”, so they were doomed.
If you look at a graph of Netscape’s share price, it peaked in late 1995 and by 1997 when it released Communicator it was already dying because of Microsoft’s illegal tactics. 6 months after Communicator was released Netscape had to undergo a big round of layoffs. 1 year after that it was bought by AOL.
There’s no way that this is a story of Netscape failing. It’s quite obviously a story of Microsoft using its monopoly illegally to force a competitor in another area out of business. That was proven in the trial.
After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0
Netscape Communicator was the 4.0 version of the company’s browser. 1.0 came out in December 1994. 2.0 came out in March 1996. 3.0 Came out in August 1996. This supposedly bloated version you’re talking about was the 4.0 release and came out in June 1997. As evidence they were dying by the time they released communicator, they only managed one more release before they were acquired by AOL.
It wasn’t until PhoenixFirebird Firefox project
You do understand the purpose of the Mozilla Corporation and the Firefox project right? They knew that the company was doomed because of what Microsoft had done, and created the Mozilla non-profit as a kind of life-raft so that the browser didn’t simply die when the company was crushed.
In fact those names you crossed out just support what I’m saying: “Firefox was originally named “Phoenix”, a name which implied that it would rise like a Phoenix after Netscape was killed off by Microsoft.”
that IE had real competition.
You have that completely backwards. At first Netscape was the dominant browser, but as Microsoft used its illegal tactics the usage of Netscape declined until it disappeared. But, as they hoped, Firefox did rise from the ashes of the Netscape company and come to compete with Microsoft. But it was really Chrome that killed off Internet Explorer years after Netscape was driven out of business.
But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator
The Mozilla organization was created before the release of Communicator. They already knew their company was doomed by the time Communicator was released.
and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier?
A decade earlier? In the 1980s? Tim Berners-Lee didn’t even describe the web until 1990, so I don’t think selling a web browser was a viable business before that.
Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover
Yes, because they were driven out of business by Microsoft. We covered that already. Most of the talented people just left. jwz bought a bar and left the technology business entirely.
Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator
Why are you so focused on Communicator instead of Navigator?
Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time
The problems with IE were never that it “wasn’t improved over time”, it was that it trampled all over standards and intentionally broke things as part of Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.
people tend to do revisionist history
You seem to be a revisionist historian who doesn’t know the basics of what they’re talking about.
P.S. As an experiment, take a look at that graph of browser share and see if you can spot when the US government sued Microsoft for abusing its monopoly.
Microsoft did lots of shady shit to leverage their quasi monopoly on PC operating systems. However Microsoft Office was actually better than the competition in many aspects. The main competition for Microsoft Office was IBM’s Smart Suite. Excel left industry leader Lotus 1-2-3 in the dust pretty quickly in the early 1990s. MS Word was also better than market leader WordPerfect. Then in the late 1990s Outlook became leading and is still unmatched by anything else. Softmaker Office is the only office suite that still exists from back then.
WordPerfect was the leading word processing program under DOS. When Windows was released Microsoft screwed with them by not giving them full access to all the Windows APIs (something Microsoft was notorious for). Surprise, surprise, at the same time Microsoft was not giving WordPerfect the API info they needed, they were releasing their own competitive word processor in Word.
But, once WordPerfect got access to the APIs, they produced a word processor that was superior to Word. The only reason that Word took off is that Microsoft aggressively bundled it with everything.
As for Outlook, I’ve never met anybody who actually likes it. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s available by default and it’s the only thing compatible with emails from other Outlook users. There’s a reason its nickname is “outhouse”. Outlook did the same things that Microsoft did with HTML and HTTP: embrace, extend, extinguish. They took de-facto and de-jure email standards and modified them so that only other Outlook users could use the email properly. They made sure that if you tried to use anything other than Outlook with Microsoft Exchange, that it wouldn’t quite work right.
With Microsoft it’s always about taking their monopoly in one area and squeezing another area, driving their competitors away. It’s what they’re now doing with developer tools, like github and visual studio code.
That is literally the only other way to organize things, yes. Absolutely. One can only be capitalist or feudalist. God you’re smart for catching my bullshit there.
Microsoft has had a monopoly on office software since the 90s. They illegally leveraged this monopoly to try to destroy competition in other areas. Most infamously, they destroyed Netscape to try to kill competition in the early Internet space. That resulted in a trial for illegally abusing their monopoly which they lost. Then George W. Bush was elected president, and somehow Microsoft effectively got off with essentially no punishment. Admittedly though, part of that was that the judge in the case was so outraged at some of the stuff Microsoft pulled (submitting falsified evidence, having Bill Gates lie under oath repeatedly) that he talked about it in public when he shouldn’t, which opened a door for Microsoft to try to weasel out of the loss.
The “evil” in Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” was widely viewed as being Microsoft. Google was an Internet company in an age where Microsoft was on trial for using their power to make everything about the Internet shitty so that they could control it. In the early days of Google, people weren’t even allowed to use Microsoft software, including Windows, without a special dispensation from the higher-ups. Microsoft effectively avoided any kind of punishment for their abuse of their monopoly, but it distracted them and made them cautious, so they weren’t able to crush Google before it could get going. Before anybody chimes in about how Google is evil, first read up in what Microsoft did. Google might be a bit shady, but where Google got its monopoly by spending hundreds of billions to make its search engine the default, Microsoft used tactics to destroy potential competitors and drive them out of business.
If the US (and the world) had effective enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws, Word would actually have to compete on its own merits. But, because it’s a monopoly, Microsoft can just sit back and keep collecting rent.
Microsoft hurt Netscape, but it was AOL that killed it. At the height of the dotcom bubble, Wall street handed AOL more money than they knew what to do with so AOL bought Netscape. Of course they didn’t have any idea what to do with it (they still kept putting IE on the discs they mailed out to people even when they owned Netscape) and it eventually withered away and died.
The people that ran Netscape correctly predicted it would go this way, but it was a ridiculous amount of money AOL was offering. Luckily they made releasing the code as open source as part of the deal.
No, your revisionist history is wrong. By the time AOL acquired it, Microsoft’s damage had already been done. Its stock price had fallen 50% from its peak value.
The reason AOL didn’t know what to do with Netscape is that it was no longer a viable business due to the interference from Microsoft. Up until Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer for free as part of the OS, the plan for Netscape was to charge for the browser. That was perfectly normal. People charged for every piece of software up until then. But, when they had to compete with Microsoft’s price of free, they had no real business model anymore.
That’s the whole reason that Microsoft was charged with violating antitrust law. They leveraged their operating system monopoly to enter a new business and destroy their main competitor. Even with their falsifying evidence and Bill Gates lying on the stand, it was an open and shut case.
Eh, I was around in that time. Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.
After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0 and it was basically as bloated as Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t until
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox project that pulled out a browser (and they later pulled out the email client and other things from that monolith) that IE had real competition.But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier? Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover and there really wasn’t a real answer for IE until Firefox. Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator was worse than IE if you didn’t want a browser that took more than 20 seconds to start up and use up all your memory just in case you might want to use an HTML editor.
Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time it became the outdated garbage we know it as today, but before that it was Netscape that wasn’t improving their product with similar results.
With technology, people tend to do revisionist history by preferring the better story without regards to the actual quality of the tech. But the reality was IE was actually better than Netscape Communicator (says a lot about how bad Communicator was) just like VHS was actually better than Betamax. Just doesn’t make as good a story when it’s about people using a tech that was better instead of the story being about people using inferior tech because of shenanigans.
So was I.
Netscape Communicator came out in mid 1997. By that time, Netscape was already doomed because of Microsoft’s illegal bundling.
Netscape’s IPO was in early August of 1995. It opened at $28 per share, and closed at $75 per share on that first day. The browser they were selling at that point was Netscape Navigator, and it was by far the best one available. 2 weeks later Microsoft introduced the first version of Internet Explorer. It was terrible, but it was free. Microsoft kept shoving IE in people’s faces for years, making it the default, bundling it with Windows, and doing everything it could to sabotage Netscape’s business.
Microsoft was able to do this because they were able to subsidize the massive losses for R&D on Internet Explorer and IIS by taking money from their monopoly on operating systems. Netscape didn’t have another business, and it’s very difficult to compete with “free”, so they were doomed.
If you look at a graph of Netscape’s share price, it peaked in late 1995 and by 1997 when it released Communicator it was already dying because of Microsoft’s illegal tactics. 6 months after Communicator was released Netscape had to undergo a big round of layoffs. 1 year after that it was bought by AOL.
There’s no way that this is a story of Netscape failing. It’s quite obviously a story of Microsoft using its monopoly illegally to force a competitor in another area out of business. That was proven in the trial.
Netscape Communicator was the 4.0 version of the company’s browser. 1.0 came out in December 1994. 2.0 came out in March 1996. 3.0 Came out in August 1996. This supposedly bloated version you’re talking about was the 4.0 release and came out in June 1997. As evidence they were dying by the time they released communicator, they only managed one more release before they were acquired by AOL.
You do understand the purpose of the Mozilla Corporation and the Firefox project right? They knew that the company was doomed because of what Microsoft had done, and created the Mozilla non-profit as a kind of life-raft so that the browser didn’t simply die when the company was crushed.
In fact those names you crossed out just support what I’m saying: “Firefox was originally named “Phoenix”, a name which implied that it would rise like a Phoenix after Netscape was killed off by Microsoft.”
You have that completely backwards. At first Netscape was the dominant browser, but as Microsoft used its illegal tactics the usage of Netscape declined until it disappeared. But, as they hoped, Firefox did rise from the ashes of the Netscape company and come to compete with Microsoft. But it was really Chrome that killed off Internet Explorer years after Netscape was driven out of business.
The Mozilla organization was created before the release of Communicator. They already knew their company was doomed by the time Communicator was released.
A decade earlier? In the 1980s? Tim Berners-Lee didn’t even describe the web until 1990, so I don’t think selling a web browser was a viable business before that.
Yes, because they were driven out of business by Microsoft. We covered that already. Most of the talented people just left. jwz bought a bar and left the technology business entirely.
Why are you so focused on Communicator instead of Navigator?
The problems with IE were never that it “wasn’t improved over time”, it was that it trampled all over standards and intentionally broke things as part of Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.
You seem to be a revisionist historian who doesn’t know the basics of what they’re talking about.
P.S. As an experiment, take a look at that graph of browser share and see if you can spot when the US government sued Microsoft for abusing its monopoly.
Microsoft did lots of shady shit to leverage their quasi monopoly on PC operating systems. However Microsoft Office was actually better than the competition in many aspects. The main competition for Microsoft Office was IBM’s Smart Suite. Excel left industry leader Lotus 1-2-3 in the dust pretty quickly in the early 1990s. MS Word was also better than market leader WordPerfect. Then in the late 1990s Outlook became leading and is still unmatched by anything else. Softmaker Office is the only office suite that still exists from back then.
WordPerfect was the leading word processing program under DOS. When Windows was released Microsoft screwed with them by not giving them full access to all the Windows APIs (something Microsoft was notorious for). Surprise, surprise, at the same time Microsoft was not giving WordPerfect the API info they needed, they were releasing their own competitive word processor in Word.
But, once WordPerfect got access to the APIs, they produced a word processor that was superior to Word. The only reason that Word took off is that Microsoft aggressively bundled it with everything.
As for Outlook, I’ve never met anybody who actually likes it. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s available by default and it’s the only thing compatible with emails from other Outlook users. There’s a reason its nickname is “outhouse”. Outlook did the same things that Microsoft did with HTML and HTTP: embrace, extend, extinguish. They took de-facto and de-jure email standards and modified them so that only other Outlook users could use the email properly. They made sure that if you tried to use anything other than Outlook with Microsoft Exchange, that it wouldn’t quite work right.
With Microsoft it’s always about taking their monopoly in one area and squeezing another area, driving their competitors away. It’s what they’re now doing with developer tools, like github and visual studio code.
MS Word is significantly worse than WordPerfect. Reveal codes FTW.
There is currently* nothing Microsoft Office does that I can’t happily do in LibreOffice
The only thing I miss is Excel. Nothing even compares. I use other stuff now, but man my spreadsheets used to be beautiful. Lol
Capitalism? Or nice things? Your decision.
You prefer feudalism?
That is literally the only other way to organize things, yes. Absolutely. One can only be capitalist or feudalist. God you’re smart for catching my bullshit there.
Ah, you’re a fan of dictatorships then?
Only feudal ones, as established.
Plenty of nice things in capitalism
In its gut, being digested, sure