A former Microsoft employee's blog about Microsoft's culture, software development history, and the work behind products like Windows and Office.
HN commenters call it a worthwhile if dated look at the Microsoft mindset, and debate its post on Lotus and DOS.
> betting on the wrong horse (OS/2)
Ahhhh, your hindsight is well developed. I would be interested to know the background on the reasons why Lotus made that bet. We can't know the counterfactual, but Lotus delivering on a platform owned by their deadly competitor Microsoft would seem to me to be a clearly worrysome idea to Lotus at the time. Turned out it was an existentially bad idea. Did Lotus fear Microsoft? "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" is a myth[1] for a reason. Edit: DRDOS errors[2] were one reason Lotus might fear Microsoft. We can just imagine a narritive of a different timeline where Lotus delivered on Windows but did some things differently to beat Excel. I agree, Lotus made other mistakes and Microsoft made some great decisions, but the point remains.
We can also suspect that AMD have a similar choice now where they are forked. Depending on Nvidea/CUDA may be a similar choice for AMD - fail if they do and fail if they don't.
[1] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html
[2] https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/
...until Lotus won't run.
It's a cute saying, but almost certainly apocryphal:
http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html
Microsoft has always put a lot of work into keeping applications running in new OS versions. Raymond Chen has chronicled these efforts over the years in his blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
Many of the compatibility problems have been from apps that used undocumented features or APIs, or made bad assumptions about APIs. So Microsoft has put in compatibility shims and workarounds to keep these apps running.
Every time Raymond describes one of these hacks, there are comments about how they're just adding cruft and bloating Windows, and even worse they're encouraging developers to be lazy or overly clever, and they should just let the apps break so people won't do that.
His reply is always the same: when a customer upgrades Windows and their apps break, they don't blame the app, they blame Windows.
Of course something did break here. Nobody's perfect.
That is not accurate, incidentally.
> "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft."
> Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades?
[0] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html
I'm reminded of the story of Windows NT and how David Cutler commented at one point after the release that divorces and nervous breakdowns were tracked in the program metrics. I expect that's hyperbole, but there is a real cost to these death marches.
I couldn't find that specific quote, though, and being 25 years back it could be a false memory of who said it (I did read it somewhere, if you were on the team at the time, please speak up!). Here are a couple of illustrations[0][1].
[0] http://read.pudn.com/downloads196/ebook/923902/ShowStopper!-The%20Breakneck%20Race%20To%20Create%20WindowsNT%20And%20The%20Next%20Generation%20At%20Microsoft.pdf
[1] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2007/09/dave_cutler_win.html
Microsoft's ugly history is full of sketchy shenanigans, like the time it seemed like they were working to make sure WordPerfect wouldn't run in DOS due to subtle, breaking changes to the API (http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ancient-microsoft-novell-case-ends-in-hung-jury/) or those occasions where they were suspected of kneecapping Lotus in much the same way (http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html).
The new Microsoft leadership seems more interested in building bridges than in crushing and destroying companies Ballmer style, but I could be wrong. Removing win32 seems like a huge mistake both from an optics perspective and because of its impact on partners.
You must not be aware of the long history of Microsoft being very untrustworthy and lying about how their software behaves.
e.g. funding SCO to pursue a campaign against Linux users and threatening to take them to court for using Linux: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/fact-and-fiction-in-the-microsoft-sco-relationship/
e.g. DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run: https://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html
and many, many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft