[repolfx]

What kind of historical revisionism is this? Microsoft has always faced competent and well resourced competitors at every step of the way.

Apple, IBM for consumer operating systems. Later on NeXTStep and BeOS. UNIX vendors for Windows Server.

Lotus, WordPerfect for office suites.

Borland, Sun for developer tools.

PalmOS, then Nokia, Apple and Google for Windows Phone.

Gates is being modest. Microsoft beat these companies again and again, and only partly through over-aggressive tactics. Mostly his competitors just didn't invest in the right things at the right times, or got distracted, or couldn't hire the right talent, or made other strategic mistakes. Gates wasn't perfect either but he was smart enough to make plenty of good decisions, and turn on a dime when he realised he'd made mistakes (e.g. the internet pivot).

The idea that Gates isn't a good example of meritocracy is a strange one indeed. I can't help but think this sort of attack on "meritocracy" comes from SJWs who hate the idea that maybe the people at the top look the way they do because that's who deserves to be there!

[peterashford]

I don't think it's historical revisionism. The initial stroke of luck was IBM not realising what a gold mine they had gifted Microsoft. Beyond that point, MS leveraged their platform advantage to neutralise competitors. They made Lotus 1-2-3 run slower on their platform, then copied it. Stacker's code, they straight out stole. Once they were in a powerful position, that gifted them more power, but it was luck that got them there in the first place. None of that has to do with any meritorious coding by Gates.

[repolfx]

OK, there's a lot to unpack here, but none of it supports your point. Firstly: the whole "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" is an urban legend.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Lotus employees themselves said they don't recall DOS ever breaking or slowing down their app, and Microsoft gave them betas to test. Any compatibility issues were bugs in DOS that Microsoft fixed. So you're repeating long since debunked myths here. Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is one of the strategic issues Gates got right.

Secondly, IBM not realising the OS was a "gold mine" is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That's not luck. Luck is a dice roll, it's something that could happen to anyone. Noticing important opportunities other firms have missed due to lack of strategic insight isn't "luck", that's indeed the heart of merit!

Thirdly, Stacker wasn't stolen. The Stacker lawsuit was about patents, it happened because Microsoft evaluated Stac's technology and decided to go with a different compression engine, which pissed off Stac so they sued. The judge concluded any infringement wasn't "wilful" i.e. the Microsoft people who did DoubleSpace didn't know about Stac's patents. This is the kind of dispute that happens to every software company.

Finally, being in a powerful position didn't automatically "gift them more power". It doesn't work like that. Look at Azure - it doesn't benefit from Windows at all, yet is growing like a weed and beating GCP. That's not something that was gifted to them merely by being there.

What I'm seeing here is a very strange view of business and leadership - good decisions are described as luck, hard work to build new products is zeroed out and described as merely 'gifts', and a bunch of garbled or false urban legends are used to minimise their achievements.

Look, I've never worked for Microsoft and have no particular reason to love them. In the 1990s I was a full on Microsoft-hating Linux fanboy in fact. But with the benefit of age and time, and watching competitors, I can see now just how many good decisions Gates made repeatedly to get him and his firm where he is now. It wasn't luck.

[PopeDotNinja]

> What kind of historical revisionism is this?

I'd guess it applies the initial deal Microsoft had with IBM to write DOS, along with keeping the rights to the IP. A whole lot of luck was involved: being in the right time at the right place, IBM focusing more on hardware, etc.

I ran a business for a while, and I distinctly remember several key moments where I got super lucky. Eventually the business got big enough that less luck was required to make it on a daily basis.

[peterashford]

"SJWs" is a pejorative not worthy of serious discussions. I'm sure you could make your point on its own merits without inventing strawmen to attack.

[belorn]

The term belongs in the same bin as toxic masculinity, mainsplaining, manspreading and Patriarchy. Words people one on side of a political spectrum use since they think its descriptive, and the other side find that they only end discussions.

[repolfx]

SJW is not a pejorative, it's a descriptive term for people whose overriding concern is social justice, which they define as equitable outcomes, and whose concern is sufficiently great that they spent lots of time engaging in aggressive rhetoric and tactics ("warrioring").

Remember what happened to GitHub's rug that said "meritocracy" on it? Pictures of the rug reached a bunch of feminist forums and they then started demanding it be got rid of because if GitHub is a meritocracy then why isn't it full of women? They then kicked up such a stink that one of the first acts of the new CEO was to get rid of it - sending a rather powerful message to everyone else about who really runs the place.

It's therefore an extremely relevant term for extremely serious discussions, which is why it crops up so much. There are many people who describe themselves is nearly identical words, such as "social justice activist". If everyone who used the term SJW started using SJA instead, rapidly you'd come to the view that SJA is also a pejorative, simply because so much discussion of these types of people is disapproving in nature.

[andrekandre]

what does the role of anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior from microsoft play in that narrative?

maybe it’s more nuanced...