[AnthonyMouse]

> Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.).

You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor.

Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc.

They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.

[0x0nyandesu]

Windows market share is the lowest it's ever been. Haven't used windows myself since March 2020 and nothing is making me want to change that.

[lotsofpulp]

As far as I am concerned, the whole future of Microsoft is Azure and extracting rent from Office.

[Tozen]

Well, until the LibreOffice Foundation gets a bit smarter or greater business support from some heavy hitters. Microsoft relying on Office is on shaky ground.

People arguably use MS Office out of habit and since it's a forced de facto standard at work. But, there is no reason they can't switch to LibreOffice for 95% plus of what people are doing.

[lotsofpulp]

Leaders of large organizations need someone outside the organization to blame when things go wrong. You cannot do that with Libre Office.

[0x0nyandesu]

My org is basically at this point exclusively Google docs. Chromebooks for support staff and Linux laptops for devs. I think only sales is still on windows.

[jacquesm]

And they can't even get those right, between Skype and Teams it would be hard to pick the bigger failure.

[ta3567367]

Underestimating the JVM there a bit. Sucks that Oracle tried to monster it, but it's a solid workhorse. Also, down with MS, leopards don't change their stripes so easily, a change of helm won't turn a company with greed so deeply entrenched in their DNA. *Spots not stripes. Or tigers.

[AnthonyMouse]

So this requires some context.

Java was released by Sun Microsystems, a Unix vendor with their own hardware architecture. The big feature was "write once, run anywhere." Write the program once and it would run on Windows/Intel as well as Solaris/SPARC.

The Java language wasn't horrible and WORA was a big advantage in the days when there were half a dozen Unix vendors plus Mac and Windows and Novell Netware etc. So it was becoming popular, and every app the developer decided to write in Java was one that wasn't tied to the Win32 API and therefore Windows.

It's also possible to compile other languages to Java bytecode as along as they didn't use OS-specific APIs -- and Java provided platform-independent ones. So there was a real risk that everything would end up running on a platform-independent JVM. Which Microsoft successfully prevented from happening for long enough for Sun to run out of money and get consumed by Oracle.

[com2kid]

It is hard to remember, or for younger developers to believe, but there was a time in the mid 90s when:

1. Most programing languages sucked

2. Java was fresh and new

Java had a lot going for it. It was free, with a functioning IDE that had a working graphical debugger! MS had just about finished killing Delphi (which also cost $$) and over in *nix land the GUI libraries were fighting amongst themselves and Linux wasn't something even an average developer was going to install.

So you had Perl, raw C, the horrors that were DSLs and frameworks written in the c++ of the time, then Java came along.

Applets failed, sure. And back then everyone wanted their GUIs to look like the platform native UI (how times have changed!) but Swing was super easy to write UIs in.

I'd wager the majority of programmers, outside of ex-LISP folks, didn't know what closures were, and functions as first class objects wasn't on anyone's mind.

So all of Java's shortcomings didn't seem like a big deal. It "compiled" fast, had actual packages you could distribute and import easily, and the compiler errors made sense.

So yeah Java was a fresh breath when it came out.

Then c# came out a bit later and was basically better in a million small ways from day 1, except it wasn't open source so a community never built up around it in the same way.

Now days we are spoiled for languages to choose from.

[stickfigure]

None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"? And they're misleading at best.

Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system. That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality (see: every other OS). Just imagine shipping a computing device today without a browser! Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode. The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.

Java was never a Windows replacement. And as a platform it is doing just fine.

Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. It's not like everyone is using Skype (which MS bought, not built, and long after the IM dust had settled).

Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach. It requires professional knowledge to get email delivered these days.

[nitrogen]

None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"?

They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser.

That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality

That's what BG said in his deposition, but MS was the only company who embedded IE into the OS to make ActiveDesktop and put VBScript and ActiveX into IE.

Java was never a Windows replacement.

AWT and Swing and browser applets were Windows replacements.

Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.

You're talking about things that happened ten years later. There was a time when one app would connect to every network.

Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.

MS Exchange dominates email.

[dralley]

>They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser.

All of those efforts failed miserably. They have nothing to do with the actual reasons why Netscape died, why Firefox is trending down, why Java never became dominant, why Open/LibreOffice never replaced MS Office, why open chat protocols were replaced by chat services from Google, Facebook, Discord and Slack, why Java applets never caught on, etc.

[nitrogen]

All of those efforts failed miserably.

The grandparent comment is right on the money with "You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor."

MS bought at least 10-15 years of dominance with EEE, vaporware, and other anticompetitive practices.

Just like Google killed RSS with Reader.

Just like Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to avoid them potentially growing into replacements for Facebook.

The goal was to kill or delay an upstart that would distract users away from their core products, not to produce a successful competitor to the upstart.

Netscape

Netscape no doubt had its own problems, but MS deeply embedding IE into Windows 98 was a huge part of them.

Java

Actually Java was pretty dominant. Interactive web was either Flash or Java. If it was for entertainment, it was Flash, if it was for work or computation, it was Java.

Open/LibreOffice

Have you forgotten WordPerfect?

[stickfigure]

WordPerfect lost to Word for the exact same reason Lotus 1-2-3 lost to Excel. They were extremely late to the transition to GUIs. By the time they had Windows versions, the world had already switched.

Java was never widely deployed on the web. The only services that ever used applets in any meaningful way were a handful of Asia-only banks. Applets were stillborn for a large number of reasons, all of which you can blame on Sun.

MS giving away IE for free torched Netscape's business model, but that seems like a strange objection - we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.

[nitrogen]

They were extremely late to the transition to GUIs. By the time they had Windows versions, the world had already switched.

In the case of WordPerfect, what I recall reading was that this was in small part because WP kept writing everything in pure assembly language for way too long, and in large part because MS gave Word a leg up with internal Windows APIs. This was raised in one of the antitrust suits against MS, but I don't recall which one. Either way, I had used a GUI WYSYWIG version of WordPerfect (for DOS) long before I'd ever even seen MS Word of any form.

Java was never widely deployed on the web.

This is a point that would have to be settled by numbers, and I don't have them. What I do know is that every simple web-based calculator app was written in Java, and that in my circles installing Java was one of the first things one did after installing Windows and a browser.

we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.

I think this was a mistake. All that "you're a feature, not a product" nonsense is a distraction from the insane degree of consolidation we've tolerated in technology. There should be thousands of billion dollar tech companies each serving in interoperable niches, not a handful of trillion dollar tech companies.

[AnthonyMouse]

> All of those efforts failed miserably.

To this day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...

There was a period in the early 2000s where that was everywhere, and that was when Netscape died.

Causing intentional problems with non-Microsoft Office products on Microsoft operating systems is what caused everyone to get locked into Microsoft Office file formats.

Microsoft successfully suppressed Java for long enough for Sun to die.

You can't just say "no it isn't" and make it otherwise.

[trulyme]

> Causing intentional problems with non-Microsoft Office products on Microsoft operating systems is what caused everyone to get locked into Microsoft Office file formats.

So it's like Google making their services slow on Firefox? History repeats itself, only the names are different.

[stickfigure]

It's tiresome refuting misinformation like this point by point, so I'll just pick the one I have deep knowledge of:

> Microsoft successfully suppressed Java for long enough for Sun to die.

Tell me, how did Microsoft "suppress" Java? The main contention of Sun's lawsuit is that Microsoft was harming Java by adding features (most notably, delegate - ie closures). That almost nobody used. I know, I used them. There's no meaningful interpretation of the word "suppress" that applies here.

Furthermore, Java was always a cost center for Sun. There is no alternate history where Java somehow saved Sun. They made their money from selling hardware that eventually nobody bought.

Set aside your blind hate and learn from people that actually worked with these technologies in that era.

[noAnswer]

I can only speak as a SysAdmin at the time. There where sites/applets that did only run in IE with MSs version of Java and sites/applets that only run with Suns Java. I remember having to create different desktop shortcuts for differently configured browsers. That (plus the long startup time of the odd Java based sysadmin-tool) lead to a general feeling of "Java == Bad". Which shined through to invitation to tender. No mater whether the subject had anything to do with something user facing.

[nitrogen]

Tell me, how did Microsoft "suppress" Java?

One way to suppress something is by diluting it or distracting from it with a bunch of slightly different options. Kind of like the spoiler effect in first-past-the-post elections.

[mcguire]

"MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java."

You mean C#?

[nitrogen]

C# was part of what survived all of that, but I mean MS's original forays into Java.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun's_litigatio...

[selectodude]

>Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Dropbox, which has also been falling apart trying to become a product.

[letitbeirie]

> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system

It's hard to decouple the fate of Netscape from their catastrophic decision to rewrite their entire codebase from scratch:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[mixmastamyk]

That was the final nail in the coffin, but they had been pushed aside before that. Hence the final "hail mary."

[AnthonyMouse]

> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system.

You're ignoring the actual EEE part.

Microsoft didn't just include a browser, they included a browser that didn't follow standards and had a bunch of its own extensions. Then since Windows was the largest platform, lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls and other IE-specific features on websites, and users had to switch to IE even if they preferred a different browser.

> Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Steve Jobs did the same thing. You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers to force developers into making native apps where Apple gets 30% of the developer's revenue and can exclude apps that compete with their own services.

> Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode.

The history of Office goes like this. There were many competitors and many users preferred the competitors, but Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems so that people would use Office instead.

Then, once Office had the most market share and everybody was locked into it because all their documents were in its proprietary format, they used the revenues they denied to competitors to make Office better. Now you say, look how good it is! But how did it get there and why is nobody else?

> The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Java was never a Windows replacement.

It wasn't supposed to be an operating system. It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems, which Microsoft successfully impaired.

> Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.

This is the one where they basically failed, because the network effect counterbalanced the leverage of the Windows monopoly. If your friends had ICQ then you installed ICQ even if you already had MSN Messenger installed as part of Windows.

But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE. If they'd succeeded in getting MSN Messenger into a dominant market position then they could discontinue or cripple the non-Windows clients and lock people into Windows with it.

> Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.

Outlook.com has 400 million users.

> And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach.

Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach, by marking email from small email servers as spam even when it wasn't. Plausibly on purpose.

And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange. Gmail did that by offering 1GB free storage back when that was expensive and subsidizing it with Google Search revenues.

[mrtranscendence]

> You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers

This is not a serious take. Safari on iOS is a very capable browser and crazy things have been done with it. Where it does make it difficult to replace a dedicated app, this can be ascribed to security more easily than "Apple wants one of its major iOS features to be bad".

> Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems

This is not a serious take. I'd love to see proof of this. There are lots of reasons Office became dominant, some of them even anticompetitive; "MS made competitors crash" is probably not one of them.

> It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems

This is not a serious take. Java was never intended to make it easy for users to switch operating systems. Sun did not make "supplant Windows!" one of its KPIs, and the continued dominance of Windows is neither here nor there when evaluating whether Java was successful. Java's pitch was to make writing platform-independent code easier, but at best that's tangentially related to having users switch OS's.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

So?

> And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange.

You're replying to a comment about people who run their own web server, so talking about Exchange lock-in is neither here nor there.

[stickfigure]

> lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls

Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s

> The history of Office goes like this.

I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

> Java

Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

> But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE.

You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

"Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

> Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach

Man where do you get this stuff? I wrote a mailing list server that had a brief moment of popularity, and the underlying (Java!) smtp library that lots of other folks use still today. I know a thing or two about smtp, and I gave up running my own email servers a long time ago. Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team. Barring some sort of massive change in the protocols, the home email server is dead dead dead. Microsoft and Google are the symptom, not the cause.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s

It did take over the web, for long enough to kill Netscape. Then they stopped caring because Netscape was already dead.

> I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

You're denying that Microsoft caused intentional problems for companies making competing products on Microsoft operating systems?

> Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

For Java to pose a threat to Windows it had to be a large enough proportion of software to allow people to switch away from Windows. To succeed they only needed to keep it below that threshold, not keep anyone from developing any Java applications at all.

> You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

Explain Internet Explorer's market share circa 2004.

> "Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

So a number of users larger than the population of the United States is to be disregarded because one other provider's is bigger?

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team.

The problem is completely the other way around. Receiving spam is a minor inconvenience. The biggest problem with running a small email server is that messages you send are marked as spam by large email providers even when they're not.

[mixmastamyk]

How odd… seem to have all the facts at your disposal, yet use them to support the argument of the person you are adamant that you disagree with. Not a combo I've seen.

MS did destroy whole swaths of the industry that threatened it—on purpose. A lot of the initiatives failed later, but I'm sure they cried all the way to the bank and their record-breaking yachts.

That a lot of their competitors stumbled on their own was simple fate. Every company stumbles once in a while. Unlike MS which was bolstered by monopoly, a single significant mistake meant the end of most competitors. MS on the other hand was heavily insured with a river of money after the IBM deal.