Bill Gates was a ruthless, cutthroat businessman who made his vast wealth by using every dirty trick in the book (and inventing a few new dirty tricks along the way) and then using Microsoft's success to effectively hold the computer industry hostage for 20 years.
He viewed any successful non-Microsoft software as a threat, even if that software was for Windows. And if that software was cross-platform he viewed it as an existential threat, since it lessened people's dependence on Microsoft.
Internet Explorer? Microsoft didn't make it. They completely missed the boat on the World Wide Web, and with the popularity of the Netscape Navigator web browser (which was available on almost every computer, from $20k SGI workstations to Macs to Windows PCs), Bill Gates & co saw a threat to Microsoft's dominance, so they rushed to get their own web browser by buying one from a company called Spyglass Software. Now, since Netscape Navigator cost money, everyone assumed Microsoft would charge for Internet Explorer, and Microsoft's contract with Spyglass Software promised to give Spyglass a cut of whatever money they made from Internet Explorer sales. So what did Microsoft do? They released Internet Explorer for free, which was something none of their competitors could do since Microsoft had such deep pockets. Spyglass Software was ruined, and so was Netscape eventually. Once Internet Explorer was available, Microsoft threatened not to sell Windows to any PC manufacturer that bundled Netscape Navigator, which would later get them in trouble with the Department of Justice and the EU.
DirectX? Began life as an OpenGL knock-off that would (Microsoft hoped) lock-in developers to Windows. Hell, Microsoft was so afraid of OpenGL (since it was cross platform and the industry standard at the time) that they offered to partner with SGI (creator of OpenGL) on a new, cross platform graphics library called FireGL. Except that Microsoft had no intention of actually releasing FireGL. They hoped working on FireGL would distract SGI from advancing OpenGL long enough to let DirectX (then called Direct3D) catch up to it, and when their plan worked Microsoft just up and abandoned FireGL.
When 3D accelerators were new (which are now called GPUs), there was a much larger number of companies developing desktop GPUs than the nVidia/AMD/Intel tri-opoly we have today, and many of them were too small to afford to create their own full OpenGL implementations. Since most PC GPUs at the time only implemented a small subset of OpenGL in hardware, Microsoft wrote a full software OpenGL implementation and then offered it to GPU companies, so those companies could just replace the parts that their GPU implemented in hardware and still have a full OpenGL driver. Once they had all spent a good deal of time doing this, Microsoft actually refused to license any of their OpenGL code for release, effectively guaranteeing that smaller GPU companies would only have support for DirectX.
Kayden Brooks
You sound like a hater.
Julian Jackson
Video For Windows? VFW (now called Windows Media or whatever) only came into being because Microsoft literally stole the source code to QuickTime For Windows. Both Microsoft and Intel were having a hard time getting video to play smoothly on PCs, when Apple surprised them both by releasing QuickTime For Windows, a port of their QuickTime video framework for Macintosh. QuickTime For Windows could to smooth video playback on ordinary PCs with no special hardware, and Microsoft and Intel were caught completely off guard by it. Apple had contracted out to a 3rd party company to do the Windows port of QuickTime, so what did MS do? They went to the same company and gave them a ton of money to develop Video For Windows, but an insanely short schedule, knowing full well that the company would essentially have to re-use a lot of the QuickTime For Windows source code to get the project done on time.
When Apple found out (their contract with the other company stated that Apple owned all the QuickTime For Windows source code), they went ballistic and sued Microsoft. Microsoft had been caught red-handed and knew that Apple had them by the balls. So MS settled. Remember when Microsoft "bailed out" Apple in the 90s by buying $150 million in Apple stock? Despite what the tech press reported, that's not what actually happened. The $150 million in non-voting Apple stock that Microsoft bought was part of their settlement (Apple was no longer on the verge of bankruptcy by that point, and didn't need to be bailed out). The settlement also had Microsoft agreeing to port MS Office and Internet Explorer to Macintosh.
So a lot of people my age tend to view Bill Gates' recent charities as an attempt to whitewash his reputation and, in a way, buy his way into heaven.
Mason Martin
Not only that, but they had deals with PC manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc.) that gave them a huge discount when they installed Windows, but, there was a clause in the deal saying that if they ever sold a computer without Windows they were in violation of that license and had to pay full price for Windows.
That meant that you couldn't buy a pre-built computer without buying Windows.
There was also an infamous story of a company Microsoft wanted to buy that refused to agree to the deal. Microsoft found they had one major customer, so they bought the customer and shut it down. This left the first company with nobody to buy their products, and Microsoft was later able to buy them at a cut rate. Then there's the whole Dr. DOS evil they pulled.
The "don't be evil" in Google's unofficial motto is a direct reference to Microsoft. Even his Simpsons character
was evil.
I don't think Gates is necessarily trying to whitewash his reputation. Even at the height of his power he always said he intended to give away most of his wealth so his kids (if he had any) weren't multi-billionaires. On the other hand, it is really annoying that 90s and 00s kids think of Gates as nothing but a humanitarian, and don't realize how much better computing would be today it it hadn't been for him. He single-handedly destroyed a lot of good innovations, in order to consolidate more power under Microsoft.
Dominic Thompson
On top of this, consider the World Wide Web Consortium (The "W3C") an outside standardizing body that would place all browsers on a level playing field by requesting they all adhere to W3 Compliance for HTML.
Bill Gates looked at the W3C standards body and decided that not only was Internet Explorer NOT going to try to be compliant, it would PURPOSEFULLY try to be as NON-COMPLIANT as possible with the W3 standards for HTML. This was to make websites basically malfunction as hard as possible unless you wrote code the Internet Explorer way. Opera and Firefox tried to be as compliant as possible but it was not possible to write code for the standards compliant HTML/JS that would also run in Internet Explorer. The goal was to get as many people to ditch Firefox in exchange for IE.
There was a famous story that i can't seem to unearth via google but it involved some code in Internet Explorer that would specifically mis-render the Opera Browser homepage. MS was dirty, dirty, dirty.
Kayden Peterson
By the way, Microsoft still abuse OEM shenanigans.
I had to buy a laptop because lack of space (I was living in a room that literally only fit my bed, so I needed a computer that I could use while sitting on the bed), of course this mean you must buy a OEM machine... And to my surprise, almost no manufacturer is willing to sell Linux laptops (excepting some guys specialized in that, but living in Brazil that means paying crazy import taxes I could not afford).
I found out that Dell was selling Linux machines... I checked, and after seeing the result I also checked for Desktops: Linux machines cost about 150 USD MORE than Windows machines with the same hardware... I guess that MS is just bribing Dell to do that (probably giving Dell money for each license "sold" instead of charging Dell).
I ended buying an ASUS laptop with Windows 8, I really DON'T wanted Windows 8, but it was the only thing I could afford (all laptops I found without Windows, be it with other OS, or no OS, were more expensive), then the first thing I did when it arrived was try to remove windows and install Fedora, only to have so much trouble with the UEFI SecureBoot that I had to give up.
It worked (I mean, for Microsoft), this was 3 years ago
Gavin Torres
they put 106 million $ into SCO (formerly Caldera) to support its baseless copyright claims against Linux.
SCO came to own the copyright on a few fundamental versions of Unix. When they saw Linux rising, they threatened to sue every Linux-using company they could find, claiming that Linux had stolen Unix source code. They sued some of the largest Linux vendors and tried to sell licenses for other companies' distros of Linux at 700$ PER CPU. After literally years of saber-rattling, the claims were found to be absolutely baseless.
Just to add one major technique Microsoft essentially invented (and frequently improved upon) -- "embrace and extend". Microsoft leveraged its de-facto monopoly in conjunction with the standardization process in several ways:
1) Microsoft took existing standards and then added non-standard features on top of them, encouraging users to take advantage of them and thus limit compatibility. Often, implementations were just close enough that they'd almost interoperate -- making networks with standard implementations seem unstable or of poor quality the moment that a microsoft implementation is added. (Ex: LDAP vs Kerberos)
2) Microsoft put through several standards of its own, by itself, based on existing proprietary formats, in order to interfere with standards being created through other standardization agencies. (Ex: OOXML, an xml encapsulation of Microsoft office binary blobs required to be bug-compatible with office, introduced in order to compete with the OpenDocument format being standardized by the people behind the OpenOffice project)
3) Working on standards committees and then releasing intentionally incompatible implementations just before the standard is ratified. (Ex: SMIL, a W3C standard from 1998 for performing most of the functions that Flash did, including movie playing; Microsoft was on the committee along with Apple and Real, and the day that the standard was approved Microsoft bundled a version of SMIL with IE where every SMIL tag had to be prefixed by a string indicating that it was MSIE SMIL -- making it incompatible with the Apple and Real versions, splitting the user-base in two, and essentially killing Real. The components that made up SMIL were split in half a decade later, with one half becoming SVG and the other half becoming most of HTML5. So, Microsoft prevented us from having what amounts to SVG and HTML5 in 1998, and instead gave us ten years of shitty flash players.)
Anthony Mitchell
It's important to note that people aren't just upset that his filthy, illegal business practices made him the richest man in the world. It's that it set the computer industry back a decade or twenty years in some cases.
Windows was a steaming pile of crap with no memory protection, no security, and terrible multiprocessing all the way through Windows 95/98 etc. and not much better with NT. Had other companies been able to compete in a non-monopolized market, better technologies would have been on the desktop ages ago. Most people are still stuck with Windows, though some have moved to a BSD UNIX (note: not linux) based MacOS X.
Another example that leaps to mind is how most people don't know how to do email right today, even ones who consider themselves to be computer literate. MS Outlook has trained people to use email in the most brain-damaged, counter-productive way possible. It's difficult to quantify the man-eons of lost productivity that has resulted and continues today. For examples of how to use email right, look at the bottom-posting mailing lists like the linux kernel mailing list or the mailing list of any big open source project.
Logan Gomez
microsoft partnered with IBM to develop an operating system a few years before NT came out...
Microsoft then pulled out, and, in a few weeks, NT was born, with, among other things, NTFS, the FS developed for IBM. NT became the foundation of what has now become, after some truly spectacular development failures after XP, the windows we know today.
Also, netscape was free for personal use, but charged for commercial use.
Then there was microsoft paying customers to pack international standard bodies (iso?) to shove through office open xml.
Jeremiah Ward
TL;DR
Zachary Hill
Nice thread OP
Brayden Davis
Is this OC? I'm impressed. Nice story bro.
Levi Barnes
Can you cite some sources?
Grayson Nguyen
...
Andrew Watson
Preaching to the choir. Get a blog.
Wyatt Morris
literally history
Leo Watson
My bullshit detector is kinda beeping here and there. I can't find ANY reference to FireGL that is not the ATI professional line of cards. Also DirectX only started to look like Open GL on the version 8. Before that it was a huge display list madness from hell that worked nothing like Open GL, being more akin to a slightly higher level GPU inner work.
Wyatt Wright
I don't think average Sup Forums babbies are upto the speed, OP
Brayden Reyes
is this a redpill thread?
Jayden Wright
>being THIS mad
lmao
Robert Turner
kek Too bad no one took IE seriously and it gradually failed
Luke Walker
His daughters will destroy his legacy.
Carson Hernandez
This was viewed as such a crock of shit at the time that IBM basically flat-out indemnified all of its customers using Linux. Frankly, Darrel McBride should probably be in jail after all this. He most certainly wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to commit what amounts to extortion.
The entire case really reeks, too. SCO was one of the best distributors of x86 Unix prior to the rise of Linux, but it merged with Caldera (a very prominent Linux company in the mid-to-late 90s, with a very innovative desktop distribution), and things changed after that (I'm not sure WHAT changed, though - they were awesome, then they lost their marbles), eventually resulting in a company that literally pretty much lived to commit extortion on Linux users based on a flimsy infringement pretext. I think SCO technically still exists as a zombie of a company, but fortunately at this point I think it's been defanged, so while deep down it still wants to feast on your brains, it can't get past your skull with just gums.
Ayden Long
It wasn't tht they wanted to kill random companies, but more that they wanted to protect their own inferior products.
E.g., ibm/Ms Dos 3.3 came out in April 1987. It was pretty good.
Ibm/Ms dos 4 came out in July 1988. It was a buggy mess. Fixed as 4.01 in November, but dos 3.3 still sold.
DR dos 5 came out in April 1990. It is much more advanced than Ms dos, so Ms announce Ms dos 5 with the same feature set. However Ms dos 5 doesn't come out for a full 12 months after that, so the announcement can only have been anticompetitive. MS doesn't fully catch up with Dr dos until 1993, but it still outsells it due to its vapor announcements.
And the Windows 3.1 running on DR-DOS debacle (it pretty much didn't). You also had the interesting hidden API stuff that helped kill SmartSuite off... no matter how much they optimised it Office was faster; because it was cheating.
I seem to remember someone sat down in the late 90's and wrote Windows 3.1 from the published API's, at least enough of a skeleton that programs should think they were running in 3.1. SmartSuite fired up. Office didn't and bitched about API's missing.
James Richardson
Please keep this thread alive while I sleep.
You mean putting lots of quotes? Teach me how to do that senpai.
Dominic Scott
Not OP but it legit makes me mad that the best FS your typical win user will be able to use for the next decade was made in 1993.
They're actually holding a lot of shit back.
Carson Richardson
That too, was stolen from the IBM
Liam Peterson
Ok kid.
Oliver Watson
Do you have a sauce on this? Not that I don't believe you I just want the extra ammo and am too lazy to find it myself.
>DirectX? Began life as an OpenGL knock-off that would (Microsoft hoped) lock-in developers to Windows. Hell, Microsoft was so afraid of OpenGL (since it was cross platform and the industry standard at the time) that they offered to partner with SGI (creator of OpenGL) on a new, cross platform graphics library called FireGL. Except that Microsoft had no intention of actually releasing FireGL. They hoped working on FireGL would distract SGI from advancing OpenGL long enough to let DirectX (then called Direct3D) catch up to it, and when their plan worked Microsoft just up and abandoned FireGL.
>Being THIS desperate
Hudson Thomas
>Spyglass Software promised to give Spyglass a cut of whatever money they made from Internet Explorer sales. So what did Microsoft do? They released Internet Explorer for free what a deal man. "I'll give you a cut"
Evan Garcia
>holding humanity's intellectual progress hostage for personal gain lmao yeah h8rz amirite?
Robert Cox
How old are you.
It absolutely dominated until the age of chrome.
Ryan Sanders
>NTFS with checksums and semi functional dedup
I used to be stuck with that shit Free your mind and your ass will follow
Ayden Hill
I knew there was some overlap between quicktime and early video for windows, because they used a lot of the same codecs (cross-platform codecs like indeo 2, 3, 4, and 5, and cinepak). what I never knew was the overlap in source code. then with quicktime 3 the cross-compatibility ended. they could play the old files, but the quicktime format was modified in such a way windows media player couldn't play the newer files anymore (I thought it was due to bidirectional frames, but I'm still not sure)
thank god for ffmpeg, libav, mpc, vlc, etc...
if it weren't for them, we'd be stuck with proprietary media players playing proprietary formats, bundling whatever they please (quicktime, real, wmp, whatever crap would be released for flv, etc)
Levi Lewis
Wow, this is a good effortpost. I agree, Gates recent charity spending is just a drop in the ocean compared to the damage that his company's monopoly has done
Caleb Lewis
>all these mad linuxbabbies hating on a guy who brought computing to the masses KYS, just call this thread for what it is, a Linux circlejerk
Some standards in computing didn't hold back shit or stop "progress", they were the catalyst for the explosion in computing we had, no one was going to get shit done aside from Microsoft.
>muh proprietary software Fucking commie pieces of shit
Brandon Thompson
You pretty much didn't read any of the posts that are historically well established and contradicted yourself about Microsoft being pro-progress. Sad.
So this is what a blind fanboy looks like
Thomas Parker
>KYS >Commie >piece of shit Someone's angry and nervous
Robert Garcia
wow this is serious
Ian Stewart
>a guy who brought computing to the masses Come now, there's no need to be a shameless apologist
Lincoln Harris
Fuck off poltard nobody cares about your autistic screeching
Brayden Perez
you did
Nolan Gray
I did read them and I know Microsoft's history, truth is, there is nothing anti progress about Microsoft, and all of these factoids you've mentioned in your shill thread did not slow down the growth of computing at all, the only thing they slowed down was the birth of open source trash, whose userbase is practically non existent today and was irrelevant in the 90s and early 2000s.
Microsoft did much more for computing than freetard shills ever did
Luis Torres
>after some truly spectacular development failures after XP Lol, I still remember all the articles about "Longhorn" as if it would be the fucking bees knees of operating systems.
And then we got Vista.
Kevin Nelson
OP, all I care about is having a system that runs all my programs and doesn't take too much of my time when I need to configure or repair it. Linux has none of those things and MacOS is lackluster in all.
At the end of the day, I just want MY life to be simple and easy. I don't give a fuck about ethics when dealing with large companies that benefit my quality of life.
Alexander Gray
This x1000, the thread is infested with NEET freetards whining about irrelevant bullshit.
Caleb Parker
>there is nothing anti progress about Microsoft Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Microsoft wanted no competition, and without competition, there is no pressure to progress.
It wasn't until the antitrust issues and tons of bad press that came with it that they even thought of not being a blatantly shitty company.
Noah Roberts
underrated
Elijah Nguyen
>no one was going to get shit done aside from Microsoft. Haha, no.
Gabriel Lewis
Me too, and Gates/Microsoft delivered with Windows XP, Vista, and 7 (the best OS to this day).
However This doesn't seem like irrelevant bullshit, as of course NEETs wrote it but I might want to look into it with actual sources because it seems interesting.
At least they're not Windows 10 cucks that have no respect for privacy or integrity as a human in the PC world.
P.S: Linux appears to me like a system that has people that only aim to perfect that system and not to perfect towards the average PC user. Just to improve their little hideout of whatever it is (I honestly haven't seen much of it) but at least its open-source and not spyware (props to that).
>in b4 samefag
Nicholas Martinez
No you didn't. >Microsoft did much more for computing than freetard shills ever did Microsoft ACTIVELY PREVENTED software technologies' growth by vendor and source lock-in. You don't bring progress by locking down your and others' invention to a standstill. This creates information-silo. Science community patents their inventions, they don't LOCK DOWN and HIDE like microsoft did.
>Microsoft did much more for computing than freetard shills ever did Fuck off, millennial. But for GCC, people would not have free access to anything about computers and software.
Aiden Garcia
I know people are stupid and just dick ride Steve Jobs but I'm always surprised at the level of ignorance most people have regarding Bill Gates and his business practices regarding Microsoft. People forget about the massive antitrust suit.
Austin Diaz
>I don't care about technology, I care about my product. Here's why you do not belong to Sup Forums. People like you use technologies as a fashion statement. You are and were never interested in methodology and the technology that created your shiny laptops. Get out.
Christian Taylor
This. The easiest way to spot a MS shillboi or bandwagoner is if they shit on Apple and Jobs but totally and conveniently neglect the absurd amounts of bullshit Gates and MS has pulled.
Joshua Williams
Fuck off, Bill.
Colton Nguyen
Fuck off, Bill.
Noah Martin
>he did anything to make his business strive so HES EVIL!!!!!!
OpenGL is cancer
Need sauce
Oh no who could imagine that a OS company would do anything to make sure manufacturers sell computers with their system so they get money?
Sauce
Sounds like you're just retarded
So it was settled in court, what's the issue?
>microsoft added onto standards so that makes them EVIL!!!!!!
>illegal >literally did the smartest move that any business owner would do if it meant they'd get billions, even apple has done this shit
It's almost like they pulled out because the partnership didn't work.
Gavin Parker
DirectX is a cancer on top of cancer
Daniel Cruz
How about do some research before shamelessly deny like a retarded millennial?
Eli Bell
It just werks. Unlike the buggy opengl.
Carson King
>OpenGL is buggy You never even wrote a single line of C++, have you?
David Butler
>those one-liner denials You are fucking adorable
Jackson Fisher
I agree. People think Gates is a good guy, but he's semi-permanently fucked computers up for everyone with his stupid bullshit.
Chase Perry
>they pulled out because the partnership didn't work. Do more research, kid
Alexander Moore
He's making the claim it's up to him to support it with facts. Unless you're trying to say facts hurt your feeling or something.
Let's be honest if they were longer than a line each people would just scroll past.
Sebastian Powell
>people would just scroll past. People without reading ability like you, maybe.
Kevin Campbell
>So it was settled in court, what's the issue? My uncle raped exactly 100 children and got sued. He's morally in the right because it got settled in court, though.
Eli Kelly
what a good read, didn't see things like this
Isaiah Price
You keep saying things would be better without Microsoft, but can you actually give any specific examples of how things would have gone differently and ultimately resulted in something better than what we have now?
Mason Watson
Bill Gates practically created DRM
Aiden Ortiz
False equivalency.
Colton Brown
It's a false equivalency when you don't like it
Robert Allen
And what are ya gonna do about it?
Adam Collins
by not using windows you fucking subhuman.
Jason Myers
Fucking checked
Cameron Ward
By embracing the open source culture
Wyatt Gray
I mean at least he's not a dirty fucking kike. So for that I give him a pass.
Mason Ramirez
The dirtiest of kikes don't let others know
Austin Hernandez
Did you read any of this? He's definitley a kike.
Jose Adams
He was brought up in a Christian family lol.
Grayson Price
That's a cover up
Leo Jackson
He joined the global elite, though.
Leo Reed
Kek. When did Sup Forums turn into /x/?
Jayden White
This just in: successful man is a jerk
Cooper Edwards
That explains a lot... it always seemed pretty implausible to me that Microsoft would bail out any competitor rather than either let them die or buy them up.
Ian Sanders
Replace "Bill Gates" in the OP and you could say the same about any ruthless business owner.
Now get the fuck out.
Asher Bailey
>poltard What?
Caleb Clark
That excuses Bill Gates a lot less than you think it does.
Tyler Allen
the internet explorer thing os pure devilish
Thomas Wright
That's like the most well-known antitrust case ever. Pretty sure it's commom knowledge at this point.
John Price
Kek
Ethan Taylor
>So it was settled in court, what's the issue? By the time the issue was settled, the damage had already been done.
Cameron Reed
If only you had a clue of the late 80's computing ecosystem.
Microsoft is a perfect example of what happens when stuff gets popular: only the shittiest wins.
Hunter Jenkins
>> Amiga 4000 >> Atari Falcon >> SGI >> BeOS should we continue
Benjamin Gutierrez
>Bill Gates was a ruthless, cutthroat businessman who made his vast wealth by using every dirty trick in the book (and inventing a few new dirty tricks along the way) and then using Microsoft's success to effectively hold the computer industry hostage for 20 years. Doesn't sound like a cuck. In fact, sounds like sort-of anti-cuck, the complete opposite of a cuck.
