Comment by com2kid
1 day ago
People now days don't understand how genius MS was in the 90s.
Their strategy and execution was insanely good, and I doubt we'll ever see anything so comprehensive ever again.
1. Clear mission statement: A PC in very house.
2. A nationwide training + certification program for software engineers and system admins across all of Microsoft's tooling
3. Programming lessons in schools and community centers across the country to ensure kids got started using MS tooling first
4. Their developer operations divisions was an insane powerhouse, they had an army of in house technical writers creating some of the best documentation that has ever existed. Microsoft contracted out to real software engineering companies to create fully fledged demo apps to show off new technologies, these weren't hello world sample apps, they were real applications that had months of effort and testing put into them.
5. Because the internet wasn't a distribution platform yet, Microsoft mailed out huge binders of physical CDs with sample code, documentation, and dev editions of all their software.
6. Microsoft hired the top technical writers to write books on the top MS software stacks and SDKs.
7. Their internal test labs had thousands upon thousands of manual testers whose job was to run through manual tests of all the most popular software, dating back a decade+, ensuring it kept working with each new build of Windows.
8. Microsoft pressed PC OEMs to lower prices again and again. MS also put their weight behind standards like AC'97 to further drop costs.
9. Microsoft innovated relentlessly, from online gaming to smart TVs to tablets. Microsoft was an early entrant in a ton of fields. The first Windows tablet PC was in 1991! Microsoft tried to make smart TVs a thing before there was any content, or even wide spread internet adoption (oops). They created some of the first e-readers, the first multimedia PDAs, the first smart infotainment systems, and so on and so forth.
And they did all this with a far leaner team than what they have now!
(IIRC the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!)
There was some innovation - and some good products ( MS office stands out for me ) - however what MS did relentlessly well, as you mentioned, was sales, distribution and developers.
They also leveraged their relationship with Intel to the max - Wintel was a phrase for a reason. Companies like Apple faltered, in part, in the 90's because of hardware disadvantages.
Often their competitors had superior products - but MS still won through - in part helped by their ruthlessly leveraging of synergies across their platforms. ( though as new platforms emerged the desire to maximise synergies across platforms eventually held them back).
That aggressive, Windows everywhere behaviour, is what united it's competitors around things like Java, then Linux and open source in general which stopped MS's march into the data centre, and got regulators involved when they tried to strangle the web.
> the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!
It showed
CE was a dog and probably a big part of the reason Windows Phone failed. Migrating off of it was a huge distraction and prevented the app platform from being good for a long time. I was at Microsoft and worked on Silverlight for a bit back then.
Windows phone 7's kernel was amazing. It was a complete rewrite from the old kernel and had incredible performance, minimal resource usage, and an amazing power profile.
IMHO the reason for Microsoft's failed phone venture was moving onto the windows kernel and 2xing system requirements.
Strongly disagree. Optimizing for resource usage above all else was the wrong thing. The developer experience was beyond awful. Terrible tooling. And poor resource isolation meant that it didn't recover from errors during development, needing constant reboots, like the bad old days of Windows 3 or classic Mac OS. There was no chance of building a decent app platform for third party native code on top of it because of that.
Phone hardware was exploding in capability at the time and the right thing was to lean into that and offer the same developer experience as on desktops with the same OS kernel, like Apple did from the beginning with Darwin and Android with Linux. Microsoft only realized too late.
Really? It’s always felt to me like it was app availability — for all the efforts, the app marketplace was a fraction of a fraction of the competitions’, and much like the network effects in social media, if you can’t catch up quickly, it can be almost impossible to ever do so. Haemorrhaging billions per quarter takes a strong stomach and a long vision, one that’s likely to put any executive’s tenure at risk. Nevertheless, it interesting to think what things might’ve looked like had Microsoft persisted another decade.
> some of the best documentation that has ever existed.
You have got to be kidding. The 90s was my heyday, and Microsoft documentation was extravagantly unhelpful, always.
Compared to today's documentation it is amazing.
One of my internships was at a company writing an example app for SQL server offline replication. Taking a DB that had changed while offline and syncing them to a master DB when reconnection happened. (Back in 2004 or so, now days this is an easier thing).
The company I interned at was hired by MSFT to write a sample app for Fabrikam Fine Furniture that did the following:
1. Sales people on the floor could draw a floorplan on a tablet PC of a desired sectional couch layout and the pieces would be identified and the order automatically made up .
2. Customer enters their delivery info on the tablet.
3. DB replicated down to the delivery driver's tablet PC when the driver next pulls into the loading bay with all the order info.
4. After the delivery is finished and signed for on the tablet PC, the customer's signature is digitally signed so it cannot be tampered with later.
5. When the delivery truck pulls back into the depot, SQL server replication happens again, syncing state changes from the driver back to the master DB.
That is an insane sample app, just one of countless thousands that Microsoft shipped out. Compare that to the bare bones hello world samples you get now days.