Comment by pdonis
1 day ago
MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about.
MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.
The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.
Microsoft was a language company at the start - they had a huge share in 8-bit computers and their BASIC made into the ROMs of almost every computer sold in the 70s and 80s. Then they branched out to applications, with little success (I remember Multiplan on CP/M, DOS, and Mac). When they started selling PC-DOS and MS-DOS they had no applications play to speak of. Office only came much later, and the apps that appeared for Mac, Word and Excel, were ported to Windows starting on Windows 2. Word for DOS struggled in the market and never reached a significant share.
> Office only came much later
In the sense of being marketed as a single integrated package, yes, I agree. I was using the term loosely to refer to the apps themselves (Word & Excel were the first two, as you note, the others came after).
How do you reconcile this with their history of bending over backwards to achieve backwards compatibility for third parties?
Because their strategy for getting their applications in front of everyone has always been to get Windows in front of everyone, and that meant having to support third party applications that they chose not to try to incorporate into their own apps, but which got enough usage that not supporting them would mean losing those Windows desktops, and thus losing those users of the MS applications that were on every Windows desktop.
It's quite possible that this attributes too much intentional strategy to MS, and also treats them as a single entity with a single strategy more than they deserve. The MS internal teams that were bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility were not the same as the teams that were churning out new APIs, building Azure, etc., and quite likely had very different incentives.
This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.
Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.