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This is the motive, as someone cited before me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I was merely agreeing.

Look at MS' history. It used this tactic to kill or maim a long list of companies: Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, Aldus, Novell, Sybase, STAC, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, and dozens more.

It tried it with Sun and Java -- it failed, but only just.

It tried it with the WWW itself with ActiveX and IIS ASP. Again, this only just failed.

It has a long long history of being the nastiest, most deceitful, dishonest, back-stabbing company in the computer industry -- and that is saying a lot.

It is not a coincidence that Gates became the richest man in the world.

Cory Doctorow's Twitter summary is pretty good (short thread): https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1304811968398729218

The LA Times did a great investigative piece on the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation _thirteen years ago_: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gates...

TL;DR -- it spends just enough money that Gates & Buffett don't pay tax on the interest of their wealth; it does not do ethical investment of any kind; its objective is whitewashing the reputation of a retired criminal, in which it is very successful.

I have yet to see any evidence that the company culture that Gates created and Ballmer continued has changed in any substantive way.

1 comments

> "Look at MS' history. It used this tactic to kill or maim a long list of companies: Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, Aldus, Novell, Sybase, STAC, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, and dozens more."

Netscape defunct 2003, FireFox still exists. Lotus 1-2-3 last release 2002. Sybase still existed until it was sold to SAP in 2010 and SAP killed it in 2014. WordPerfect still exists. Quarterdeck defunct 1998.

Sun, Java, ActiveX, ASP. 1990s.

Anything from this last decade? And, how is "this tactic" going to stop you from using Linux?

> "It has a long long history of being the nastiest, most deceitful, dishonest, back-stabbing company in the computer industry -- and that is saying a lot."

Cruelty, ruthlessness, and exploitation goes with success in capitalism.

> "TL;DR -- it spends just enough money that Gates & Buffett don't pay tax on the interest of their wealth; it does not do ethical investment of any kind; its objective is whitewashing the reputation of a retired criminal, in which it is very successful."

Character attack on a retired man, based on bad things which happened a generation ago, while giving free pass to Google who are strongarming the web with AMP and unilateral changes to Chrome, and unilateral standards which were proprietary Google internals released to the world, because they use Linux in their advertising-spyware mobile platform, and to Amazon, a much maligned company run by one of the current world's richest people, known for its mistreatment of employees and abusive attitude to the publishing industry, and for using its cloud platform to steal and reimplement popular services and put them out of business, free pass for current bad behaviour because they let people run Linux cheaply?

The reason MS didn't have to do this stuff in the last decade or 2 is because it has already killed all its opponents.

Name another big desktop app vendor will hundreds of millions of seats. Name another industry-leading groupware system.

The last big dominant rival MS took down was Nokia's phones operation, but it mainly succeeded there because Google and Apple accidentally helped: Evidence: MS doesn't make phones any more. It derailed the #1 smartphone vendor's own OS efforts and planted an MS exec in charge so that vendor used exclusively MS phone OSes, but it wasn't good enough. The OS failed and the vendor left the market.

Apple is in a different market. Apple sells hardware. Its OSes are free. It also makes a cut on content for those devices.

Character attacks? Have you bothered to read any of the links I have supplied to support my argument?

I remember the 90s just fine, but i think MS also knows that they lucked out on the antitrust rulings with getting their fingers slapped. Also on top of it Gates isn't there in charge to be ruthless any more (and the competitors today knows the things to watch out for).

But more importantly than all that... MS knows they aren't competing with other companies per-se but rather ecosystems, open source and developer mindshare. If we don't like it we can fork off things and go on our way (like developers did during the Ballmer era despite him jumping around chanting developers....).

Windows isn't even the most used personal OS today, Android is.

Funnily enough thanks to MS in part, not because they sabotaged Nokia (Many N insiders have spoken about how dysfunctional and unfocused their management was even before MS came into the picture), But rather because they fucked over their enthusiastic WinPhone7 users, retailers and devs with WP8 not supporting the prev generation of devices and API's changing.

WP7 had a far snapper and easier to understand UI than contemporary Android devices, but once they dropped the WP8 news the old devices just lay on shelves and sellers who had bet on WP7 selling were left with un-sellable devices and didn't feel like buying a new batch to see it happen again.

Yes, that's all fair.

I know why the WinPhone fiasco happened: they, very reasonably, wanted to get everything on an NT base. WinPhone 7 was WinCE, WinPhone 8 was NT.

I don't think they realised how many people used WinPhone 7 and were happy with it. Over here in Czechia, Windows phones were the main smartphones I saw when I moved here in 2014 -- Android and iOS were very rare, because they were very expensive. Windows phones were the affordable way to get a smartphone -- there were a lot of candybar dumbphones still around here in 5-6 years ago.

I don't think dodging antitrust was luck, though. I think the US was afraid to kill or even maim one of its very few big success stories, one of the only ones that _wasn't_ being outcompeted by Asian or European companies.

Since then, MS has lost some big battles -- notably, phones and tablets -- and it's learned to be conciliatory and how to appear friendly to people too young to remember the viciously rapacious 1990s MS.

My point is, I still think it is just play-acting friendly. This is the null hypothesis: same company, same people, same structure, and therefore, same business practices. It just got burned a few times so now it wants to come over as a reformed character.

Oh my, didn't remember or take notice of the the CE/NT thing. So understandable and yet so stupid in hindsight (gotta have been a bunch of internal voices agains't this but well).

When i mean lucked out i mean that they were lucky enough to have good enough lobbyists to pay their way out of their trouble.

Any company can become aggressive/shitty/evil depending on who runs things. I mean if we look at Suns legacy, Sun today is the biggest threat to open source we have (would would have thought about that in the 90s?).. sure it's really called Oracle now with Larry.E pulling the strings.

MS in the 80s and 90s had lucked in on their DOS deal and i think Gates in the back of his mind might was just watching all the time for threats coming and doing to MS what he did to IBM. But being facing a split-up i think Gates didn't see much point in "winning" any more since doing that would just lead to being big enough to actually be forced to divest things. (So he got bored and started doing other stuff, i know i would)

I think a comparison to the oil industry is apt, early oil was really ruthless in terms of competition (until the breakup of Standard Oil that really MS was the closest to becomming) but todays big-oil industry is quite evil but that is more the making of a collective greed of many middle to high managers and we're seeing the big IT firms approach that state quickly.