Microsoft employees recall their early years

Posted by rmason 3/31/2025

Microsoft employees recall their early years(www.seattletimes.com)

162 points | 129 commentspage 2

JKCalhoun 4/4/2025|

nocarrier 4/4/2025||

I loved how the Windows 95 install CD had Weezer's Buddy Holly video on it. I remember finding it and thinking it was so cool they did that.

mtmail 4/4/2025|

And the trailer to Rob Roy. (Why do I even remember this??) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8YJGwn9Y8

stu2184 4/4/2025||

Actual Code https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...

brcmthrowaway 4/4/2025||

No Microsoft, no Half-Life.

lvl155 4/4/2025||

What’s cool about MSFT and APPLE is that there will never be another company like those two. They are true trailblazers in so many ways.

breadwinner 4/4/2025||

That's absurd. Trailblazer means a pioneer; an innovator. Apple is one. Microsoft isn't. Microsoft is known for copying ideas, not for innovating. If there is one thing that hasn't changed in 50 years, it is the fact that they don't innovate. Take their recent products: Teams is a copy of Slack. Loop is a copy of Notion. This has been going on throughout their history. .NET is a copy of Java. Windows is a copy of MacOS. Excel is a copy of Visicalc and Lotus 123, Word is a copy of WordStar and WordPerfect, PowerPoint a copy of Harvard Graphics and Aldus Persuasion, and Access a copy of dBASE and FoxPro.

What about Microsoft makes them not innovate? To innovate you have to hire smart developers and let them do what they love doing. This will result in some waste, as only some of the ideas will be successful financially. But the ones that succeed will be innovative. Microsoft doesn't do that. They hire good developers and assign them to a Program Manager who gives them a fully nailed-down spec for what to build. Inevitably the Program Manager (who are often business people) will find financially successful products to clone. This rarely results in waste as the product they are cloning has already created a market, Microsoft only needs to take the market from the innovator, which they do by bundling the product with either Office or Windows.

dchuk 4/4/2025|||

While I don’t disagree that Microsoft isn’t necessarily the most innovative, Apple is absolutely the most successful example of “first mover advantage” not actually being an advantage, and second movers can often be the actual winners. Literally every product they have launched in the last few decades has had the category already defined, they just came in with so much more polish and elegance (and sharp marketing) that they just repeatedly obliterate and take over the category as if they invented it.

I’ll never forget when they dedicated a minute or two in a keynote a few years ago to how they improved the volume indicator visual overlay in iOS to be less obtrusive like they talked to god himself to figure this out, when Android had that style for years…it was brilliant marketing.

I say all of this as a die hard Apple guy.

asdefghyk 4/4/2025||

RE ....Microsoft isn’t necessarily the most innovative.... Did you know Microsoft copied the idea of product activation from a PATENT and got fined about $300M USD for stealing the IP. Google the words Microsoft's fine for copying product activation idea, Ric Richardson for all the details .....

linguae 4/4/2025||||

I’m no Microsoft fanboy, but Microsoft Excel was very innovative for being one of the first graphical spreadsheets, originally written for the classic Mac OS in the mid-1980s before it was available for Windows. It was Excel, not Word or PowerPoint, that fueled the popularity of Microsoft Office in the 1990s, though admittedly I lament the decline of WordPerfect and other word processors. Sure, Excel might not have been the most innovative graphical spreadsheet; that award goes to Lotus Improv for the NeXT computer. However, Excel was a leap ahead of DOS-based spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3.

There are other innovative Microsoft products. Visual Basic was a very nice rapid GUI development environment in the 1990s. Windows 95’s interface was the result of a lot of research done on the user experience, and the result was a GUI that not only has persisted (with many modifications, of course) for about 30 years, but has inspired other desktops such as various Linux desktops, and in some ways even influenced later Mac operating systems.

Let’s also not forget Microsoft Research, which has produced a lot of interesting work in operating systems and programming language research.

adrian_b 4/4/2025||

While I agree that Microsoft Excel is a contender for the best Microsoft product ever, I do not see how one can claim that it was a more "graphical" spreadsheet that MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3, except if by "graphical" you just mean that it was a native Windows application, so you did not have to exit Windows and revert to MS-DOS for having the best user experience, like you would have needed with MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 (whose drivers for various hardware graphics devices would not have worked well or at all under Windows emulation).

When Windows 95 has made MS-DOS obsolete, Excel had the huge advantage of being a native Windows application, so I have switched like everybody else from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel, because switching between Windows and MS-DOS was unpleasant and inconvenient, and because the new Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows did not have any of the advantages of Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, while being inferior as a Windows program to MS Excel.

Even if I have switched to Excel, for supporting the general Windows features, like nice TrueType fonts and being able to use great amounts of memory in a faster way, due to direct access instead of using extended/expanded memory, at that time Excel did not have any spreadsheet-specific feature, graphic or otherwise, that was better than Lotus 1-2-3.

Despite strongly preferring Windows 95 to MS-DOS, I have always regretted a few MS-DOS programs that had a much better user interface than any Windows program that I have ever seen.

One of those was Lotus 1-2-3. Learning to use MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 was significantly more difficult than learning MS Excel, but once you were an expert the speed of doing any spreadsheet operations using keyboard shortcuts was many times greater than what is possible in Excel with a mouse-based UI, or even with the Excel keyboard shortcuts, which are much less efficient.

While the early Excel was extremely easy to use, that is no longer true about modern Excel or MS Office. Even if I had used for many decades MS Excel and several other spreadsheet applications, when I open now the recent versions of MS Word or MS Excel, I am no longer able to find most of the commands that I need and that I know that they must exist, except after a long random search through various menus, because those no longer have a hierarchical structure whose principles of organization I can discern. This is completely different from older versions of Excel, where one needed no help and no manuals to easily find any required command.

kristopolous 4/4/2025||||

WSL2 is pretty nice as is powershell. Also I haven't done windows development in years but I miss windbg - still don't have anything like it on linux. Also you probably use vscode and people like typescript. playwright and omniparse are pretty useful as well.

And unlike with a lot of companies, they often continue to invest and move their acquisitions forward, such as github.

Microsoft 2025 isn't the same bastard from 1992.

thewebguyd 4/4/2025||

> And unlike with a lot of companies, they often continue to invest and move their acquisitions forward, such as github.

Which helps them win in the enterprise. Not just their acquisitions, but if MS puts out a tech you can be confidently sure they are going to support it for a long time. There's been a few examples contrary to that - Silverlight and their UI frameworks they can't seem to get a handle on, but everything else they've put out exists long-term, and is generally backwards compatible.

There aren't many others that offer that level of stability. We tend to value new and shiny, but non-tech companies don't they want boring and stable, which is why Microsoft won there. Hell, you can still run a lot of apps from the Windows 3.11 era on Windows 11 with minimal fuss. The same can't be said for most other platforms.

Microsoft tech isn't necessarily sexy or exciting, but it checks boxes and is supported for a LONG time, and for a closed source OS, Windows is surprisingly open and configurable (well, used to be anyway - that seems to be going away with 11+)

p_ing 4/4/2025||||

You're conflating innovation with discovery/invention. Innovation isn't simply "think of/create something new", it includes incremental changes to something, leveraging an existing thing in a new way, etc.

.NET is certainly not "a copy" of Java, it's just Java done correctly ;-)

breadwinner 4/4/2025||

Incorrectly. Wherever they deviated from Java they messed up. See exceptions, for example: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

neonsunset 4/4/2025|||

Surely you're not arguing in favour of checked exceptions, which are widely regarded by Java programmers as a mistake, are you? (not sure but I think I saw you argue in favour of that previously before getting quickly pointed out all the issues with checked exceptions)

In either case I encourage you to try out .NET before making a statement, there's a good chance it will pleasantly surprise you.

p_ing 4/4/2025|||

"Incorrect" okay, based on a brand-new-to-C# developer's experience. Sure.

"The Trouble with Checked Exceptions" - https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...

Cpoll 4/4/2025|||

In the linked article, Hejlsberg considers adding a new checked exception a breaking change (true), but adding a new thrown exception to not be, because "in a lot of cases, people don't care." I think this is obviously open to debate.

You're conflating "incorrect" with "mistake," no one is saying the C# team forgot to add checked exceptions.

breadwinner 4/4/2025|||

I have a lot of respect for Anders Hejlsberg. But that doesn't mean he is never wrong. Hejlsberg doesn't think anyone would want to recover from exceptions. "There's a bottom level exception handler around their message loop. That handler is just going to bring up a dialog that says what went wrong and continue." Okaayyy... I think we know a bit more about exception handling than that today! Real-world applications often need more sophisticated exception handling strategies.

p_ing 4/4/2025||

"Something went wrong."

[no option to continue]

Those are our error messages of today.

And yes, even the brightest can be wrong from time to time or frequently

breadwinner 4/4/2025||

> Those are our error messages of today.

Is that in your .NET code? Time to switch to Java!

zvrba 4/4/2025||||

Check out work by Microsoft research. Examples: Z3 solver, project Orleans.

lvl155 4/4/2025||||

That’s fair. For Microsoft, I think they trailblazed on how to be a global tech monopoly. The dotcom companies (ie Amazon, Google, etc) all followed those footprints to dominate.

robertlagrant 4/4/2025||||

By that measure iOS and Android are copies of Windows Mobile, no?

UberFly 4/4/2025|||

Absurd comment. Microsoft forged the desktop space into what it is today. You clearly don't like them but their contributions and market decisions quickly outpaced Apple and everyone else in the 1990s. They created the dominant PC experience that remains to this day by a large margin.

Mistletoe 4/4/2025|||

>What’s cool about the Dutch East India Company and Standard Oil is that there will never be another company like those two. They are true trailblazers in so many ways.

evidencetamper 4/4/2025||

What do you mean by that? I don't understand the comparison, but would like to. Is it about monopoly?

pickdan 4/4/2025||

It's just a joke about the ridiculousness that large economy dominating companies can't possibly be replaced and will last forever. Thus, instead of modern companies they give the example of two titans of vintage corporate might (one from several centuries ago and one more recent, just a century ago) are used instead. Ah, Hubris.

bushbaba 4/4/2025|||

Amazon? Google? Meta? Tencent? etc etc etc

CharlesW 4/4/2025|||

Apple and Microsoft (as well as companies like Commodore) were there for personal computing’s birth. Amazon, Google and Meta came far later and didn’t invent their respective industries.

9rx 4/4/2025|||

HP sold what they called a "personal computer" in the 1960s, well before Apple and Microsoft came around. It wasn't exactly what we consider to be a personal computer nowadays, but MySpace wasn't exactly what we consider social media to be today either. I'm not sure these things happen in discrete steps like you seem to imply. There is a clear continuum. I think it is quite fair to say, for example, that Meta help define its industry like Microsoft and Apple helped define theirs.

There will never be exact replicas of Apple and Microsoft again, but there undoubtedly will be many companies in the future that we will eventually look back upon in the same way.

seanmcdirmid 4/4/2025||

You are confusing the first personal computer with the rise of personal computing. Inventing a product isn’t very useful if you don’t invent the product market as well.

9rx 4/4/2025||

Huh? The entire comment is about that rise. Did you stop reading after the first few words?

pests 4/4/2025|||

Amazon did quite literally invent their respective industries - AWS and the cloud?

scarface_74 4/4/2025|||

Google is an ad company that can’t make another significant product to save its life.

Meta under Zuckerberg has been able to stay relevant. But FB is already seen as being for old people.

russellbeattie 4/4/2025||

It's interesting that Microsoft was founded almost exactly a year before Apple (April 1st, 1976). I can't imagine Apple will miss the opportunity to make a big deal out of it.

sunrisegeek 4/4/2025||

Crazy to think how Microsoft went from a small startup to one of the biggest companies in the world. Wonder what the next 50 years will look like.

warmandsoft 4/4/2025|

[flagged]

TechDebtDevin 4/4/2025||

Funny that they changed their name from 'Micro-Soft' to Microsoft.

Almondsetat 4/4/2025|

Windows Recall