Most of you here who are under the age of 40 probably do not appreciate how we came within an inch of having the world run on a monopolized MSInternet(r) in the late nineties. Microsoft had its foothold in every aspect of consumer facing computing save for mobile computing with PDAs and such (it was rathern niche then and yet they soon attacked that space with Windows Mobile).
The death of Netscape in the late nineties and the explosion in popularity of Internet Explorer was an imminent threat as Microsoft was ready to roll out their proprietary APIs such as OLE (rebranded as ActiveX) all over consumer facing internet. As the memo articulates in a few places, the goal was to embrace the formats and extend them with proprietary Microsft shit so they would not work or work poorly on non-Wintel platforms running Microsoft products.
The academia was the last MS free stronghold because Sun still had a lot of foothold and from there emerged companies like Google who in the early days provided the last shred of hope and almost miraculously it kind of worked. Now Microsoft and ironically Google too continue to be threats to the open nature of the internet until the present day. Hopefully neither ever succeeds but I see a lot of younger people that scoff at Google's unfair practices give way too much credit of trust to Microsoft that is absolutely undeserved and unearned.
The death of Netscape in the late nineties and the explosion in popularity of Internet Explorer was an imminent threat as Microsoft was ready to roll out their proprietary APIs such as OLE (rebranded as ActiveX) all over consumer facing internet. As the memo articulates in a few places, the goal was to embrace the formats and extend them with proprietary Microsft shit so they would not work or work poorly on non-Wintel platforms running Microsoft products.
The academia was the last MS free stronghold because Sun still had a lot of foothold and from there emerged companies like Google who in the early days provided the last shred of hope and almost miraculously it kind of worked. Now Microsoft and ironically Google too continue to be threats to the open nature of the internet until the present day. Hopefully neither ever succeeds but I see a lot of younger people that scoff at Google's unfair practices give way too much credit of trust to Microsoft that is absolutely undeserved and unearned.