It was the battle for "the web" and the sun+netscape partnership was an actual menace to microsoft's activex and vbscript things. There is an espisode the Lex Fridman podcast with Brendan Eich where he talks a little about that specific time.[1]
The "panic" was right imo (only in that specific area) i mean, there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today.
C#, TypeScript, Azure, Visual Studio, VSCode, GitHub, the npm package ecosystem, Microsoft Edge, having the de facto monopoly of several markets with office and its web integrations, Microsoft Teams suite for enterprise and I think I'm missing a lot more stuff.
Claiming there's no Microsoft on the web seems far fetched when Microsoft de facto controls extremely large parts of producing modern web applications, deploying them and serving the tools necessary for businesses to coordinate.
It may have lost share to competing applications or it missed the train exactly, but I cannot think of any other single company you can lock in your organization from management, production to deployment and even consumption on Microsoft own devices from Surfaces to Xbox.
This is the "post-apocalyptic" Microsoft. These things are open-source and supporting Linux, which was unthinkable for Bill's Microsoft.
MS used to call Linux cancer, and now they're running Linux servers for people. MS used to spread FUD that it's irresponsible and amateurish to expose source code of programs, and later they had to acquire GitHub and npm to stay relevant.
Microsoft had to adapt, because the old Microsoft has lost. Remember MS was selling very expensive per-CPU licenses for servers to run IIS, ASP.Net, and SqlServer. Admin tasks that we use webapps for were supposed to be a combination of Office, Access, VBA, native Windows applications, and a dash of ActiveX.
It is also key to understand that they are far more diverse than ever. Azure earns money independently, so does Office and Windows, XBox, etc. They do not rely on each other anymore.
The only big part which is different is the former developer division. I do not think they earn the money themselves but are more a cost center to everyone else. But considering that everyone else is a giant company with a diverse set of developer needs, maybe that is just okay. Which again is interesting because the rest of the industry is also relying on this part of Microsoft.
Even if .NET is technically a cost center, the reduced cost they get from optimizing it making things like Bing faster probably still makes it indirectly a profit center by saving them so much money.
I've worked (as a consultant) on a number of 'boring' B2B web applications targeting 'boring' industries and one thing they all had in common was that they where all in on the Microsoft stack.
TS is just fancy JS. If it didn't exist, Flow, Haxe or Dart would just be in the same place (static types languages with JS-ish syntax that compile to JS).
> TS is just fancy JS. If it didn't exist, Flow, Haxe or Dart would just be in the same place
"TS is just fancy JS" is like saying "Java is just fancy machine code" or something like that. It's a major software project with a much larger scope than simply slapping a few types on top of common JS constructs. More importantly, it's been an innovating force at the language and editor tooling levels for web developers worldwide. I think it's likely to be the most successful language that Microsoft has ever produced in the long run.
> "TS is just fancy JS" is like saying "Java is just fancy machine code"
Terrible analogy. TS doesn't compile to WASM or anything, it compiles to human-readable JS. Java doesn't compile to C++ or C. The JVM is an entire platform.
> More importantly, it's been an innovating force at the language and editor tooling levels for web developers worldwide.
MS has always been decent when it comes to tooling but there's nothing particularly innovative about TS.
And if Java didn't exist we would have other tools as well. And yet Microsoft has by far the largest share of language adoption on the web, which likely applies to the tooling too.
By far? You really think the majority of websites are using TS-generated JS? The majority of the web is Wordpress and PHP frameworks. TS has only become 'popular' rather recently, and there's still a TON of websites that are full-stack SSR with only modest amounts of JS.
As for tooling, maybe. VS has always had a decent amount of mind-share. Even then though, I can see Jetbrains + Eclipse + Sublime + Emacs + Vim + others capturing at least 50% combined...
One thing i noticed is that most of the conversation here feels alien to me.
I think this is because most of the people here are living in California and they seem to have a very particular world view not always compatible or even undertandable for anyone from any other place.
I used to enjoy this website in like, 2015/16 i think, now the topics are not even tech related anymore.
Fewer than 10% of HN users are in the Bay Area. I don't know what the number for California is but I'd be surprised if it were above 15%. Half of the userbase is outside the U.S. People make a lot of false assumptions about the demographics here.
HN has always had a mix of topics. That hasn't changed.
Interesting, what is the next highest cohort, though? 10% may still be enough to dominate conversation if its a big enough plurality.
This is a vote-driven website, and while maybe less prone to the bandwagon effects on, say, reddit, it still happens that if a group of people begin to vote up a post or comment, it will have strong momentum to gain further votes.
I've seen you post this verbatim comment before and it always feels a little like a shallow dismissal.
Maybe its worth someone taking the HN Kaggle dataset and doing a keyword analysis. Demographics are one thing, the topics themselves should be studied.
This is a reflection of how engineers have become aware of the ethical and political effects of their work. To HN's credit the non-technical discussions are of high quality, in general.
From a purely technical standpoint, HN remains the best forum for discovery of new projects and giving feedback to FAANG. (M not so much).
I mean, it is actually comprehensible but you know, California tech workers live in a monopoly money bubble and they think they know something about how the world works. Also they think that their own "culture" and leftist values are relevant to everywhere in the world even if they cant even point places on a map.
I'd like to know what is non-comprehensible. I am an independent - not "right" of "left", and I think that I can understand both sides. And I think that both sides can understand each other, but they just disagree on what the other side wants to do. But that is not the same as incomprehensible.
So, without getting into a political rant, what do you calmly and objectively, with no wrath attached, do you think is incomprehensible to others who don't live in California. And, by the way, I live in California and 100% guarantee you that there's a wide spectrum of people here. Had one guy a few months ago that I was trying to do business with say that if we meet, he doesn't wear a mask. I've talked to a lot of people in California who don't accept evolution and think that the earth was created 6,000 years ago.
And, you talk a place like Texas, supposedly hard red state, but you go to places like Austin, and Austin voted something like 70% for Biden.... I just looked it up just now, and was right - 71% https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/texas/
So I think before Texas and Missouri and all the rest of the red states get their hate on about California, they should first go into all their own blue areas. And, pretty much, the blue areas are mostly university towns. The kids. So, all the red states should start putting all their children who are college students at University of Texas or University of Iowa and all the other university towns into gas chambers or whatever they want to do. Start the hate at home, I always say. Fix one's own home. Kill the kids. Even in harder hard-core states like Mississippi, there are a bunch of counties were at 70% Biden. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/mississippi-... Why bother about California? And, of course, there is a boatload of counties in California that voted 70% for Trump https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/california/
So. What specifically are these things that are incomprehensible to others, that californians do, supposedly. Give me specifics.
Not OP, but the dynamics that quash dissent in these specific areas are still at play even when individuals like you ask for specificity and openness. If your goal is to get at the truth of the matter, you'll probably have better luck discussing with folks 1:1.
I'm neither part of the tech nor startup scene. I'm happy to see more variety in the content, as long as it's high quality and has interesting comments.
To be frank, work is work and I don't care so much to read about it. I care even less about drama at other companies.
> SV's political culture (and largely America's culture) is being exported to the world at an ever increasing pace
The valley's culture has little in common the the rest of America's. It "exporting" its culture to the rest of the US as much as it is anywhere else, though I'd personally characterize it more as imperialism than exporting.
I made this [1] little thing just to change a Commodor Amiga emulator opacity so i could copy some images in Deluxe Paint II or even Deluxe Paint in DOSBox.
Made it in like 20 minutes for that absolutely weird use case. Almost never used it again.
I didn't because it's really hard to get it in my country this year. It's been prioritized for those highly at risk. At this point I'm likely not going to bother given how difficult it is.
The harder part was getting elderly relatives the seasonal flu shot safely. Going to the doctors is unsafe right now if they have no specific appointment otherwise.
Luckily they did a "drive through" flu-shot event, and we got it for them that way. Essentially just stick your arm out the window, jab, and go.
It's not recommended for me in my country (Germany) to take the seasonal flu shot, because I'm not over 60. I suppose it might be similar in other countries.
This is a great question, and I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was quite low. Not because people are against it, but because people don't make the effort to get it. This will be a big hurdle for the covid vaccine as well I think.
A quick Google search tells me that in the US, 33.9%–56.3% of adults get the seasonal flu shot (children are higher at 46.0%–81.1%).
The "panic" was right imo (only in that specific area) i mean, there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE