Begun, the Browser War Had
May 28, 2018 8:44 AM Subscribe
On May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general filed an antitrust suit against the most powerful tech company in America: Microsoft. The then-23-year-old giant, which ruled the personal computer market with a despotic zeal, stood accused of using monopoly power to bully collaborators and squelch competitors. Its most famous victim was Netscape, the pioneering web browser, but everyone from Apple to American Airlines felt threatened by late-’90s Microsoft. An oral history of the Microsoft antitrust suit, twenty years later.
This was after they got away clean with destroying competition in the applications market (Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, Wordperfect) with secret WIndows APIs that only Office could use.
posted by thelonius at 9:03 AM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 9:03 AM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
The secret Windows APIs are a myth. I worked at Microsoft at the time. An internal audit was conducted. There were no "secret Windows APIs." For that matter, Lotus actually was the one using internal unpublished APIs, which made maintenance on Windows difficult, because performing what should have been routine refactoring of Windows between versions caused Lotus to break, which was a PR nightmare for Microsoft. Microsoft did extra work to keep Lotus working.
What wasn't well known was that Microsoft did not use the same compiler that everyone else used; it was for Microsoft apps only. They compiled to pseudocode, that was then interpreted at run time, rather than using the normal native code compiler. This ran somewhat slower, but caused the large applications like Excel, Word, and Access to fit into the memory constraints that were in place at the time. (The debugging tools for it were horrible, BTW!) This is what gave Microsoft the competitive advantage, not APIs. Any other company could have created their own compiler like Microsoft did.
posted by Xoc at 9:21 AM on May 28, 2018 [31 favorites]
What wasn't well known was that Microsoft did not use the same compiler that everyone else used; it was for Microsoft apps only. They compiled to pseudocode, that was then interpreted at run time, rather than using the normal native code compiler. This ran somewhat slower, but caused the large applications like Excel, Word, and Access to fit into the memory constraints that were in place at the time. (The debugging tools for it were horrible, BTW!) This is what gave Microsoft the competitive advantage, not APIs. Any other company could have created their own compiler like Microsoft did.
posted by Xoc at 9:21 AM on May 28, 2018 [31 favorites]
Marc Andreessen famously said what they wanted to do was reduce Windows to a buggy set of device drivers underneath the browser...and instead have a buggy set of cut-and-pasted JavaScript code overlaying the browser.
posted by clawsoon at 9:23 AM on May 28, 2018 [19 favorites]
I was at MS when all this went down—before and after—and the most significant thing I experienced was that the culture went from a "do it and get permission later" attitude to a profoundly risk averse red-tape attitude that strangled the ability to accomplish things. A lot of bold creative people left MS in frustration in the wake of the consent decree.
posted by bz at 9:44 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by bz at 9:44 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
Twenty years on and I immediately close Microsoft Edge every time windows 10 insists on using it despite it not being my default browser.
posted by srboisvert at 10:06 AM on May 28, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 10:06 AM on May 28, 2018 [12 favorites]
I remember listening to Gates talk at the time and he said something like, "Sure, Microsoft is big right now. But things change. One day, Apple may be the biggest company in the world," and, literally, everyone who was sitting in my living room guffawed at how outrageously ludicrous this comment was.
posted by dobbs at 10:24 AM on May 28, 2018 [13 favorites]
posted by dobbs at 10:24 AM on May 28, 2018 [13 favorites]
> Any other company could have created their own compiler like Microsoft did.
Wasn't that what Borland was for?
posted by ardgedee at 10:30 AM on May 28, 2018
Wasn't that what Borland was for?
posted by ardgedee at 10:30 AM on May 28, 2018
There were no "secret Windows APIs."
IMO the issue was that people were only beginning to recognize that when you were an app vendor it made you more of a sharecropper than an actual business. There is no way to beat a platform vendor at shipping apps. The only way to win is if your market is too small for the platform vendor to care or if your app constitutes a platform in itself - Microsoft can't really take on Adobe for a bunch of reasons. But WordPerfect? Hell yeah. Lotus? You bet.
What people though was "secret APIs" was just the structural advantage of being the platform vendor.
Apple and Google have learned this lesson very deeply. Amazon has learned it sort of - AWS is the dominant cloud platform but somehow they thought they could win with a worse version of Android and clearly they haven't.
posted by GuyZero at 11:09 AM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
IMO the issue was that people were only beginning to recognize that when you were an app vendor it made you more of a sharecropper than an actual business. There is no way to beat a platform vendor at shipping apps. The only way to win is if your market is too small for the platform vendor to care or if your app constitutes a platform in itself - Microsoft can't really take on Adobe for a bunch of reasons. But WordPerfect? Hell yeah. Lotus? You bet.
What people though was "secret APIs" was just the structural advantage of being the platform vendor.
Apple and Google have learned this lesson very deeply. Amazon has learned it sort of - AWS is the dominant cloud platform but somehow they thought they could win with a worse version of Android and clearly they haven't.
posted by GuyZero at 11:09 AM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
One day, Apple may be the biggest company in the world," and, literally, everyone who was sitting in my living room guffawed at how outrageously ludicrous this comment was.
Stopped clock, etc. That was nearly 10 years before the iPhone - Apple didn't get huge selling Macs.
posted by GuyZero at 11:10 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
Stopped clock, etc. That was nearly 10 years before the iPhone - Apple didn't get huge selling Macs.
posted by GuyZero at 11:10 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
the replacement of making sure I feel threatened by American capitalism.
FTFY.
posted by eustacescrubb at 11:19 AM on May 28, 2018
FTFY.
posted by eustacescrubb at 11:19 AM on May 28, 2018
its really hard to remember a time when microsoft was relevant, but that once was a thing
(this post also ties in nicely with this post further down the front page)
posted by entropicamericana at 11:20 AM on May 28, 2018
(this post also ties in nicely with this post further down the front page)
posted by entropicamericana at 11:20 AM on May 28, 2018
> Wasn't that what Borland was for?
Borland Turbo Pascal actually used similar technology, compiling to pseudocode, then interpreting at runtime. Microsoft eventually added that ability to their shipping C compiler, but only after it became irrelevant. It would have been around 1995 that computers had changed enough that memory became less of an issue and Microsoft switched to using native code.
Another thing...there was no "Chinese Wall" between the Applications (Office) developers and the Systems (Windows) developers. I was in Applications (Access), but would eat Thai food with the Systems guys and talk about how to write my code so it ran efficiently on Windows. Also, we were the earliest alpha testers for the next version of Windows, so any bugs we found in Windows, including performance problems, were patched very early. We could also make feature requests of the Windows team that were sometimes accepted. So yes, there were certain advantages to Office and Windows being developed at the same company. But it is completely false that Windows had special (non public) APIs to make Office faster than the competition.
posted by Xoc at 11:23 AM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
Borland Turbo Pascal actually used similar technology, compiling to pseudocode, then interpreting at runtime. Microsoft eventually added that ability to their shipping C compiler, but only after it became irrelevant. It would have been around 1995 that computers had changed enough that memory became less of an issue and Microsoft switched to using native code.
Another thing...there was no "Chinese Wall" between the Applications (Office) developers and the Systems (Windows) developers. I was in Applications (Access), but would eat Thai food with the Systems guys and talk about how to write my code so it ran efficiently on Windows. Also, we were the earliest alpha testers for the next version of Windows, so any bugs we found in Windows, including performance problems, were patched very early. We could also make feature requests of the Windows team that were sometimes accepted. So yes, there were certain advantages to Office and Windows being developed at the same company. But it is completely false that Windows had special (non public) APIs to make Office faster than the competition.
posted by Xoc at 11:23 AM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
I don't think Netscape's demise can entirely, or even mostly, be blamed on Microsoft. Its code was a disaster. It would crash on the simplest of web pages, sometimes with as little as a dozen bytes.
posted by justkevin at 11:35 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by justkevin at 11:35 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
I don't think Netscape's demise can entirely, or even mostly, be blamed on Microsoft. Its code was a disaster. It would crash on the simplest of web pages, sometimes with as little as a dozen bytes.
You mean those pages with the "Made for Internet Explorer" icon?
posted by Thorzdad at 12:19 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
You mean those pages with the "Made for Internet Explorer" icon?
posted by Thorzdad at 12:19 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
I still have to do my timesheets at work on Internet Explorer because stupid Kronos doesn't work on anything else. I use a MacBook normally but keep an HP tower running just so that I can log in once every two weeks and submit my timesheets.
posted by octothorpe at 12:30 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by octothorpe at 12:30 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
its really hard to remember a time when microsoft was relevant, but that once was a thing
I'm not sure what you mean by 'relevant', but they currently have an 82% share of the desktop/laptop OS market.
posted by rocket88 at 12:46 PM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]
I'm not sure what you mean by 'relevant', but they currently have an 82% share of the desktop/laptop OS market.
posted by rocket88 at 12:46 PM on May 28, 2018 [9 favorites]
the market that has had five straight years of decline? that market?
posted by entropicamericana at 1:00 PM on May 28, 2018
posted by entropicamericana at 1:00 PM on May 28, 2018
ineteen-ninety-eight changed the course of technology, which is to say that it changed the course of history. A nearly bankrupt relic of ’80s tech nostalgia released a gumdrop-shaped PC called the iMac. An innovative search engine originally known as BackRub became a company with an even stranger name. A fast-growing online bookstore hatched a plan to start selling, well, everything.
This is really interesting. My normal reference point for '98 is the frankly berserk slate of amazing games that were released in that year. And wasn't it the year that the machines picked as the high point of western civilisation to immortalise in The Matrix?
Hm. /morpheus
posted by Sebmojo at 2:18 PM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]
This is really interesting. My normal reference point for '98 is the frankly berserk slate of amazing games that were released in that year. And wasn't it the year that the machines picked as the high point of western civilisation to immortalise in The Matrix?
Hm. /morpheus
posted by Sebmojo at 2:18 PM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]
rocket88: I'm not sure what you mean by 'relevant', but they currently have an 82% share of the desktop/laptop OS market.
entropicamericana: the market that has had five straight years of decline? that market?
I'm sure there's some point when my work environment can shift to tablets (some upper management folks have them now, with keyboards, natch), but there are still more processor-intensive work that seems better suited by desktops or latptops. And speaking of work environments, I also run multiple browsers, just because some sites I use for work still don't play well anywhere except on Internet Explorer.
Corporate/ government momentum is a hard thing to kick.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:38 PM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
entropicamericana: the market that has had five straight years of decline? that market?
I'm sure there's some point when my work environment can shift to tablets (some upper management folks have them now, with keyboards, natch), but there are still more processor-intensive work that seems better suited by desktops or latptops. And speaking of work environments, I also run multiple browsers, just because some sites I use for work still don't play well anywhere except on Internet Explorer.
Corporate/ government momentum is a hard thing to kick.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:38 PM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
Apple didn't get huge selling Macs.
Expanding brain: iPhone is a tiny iMac is a NeXTcube.
Galaxy brain: Should have bought that AAPL at $3 instead of being the dumb
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:56 PM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
Expanding brain: iPhone is a tiny iMac is a NeXTcube.
Galaxy brain: Should have bought that AAPL at $3 instead of being the dumb
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:56 PM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
My memory is foggy, but I recall hearing about an internal tool at MS that would reorganize a binary to move the hottest code paths into a single page to reduce the impact of VM swapping on an app's performance.
posted by i_have_a_computer at 4:56 PM on May 28, 2018
posted by i_have_a_computer at 4:56 PM on May 28, 2018
I've seen an argument that Netscape's mistake was letting it be publicly known that they wanted to replace the role Windows plays in the OS ecosystem. If they had publicly said that Microsoft is a great partner and they're excited to make Windows PCs even more useful to take advantage of this bold new frontier, Microsoft probably wouldn't have noticed how important Netscape was until Netscape could actually defend itself. Privately, they could keep the same ambitions, but those shiny TIME magazine covers seem to entrance men with gigantic egos.
posted by Merus at 5:29 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Merus at 5:29 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
As someone who was right in the middle of all this, it’s weird how this article misses the point by such a wide margin.
Bill Gates, we now know, is a good guy. If you don’t realize it yet perhaps you will when he eradicates malaria or cures fucking cancer. I hate Windows, but I can’t hate Bill.
Jim Clark, owner of Netscape is however a Gavin Belson-clone fuckwad of immense proportions.
This was purely a battle between those two billionaires, Jim Clark and Bill Gates. Clark thought he’d purchased a virtual monopoly in web browsers by setting up Netscape. He imagined a world where people buy web browsers as a premium price retail product, and was already counting the fat stacks of cash he thought he was going to make selling shrink wrapped browser software. Gates thought browsers made more sense as a free part of an OS, so created IE and included it as part of Windows. Win IE was an existential threat to Netscape, since competing with free and built-in is not easy. Apple at the time was so clueless about the internet that it didn’t even have a browser of its own, and ended up as a pawn in the battle. This is where the fight starts.
You would think that Gates would have the advantage, but Gates was a political virgin, whereas Clark founder of SGI was very well connected in DC, and with the Clinton administration, particularly Al Gore. For all SGI’s image as a film industry darling, they made their real money on government contracts selling to spooks like the NSA and he’d been immersed in that world of political maneuvering for years. Before Gates even knew what was coming Clark had pulled strings to set the DOJ on him. By this point I’m guessing Clark already knew that Netscape was fucked, but like the Gavin Belson clone he is, he went all out on destroying Microsoft in revenge.
The long term consequences of this were all bad for the world. Microsoft throws its cash behind Bush, not Gore, possibly swinging that very close election. Bush kills the DOJ case, but turns out to be a terrible president.
IE on all platforms secretly lost its funding and turned into a joke.
Jobs tries to buy Mac IE, gets denied and creates Safari, free part of the OS.
Netscape limps on as a spoiler operation under various names. Eventually Google gets sick of a world with no decent Windows web browsers and has to make Chrome at great expense. They have to move heaven and earth to make a successful third party browser, and it’s still free.
Still nobody has ever paid for a web browser and Jim Clark was always wrong.
posted by w0mbat at 6:46 PM on May 28, 2018 [12 favorites]
Bill Gates, we now know, is a good guy. If you don’t realize it yet perhaps you will when he eradicates malaria or cures fucking cancer. I hate Windows, but I can’t hate Bill.
Jim Clark, owner of Netscape is however a Gavin Belson-clone fuckwad of immense proportions.
This was purely a battle between those two billionaires, Jim Clark and Bill Gates. Clark thought he’d purchased a virtual monopoly in web browsers by setting up Netscape. He imagined a world where people buy web browsers as a premium price retail product, and was already counting the fat stacks of cash he thought he was going to make selling shrink wrapped browser software. Gates thought browsers made more sense as a free part of an OS, so created IE and included it as part of Windows. Win IE was an existential threat to Netscape, since competing with free and built-in is not easy. Apple at the time was so clueless about the internet that it didn’t even have a browser of its own, and ended up as a pawn in the battle. This is where the fight starts.
You would think that Gates would have the advantage, but Gates was a political virgin, whereas Clark founder of SGI was very well connected in DC, and with the Clinton administration, particularly Al Gore. For all SGI’s image as a film industry darling, they made their real money on government contracts selling to spooks like the NSA and he’d been immersed in that world of political maneuvering for years. Before Gates even knew what was coming Clark had pulled strings to set the DOJ on him. By this point I’m guessing Clark already knew that Netscape was fucked, but like the Gavin Belson clone he is, he went all out on destroying Microsoft in revenge.
The long term consequences of this were all bad for the world. Microsoft throws its cash behind Bush, not Gore, possibly swinging that very close election. Bush kills the DOJ case, but turns out to be a terrible president.
IE on all platforms secretly lost its funding and turned into a joke.
Jobs tries to buy Mac IE, gets denied and creates Safari, free part of the OS.
Netscape limps on as a spoiler operation under various names. Eventually Google gets sick of a world with no decent Windows web browsers and has to make Chrome at great expense. They have to move heaven and earth to make a successful third party browser, and it’s still free.
Still nobody has ever paid for a web browser and Jim Clark was always wrong.
posted by w0mbat at 6:46 PM on May 28, 2018 [12 favorites]
Well, I paid for the full version of Opera back in the day (a couple times even, as each new major version came out) but that was because all the alternatives were such absolute shite. So that’s one person who paid for a web browser.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:12 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:12 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
Bill Gates, maybe not really a good guy, but he can be pretty funny, both intentionally and unintentionally.
posted by ovvl at 9:29 PM on May 28, 2018
posted by ovvl at 9:29 PM on May 28, 2018
It's industry lore that Bill Gates ran approval meetings where he berated people who failed his gotcha questions. Donating to charity doesn't necessarily mean you're a good person.
posted by Merus at 12:30 AM on May 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Merus at 12:30 AM on May 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
Bill Gates, maybe not really a good guy, but he can be pretty funny, both intentionally and unintentionally.
he may be the finest chair leaper that ever lived, but ballmer was the better hoofer
posted by entropicamericana at 9:27 AM on May 29, 2018
he may be the finest chair leaper that ever lived, but ballmer was the better hoofer
posted by entropicamericana at 9:27 AM on May 29, 2018
Only tangentially connected, but as an academic librarian I've had to explain to more than one graduate student what a browser is.
A certain MeFite upthread is presumably going to find some other way to deem Microsoft irrelevant, but in addition to a market cap of $500 bn, they're still considered one of the most valuable brands in the world (Forbes says #3). They are over forty years old and have a frankly astonishing IP portfolio, to the point that they could probably remain profitable on infringement lawsuits alone.
Microsoft is a hell of a lot more relevant (and extant/solvent) than virtually every other tech company that existed when they were founded.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:02 PM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
A certain MeFite upthread is presumably going to find some other way to deem Microsoft irrelevant, but in addition to a market cap of $500 bn, they're still considered one of the most valuable brands in the world (Forbes says #3). They are over forty years old and have a frankly astonishing IP portfolio, to the point that they could probably remain profitable on infringement lawsuits alone.
Microsoft is a hell of a lot more relevant (and extant/solvent) than virtually every other tech company that existed when they were founded.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:02 PM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Xoc,
re: pseudocode -
P-code is a great environment for developers, true, but I've always kind of had the feeling that it allowed app developers to get out of the mindset of free-standing executables in general and led us to the hell that are dynamic link libraries. You and the OS devs were CO-ENABLERS!!
Chitownfats runs away weeping
posted by Chitownfats at 6:38 PM on May 29, 2018
re: pseudocode -
P-code is a great environment for developers, true, but I've always kind of had the feeling that it allowed app developers to get out of the mindset of free-standing executables in general and led us to the hell that are dynamic link libraries. You and the OS devs were CO-ENABLERS!!
Chitownfats runs away weeping
posted by Chitownfats at 6:38 PM on May 29, 2018
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However, the replacement of making sure I feel threatened by Verizon, AT&T, Apple, Samsung, Google, Amazon, Boston Dynamics, SpaceX, every single bank, my insurance company, for that matter my employer, and pretty much every other company has me pretty much convinced that we are losing the game of whack-a-mole.
On Edit: Can't believe I forgot Comcast.... I feel threatened by Comcast too.
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:59 AM on May 28, 2018 [16 favorites]