> lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls
Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s
> The history of Office goes like this.
I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.
> Java
Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.
> But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE.
You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.
> Outlook.com has 400 million users.
"Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia
> Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach
Man where do you get this stuff? I wrote a mailing list server that had a brief moment of popularity, and the underlying (Java!) smtp library that lots of other folks use still today. I know a thing or two about smtp, and I gave up running my own email servers a long time ago. Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team. Barring some sort of massive change in the protocols, the home email server is dead dead dead. Microsoft and Google are the symptom, not the cause.
> Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s
It did take over the web, for long enough to kill Netscape. Then they stopped caring because Netscape was already dead.
> I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.
You're denying that Microsoft caused intentional problems for companies making competing products on Microsoft operating systems?
> Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.
For Java to pose a threat to Windows it had to be a large enough proportion of software to allow people to switch away from Windows. To succeed they only needed to keep it below that threshold, not keep anyone from developing any Java applications at all.
> You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.
Explain Internet Explorer's market share circa 2004.
> "Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia
So a number of users larger than the population of the United States is to be disregarded because one other provider's is bigger?
now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.
> Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team.
The problem is completely the other way around. Receiving spam is a minor inconvenience. The biggest problem with running a small email server is that messages you send are marked as spam by large email providers even when they're not.
How odd… seem to have all the facts at your disposal, yet use them to support the argument of the person you are adamant that you disagree with. Not a combo I've seen.
MS did destroy whole swaths of the industry that threatened it—on purpose. A lot of the initiatives failed later, but I'm sure they cried all the way to the bank and their record-breaking yachts.
That a lot of their competitors stumbled on their own was simple fate. Every company stumbles once in a while. Unlike MS which was bolstered by monopoly, a single significant mistake meant the end of most competitors. MS on the other hand was heavily insured with a river of money after the IBM deal.
Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s
> The history of Office goes like this.
I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.
> Java
Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.
> But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE.
You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.
> Outlook.com has 400 million users.
"Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia
> Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach
Man where do you get this stuff? I wrote a mailing list server that had a brief moment of popularity, and the underlying (Java!) smtp library that lots of other folks use still today. I know a thing or two about smtp, and I gave up running my own email servers a long time ago. Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team. Barring some sort of massive change in the protocols, the home email server is dead dead dead. Microsoft and Google are the symptom, not the cause.