Weekly Rant: Microsoft
This post is part of the “Weekly Rant” series
Once upon a time I was building websites. Back when that really meant just rendering some HTML using PHP, adding a sprinkle of JavaScript. I am talking pre-jQuery. I am talking, still having to account for IE 5.5 using conditional CSS-times.
These early post-first browser wars times were when I first learned to dislike Microsoft. General sentiment against Microsoft was very negative for their cutthroat business tactics towards Netscape. A David and Goliath story, where Goliath instead had clobbered David to a swift but bloody death.
Netscape reincarnate Mozilla came out with Firefox and like most Web developers, I rode into the second browser wars aback this mighty beast until eventually I let myself be tempted by the snappy Google Chrome. At the time the Google motto was still “don’t be evil”, and many of use were swayed by the incoming startuppy neo-corporate overlords of the Internet. At least they were not Microsoft.
While Microsoft sentiment remained somewhat negative in Web development circles, it slowly faded. Most were still using Windows on a daily basis. MacBooks would become a thing only later. I took refuge in Linux, using this hot new distribution called “Ubuntu” which promised to be “Debian, but cool”. There learned for the second time how “evil” Microsoft was. I became to some degree enamoured by the idea of OSS, and Microsoft was that ideas “anti-Christ”. Perhaps it was its own success destroying Netscape by giving IE away for free, that made Microsoft so terribly afraid of Free Software. Until they weren’t.
A big corporation fighting an army of people passionately doing what they love, is asymmetric warfare. Somewhere along the way, Microsoft wised up and decided that it was better not trying to fight Open Source. One of the early and arguably more futile attempts was to make PHP and later NodeJS “on Windows” a serious thing. But since then Microsoft has become a serious and major contributor to OSS. Internet Explorer was a ploy to bind people (rather successfully) to Windows. Microsoft, and corporations in general, contribute to OSS for a much more complex set of reasons.
At this point, already some 10+ years ago, despite having serious reservations about the corporate domination of OSS, I found myself having one less reason to hate Microsoft. Darn. Let’s take a few steps back.
I think it was 2004 when Google started giving out Gmail accounts by invitation. Everyone was raving about it, and I signed up as well. There were at the time other online email services, most notably “hotmail” (acquired by Microsoft in the late 90s). But Gmail was part of a trend, fueled primarily by Google, and mass-adopted like a Boxer breed dog slobbers a bowl of kibbles. A lot of people were focusing on the less ominous part of that trend: everything was moving online. Your email editor, your calendar, everything was online. Smart phones accelerated that trend: all your data had to be connected.
The ominous part of it, obviously, was that everything was controlled by a small number of companies. A hand-full of American companies own practically all data of all the private and professional lives of all people in the so-called “Free World”. The capability to analyze and use this data has gone through serious developments in the last 2 decades. You don’t need much imagination to see the dangers of this development.
Microsoft performance amongst these goliaths has been superficially lackluster. It lost the (second) browser wars (to Google), it lost the mobile phone wars (to Google and Apple), and for a while it seemed to have lost the cloud compute wars (to Amazon). It seems to be fairing a bit better in the recent AI war. Despite lack of dramatic victories, Microsofts foot in the door in OSS the software space in general, but probably more importantly the ubiquitous nature of Windows and later “Office”, have kept Microsoft firmly categorized as “Big Tech”.
What’s left of my gripes with Microsoft is not with Microsoft itself. It’s also not with Google. Or any “Big Tech”. It’s a gripe with society, including myself. We walked right into this with open eyes. For a while, “privacy” was a big concern, and I would hear and read about privacy advocacy groups". But that was already years ago. Not enough people cared. Or rather, not enough people cared to offset the convenience.
Over here in Europe, there’s new resistance to Big Tech. This time its more about sovereignty, as the US is ruled by an orange conman and his cronies. And this hostile faction is holding a huge frikken stick over us: Microsoft. European corporations and governments are completely addicted to Microsoft and have been so since Windows 95.
But Windows worked offline / locally. Now, like everything, our (almost) whole corporate lives exist on Microsoft servers. If they would “pull the plug”, the whole continent would be in disarray. If they are smart, of which I remain to be convinced, they will keep that as a last resort. Because the “sovereign cloud” is a sham. If the US government wants the EU data, they are going to get it. This executive branch specifically doesn’t seem too bothered by legalities, especially not those of an international nature.
There’s a lot of conjecture I could go into here. Instead I’m going to take off my tin foil hat, accept that my influence over these circumstances is limited, hope for the best, and do what little I can. Maybe this time, we will all get the memo, collectively do something that actually makes a difference.
I’m not overly optimistic.