The Internet Tidal Wave (1995)

https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave/

by simonpure • 4 years ago

37 42 4 years ago

May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” to all executive staff within Microsoft.

Say what you want, but Bill Gates' vision of the internet was spot on.

The drawback is that Microsoft used illicit and mostly unethical tactics to fend off competition (Netscape, etc) and gain and retain a certain market dominance, and this was done under Bill's scrutiny.

It's really hard to find a saint, and Bill is not one.

Besides this, I find Letters of Note to be an invaluable treasure trove of forgotten gems like this letter.

autotune5• 4 years ago

Bill Gates of today is a very different person from the one who ruled over Microsoft back then. See Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

simonebrunozzi2• 4 years ago

Source? Do you know him personally?

kxkdkdmxn• 4 years ago

His PR is certainly a lot better, and there does exist a charitable foundation, sure, but a lot of foundations are just tax shelters, and just starting a charitable foundation doesn't absolve you of your sins or make you a good person, but it's great PR

Unless you know Bill personally you're just commenting on the quality of his public persona 's public messaging, or your parasocial relationship with that persona

Melinda Gates definitely still thinks Bill is worth divorcing, you know

the_third_wave3• 4 years ago

Gates was a relative latecomer to see the 'net as a factor of importance. He wrote a book called 'The Road Ahead' [1] which exists in two forms [2] of which the first portrayed the 'net as a precursor to the real network of the future which would be embodied in proprietary networks like Microsoft Network (MSN). It was only a few weeks before the book would hit the shelves that he changes his mind and wrote the above memo, focusing Microsoft on the internet while demoting Microsoft Network - which was launched as a separate dial-up network in the style of Compuserve - to an internet service.

[1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29

[2] https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%29?la...

Dracophoenix• 4 years ago

In a way, Gates was right. Social media sites are basically the AOLs and CompuServes of today with the only difference being the protocol (POTS/PTSN vs HTTP)

bitwize• 4 years ago

His vision wasn't too different from a lot of other pundits', and it came a year or two too late.

tialaramex• 4 years ago

Right. People are acting as though 1995 is early, but it's like figuring out there will be another major European war on Christmas Day 1939. No shit, the Nazis have already conquered Poland.

The Internet is the Third Network. Figuring this out in 1974/75 counts as clairvoyance since most of the technologies (e.g. TCP exists but IP takes until 1978) don't exist yet and nor does the terminology, although in hindsight things are coming together. Figuring it out in 1985 is still very impressive, by that point there's a significant TCP/IP network but it's unclear whether this North American idea triumphs - if you had confidence you could have made some smart investments and made yourself a lot of money. Figuring it out in 1995 is barely even noteworthy. "Eternal September" the point when there are constantly so many new people that it's always like the first weeks of a new year of university students on the Internet, began in 1993.

twoodfin2• 4 years ago

What was unethical about how they beat Netscape? They were the first to realize that “browser technology” (as Gates repeatedly called it during his antitrust deposition) would be beneficial to consumers as part of the OS platform, and lo today you can’t find a consumer OS on any device that doesn’t embed its own web engine.

the_third_wave3• 4 years ago

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

Search for "Netscape" if you're really interested.

dboreham2• 4 years ago

Enjoy your "browser-device". Some people prefer their computer to be separable from the applications it runs.

nazgulsenpai• 4 years ago

We need to establish distributed OLE as the protocol for Internet programming.

Oh the horror!

AlbertCory2• 4 years ago

"Letters of Note" would make a great Christmas present for almost anyone on your list. They almost certainly haven't heard of it, and it'll keep them captivated.

Elvis writing to President Nixon asking to become a special Federal agent: who doesn't want to read that?

I hosted Shaun at Google! Some of the attendees read a letter out loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM

dang• 4 years ago

The Internet Tidal Wave [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3455264 - Jan 2012 (1 comment)

The Internet Tidal Wave (Gates, 1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899714 - Aug 2011 (10 comments)

Pretty sure there have been other threads about this, if anyone wants to look...

ud0• 4 years ago

How was Gates able to predict the future with so much accuracy and yet still failed to capture the most value from it or better still establish itself as a core player on the internet like Google etc.

tomrod• 4 years ago

MS captured a lot of great revenue streams. Ballmer missed most of the opportunity but it's picked up steam in the last decade.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

When I was younger, there was only Internet Explorer and all online communication happened through MSN. Games ran on Windows or on consoles and that was about it. When MSN waned, Skype quickly became the de facto personal VoIP platform and at that point Microsoft had already acquired it.

I was conceptually aware of Macs, but I didn't know anyone who had actually used one. I know this isn't the typical experience around here, but where I grew up, Microsoft was simply the only option.

They lost it all years later when Blackberry, Google and later Apple started to become serious competition. They couldn't get Windows Phone to succeed (despite its superior underpinnings), they lost to Chromebooks in education, and they failed to keep Office competitive enough to make it as ubiquitous as it once was. I'm surprised Xbox is still around at this point.

Gates had a vision and a keen eye for opportunities. When he was leaving, Microsoft was dealing with a failed products and unexpected competition. (Vista, iPhone, Zune) and after he was gone it took a while before MS got its vision back. The company tried to go a wild, new direction after fixing Vista and turning it into 7 by going all-in on Windows 8. Mobile, tablets, desktop, and console were all moving towards the same, unified ecosystem and design, something that brought Apple great success. On the Windows side, though, I think it's safe to say Windows 8 was universally disliked, tolerated at best. Windows Mobile died because of its many backwards incompatible releases despite the lacking ecosystem.

It's interesting to imagine what the world would look like if Microsoft had managed to make Windows Phone a success. I think that had 90s-Gates been at the helm, Microsoft could've even beaten the iPad.

aswanson• 4 years ago

I don't think gates won't have made a difference against Apple during that period. Apple's taste and aesthetics were just too much to overcome in the post-pc era.

pram• 4 years ago

This seems like hyperbole, I didn’t know a single person who used MSN lol. It was all AIM, Yahoo, and some weirdos on ICQ.

AlbertCory2• 4 years ago

They certainly tried, and attracted the attention of the Department of Justice in the process. See the Microsoft antitrust trial.

Internet Explorer was a dominant browser for a while. It came bundled with Windows, and Gates thought they'd use it to embrace and extend the Web, like they'd done with everything up to then. Netscape's browser share quickly went to zero.

There were other browsers, though, and the end result of the legal actions was that MS had to allow you a choice. The Internet public was not as compliant with Gates' designs as the PC public had been, and "web standards" became something they had to live with, rather than being able to set them.

peacelilly• 4 years ago

You conflate seeing the future, and wanting to improve it. Microsoft very likely tried to subvert the future. See the Halloween Documents: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

The DOJ.

The DOJ scrutiny basically knee-capped Microsoft.

Later companies learned the lesson and have spent a lot of money on lobbying and otherwise cozying up to Washington.

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

Being first in race is very costly.

dboreham2• 4 years ago

knee-capped Microsoft

In what way?

nailer5• 4 years ago

They did. Microsoft has the dominant consumer OS, the doninant browser, the instant dominant messaging platform, the dominant online email platform, some of the best tools for building web pages, and defeated palm to become the dominant mobile internet platform. Steve Balmer threw everything away.

antiterra• 4 years ago

It’s interesting he keeps up the three character file extension convention of .htm even though he knew full well that it was .html on the vast majority of sites. I’d guess he was also aware of long file names in the upcoming debut of Win 95, but conscious of the fact previous Windows releases would remain prevalent for some time.

wanderingstan• 4 years ago

Yeah, Microsoft tried to make .htm a thing. IIRC, it was the default for all IIS and ASP pages for a long time.

js4ever• 4 years ago

"SGI has also been advertising their leadership on the Internet including servers and authoring tools. Their ads are very business focused. They are backing the 3D image standard, VRML, which will allow the Internet to support virtual reality type shopping, gaming, and socializing."

Metaverse, 27 years too early

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

It really was. A tad too complex, and too early to fit the cultural soil. VRML had reactive declarative idioms over 3d scene graph.. the current web is very similar but it was heavy and machines / browser weren't ready for that.

In (2000s) college it was still a small chunk of one class, while today react/webgl is just a tutorial away for anyone to play with.

nailer5• 4 years ago

Metaverse is (future thing that will succeed) (amount of years too early).

agsamek• 4 years ago

You meant 54 years too early, right? ;)

abraxas• 4 years ago

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 Internet Tidal Wave (1995)

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