In 1990, they put out Stacker, which did transparent disk compression, effectively giving people twice as much disk space. It was a huge hit, so Microsoft called them up about an acquisition, entered discussion, and as part of the due dilligence process, even looked at the source code.
In 1993, Microsoft released their own version of Stacker as part of the OS. No thank you, no money for Stac, just a giant middle finger. Stac sued and eventually won some money, but it was never the same.
Everybody keeps telling me that Microsoft is different these days. About how they love open source now. And it's true that after decades of erosion of their primary monopolies, they can't get away with being as lazy and awful as they were in, say, the early IE era. But this suggests to me that deep down they haven't really changed.
Same here. I think I used both Stacker and SuperStor at different times. They'd create archives and those would show up as a D:\ and C:\ was all transparently compressed and uncompressed. They were a bit disingenuous wit the "double storage." That's why you needed to make sure you had plenty of 'free' space before installing something, because the OS lied to you about the space available. That and there was a performance penalty too.
Stack ranking basically chooses sociopaths over the nice guy. Applied over several years it is bound to have a statistically significant effect on who your middle layer managers are.
It does not matter if Nadella is a nice guy. It does not matter if everyone reporting to him is a nice guy. They are still forced to operate with a megacorp filled with lizard people.
On the other hand, it might be just the usual confusion that large administrative structures needed for megacorps cause.
In 1990, they put out Stacker, which did transparent disk compression, effectively giving people twice as much disk space. It was a huge hit, so Microsoft called them up about an acquisition, entered discussion, and as part of the due dilligence process, even looked at the source code.
In 1993, Microsoft released their own version of Stacker as part of the OS. No thank you, no money for Stac, just a giant middle finger. Stac sued and eventually won some money, but it was never the same.
Everybody keeps telling me that Microsoft is different these days. About how they love open source now. And it's true that after decades of erosion of their primary monopolies, they can't get away with being as lazy and awful as they were in, say, the early IE era. But this suggests to me that deep down they haven't really changed.