[Bug 1] Re: Microsoft has a majority market share

[Conrad Knauer]

nottRobin wrote: "Once again, I think it makes sense, for the sake of
clarity, to keep these point separated into priorities in operating
system design and priorities in business strategy, as they're obviosly
completely separate"

Profit as the #1 priority at Microsoft *absolutely* impacts the software
they produce; it doesn't just extend to their nasty EULAs.  I want to
share an example I read on /. a while back:

"I was on the MacIE 6 team when it got canned..."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171546&cid=14288661

---
MacIE had one of the strangest and saddest histories I've seen, of any product.

MacIE 5 was an awesome release, critically aclaimed and everything, with
a good development team and a strong testing team, that included daily
performance measurement.

And yet, almost immediately after 5.0 was released, the MacIE team was
redeployed to work on a set-top DVR box. The notion at the time was that
the team would continue to do MacIE work in their spare time, since IE 5
was the leader among Mac browsers and no longer needed a full-time team.

The problem with that notion was that WebTV, the team's new bosses, had
no reason to actually schedule any time for real IE work. So later, when
that particular set-top box got cancelled, the IE team got redployed for
other WebTV work, and since this was now out of MacBU's control, nothing
could really be done.

3 or 4 years went by before enough people in the Mac division wanted to
resume work on IE, and when it looked like we might actually need the
technology, as a base for MSN-for-Mac, the IE 6 team was formed. It got
a firm OS X-only foundation, a new even more complient browser base, and
then suddenly it became apparent that Apple was doing their own browser,
because, well, there were lots of small clues, but the big clues was
that Apple had started calling the old Mac IE team offering them jobs.

By that time the Mac division had formally committed to MSN-for-Mac-OSX,
so it's not like we were completely going to stop work. But a meeting
was held internally, the outcome of which was that it didn't make sense
to build our own browser if Apple was going to bundle one, because the
marketshare and mindshare of the distant-second-place browser, on the
distant-second-place platform, wasn't worth pursuing. A week later we
had a meeting with high-up people at Apple, where they told us they were
doing a browser. And the week after that, after confirming it with Bill
Gates, who was reportedly sad but understanding of the decision, MacIE
was officially shut down.

MSN-for-MacOSX went ahead, and was also critically acclaimed, but once
released, indications were that the number of users was about the same
as the number of developers. After that, MacBU concentrated once again
on the next Office release, and MacIE has been well and truly and
permanently dead ever since.

Over the whole sad journey, the single most surprising thing I ever
discovered was from a small conversation that went:

Me: "Look, if it makes sense to devote dozens of people to WinIE, then
surely it makes sense to devote half a dozen to MacIE!"

Higher-up: <confused look> "There aren't dozens of people on WinIE.
WinIE had some great people on it! We need those great people on
products that make money!"

Me: "Then why on earth did we pursue IE in the first place? Just so that
the DOJ would sue us?"

Higher-up: <confused look>

Some day I hope to get a proper answer on our motivation to do WinIE and
MacIE in the first place. It seems to be that we were scared of not
having control of the HTML standard. And indeed, now that Firefox is
gaining traction, Microsoft has added more people to WinIE again.

Epilogue: All of this made it a lot more easy for me to quit and go work at Google
Reminder: I may or may not be leaving some parts out for NDA reasons.
---

Oh and another example; consider from a technical perspective, why
didn't Microsoft use ODF for Office 2007?  There's really no good
reason.  But from a profit perspective...  Quoting Doug Mahugh, "a
Senior Product Manager at Microsoft specializing in Office client
interoperability and the Open XML file formats":

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/09/microsoft-tech-.html

---
"Office is a USD$10 billion revenue generator for the company. When ODF was made an ISO standard, Microsoft had to react quickly as certain governments have procurement policies which prefer ISO standards. Ecma and OASIS are "international standards", but ISO is the international "Gold Standard". Microsoft therefore had to rush this standard through. It's a simple matter of commercial interests!"
---

Honestly, most of Microsoft's technical decisions that seem odd make
perfect sense from a profit/marketing/vendor lock-in perspective.

-- 
Microsoft has a majority market share
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