This is the first of a series of articles in which you will learn about what may be one of the silliest, most preventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st century, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest customer, and the trust of the US government.
↫ Axel Rietschin
It won’t take long into this series of articles before you start wondering how anyone manages to ship anything at Microsoft. If even half of this is accurate, this company should be placed under some sort of external oversight.
“It won’t take long into this series of articles before you start wondering how anyone manages to ship anything at Microsoft. If even half of this is accurate, this company should be placed under some sort of external oversight.”
I couldn’t disagree more. My hope is that MS implodes and goes bankrupt and that IBM can buy MS’ part of OS/2 for nothing or close to nothing and then open sources it.
It would also get rid of the 800 gorilla that dominates in areas ONLY because it is a 900 pound gorilla that destroyed many excellent companies “because it could” and then bought THEIR IP for pennies on the dollar. So it would be fitting if all of MS’ assets were bought by others for pennies on the dollar.
The best part would be if Bill Gates got caught up in something where his personal stock went negative at double what he is currently worth so that he is broke and has to file for bankruptcy. He and Steve Balmer. Two _dispicable_ people should should lose all of their wealth. And that’s the NICE way of me saying this.
Sadly won’t happen, but I share your dream. Don’t really care about OS/2, though. =)
I am sorry to break the news to you, but Gates left MS almost 20 years ago now. Microsoft is only 10% of his personal portfolio, so even if MS goes bankrupt, he would barely notice that.
Mind you he is one of the few riches who donated away most of his wealth, otherwise he would be still the richest guy on the planet. He contributed greater amounts to research and eradication programmes of polio, malaria and other tropical diseases that hit Sub-Saharan countries, just for you to know. By the way, have you seen the MS balance sheet lately?
It seems like a mix of real stories and a lot of hyperbole, and a massively difficult to read writing style.
Microsoft fumbled several times. They missed the move to Internet. That caused them a lot of headaches with DoJ anti-trust issues when hastily tried to catch up.
They almost missed the living room, but Xbox was a relative success. At least in the USA they dominated early 2000s/2010s. But in classic Microsoft fashion fumbled in 2020s
They did not want to miss the AI bandwagon, which is understandable. But did two MAJOR mistakes. They build an empire based on OpenAI, which was always shirking their agreements. And they bet it ALL on an unproven technology.
OpenAI took their billions to make contracts with AWS. Somehow it looks “legal”, since they are not hosting there in the the very technical narrow sense of the word. And Microsoft managed to break Windows by having everyone “vibe coding” without checks.
Even their Star Menu is a Electron based JavaScript mess.
They are getting better though, looks like reality hit, and they have been fixing both Xbox (basically sent the team in charge of the fumble) and Windows (all native code)
Too late?
Probably not
But they missed a lot of good opportunity, and goodwill
There are many problems with the article. First every long running organisation is a shitshow, they didn’t make billions of dollars by waiting until the engineers produce their dream code after all. They got there by actually deliver mostly working products and that creates cruft, lot of cruft. This is very important for the Oracle business as such, which received a promise of demand from OpenAI, itself a heavily money losing empire. That future demand which might not manifest, as we can see that already some plans fell to nihil.
It is an unethical article anyhow, I am not sure If I were to remain employable, whether I were to detail so much detail about my past employers (and I have seen many hard and terrible things during my career). So with that, I feel this is more personal advertisement or revenge than actual useful info about software development.
This is a very interesting read but I have two issues. One. It’s hard to follow or validate the technical narrative. And from this guy’s description, it straddles numerous deep knowledge silos that very few people could follow. Two. When you are a technical resource and you need to escalate a serious issue, you are supposed to build support with your boss or team and have them escalate. Otherwise you are out of channel and very likely to be ignored.