It is now just a month shy of 20 years since that letter was written.
And what did Microsoft do? They bought a browser and gave it away for free, cutting off Netscape at the knees, til the company folded and become the Mozilla Foundation.
They poured billions and billions of dollars into online initiatives from the Microsoft Network to Bing, including buying dozens and dozens of companies.
None of those were big successes. None of those have been a "tidal wave" of innovation, or success, or money. At least that I can see. Internet Explorer became dominant, but mainly due to bundling and that has gone away. IIS was a popular web server for a long time and people have written web sites using microsoft technology, but .net which is just a renamed MFC, isn't really much more used outside the same types of shops that used it before 1995. Yes, the mono project brought it to linux and made C# a more viable language, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing.
Maybe I'm missing something. Xbox and Xbox online are huge money sinks that I don't know if MSFT is ever going to recover the money from. The stock has been flat during that period while google, amazon and apple have been going like gangbusters. (And given the level of monetary inflation over the past 15 years flat means down.) Yes, it did boom during the bubble but that was %100 windows and office from the boom in companies putting computers on everyone's desk. And yes, it's grown the past couple of years after being flat from 2001-2011. But that's not a result of the 1995 "initiative".
Microsoft, like Apple, unfortunately for both, doesn't quite get the internet. It doesn't get mobile (unlike Apple).
The new CEO might change this, I don't know.
But the "internet tidal wave" happened pretty much completely without microsoft.
For the record, I worked for the company near the time of this letter, lived in Seattle during most of the intervening years and have been watching Microsoft closely for about 25 years.
I can't agree with this. MFC was a thin C++ encapsulation of the Windows API. It was a reasonably successful technology but was unloved largely because it was so thin - it didn't try to fix the ugly mess beneath and so left developers wrestling a large smelly octopus. .Net was more of a clean room attempt to provide developers with a clean, sane, consistent API built on a new virtual machine based architecture complete with a shiny new language (C#, basically Java++).
I originally went from Borland C++ Builder to .Net 1.1, the move from one IDE to the other felt very familiar, going from MFC to .Net was nothing like this.
Yes. Microsoft hired Anders Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal and Delphi) to architect their C# / .Net development tools. So you observed a distinct family relationship there. But MFC is a different beast entirely.
"MFC was introduced in 1992 with Microsoft's C/C++ 7.0 compiler for use with 16-bit versions of Windows as an extremely thin object-oriented C++ wrapper for the Windows API."
Thinness is probably in the eye of the beholder, but as one of the many MFC victims back in the day, I found using MFC to be endlessly frustrating because it added a layer of complexity and pain to Win32 programming without giving me anything I really wanted back in compensation - you still needed to work directly with arcane Win32 mechanisms to do simple things, like, change the background color of a window for example. Admittedly there was some (less thin) Document/View model stuff thrown in there, but the impression I got was that this was an afterthought bolted on the side.
In contrast, Qt and wxWidgets for example are toolkits that are designed to make a programmer's life easier by providing a genuinely convenient abstraction of a Windowed GUI.
My perception on MFC is that it was neither thin, nor particularly well thought out. It felt like something Microsoft started developing for internal use and that they decided to turn it into a product for developers, with all sort of idiosyncratic oddities that make perfect sense when you are Microsoft and none to anyone else.
What they did was bundle internet connectivity in with the every windows PC. Sounds ridiculous even mentioning it, right?
Back then you couldn't connect to the internet without installing third party tools, usually from an ISP on a disc. You had to install a browser, you couldn't embed hyperlinks in documents, there was no built-in way to get an email client..etcetcetc.
The original memo was not about building developer tools for the internet, but on taking a stand-alone operating system and shipping it with networking and hyperlinks and forming partnerships with ISPs and on and on.
But those tools were hard for laypeople to use in 1995. Sure, Windows now had a web browser and email program but you still needed an ISP and the email client was confusing to setup. Hell, their own Microsoft Network service was hard to figure out; one phone number to connect to the proprietary service and a different one for the Web (which never connected for me).
It was much simpler for users to put in the AOL disk and stay inside their walled garden - both conceptually and technically easier for laypeople.
Your points may be true, but the point is they went from potentially letting AOL own all their customers to regaining the initiative. Prior to the strategy change, it would have been simple for AOL to maintain a steel grip on those customers and harvest all the value from them.
Just because Microsoft went on to dominate the desktop market and win the browser war doesn't mean it was inevitable.
.NET is a renamed MFC? I stopped reading afterwards. You are completely clueless about .NET, aren't you? Do you think that Java and the JVM are just "rebranded" Delphi as well?
And what did Microsoft do? They bought a browser and gave it away for free, cutting off Netscape at the knees, til the company folded and become the Mozilla Foundation.
They poured billions and billions of dollars into online initiatives from the Microsoft Network to Bing, including buying dozens and dozens of companies.
None of those were big successes. None of those have been a "tidal wave" of innovation, or success, or money. At least that I can see. Internet Explorer became dominant, but mainly due to bundling and that has gone away. IIS was a popular web server for a long time and people have written web sites using microsoft technology, but .net which is just a renamed MFC, isn't really much more used outside the same types of shops that used it before 1995. Yes, the mono project brought it to linux and made C# a more viable language, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing.
Maybe I'm missing something. Xbox and Xbox online are huge money sinks that I don't know if MSFT is ever going to recover the money from. The stock has been flat during that period while google, amazon and apple have been going like gangbusters. (And given the level of monetary inflation over the past 15 years flat means down.) Yes, it did boom during the bubble but that was %100 windows and office from the boom in companies putting computers on everyone's desk. And yes, it's grown the past couple of years after being flat from 2001-2011. But that's not a result of the 1995 "initiative".
Microsoft, like Apple, unfortunately for both, doesn't quite get the internet. It doesn't get mobile (unlike Apple).
The new CEO might change this, I don't know.
But the "internet tidal wave" happened pretty much completely without microsoft.
For the record, I worked for the company near the time of this letter, lived in Seattle during most of the intervening years and have been watching Microsoft closely for about 25 years.