In 2000, I worked at a web company that was a “Platinum Partner” with MS, and we did a lot of consulting work with them for various large clients. Me and another guy were invited to come out to learn about this new platform that MS was building called “Cool”, which was the internal name for c# at the time, and the early forms of .NET.
While we were there, Scott Guthrie (I’m 99% sure it was him) was supposed to lead us in some discussion but wasn’t there, and someone filled in for him. We learned later it was because he had been called into Bill G’s office and got dressed down a bit because Scott had basically created his own version of Apache web server to use within the dot net tools. It was rudimentary and temporary, but the reason he did it was because he had been trying for months to get the IIS team to give him a version of their server for use within the dot net dev tools, and they just kept putting him off. So he went around them and built his own. They found out, went up the chain, and Scott got dragged into the office to be told to cut it out and work with them instead.
Granted, this is 20 years ago, so my memory might not be as crisp, but it stuck with me as a lesson that Microsoft was not a single company, but like 10-15 different little companies, and they competed among themselves as much as they worked together. And as OSS was coming up at the time I thought, “they have no chance to survive what’s coming.”
While we were there, Scott Guthrie (I’m 99% sure it was him) was supposed to lead us in some discussion but wasn’t there, and someone filled in for him. We learned later it was because he had been called into Bill G’s office and got dressed down a bit because Scott had basically created his own version of Apache web server to use within the dot net tools. It was rudimentary and temporary, but the reason he did it was because he had been trying for months to get the IIS team to give him a version of their server for use within the dot net dev tools, and they just kept putting him off. So he went around them and built his own. They found out, went up the chain, and Scott got dragged into the office to be told to cut it out and work with them instead.
Granted, this is 20 years ago, so my memory might not be as crisp, but it stuck with me as a lesson that Microsoft was not a single company, but like 10-15 different little companies, and they competed among themselves as much as they worked together. And as OSS was coming up at the time I thought, “they have no chance to survive what’s coming.”
I’m still not sure if I was wrong or not yet.