> Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear :)
First it's not funny. Many companies including Netscape, Google (and at the moment PaaS companies) have/had the fear that Microsoft will crush them. You are either too young, or an employee of MS, otherwise nothing funny about. Maybe you should read pg's essay:
"Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone
at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a
technology company, the next thought would have been
that Microsoft would crush them.
It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand
the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a
company with several times the power Google has now, but
way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of
them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet
company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if
they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the
same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would
turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?"
"Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
The threatened world was where IE6 and ActiveX won, where websites routinely insisted on running unsandboxed native code in the browser to implement closed source client-server applications. Where both client and server had to be Microsoft in order to interoperate, paying MS license fees for every client and server. Where sufficiently successful application developers got the phone call from Microsoft offering to either lowball buyout their company or Microsoft would ship a competing product for free in their next release.
(Containerisation would be absurdly expensive in this world, as you'd need a new Windows Server license for every VM. I think you still do, so nobody does this).
