Microsoft Paid $173 Million For It, Then Switched It Off

Comments · 79

• 19

  @1906Farnsworth · 2 weeks ago

  Moral: Do not trust Microsoft. Or any other proprietary product to perform functions that your business can't do without.

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• TH

  @TheRaiderman1 · 12 days ago

  Microsoft has been toxic for most of its history.

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• GL

  @GladeSwope · 2 weeks ago

  They have been known to anti-preserve their classics.

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• JA

  @janbergstrom645 · 2 weeks ago

  In several instances, Microsoft has discontinued products—at the initiative of product managers who are accountable only for their specific new products rather than overall sales figures—in order to force users to switch to new products that lacked sufficient appeal. This has proven very costly for Microsoft, as senior management has simply remained indifferent to the reality of the situation.

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• MA

  @mar-j4r9m · 2 weeks ago

  Microsoft has this track record. Think of Visual Basic, Silverlight, Xamarin Forms and others. Just when developers embrace a tech, they drop it.

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• JT

  @jtclark5274 · 2 weeks ago

  Ahh my dBase/Fox days 30 years ago. I don't miss them...

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• AN

  @andrehinds568 · 2 weeks ago

  The bare bones of this story is on the same line as the basic story about HyperCard for the Macintosh.

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• GO

  @gorilladisco9108 · 2 weeks ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fydFaFgCWis&amp;t=400">6:40</a> So that&apos;s why Foxbase was very similar to dBase.🤔<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fydFaFgCWis&amp;t=535">8:55</a> ... and the disease transferred to Borland. 😖<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fydFaFgCWis&amp;t=630">10:30</a> FoxPro has its own IDE, while Access was a database &quot;add-on&quot; for Visual Basic user.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fydFaFgCWis&amp;t=805">13:25</a> The flaw of Visual FoxPro was it&apos;s a file-based database, not a server-based database. It worked in 1990s where the companies who used it only had one or two computers. By 2000s, that same company had a dozen or more of computers, requiring a server to coordinate them. Visual FoxPro deal with it in halfassed solution, by becoming an IDE to write programs to communicate with server-based databases (MySQL, SQLServer, Oracle, etc.), in other words, became a glorified Notepad++.<br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fydFaFgCWis&amp;t=945">15:45</a> The defection of Hejlsberg was a turning point in history. 😯It killed Borland. It killed VB. It killed Visual Foxpro. <br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fydFaFgCWis&amp;t=1020">17:00</a> I count five words 😠

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• IN

  @intel386DX · 12 days ago

  They killed Skype as well.

• SI

  @sib183 · 2 weeks ago

  please hire a human to edit or review stuff like this. &nbsp;there are sections where text is not wrapping, but runs off the right edge of the screen. &nbsp;minus many points.

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• CH

  @Chalisque · 12 days ago

  &quot;They had done nothing wrong. They bought a Microsoft product.&quot; That&apos;s the mistake: trusting a single supplier who can pull the plug at any time for whatever they deem business reasons. Buying such a product is a single point of failure that puts you at the mercy of Microsoft&apos;s business interests.

• KA

  @karinchaney101 · 2 weeks ago

  AI is ruining Youtube.

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