Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and in honour of this milestone, Bill Gates has published a blog post about the first code the company ever wrote.
In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home.
Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive. Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella—along with the many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years.
↫ Bill Gates
There’s obviously no denying the impact Microsoft has had on the computer industry and the world as a whole, and a lot of that impact is not exactly what you would call positive. I find the fact that the blog post by Gates is nothing but JavaScript that slows down some browsers and devices, breaks page up/page down navigation for some people, does not allow for text selection, and whose source code is just a bunch of scripts without any of the actual text is a biting metaphor for the role Microsoft has played in the industry.
Making today’s celebrations even more biting is the fact that Microsoft’s role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza is causing a lot of unrest within the company. Twice now today, presentations and talks by Microsoft’s current and former CEOs have been interrupted by Microsoft employees protesting Microsoft’s contributions to the genocide in Gaza, and before the day’s over there will probably be more incidents like these. One of the Microsoft employees who protested, Ibtihal Aboussad, also sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees, detailing why Microsoft employees are protesting today.
My name is Ibtihal, and for the past 3.5 years, I’ve been a software engineer on Microsoft’s AI Platform org. I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice. This is especially true when I’ve witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue. For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard.
↫ Ibtihal Aboussad
It goes without saying that Ibtihal Aboussad can probably go and clean out her desk after this, but giving up what must be a high-paying job – and possibly risking worse under the current Trump regime – for standing up and protesting an ongoing genocide is nothing but praise-worthy and noble. It obviously won’t stop the genocide or make Microsoft even blink, but it’s better than doing nothing, and it does painfully highlight how many other Microsoft employees remain silent while the company they work for does an IBM.
I don’t really care about Microsoft’s 50th anniversary. Look at any of the company’s current products – Office, Windows, the “AI” stuff – and there’s clearly nothing left. They’re empty shells of what they used to be, hollowed out, their contents replaced with upsells, dark patterns, cruft, and “AI” nonsense nobody wants. But hey, at least Microsoft is creating synergies to make eradicating Gazans easier.
Here’s your party popper.
Your site, your rules.
Fine by me.
“Microsoft’s human rights statement prohibits retaliation against anyone who raises a human rights-related concern: Human rights statement | Microsoft CSR”
Even if they hold to that, they may still decide that disrupting a high profile event and embarrassing the company is something they can still take action against.
I imagine that refusing to sell to the Israeli military is a tricky business in the US. Supporting Israel seems to be a bit of a political litmus test. Years ago, I worked at a company that employed a really high percentage of Israeli ex-pats. So, I have a soft spot for the country and the culture. The current situation is hard to support but easy to understand if you have the context. When it comes to security, the Israelis are deadly serious. In their view, they are defending against total annihilation. An expression I heard more than once was “you give one knuckle and they take all your hand”.
I am primarily a Linux user but I cannot say that I do not like anything from Microsoft. I try to avoid Office but it is clearly the best in class. I am quite a fan of .NET and think it just keeps getting better. Teams sucks but it is probably the remote meeting app I use the most. Their APIs are the gold standard platform for PC gaming. They wrote the memory allocator in my Linux distro (so I am using their software right now).
Until recently, I was responsible for a product portfolio that collected and housed petabytes of data for US law enforcement. We used Azure Gov and a fair bit of Microsoft AI. A lot of what we did was video surveillance. So, I guess I have blood on my hands as well. That said, I found that Microsoft took the ethics of the technology fairly seriously to the point that they exited a few areas of potential business as a result. I do not want to overstate their altruism but they were not exactly openly evil by any stretch. The individual people were top notch. I have worked with worse.
One thing that always fascinated me about Bill Gates is that he anticipated so clearly the PC revolution but totally spaced on mobile.
Before Microsoft, software was built by teams of programmers who would write large, single purpose, custom applications for a single big machine. Bill imagined a world where he would sell small, general purpose software to be run on a large number of smaller machines. The name Microsoft was no accident. And what could be more general purpose than a standardized platform to write your own small programs? (BASIC).
The C programming language was invented just a couple of years before Altair BASIC. C was originally created to write the operating system and utilities for a single machine. Nobody was “selling software” other than paying people to write it. Neither C or UNIX became portable until a few years after Altair BASIC. “The C Programming Language” book was written in 1978. Meanwhile, Bill ported Microsoft BASIC to every small computer platform available and sold it for money (complaining loudly about people who used his software without paying), As we all know, writing small, general purpose software that could be sold to run unmodified on a many, many individual machines made Bill Gates very rich.
Yet, when it came to mobile, he somehow missed that the same thing would happen again. His vision of mobile devices was that they would be fixed-function appliances like phones, or calculators, or pagers, or your toaster was at the time. Sure they would have more functionality. He wrote about mobile weather apps, and note-taking apps, and calculators, and even cameras way before such devices existed. He saw the potential of the technology but missed the business implications. He thought you would buy hardware with fixed capabilities instead of seeing mobile as a platform for the distribution of applications. He did not see the market for even more “micro” software. In some ways, this was his big miss on the Internet as well. Again, seeing it as an application distribution platform did not seem to occur to him.
Perhaps the success of Windows changed his thinking. He coveted selling the platform instead of leveraging it as a market to sell apps. He didn’t even imagine the App Store. It is like he imagined selling you Windows to run notepad and paint instead of selling you Microsoft Office to run on whatever you have.
Than again, maybe he was ultimately right. These days, even Windows and Linux are just two different applications that you can run on Azure. In this era of “services” over software, we seem to be back to the idea that the real money is in the platform, not the applications. And, despite not selling much software, Apple certainly makes a lot of money off the App Store.
How is this Microsoft’s fault? It was Netscape that unleashed the plague that is JavaScript and the “script” HTML tag upon this world.
Flash/ActionScript got it right from the start: scripts should be confined to a single DOM node, not have authority over the entire DOM. Too bad the implementation sucked.
Do you not know what a metaphor is…?
And he is also not right. Netscape did unleash JS, but we had scripting long before that.
Lisp ?
Thom Holwerda,
Trump just fired both the director and deputy of the NSA, I’m pretty sure we can all guess what Trump was demanding: absolute loyalty to him and for the NSA to pursue his enemies. His administration seems to be quite open about revoking the legal status of immigrants who’ve criticized the civilian casualties in Palestine. The heads of the NSA would have protested that Trump’s demands were illegal, particularly when using the NSA’s powers against people legally in the US. Trump, not giving a damn about the constitution nor their oaths of office, fired them both. Their replacements will naturally bend over to do whatever Trump asks without question. This is prescribed by project 2025 too. With the power of the NSA behind this witch hunt, it’s scope becomes a whole lot more serious for everyone. They will scrape every inch of the web, social media sites, obtain data from confidential PRISM partners, employ NSA backdoors to compile lists for Trump, one of which will likely include gaza sympathizers. Those who end up high enough on these lists may be deprived of legal status and deported without much opportunity to defend themselves. Speaking out online has never been more dangerous for those in the US…we were living under the cozy blanket of the first amendment, but now we’re finally going to see how having all of our thoughts recorded online is going to be used against us. It just required an authoritarian president to turn the key.
It’s sad that Microsoft money goes to people supporting terrorism. I hope MS will be able to weed them out instead of funding daily rocket attacks on Israel.
In war, it’s just a definition what constitutes terrorism and what defense.
What would YOU do if someone decided to put up their houses on the property where you’re been living for years and start harrassing you? And yes, depending on how far back in time you choose to go, all of the peoples who have lived on that land have been on both sides of this. Which makes who the “terrorist” is, mostly a question of which side you were indoctrinated by first.
It just has to stop, and as the bigger kid on the block (at the moment, anyways), it’s *Israel*’s responsibility to retreat a good and fair amount. If I were Israel I’d make that retreat go back *well* beyond the 1967 boundaries. And if I were the Palestinians, I’d still not trust Israel one single bit after that.
But we’d have a start.
With all the pain and death that Jewish people had to suffer under Nazi Germany, one would think they’d realize how *their* government has now become the genocide machine. One would think they’d be protesting in the streets for an end to the violence. And lo and behold, even *orthodox* Jews have been protesting the Israeli government in the streets. Google it if you didn’t yet know.
And before you twist all of the above around … none of it justifies what Hamas did last year, either. It simply explains it and puts it in the context you so conveniently chose to omit.
There is more than enough blame to go around. Last night I saw in the news how the IDF were deliberately bombing ambulances and then lying about it until a video of the incident appeared.
That is also a big fat war crime right there.
kragil,
This keeps happening, the IDF reporting one thing but someone else captured the encounter that completely contradicts IDF’s official record. Either the IDF is woefully inept at uncovering what their soldiers are doing, or they intentionally choose to cover it up/lie about it. If we want to give them the benefit of doubt on the “lie” part, then it implies their investigators routinely fail to do their jobs.
It is a similar dynamic that has ultimately lead to many police departments in the US being forced to wear & use body cams in public. What’s really ironic is how many police still end up lying about the encouters on their own cameras. But the footage is subject to FOIA requests and can be used to prove their wrongdoing. Many such videos notoriously end up on youtube. Maybe body cams should be worn by military soldiers too, although I don’t think it will happen because I get the impression military branches are against having accountability.
Check Wikipedia for the “LGBTQ rights in the State of Palestine”.
Ah yes, that certainly justifies a genocide.
You must be very smart!
Well that turned dark fast… Islam i the enemy of all non-heterosexual people. This is not news. Do as you wish,
Because Christianity and other organized religions have such a great track record, am I right?
The person with the intersectional queer flag avatar is just throwing it around to support genocide. How cute, and how very typical of tech site comment sections.
No. Fuck off. Take those extra colors off your flag, go join the rainbow capitalist brigade. If bigotry were a justification for genocide, not a single country on Earth would be safe.
IDK, lets just die in ukraine then… I dont care any more.
What the fuck are you even talking about
On second thought nevermind, I remember you were all on about Donald Trump ushering in world peace before he got elected last year, so it’s pretty clear nothing you say is worth listening to
@thom “….Microsoft’s contributions to the genocide in Gaza….” Please explain, because it’s not obvious. I’m just observing employees protesting but it’s really unclear what Microsoft’s role or contribution actually is here.
It probably comes down to selling their ordinary software licenses to the Israeli military. I highly doubt MS is pulling an IBM and delivering custom tech to aid in the violence.
From what I can gather they’re developing and providing the AI that is picking places to bomb. That is vile, no matter what conflict it happens in. An then, when employees protest such a use of their work, they fire them.
Tom, I was fully expected genocide to happen after October 7 pogrom of Jews done by Palestinians from Gaza.
It luckily did not happen. The Israeli are better people than I would’ve been in their shoes.
The scale of the Oct 7 attack roughly translates to 13 times of the WTC attack, if you calculate per capita. It’s as if someone killed 40,000 Americans in one day. What do you think Americans would have done? There would be no Gaza to speak of.
Palestinians are extremely lucky the Jews are unbelievably generous and forgiving bunch.