Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL

This passage hits pretty hard in terms of company culture. I think this is what Peter Thiel meant by "dont fuck up the culture" to Airbnb. "Those were the years of Microsoft’s long, slow decline, which continues to this day. The number of things wrong with the company was extraordinary, but they can be summed up by the word bureaucracy. Early on at Microsoft—and even later, when we first started Messenger—you could just do things. You had a good idea…

This is a great article. Ok, I skipped the parts where he explain how computer works and the history of MS, but I loved how he goes from the internal working of Messenger to the higher level problems in MS. On the other side, does anyone have a good, encompassing explanation to why AOL was a such a systematic value destroyer? I always read about MS structural problems, but not AOL's. Nullsoft (Winamp), Mirabilis (ICQ) and Netscape (Navigator) quickly come…

Another great piece from n+1.

Any submission that opens with "In the summer of 1998 I graduated from college and went to work as a programmer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I was put on the group that was building MSN Messenger Service" and then goes in to reverse engineering the OSCAR protocol gets my vote. When it then goes in to the origins of Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" thinking all I can say is - Thanks for the trip down memory lane.