There's some wiggle room here, depending on how you "count". The first HTTP client and server were certainly created as NeXT apps, and I love NeXTSTEP so I love mentioning this trivia, but the reality IMO is the web that people actually used in the 90s and the web that evolved into what we have now doesn't really resemble Tim Berners-Lee's vision for what he called "the web" or his client/server.

So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.

> So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.

In 1995 windows was at his birth. The majority of people used other protocols than http to explore the internet. I was searching for a DOS browser to run it on the university computer (DOS diskless) to see the new web. Then MS bought Spyglass (or something) and they destroyed Netscape by bundling IE with windows. Windows did not bring anymore the web to the masses than netscape, chimera and others did. They just happened (as today) to hold a monopolistic position on the market and exploited this position.

> Then MS bought Spyglass (or something)

This is actually kind of an amazing story when you dig into it. Microsoft licensed Spyglass -- which was the commercialized version of the original Mosaic -- on a royalty basis. Microsoft's version of Spyglass was Internet Explorer 1.0, part of the commercial "Microsoft Plus!" package. But then Microsoft released IE separately for free, and when it was bundled with Windows, a bit of accounting sleight-of-hand treated it as $0 direct revenue (after all, it's just freeware they're not making you download separately, right?). So, the royalty payment to Spyglass became: $0. They still paid a fairly small flat minimum, but that was it.

Amazing? You mean despicable. Like pretty much everything Microsoft has ever done.

In case you or others are not aware: "amazing" and "awesome" are commonly-inferred as having positive connotations in the native-english-speaking-world, but the dictionary definitions of these words have no such connotations.

Amazing: causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing.

Awesome: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.

So, "Amazing" is not incompatible with "Despicable". It's like a magnitude without a direction (whereas "despicable" is magnitude and direction).

Right. One could fairly describe both Casablanca and Tommy Wiseau's The Room as amazing movies, but for markedly different reasons. :)

Thanks, the intent of my comment was to apply the 'direction', as you described it.

Amazing's common usage was too ambiguous for this topic for me. :)

We might even see MS making popular Progressive Web Apps!

>Quote : That is going to be the fundamental challenge in such a world, but we feel that there are ways. One of the ways I look at this is you can light an Android app or a PWA app or a UWP app on Windows in the future, or even today, for some of the new AI APIs.

Would it be fair to say that the web we know today, with a few big players that gather all our data was born on Windows but the web we know and love, with an abundance of personal websites was born on Unix?

Probably not, but there is some correlation I guess

Probably not. Most people in the 90s had their personal websites in some shared hosting service, while clients across the board were and still are predominantly Windows.

Benefit of the doubt, he's not talking about literally invention, but rather adoption. Most early internet users were definitely on Windows and Internet Explorer was the dominant browser for many years. Even that take glosses over them cheating Netscape out of their spot, but really IE was a cutting edge browser when it was at it's peak.

I mean, AOL was a pretty big player for adoption of the internet and they had their own version of a walled garden. Before that, there were a lot of people using lynx on a text terminal in libraries/gopher clients/dialup to a local university. By the time Netscape/Internet Explorer were making it to the scene, they were competing for something already established and growing.

And then Microsoft gave us the gift of Internet Explorer 6.

For all the mistakes made with IE6, the modern web would not be possible without Microsoft's introduction of "XMLHTTPRequest".

IE6 was actually a perfectly fine browser at launch, the trouble was that it stayed current for so long that getting IT infrastructure to abandon it took far longer than it should have. XP and Server 2003 had a similar predicament.

> IE6 was actually a perfectly fine browser at launch, the trouble was that it stayed current for so long that getting IT infrastructure to abandon it took far longer than it should have. XP and Server 2003 had a similar predicament.

My worst experience with Internet Explorer didn't even have to exist. Why did Windows 98 do Windows Update with Internet Explorer? Was there a technical reason why Windows Update had to be coupled with an open web browser session? My memory isn't that good but from what I recall it was really painful over dial up (technically up to 48kbps but in practice, you'd be lucky to get half of that).

> Was there a technical reason why Windows Update had to be coupled with an open web browser session

Yes, it was so that Microsoft can claim that IE4 was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed.

IE6 was released in 2001, 3 years before Firefox 1.0.

At the time, it was indeed a gift and Netscape was already on its dying legs with Netscape 6, bloated beyond recognition

I'm sure most of you have seen this, but for the younger crowd, this is the actual machine: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co82323...

Not only that but they were trying to get people on their own proprietary network (MSN, not to be confused with msn.com).

Isn’t that proving Nadella’s point?

Windows in 1994 was not the kind of walled garden where Microsoft could have forced users exclusively onto MSN. When the web turned out to be the winner, Microsoft had to adapt and build their own browser; they couldn’t just tighten the App Store screws like Apple would do in a similar situation on iOS.

I dont think you can compare what Apple and Microsoft are doing at 2 completely different points in the evolution of the internet. When microsoft embraced the internet we didn’t have ubiquitous TCP/IP yet. It was essential. Today we have the bottom layers so what businesses choose to do on top is their, well, business.

Ah, but MS came up with Ajax, moving the web from REST to movable code...

He very carefully does not say "born on windows" but "grew up on windows". Be sure that phrasing of a CEO's words on a press interview are very carefully chosen and checked.

Hah, QuakeEd, quake's editor was born on NeXT (written in Objective C), but then ported to Windows (MFC) as this was (and still is) the typical developer's machine (or DOS back in the days).