You were rude for absolutely no reason. You could point out where you think the article comes short and make suggestions on how to improve it. With this approach, you achieved nothing.

Being competent requires being knowledgeable AND getting things done. You might be knowledgeable, but you need to learn how to work with other people.

> Do you have an example use case?

The one that comes to mind is HPC, where you avoid over allocation of the physical cores. If the process has the whole node for itself for a brief period, inefficient memory access might have a bigger impact than memory starvation.

IBM also has their RAID-like memory for mainframes that might be able to do something similar. This feels like software implemented RAID-1.

Someone has their bonus tied to how many copies of Edge are installed.

Interesting and fun read - we are well into the terrain of what was completely impossible to do back then. Now I can't wait to see a faster AppleSoft ROM ;-)

Isn't it too early in this timeline to have a Rei Toei?

I know I must have read it, because I've found the book here with a page marker, but I don't remember much. I also can't find the book right now - it must be in my office somewhere.

Remember to check your pancreas regularly.

You really start wondering when they are introduced and it all kind of clicks at the end, when we realize we had the rug pulled from under our feet when the book started, and we only know it by the point we land on our faces.

Microsoft was a language company at the start - they had a huge share in 8-bit computers and their BASIC made into the ROMs of almost every computer sold in the 70s and 80s. Then they branched out to applications, with little success (I remember Multiplan on CP/M, DOS, and Mac). When they started selling PC-DOS and MS-DOS they had no applications play to speak of. Office only came much later, and the apps that appeared for Mac, Word and Excel, were ported to Windows starting on Windows 2. Word for DOS struggled in the market and never reached a significant share.

They might have forgotten to pull that rug.

At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform.

Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).