But the reality of shareholder value and developers salaries had to come from somewhere, and here we are, the enshittification of the internet is upon us and you can’t even load a HTML document without being tracked, spammed and generally frustrated.

I do find the commercial corruption of some areas of computing frustrating - but there are still pools of tranquility if you choose to focus on them. I'm having some fun trying to self-curate an interesting set of people in my Mastodon feed for example - slow going but there's no hurry.

Then there are lots of interesting and/or quirky little projects on GitHub and elsewhere that I can try to steer my attention toward instead of the social-network noise.

I started my web dev career when MSIE was accelerating and achieved crazy levels of dominance. Developing for IE was shit. I mean, I was never out of work, but the wasted time figuring out which quirk you were coding around was, frankly, ridiculous when you look back on it. But you had an arsenal of workarounds and techniques which that generation of developer fantastic problem-solvers and have lots of initiative.

Despite how they did it, it is essential that nobody in or around the industry forgets how good MSIE was for mainstream adoption of the internet/www. It literally made it so that everyone was online. This was when the beige box in the corner was your window to the www and very few people had that kind of connectivity in their pocket.

Reflecting on how MS achieved dominance and then essentially backburnered MSIE development really befuddles me to this day. Some of the thoughts in the comments make sense; Was it arrogance and MS seriously thought Win32/.NET would remain dominant? Or simply that they'd dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre?

You aren't entirely wrong; Microsoft tripped over themselves trying to get XP's successor out of development hell.

It was five years from Windows XP to Windows Vista, compared to one to two years between Windows releases up to XP. And then as we all know, Windows Vista completely flopped because it was too advanced for its time.

It took eight years from Windows XP to Windows 7 until Microsoft finally had a new Windows release that people would come out and buy. In a way, they really were too busy elsewhere to care about IE.

True is the lesson that scale doesn’t represent success. I wonder how many of the current tech companies will learn the same lesson, or have we reached a period of maturity where products that don’t contribute to the bottom line aren’t allowed to linger like this did?

Brand awareness for "MSN" just from MSN Messenger alone must have been massive. I'd be surprised today if half of your average kids using WhatsApp have even heard of Bing or Office 365. Hell, if it wasn't for Xbox Live the same could probably be said for that

Seems like a huge amount of wasted traction and momentum for the generation that grew up on MSN messenger, and now might be making purchase decisions where that traction could've been leveraged. It's what any other (non tech) brands do very successfully.

I saw someone repost something from msn.com the other day, and was genuinely surprised to see it was still live.

But, the way that the brand was migrated

   MSN Messenger -> Windows Live Messenger -> Bing (?) -> etc etc 

Mini cabs were/are ass, in every UK city, and they deserved to get disrupted.

And the net effect is that the whole market had to compete for it's market share again, which meant a better experience for the customer overall.

I laugh when I encounter a super local minicab service that has maybe a half dozen drivers, you book them by phone, radios them to go to pickups and still only take cash. Who are ordering these jalopies? Meanwhile, anyone serious has an app, contactless payment/prepayment and real time ETA. Much better.

Just because certain personality types work better in solitude doesn’t mean it’s one-size-fits-all.

Others are suffering loneliness, marginalisation, are struggling inside their own heads, are stuck in tiny apartments or don’t have access to outdoor space. If you hate the office that badly, you’re probably working at the wrong place.

And yeah, a truly creative collaborative working environment can’t be replicated over video call.

I know I'd rather be coding from a beach than in a fluorescent-lit cubicle (and I do). Even if it's more productive for Bill to barge into my cubicle than wait for me to respond to his Slack message.

Let's at least let our work culture hit a nice 50/50 split between office jobs and remote jobs before we damn the WFH movement too much.

Btw, the "kool aid" you're seeing is companies grappling with a pandemic. It's not like fanatical WFHers have spontaneously become ascendent in our society.

I don't think a 50/50 split is required to test out any new idea. All you need is a representative statistical sample.

That's quite a departure from "WFH isn't one-size-fits-all". If working from home isn't for everyone, why do you assume the office is?

> And yeah, a truly creative collaborative working environment can’t be replicated over video call.

Strongly disagree. I don't think you even real-time communication, much less video is required to have strong collaboration. There are certainly times when it helps, but even in those times I've never felt held back by jumping on a quick call vs an in-person meeting, and we almost never do video.

As a manager, there are certainly conversations where I find in-person to be beneficial, and for those video calls are a poor substitute. Reviews, raise negotiations, disciplinary conversations, etc, but these are all discussions where an accurate emotional read is critical for both sides.

On the other hand for discussing algorithms, software architecture, network layouts, server specifications, etc, these can certainly be topics with lots of disagreement, requiring lots of conversation, but if your relying on emotional nuance for or other non-verbal cues for communication I think you've got an unacknowledged problem, where people are communicating clearly enough with their words.

Then again I don't have children and I cycle to work so maybe that's the difference.

I haven’t seen a corporate space “designed for work” in years thanks to the cult of the open plan office.

Meanwhile at home I have a nice electrically-adjustable standing desk, an Aeron, an air conditioner set to the precise temperature I alone want it to be, and I can go to the coffee house downstairs if I want to hear people bleat about blockchain.

Replicating a truly creative collaborative working environment is impossible everywhere.

Truly creative environments are grown from the resources and people available. You can't copy something that worked elsewhere with different people and expect it to work again.

Also, entirely anecdotally, the band The Postal Service are so called because they created their album by sending each other tapes through the post. They were very creative, and living in different cities, so creative remote work has been achieved at least once.

Also comparing Covid wfh with normal wfh is vastly different and incomparable. Many of us are stuck inside, whereas normal work from home you could go to a coworking space, or a coffee shop, are the beach. Being forced inside is totally different.

In an ideal world, workplaces would strike a balance and allow each person the environment to deliver their best work.

What we should be advocating for is an inclusive policy that allows employees to choose how they want to work.

You were doing pretty well until this sentence.

I couldn't agree more with this, and from a lot of comments from the past months, this is something that seems to be a big issue with people wanting to work from home.