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Kirk Glerum's avatar

>> It might be extreme, but the general view could be distilled down to the belief that Systems was truly difficult engineering work and Apps were mostly trivial.

My favorite example of this - sorry I'm jumping ahead a couple years - was Sun Microsystem's purchase of StarOffice, rebadged to OpenOffice, to compete with MS Office. McNealy and Co thought 'hey, we write operating systems, the toughest thing going - how hard could apps be?' We (Microsoft Office) then proceeded to grind them into powder. I enjoyed that.

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Anand Rao's avatar

The most insightful chapter of the book to date, in my opinion! I'm sure the story will keep getting more hardcore from now on!

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