dan_m2k

This makes me really happy to see this non social media, non algo part of the internet going from strength to strength.

Having deleted my socials and regained some time, I’ve just got a small skeleton of the sites I used to read left in my phone’s favourites.

Despite all the wrongs of Facebook, et al, I have lost some channels and stories that I used to consume there.

How do users of readers like NNW discover new stuff? Just picking stuff up or do the apps support discovery?

A really good read. I was a bit later to the party but, my God, it was better then.

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.

Started a challenger media business, still stressy, but I have purpose and I have much more satisfaction in life

An interesting retrospective and nice to read, though I had to chuckle at "soft" discs. Is 'floppy' now considered offensive?

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?

Fucking good.

No idea, but I bet the brand equity created for the MSN brand via MSN messenger was indeed huge across a boatload of international markets.

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 

was a shitshow and made death a sweet relief for it.

A nice little slice of internet history.

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?

Yeah. Hackneys weren't great, but ubiquitous and convenient in London (even if it was like travelling in blender).

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.

Property portfolios = people paying your pension one day.

I’m so pleased that someone isn’t afraid to reject the WFH kool aid.

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 use the Dyson on my Mac’s exhaust every so often for the same reason, it’s satisfying to see the amount of crud that comes out of it.

I can’t believe I got hooked in by that deceptive, clickbaity headline. Am I on the ExpressOnline and didn’t realise?!

I call bs. It was a very clever entry to the market with lots of opportunity for product improvement. 3G chip? Reason to upgrade. App Store? Another.

Good piece, and nice to see a local lad on here. waves from Park Square

As to your colleague, thank you. If I can be of any help in helping identify where support went wrong, please hit me up.