Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 15, 2023

Mike, you’re just a nameless, faceless casualty on Gates’s march to conquer the tech world.

I’m surprised Alex is not biting her knuckles til they bleed to keep from saying I told you so.

So—are they broke? Will they file for bankruptcy??

That much ego deserves bankruptcy. His family told him exactly what would happen, when the cash offer was still there. In this life you have to pick your battles.

What’s up with Bernie, who was their main financial backer—-and then only because Mike is an old college buddy.

TODAY’S HeADLINE——“Trump’s Truth Social Platform has lost 73 Million Dollars in the past year”.

Sounds ripe for an honest takeover at 3am when the old fool is asleep.

Another small fish gets eaten by a larger one.

Too bad Alex can’t take honor to the bank

Mike, help me here. Are you mad you’re not making enough money from a product , you have no idea what it is, from a company that does know enough about it to utilize it ?

Next step: Zuckerberg.

Mike’s greed was no match for Microsoft’s greed. It’s the essence of capitalism. He should have skimmed some “cream” off the the initially high stock value and invested in Microsoft. That’s the option of capitalism.

Most people don’t get even a warning. They continue thinking their idea is unique and cannot be implemented by a competitor who understands the basis for its popularity.

“Reverse Engineering” does not necessarily mean copying any of your code. A team of powerful coders can approach each function as a “black box” and write their own code for that function. Now with AI programming assistance, you just need mediocre programmers with unlimited patience. :)

Gates was never the tech guy. He was very good at coding in BASIC but never progressed beyond that.

I do feel sorry for them in this story arc, but they absolutely saw the fully loaded semi truck bearing down on them, headlights blazing away, and did nothing to get out of the road. Nobody ever feels that they have an obligation to keep you in business— not your customers, not your suppliers, not your backers, certainly not your competition, and when push comes to shove, not even your employees. It’s your problem, not theirs. That’s what capitalism is. If you don’t like it, you can join up with those who are trying to change it. They’ve been working on that for a long time. Progress is slow.

Nah. Where there’s breath, there are acts of evil.

Research and Acquisitions at MS is light on research and big on acquisitions. If you have actually read one of those licenses that come with your software, reverse engineering is one of the no-nos listed. For just this reason. Proving it is tricky though. Internally, there may be several alternate ways to code the important operations. And adding new bells and whistles is something a user can do.

And Alex has serious adult eyes.