I remember the day MS (maybe even Bill Gates) dismissed the internet ... (He did learn quickly of his dumb error)
Hmmmmn... no, not quite. He did not dismiss internet as it was, he was sharp enough to recognize the potentiality of such a worldwide net and wanted to create an internet that was HIS. Personal. Constrained. Restricted. Bound only to him, M$ and their desires.
Who among you still remembers like I do the icon of "
The Microsoft Network", on ALL the desktops of Win95? Ever asked yourself what it was and what was there for? It was a veritable Trojan Horse of the non viral kind. A Trojan Horse that was never welcomed in our citadels, fortunately.
A proper nightmare. Just think of an Internet ruled by M$... on which you can do whatever you want, bur only as long M$ agrees... and try not to puke.
M$'s hubris level back then redlined for the first, but sadly not the last time. And in fact, with the first and only patch the TCP-IP protocol was released (
it was that or stand back and look at someone else doing it in their place) and everyone could connect to The Real Internet.
The Flight team should be commended for their attempts; they were doing their job with the same passion and excitement we had come to expect for developers. In the end, it was their upper management and MS Corporate that flat lined Flight, plain and simple.
No one here with a brain blames the coders and programmers of Flight. Coders and programmers can be blamed for FSX (
but it was another team) which code is rubbish at best, not Flight. Coders and programmers of Flight did their best to keep in line with what was asked of them. They could not make available a feature if the higher ups told them in a non uncertain way not to include, and even if the perhaps wanted Flight to be something better, the eggheads above managed to mess it up BADLY, and now are coders and programmers that are laid off.
A little like; I am a road worker, the head engineer tells me to lay down a road pavement in a certain way, it is discovered then that that road pavement is not adequate to the task, and I am fired instead of the idiot who gave the order.
It happens all too often, and the sympathies go to those who were wronged, not the SOBs that caused the problem. Speaking for myself, I've never blamed the coders and programmers of Flight. When I've hurled written lightnings to M$, I've always directed them to the idiots on the top, apparently so eager and determined to mess it up again, and again, and again, and then another time too.
There is no such a thing as overkill. Only unworthy targets.