Oddbean new post about login | logout What are examples of technical or product decisions that were fundamentally decided for political decisions? Some examples of the kind of answers I'm looking for are: The Air Force commissioning the A-10 being built to kill the Army's AH-56 project, which would've reduced the Army's reliance on the Air Force: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1341986446815596546 Steve Jobs killing HyperCard because he was mad at a dude for putting working on the project above loyalty to Steve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/083/164/154/845/291/original/f4289a7da984038d.jpeg https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/083/164/602/384/786/original/b6f3f428f65c86ae.png
Qualcomm's mobile team successfully maneuvering to kill Qualcomm's ARM server group when the server group looked like it was going to become very politically powerful because it would've had the highest performance ARM server part available and had large sales lined up at FB, etc.: https://www.patreon.com/posts/20571244 MS Office killing NetDocs basically Google Docs but created in 1997: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/790599349491212288. Also, NetMeeting (Zoom with whiteboard and stuff, '96): https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1572839354434977795?s=20
@ed709062 Microsoft Research’s Dryad got productized (search keyword: “LINQ to HPC”) and made it all the way through three beta releases with numerous customers planning to build on top of it; it got killed when some guy in Azure promised that he could make Hadoop work better with a minimal amount of time spent on “optimizing” it. He couldn’t. Too bad; “write computation DAGs in C# and have the runtime schedule them across large distributed datasets” is an unmatched feature even a decade later.
