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Steven Sinofsky
Personal blog · hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.comhardwarestartupshistory
Steven Sinofsky's personal blog at hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com covers hardware, startups and history. Since 2021, 88 different Hacker News readers have linked it 170 times, most often “Building Under Regulation”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 36 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software Substack, a first-person history of Microsoft's PC-era products, Office, Windows and the NeXT rivalry, written from his time at the company.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Called a lot of insights, very interesting, excellent, extremely detailed, a good post, and a read-this recommendation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 36 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal stories and lessons from inside the rise and fall of the PC revolution. Click to read Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Building Under Regulation9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2024-01-28
- Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-01-29
- Guide to Platforms5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-06-03
- “Steven, Bill Gates called. Call him back.”5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-02-02
- BillG the Manager4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-04-15
- BSoD to Watson4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-01-06
- The Toll of Being a Disruptor3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-11-26
- United States vs. Apple3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-23
- Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-07-11
- DeepSeek Has Been Inevitable and Here's Why (History Tells Us)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-27
What Hacker News says?
There are a lot of insights on this page. Start with chapter one. Written by BiiGs personal technical assistance back in the old days https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/
Comment linking /
on “Don't forget Microsoft”Submitted Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work as a story · 419 points
HN discussionThat would segue into a discussion about NetDocs at Microsoft. background - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) - 1998, XMLHttpRequest appears. NetDocs vs Office - https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/064-the-st... Resolving NetDocs vs Office [Spoiler Alert - if you don't know about NetDocs, there's a big reason which tells you who "won" this fight] - https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyship…
Comment linking /p/071-resolving-netdocs-v-office
on “Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git”Submitted I Shipped, Therefore I Am as a story · 301 points
HN discussionI've been reading Steven Sinofsky's extremely detailed blog about those days (it's at https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com ). He was in charge of Office in the late '90s. He mentions that Microsoft had a program where they partnered with large enterprises to collect usage data from corporate desktops. But those computers were on a network even if though often not on the Internet yet. Stats that would show…
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on “Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in Windows 1.0”Submitted Automating processes with software is hard as a story · 286 points
HN discussionOn this topic I’m finding Steve Sinofsky’s “Hardcore Software” blog/newsletter very interesting lately: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ He’s a Microsoft careerist engineer who rose through the ranks to be in charge of Office through the ambitious “Ribbon UI” redesign, then was appointed to salvage the Windows and Services segment as the Longhorn/Vista debacle was close to shipping. His latest entrie…
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on “Action Plan for a New CTO”Submitted If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading? as a story · 130 points
HN discussionI really miss Byte [0]. It covered a wide range of computing, from Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar [1], to my introduction to hypertext. It was great to read the in-depth reviews of both products [2] and technologies, and get an understanding of what was going on in the tech world. [0] - https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?tab=collection [1] - https://circuitcellar.com/ [2] - https://hardcoresoftware.learningby…
Comment linking /p/013-end-of-the-beginning
on “Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie”Submitted Office 2000 is good to go as a story · 120 points
HN discussionEven Bill Gates knew this. Throughout the 90s he saw his primary competition at the time from a technology perspective as being NeXT. When he beat up his development tools and OS platform teams over technology and tools strategy, the benchmark he measured them against was NeXT because he recognised they were best in class, regardless of their market share. This is according to Steven Sinofsky, who was very much in a…
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on “Microsoft exec: “Summary of meeting with Steve Jobs"”Submitted Competing with Steve Jobs (the first time) as a story · 91 points
HN discussionHistory of Active Directory (derived from MS Exchange), see https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/bonus-the-...
Comment linking /p/bonus-the-journey-of-the-ems-and
on “Kerberoasting”Submitted “Steven, Bill Gates called. Call him back.” as a story · 65 points
HN discussioni found it: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/014-execut...
Comment linking /p/014-executing-on-the-expansive-vision
on “Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read”Submitted Avoiding Escalation in Decision-Making as a story · 57 points
HN discussion> When Jobs acquired Apple, his vision of computing appliances was restarted - iPod, iPhone, et al. They have a lot more functionality, but the iOS walled garden keeps enough of the users happy - at least in the Silicon Valley/USA. This sentence is backwards. About the only users not happy with the iPad as computing appliance are the ones in Silicon Valley USA or drinking its "car makers should design for garage mec…
Comment linking /p/215-building-under-regulation
on “The Apple Vision Pro”Submitted "The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper as a story · 56 points
HN discussionThis is my take on this too. Software in general takes a huge amount of work to reach "completion". Mvps exist because of this. Somewhere in the "hardcore software" book (1) Stephen Sinofsky touches on the amount of work to ship desktop software. (1) https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/about
Comment linking /about
on “The harsh truth of video games programming”Submitted Everything Is Buggy as a story · 49 points
HN discussionOne of the hilarious exchanges (pun intended) that happened on Sinofsky's blog concerned MS Exchange. The executive-level view of events is vastly different from the actual events. tl;dr: Stevesi (Technical Assistant to BillG): Mgmt forced Exchange to use NT Directory (followed by glowing description of the NT directory) DonH (Exchange Directory dev lead/ later Active Directory dev lead): No, NT was late, and eventu…
Comment linking /p/021-expanding-breadth-versus-coherency
on “UI is a function of your organization”Submitted Antitrust: Split Up Microsoft as a story · 30 points
HN discussionSteven Sinofsky wrote about this in the context of the early days of Microsoft in “Don’t ship the org chart” https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/047-dont-s...
Comment linking /p/047-dont-ship-the-org-chart
on “UI is a function of your organization”Submitted Windows 3.0 Buzz as a story · 21 points
HN discussionSteven Sinofsky (former President of Microsoft’s Windows Division) shares some behind the scenes stories about Microsoft and the internet on his blog: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/026-blue-s... https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/029-tellin...
Comment linking /p/029-telling-the-untold-story
on “The Lightness of Windows”Submitted Expanding Breadth versus Coherency: The EMS Project as a story · 13 points
HN discussionOn a related note, I was shocked to read in Steven Sinofsky’s (excellent) Substack[1] that Gates in the early ‘90s saw NeXT as the primary rival for Windows in attracting developers. Enough so to have stood up multiple teams “chartered to compete with NeXT”. [1] https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...
Comment linking /p/009-password-is-nextstep
on “Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week”Submitted Systems Ideas That Sound Good but Almost Never Work – "Let's Just " as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI'm reading Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky as he writes it at the moment, it's very interesting. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ One of the things he talks about it the approach the Microsoft Tools team took to implementing MFC in C++. He talks about a lesson he learned from Martin Carroll, one of the early C++ gurus, that essentially just because a feature exists, that confers no obligation t…
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on “The School of Wirth”Submitted HTML: Opportunity, Disruption, or Wedge as a story · 10 points
HN discussion
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