25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0, its first real salvo in the “Browser Wars”. This launch taught taught me how a giant corporation could move at the speed of a startup. Here’s the story:
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I had joined the IE team a year earlier, at age 22. The team was only 9 people and trying desperately to grow as quickly as possible. I remember one question I was asked in every interview: “How soon can you start?”
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Netscape Navigator had 95% marketshare, and Netscape was the darling of the tech industry. They were famously working on “Internet time.” We were almost 2 years behind and we needed to catch up.
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Instead of hiring too fast, we kept a super-high bar for talent, betting that everybody would want to work for this new exclusive team at Microsoft that was so hard to get into. It worked.
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Early on, I learned a critical rule about execution. My boss, Chris Jones, told me: “There’s 3 ways to handle work assigned to you. If you say you’ll do it, do it. If you say you can’t, that’s ok. But if you sign up for work and drop the ball, the team fails. Learn to say no.”
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I also learned the value of motivation. Bill Gates wrote a memo to all of Microsoft, saying the Internet Explorer project is critical and asking every team to reorient their work to help us. Our inboxes exploded, but it made us feel important, and we worked even harder.
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We announced our plans publicly on Dec 7, 1995. Pearl Harbor Day. It was war. Despite Netscape’s lead, we said we’d match their every feature and even leapfrog them. We signed partnerships with anybody who would help us, even competitors like Apple and AOL.
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To motivate us more, I plastered the hallways with quotes from Netscape’s founder, Marc Andreessen: “Netscape will soon reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers.” It reminded us that this new startup threatened to destroy all of Microsoft.
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The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!
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Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.
Replying to @hadip
![Daniel Markham](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="48" height="48"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
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When IE3 launched 25 years ago, it didn’t win the browser war, but it made a serious dent, and Netscape began to worry. Two years later we shipped IE5, which became the dominant web browser of its time.
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Tech history explains this to be about Microsoft’s Windows monopoly, which surely played a role. But it wouldn’t have been possible if Microsoft didn’t also learn how to work on “Internet time.”
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For me personally, this was the launch point for my career. I got a chance to learn from the best leaders at Microsoft, such as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Brad Silverberg.
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Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it thought “we won.” As Andy Grove once said, only the paranoid survive. And Microsoft had stopped being paranoid. Years later, Internet Explorer would plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web developers.
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I didn’t have the heart to watch the slow death of my baby. I left Microsoft in 1999 and joined my former competitors from Netscape to start a startup together, Tellme Networks. I finally had a chance to apply all the lessons I had learned at Microsoft.
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Footnote to my mention of divorce (which I don’t glorify, but to note repercussions, and I must admit I exaggerated): there were 2 divorces, both in leadership, one due to gender reassignment surgery.
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This wasn’t a toxic pressure cooker of working against one’s will. The leadership worked hardest of all. Most of us were in our early twenties and it was a launch point for many careers.
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Every member of this team considered it a highlight of their career. And there was great mutual respect with the team at Netscape who are still my friends.
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People work hardest when they love their team and truly love what they do, and we did.
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Also, I wasn’t the boss then, I was 22. I wasn’t exploited, I chose to work my hardest and loved my managers. As an immigrant who grew up poor and wanted to advance quickly and pay off college debt, it was absolutely what I wanted.
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Most Microsoft engineers made $1M+ then, regardless of team. But thousands wanted to join the IE3 team just to do their best work and give their all. And thousands considered it crazy and chose other teams. Anybody who left our team was quickly hired on other teams.
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I mentioned divorces etc not to glorify but precisely to say hard work has repercussions. But these were absolutely repercussions we chose for ourselves.
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Clearly my poor word choice gave a very falsely exaggerated impression. A recent dad who worked too hard chose to take a break to focus on family, and everybody supported him fully. The one boss who divorced was 25, no kids. Another boss got divorced but it was ~10 years later.
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Considering how young this team was, the main repercussion wasn’t on families, it was self-imposed sleep loss, which is bad for health. (Had I known this tweet would blow up I would have written that bit differently!)
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The IE3 team had the highest morale of any team I’ve seen. Decades later this group still gathers as a team and looks back on those years fondly.
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In light of all the responses, I really regret posting this tweet that mischaracterized reality:
Quote Tweet
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
Hadi Partovi
@hadip
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Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.
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In fact: The IE3 team did not have an unusual rate of divorce.I know of no broken families and only one divorce during the IE3 project.
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Here’s my statement reflecting on this in greater depth:
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="680" height="389"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
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This is some "Ozymandias" shit.
You worked people into a frothing fear for their lives and livelihoods, in many cases ruining those very same things, only to see it all phased out like it was nothing.
Two vast and trunkless legs in the damn dust, my dude.
Yikes.
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This is horrible. None of us should be working like our lives depend on it and destroying our relationships in the process to release a product. That's not noble, or commendable, or worth bragging about -- it's fucking dystopian. Like, you should be ashamed of this.
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Except that certain people can CHOOSE to do so? most progress in human history (example: wars) comes from people being forced to do something as if their lives depended on it, complacency is stagnation and certain industries can't have that (like the military)
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internet explorer held back the web for a decade for the sake of microsoft's ego, but it also ruined the lives of people who worked on it who were passionate about "annihilate this other company", so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not
at least it helped your career
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Society if Microsoft hadn't entered the browser market
![Image](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="680" height="383"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
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This would never happen in infosec because infosec teams support the business, they don't drive it. They also aren't under the pressure to build and ship a product for the sake of grasping additional market share.
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"there were divorces and broken families"
Reason #1 why corporate sprinting is Bad.
Your employer is not your family, and never will be. If you sacrifice your family to your employer, we have learned horrible, evil things about your value system.
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This is tragic to hear. I had huge admiration for how Microsoft pivoted that year and produced the best web browser, holding that crown for 10 years. But it could have achieved that without incurring this horrific human cost.
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IE was never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever even close to being the best... LMAO that someone not only thinks that but seriously typed it out and then hit send. WOW. what a time to be alive.
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This sounds like you're in some way proud of making people crunch as if their lives depend on it, am I just misunderstanding the tone of the tweet? Surely nobody would be legitimately proud of facilitating such a poorly managed, toxic environment.
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Yeah, companies today dont know how it is to work like your life depends on it, and develop breakthroughs like the original Mac or iPhone. Thats the only way you do grest things. Imagine putting people and their “comfort” above changing the world and doing the best product???
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Imagine admitting to breaking up entire families to make Internet Explorer. Tech guys posting their Ls.
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Just to say, as a software engineer, this is by all means not what most companies want you to do. As a guy I worked with once said 'Relax, we are building websites we're not saving the world'.
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Or...hear me out...Microsoft could have hired another hundred people and those people would not have had their lives destroyed?
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So, actually no.
You can't rush software development by hiring more people. There's even a book about that.
What you do is accept that complicated software takes time to develop.
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I've worked 100 hour weeks, for months at a time, for ...
A class registration system.
-and-
A small business inventory and accounting system.
One of our team members even got married in the middle of that! 
Talk about crazy!
It was literally driving us all crazy.
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One of our team members even got married in the middle of that! Talk about crazy!
It was literally driving us all crazy.
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This is the very definition of toxic and all of your backpedaling and justifications just sound like you’ve brainwashed yourself into believing it was a madcap fun adventure. I’ve been on teams, I’ve worked long hours, this is inexcusable.
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Broken families to ship internet explorer is one of the most depressing things ever uttered in human existence.
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It didn’t show much “ship” as “come pre-installed”, if I recall.
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It was 95-99 bro. IE was literally the best browser around
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This Tweet is from an account you muted.
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This whole thread explains why Internet Explorer became known as Internet Exploder, and was absolutely SHIT.
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You watching a World War I documentary: "I bet everyone looks back fondly at this strategy of throwing bodies at a pointless conflict."
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"Sadly there were deaths ...." 
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This is it, the worst tweet ever - no job is worth breaking lives, and « working like their lives depend on it » only sound like a very stressful and toxic work environment. You can’t make anything good out of that.
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I can’t believe this glorification of busy, textbook overwork fetish
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So you were running 2am foosball tourneys while people’s families disintegrated at home and your lesson from that is, “you know, you really can push people farther than I thought!”
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![Image is a single-panel New Yorker cartoon. Children wearing rags sit around a fire while a man in a torn up suit tells them “Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="680" height="598"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
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This reads, was likely not intended, a bit like a sociopath. “Oh sure it destroyed the lives of people and it was only a software project not a war to the death, but you can find people you can get to self abuse like that”
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And kept on normalizing this kind of culture in the tech world. We still see this play out in OS, software, game, app dev all over the place. Misogynistic and sociopathic workplaces that are still unable to be unravelled completely
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This is what people mean when they say executive position tend to draw sociopaths.
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Nothing like “lives depend on it” + “fooseball”
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Wow, this is not something to be proud of, it actually sounds like very poor management.
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People in power can make or break companies, they can also make or break people. When someone is ok that bodies (relationships and health) were left in the wake of work that’s not leadership, that’s toxic management. We have to demand and do better.
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This entire thread is the saddest work story I’ve ever heard. “We set fire to our lives to ship a product and, in the end, the company disbanded the team and the product lost in the marketplace”
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not to mention even saying the words internet explorer should evoke shame in those who are responsible for it
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That you seem to dismiss this as a footnote, a byproduct in the almighty most important thing of shipping… a browser… tells me what a toxic environment it must have been. Work before relationships? No. Never. Toxic. Unacceptable.
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Not just any browser: the worst browser! The browser that has never once been considered the best choice for internet users by the public
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There’s nothing heroic or noble about this, nor the thread in general.
The terms abusive and muppets come to mind.
It’s a product, like any other, not WW2.
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Gates had said he didn't care for the internet as it wasn't useful. Then did an almighty u-turn. And as for the Halloween Documents.... oh now they were a read.
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![Image](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="680" height="426"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
Software salaries were pretty standard engineering salaries at the time. That number sounds about right for any of the computer companies on the east coast as well.
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Imagine casually glossing over divorce and broken families as if it’s a fixable product bug. You really wrote this thread thinking you’d get a pat on the back, but only furthered the narrative of why tech bros are loathed…
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How are you seeing this with rose-tinted glasses? That's a terrible outcome. This product resulted in spikes in malware, was a huge PITA to work with as a webdev. The early years of my professional career are some I'd rather not think about bc it was *that bad*.
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the worst part about rose-colored glasses is that they make all the red flags look like flags
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What's a few divorces and broken families compared to :: checks notes:: an internet browser?
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And the worst browser too! Lol
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If one manages a team such that shipping the product requires them to work until 2am, destroy their lives, and shatter families...that is bad management, full stop.
And for what? An OS-installed bloatware browser that slightly increased the numbers next to stock ticker MSFT?
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The culture installed at start-up in the software industry, by products-over-people approaches like this, is something my generation has since spent our careers trying to uninstall. Like a house that needs renovations to be liveable after the previous owners wrecked the floors.
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I worked on at least one major project that resulted in several divorces. Those people are still hurting thanks to some muckety-muck's idea of program management.
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I thought seeing this tweet that this thread would be about some life saving or important technology, but instead it’s about everyone’s least favorite web browser. Astonishing.
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For one thing, I feel like fewer divorces would have resulted from "sorry hon, working late again on this 1-step COVID cure." I'd be pretty upset if my partner spent all of their time away from our family to develop...internet explorer.
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This is possibly the most depraved engineering-related tweet/thread I have ever seen
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This is exactly what I was thinking. Comparison to a war, families and lives ruined, a monopoly helped (!). Uhhhh.
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Divorces and broken families for a bag of nails browser no one would have chosen to use had it not come pre-installed in the OS. Congratulations buddy, real career high for you there!
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if you think about how many lives were enriched by having another functionally identical browser on the market, it was all absolutely worth it
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