The worst betrayals in the Tech World

Gunjan thakurApril 1, 2022

Every one of us grew up familiar with glorious stories and anecdotes from the world of tech. Ivy League dropout Bill Gates (Microsoft founder) developed his first software program at the age of 13 and Steve Jobs founded Apple at 13. Napster, the first public peer-to-peer file and music sharing service was also created by teenage dropouts. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even 20 when he created Facebook during his college years.  These are the stories that have inspired and captivated us, all the while echoing with comfort, the power and strength of ordinary people, who became tech or science super beings of the sort. Lesser know are the fallouts and betrayals that happened behind the scenes, only some of which were publicized to mainstream media.

1. IBM and Microsoft:

In 1985, IBM and Microsoft joined hands to develop their first Graphical User Interface together. IBM however was in the dark about the fact that Microsoft was developing its own GUI in competition, like a spy app for Android. When the results were in, OS/2 flunked and Windows made it big. Eventually, when they dissolved their agreement in 1991, there were around 13 million copies of Windows 3.0 in the world, and only about 600, 000 of OS/2.

Companies that had banked on IBM’s OS, like Lotus and WordPerfect, plummeted. Microsoft had already taken over the Desktop OS market and eventually also conquered the productivity OS market. This is how Microsoft went from brave but humble beginnings to an aggressive monopoly.

2. Steve Jobs and Newton:

When Steve Jobs was crowned Apple CEO in 1997, the first thing he did was to discard the infamous and beloved Newton MessagePad. The Newton was Apple’s own creation, of course, but discarding it was considered no less than treachery by most early Apple device fanatics. The internet was strewn with literary obituaries and odes to the Newton written by fans, and the Newton still lives in the hearts of many, enough to inspire online tech cults and fandom.

3. The setting of the “Sun”:

When Oracle took over Sun Microsystems in 2009, it was the equivalent of Sauron taking over Frodo and Sam. Sun had been the mastermind company behind gems like Java, MySql, and OpenOffice, while Oracle was considered the evil Dark Lord of proprietary software.

4. Mark Zuckerberg vs Eduardo:

Chunks of this story made their way to cinema via the Social Network. The gist of it all was Mark Zuckerberg cutting off Eduardo Savarin, a friend, fellow mastermind, and one of the first and largest financiers of Facebook. According to reports, once Facebook went public, both geniuses saw the company going in different directions and could no longer see eye to eye. Zuckerberg claims that Savarin would’ve led Facebook to drown and eventually replaced him with Napster architect, Sean Parker.

5. Facebook’s  non-existent and dwindling  privacy:

It may come as a surprise that during its beginnings, Facebook was the most private social network in the world. Up until 2005, Facebook was restricted to education institutions only. Things changed tremendously in 2010, after the introduction of the”like” button which forwarded the information to third-party websites, like a spy listening app for Android. Mark Zuckerberg eventually found himself in court at the receiving end of a lot of hate and criticism from both, users and data privacy activists.

6. HP and Palm:

Palm was the tech company behind the first successful PDA marketed worldwide and had earned itself a huge fan following. HP bought Palm in 2010, much to the joy of its fans that were looking forward to handheld devices and tablets based on the capable WebOS.  However, only y a few weeks after the release of the Touchpad tablet, HP discarded and shut down the whole operation. Soon after, whatever was left of the WebOS was spun into a new company called Gram and eventually sold off to LG.

7. Apple vs Google:

The tech titan pair that started out as BFFS are now at daggers drawn with each other.  (this seems to be a pattern in corporate tech). Until 2009, the then Google CEO Eric Schmidt was even part of Apple’s board. This was before Google became an Android leader and was only a search engine. Soon after that, Steve Jobs all but declared war on Google and vowed to destroy it. Needless to say, it was something he didn’t witness in his lifetime. As if vying for victory in the smartphone world wasn’t enough, Apple and Google have been fighting against each other once more, over Google’s fading concern for its users’ privacy.