#72: Sending pages from your pocket

Browsing on mobile devices is the main way people use the web. As mentioned in ToW #62, the last decade has seen a complete shift from PC & Mac being used for nearly 70% of web traffic to the dominant platforms being Android and iOS.

One nuance the stats don’t take into account, though, is that most of the 30% who’re still on Windows & OS X will also be browsing on whatever phone they have. It’s not uncommon to see people sitting in front of a desktop or laptop, while using their phone for other things – be that reading stuff in a mobile web browser or using a dedicated app.

Sharing is Caring

One feature common to all the main mobile browsers and their desktop equivalents is the ability to send pages (or tabs) from one to the other, assuming you’re signed in on both using the same account. While the meedja appears to work on the assumption that everyone+dog has an iPhone, around 2/3 of mobile browsing is done with Google Chrome and variants, and over 70% of the browsing devices are running Android.

For those reasons, we’re going to use Android and Windows as the use case for this week’s tip, but the same things can also be done on Mac + iOS. Probably.

Mobile apps -> desktop

If you’re sitting on the sofa flicking through stuff, there will be times where it’s easier to look at the content on a bigger screen. Sure, you might be able mirror the device on the big TV, but who ever does that?

Let’s say you’re browsing an eBay listing and want to send it to your laptop so you can see the pictures better. One option is to try using Google’s Quick Share to send something straight from a phone app to the PC, once you’ve set up the software and signed in.  Mac users need to jump through some additional non-official hoops.

Quick Share is the new name for “Nearby Share” –  start by clicking the sharing icon on the top of the eBay app (or from whatever app you’re looking to share something).

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How the app behaves will differ from one to another; in the case of the eBay app, it will offer to send a link to this listing to some other app on the device, including the ability to share it elsewhere.

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The list of apps (and contacts) will vary depending on usage. If you have Microsoft’s Phone Link already set up between your phone and PC, you can just fire it to your PC using the Send to PC command, and it will open a new browser page right away. If using Quick Share, you’ll get a prompt to open it.

Mobile browser -> desktop

Another more general and consistent use case is when you’re on the phone using a web browser rather than an app. Clicking the Share icon in Chrome will let you copy the link to the phone’s clipboard or send it to a variety of other contacts or apps (just as in the previous eBay app example), or “Send to devices”: in this case, any other device where you’re also logged in to Chrome with the same Google ID. You could also screen grab the page or generate a QR code, so if you want to share the link with someone nearby, you can do that more easily than faffing about with Bluetooth.

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After tapping this option and choosing the relevant PC, you’ll see a notification show up in Chrome.

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You’ll also see “Your devices” if you expand Chrome’s History either in the menu or by pressing CTRL+H…

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From Edge to Edge

Some small proportion of Microsoft fans might be running the mobile Edge browser on their Android or even iOS phones. It’s a surprisingly good mobile browsing experience with built-in ad blocker, password saving integration with Microsoft Authenticator and an inevitable smatter of Copilotry.

Edge Mobile was built on the Chromium browser engine and released a year before the main desktop Edge was ported to Chromium too. As a result, many features in Google Chrome are also carried over (since it, unsurprisingly, is also based on Chromium), except that you’d be running Edge on your mobile device and signing into Edge on your PC or Mac using a Microsoft Account.

Similar to how Chrome does it, Edge will also let you send links to your PC or Mac – the quickest way is to go to the “hamburger” 3-line menu in the bottom right, and choose “Send to devices” to get a list of potential target computers. The menu that appears on the mobile browser may be several pages wide; swipe left and right to see the others and press and hold anywhere on the menu to edit it, allowing you to reorder the icons or hide/show them.

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Just as Chrome behaves, having sent the link to one or multiple PCs, a notification will appear in desktop Edge inviting you to open it…

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… and if you have the browser on PC and phone both set up to sync with your Microsoft Account, you’ll also see previous pages browsed on the phone by looking in the History page (CTRL+H) in Edge on the PC, which makes it easy to go back to pages you had previously viewed on the phone without needing to deliberately send them across.

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#71: Trying to search on LinkedIn

a cartoon image of a man sitting in front of a desktop computer screen, showing him trying to search

Since you’re not reading this on LinkedIn, you’re maybe not one of the believersStay strong! It’s been nearly 9 years since Microsoft announced its plan to blow $26Bn on acquiring the social network for business users, supposedly in competition with Salesforce, Facebook, Google…

At the time, Forbes commented:

This new deal means Microsoft can embed LinkedIn with Skype, its email system and other enterprise products so that, in the words of one Silicon Valley expert, it will be able ‘to recreate the connective tissue for enterprises.’

It seems the Skype integration never really did pan out. Outlook and LinkedIn never got especially close, and Salesforce’s nightmare of Microsoft poring over all that data and not letting anyone else get access to it never really materialised. Even Microsoft tools don’t really have very good access to the data.

One of us (but not really)

At the time, the LinkedIn acquisition was Microsoft’s largest and seen as quite risky, with the backdrop of a failed $45B bid for Yahoo! and not-exactly-successful integrations of multi-billion buyouts of Nokia and others.

There was some consternation on how LinkedIn could possibly be worth all that money – one of the most popular internal Microsoft Yammer communities has even been reborn in LinkedIn, for current and former ‘softies alike …

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(though Groups in LI seem to be less functional than Facebook Groups, so the place to go is FB’s Microsoft Old-timers, which has about 30x as many members).

In truth, LinkedIn has been very successfulas pointed out by the excellent Jack Rowbotham:

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It’s said there are over 1 billion users. LinkedIn revenue was reported as growing 9% year-on-year in the FY25 Q2 results. Though revenue numbers are combined with other groups, Statista reckons that totals about $16B annual revenue. Not bad.

Maybe what has been LinkedIn’s biggest reason for success in the Microsoft family is that it’s never really been fully assimilated. Sure, management sits at the top table (and co-founder Reid Hoffman is on the board) but LinkedIn has been kept (or kept itself?) at arm’s length; Microsoft friends and partners are not LinkedIn friends and partners. LinkedIn employees have linkedin.com primary email addresses, not microsoft.com ones (even if they may also have a lesser-user microsoft.com address…) There’s a certain defiance of separateness even after almost a decade, a bit like Dynamics used to be or as GitHub also is.

Even the platform it runs on is not quite fully on the bus – after announcing a plan to gradually move to Azure and run on Azure Linux instead of CentOS, that has reportedly been binned in favour of a hybrid model.

Searching for stuff

To paraphrase Yoda: Search not: Find, though that is sometimes easier said than done. Along with holding itself apart organisationally and technically from the rest of Microsoft, LinkedIn has a somewhat stubbornly different look and feel to everything else that comes from Redmond.

Searching on LinkedIn starts with entering whatever you’re looking for in the search bar on the home page.

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There are few operators you can use – AND/OR and putting stuff in quotes can help to guide things, but you will need to use the Posts / Companies etc filters to zone in to the right content, and you can only do that after the first search has been run. Note that AND, OR and NOT must be in capitals and they specifically call out that + / – isn’t supported.

So, if you want to find something – a previous post in a newsletter you’d read, for example – there isn’t an easy way to do it without first searching everything, then telling LinkedIn that you don’t want “people” but something else. Even going to the newsletter home page doesn’t give you the ability to search its contents, which seems like an own goal.

If you’re looking for a Post you may get a button offering “From my network”, and clicking on that will invoke a filter to select your top  connections, people you follow or your own posts.

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But you might not get that option. If you don’t, then you need to select Posts and then use the Date, Content type or, in this example, “From Member” filter. If you’re looking for your own content, you need to type your own name and have it resolve, before clicking on show results.

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More help is available on Search on LinkedIn, and you might notice that some filters stick sometimes (but not always) so if you’ve already set the Posts and From:me filters up, then others searches will keep them until you clear the filters, or they somehow just clear themselves.

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When you do get results, depending on what you search for, you’ll be presented a list of things that look like they match, but there’s no highlighting of the search terms to see where that match is, so you’ll need to open them up individually to see if they match.

For the more adventurous, you could hack the URL to add search terms and set the filters – eg

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=vermouth%20AND%20recipe&postedBy=%5B%22me%22%5D

There are some special characters in that URL – %20 is space, %22 is “ and %5B and %5D are square brackets, so you could actually enter

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=vermouth AND recipe&postedBy=[“me”]

… and the browser will sort it out.

Or just search, get a wide range of initial results then use the filters. It’s less “correct” but it’s bound to be quicker.

#70: Two Score and Ten years

50 years ago to this very day, a small company called Micro-Soft was formed. Over the last half-century it has grown unbelievably, touched many lives and at varying times has had legions of fans and detractors alike.

There has been a lot of coverage on Microsoft’s own social channels and on their special website, Cheers to 50 years – Microsoft Unlocked, which covers a lot of ground and tells some interesting tales. Other takes include last year’s Wired special, slightly less curated by corp PR, Microsoft at 50: An AI Giant. A Kinder Culture. And Still Hellbent on Domination.

Stories often help to define a corporate culture but also to explain it to outsiders too. Sometimes, they feature as a backdrop to something else entirely. Let’s look at one in particular, the rocket that took Microsoft into orbit: the original PC.

Project Chess came to town

Much has been written about IBM deciding it wanted a piece of the burgeoning early 1980s home/small office computer market, as defined by popular machines like the Trash 80 or the Apple II. Big Blue was worried that it might miss the bandwagon and at the same time was concerned that corporate customers could put a highly spec-ed Apple II on their desk and run financial analysis from there, instead of relying on the IBM Big Iron in the Data Processing dept. Finance Directors and accountants could get instant answers for a few $K with VisiCalc on their Apple II, instead of waiting for the wonks in DP to turn reports around in 24hrs.

An Apple II with 48K of RAM had a list price of over $2.5K (something like $12K in today’s money), but the cheapest IBM computer at the time was more than five times as much. When IBM brass gave the go-ahead for what was to be “Project Chess” – to build an IBM personal computer – one stipulation was that it had to be ready in 12 months, with a prototype to be produced in only 1 month, with a target cost of $1,500.

This compressed timeline, and the need to keep costs low, meant usual IBM practices of building everything in-house had to go. As much componentry as possible was sourced off-the-shelf – controllers, disk drives, etc – and when it came to choosing software, they beat a path to Bill Gates’ door for Microsoft BASIC. At the time, every computer needed a programming language, and that’s what Microsoft did – developer tools for hobbyists, essentially.

So the Suits came to Redmond, and licensed Basic (and other languages). They happened to also ask if Bill & co could point them in the direction of a suitable operating system. The popular CP/M was identified as a possible – in fact, Microsoft made a bit of hardware called SoftCard that could run CP/M on Apple II machines, so compatible apps were also available to Apple users. CP/M was produced by a company called Digital Research, which was rumoured might have merged with Microsoft at one point (and was later acquired by Novell).

That NDA

When IBM’s reps went the following day to visit Digital Research in California, the boss – Gary Kildall – was not around (there are various stories as to why, but they’re not important right now). IBM’s team slapped their standard and very one-sided Non-Disclosure Agreement on the table, but DR’s lawyer and COO wouldn’t sign it; it could be summarised as, “Don’t tell us anything confidential; if you do tell us anything and we act on it, you can’t sue us. If we tell you anything confidential and you act on any of it, we’ll sue you”.

After a protracted impasse with DR, IBM went back to Microsoft and asked Bill to sort out the operating system problem; Bill & Paul Allen had already worked with a guy from another small company in Seattle, to do the prototype of the CP/M SoftCard and as luck would have it, partly because Digital Research was dragging its feet on 16-bit CP/M, he had built a 16-bit OS for Intel chips. Microsoft bought it, hired its author, and then built PC-DOS and later MS-DOS for the IBM PC, which went on to be wildly successful.

For more detail on the IBM side of things, see this good summary from PCMag – Project Chess: The Story Behind the Original IBM PC.

IBM’s missteps opened the door

IBM’s management believed that their economy of scale meant that even if other companies tried to build a “PC”, they could never do it cheaply enough to be a threat. Over the next few years, other pioneers managed to consolidate the number of chips and other parts required, but IBM’s proprietary BIOS chip, whose software controlled how the hardware worked together, was the key to true compatibility. Even if you built an exact copy of the PC hardware, it wouldn’t run DOS or any of the other applications with 100% success, unless the BIOS looked and behaved the same as IBM’s.

A company called Phoenix first reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS and started selling their “compatible” version, allowing for companies like Compaq and Dell to spring up, building 100% compatible machines which were cheaper than Big Blue’s, and in time got the jump by adopting newer and faster hardware (like 386 processors) before IBM did. The genie was now well out of the bottle, and despite their attempts to re-assert control with the PS/2 system and OS/2 software, IBM’s grip on the massively growing ecosystem had slipped. 20 years ago, they bailed out of the PC business they had invented, selling up to Lenovo.

The best deal in corporate history…

When IBM agreed to buy the operating system for that first Personal Computer 5150 – “PC Disk Operating System”, aka PC-DOS, the initial offer was to pay Microsoft to develop it but to give IBM all the rights. Bill pushed back and said Microsoft wanted to have the rights to sell a version – MS-DOS – to other companies too.

IBM was in such a hurry to do the deal – and thinking that nobody could build a cheaper, compatible machine anyway – agreed to let Microsoft have rights on MS-DOS.

Without this decision, it’s almost certain that the PC industry would not exist. There would be no Windows; maybe OS/2 would have been the GUI on the high-end, only-available-from-IBM PC (such as the strategy was behind the PS/2). Apple might have dominated with the completely proprietary Macintosh, and would that have evolved as much without the competition from hundreds of PC vendors? Would something else have come along instead?

The availability of a Phoenix BIOS and MS-DOS meant anyone could build a compatible and competitive machine. By the mid-1990s, over 200M PCs had been sold, though IBM had only around 8% of that market (Compaq overtaking it to be the largest single PC vendor in 1994).

Thanks to that one business decision made by IBM, Bill Gates & co, a multi-trillion dollar industry grew up.

Microsoft revenues from 1984 – 1999


Further Reading & Listening

If you’re interested in these snippets from the history books, there are many other sources of information.

Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy – a 4-hour magnum opus podcast covering many points in the story of Microsoft. They talks about Project Chess and some of the points made above (from about 1h20m into the podcast).


Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace

One of the earliest chronicles of Bill Gates’ story and how Microsoft came into being, published in 1992 – so 17 years after the company came from nothing, and a little more than a decade after IBM launched the first PC. Lots happened since then, but this is a compelling account.


Arguably the best telling of the history behind lots of the early personal computer industry comes from ex-InfoWorld columnist, Bob Cringely. Accidental Empires (from 1992 before revisions) is entertaining and compelling – a must-read for anyone interested in this period. The chapter, “Chairman Bill Leads the Workers in Song” talks about what made BillG tick. The section on Steve Jobs, “The Prophet” (itself prophetic, as the book was written before Jobs came back to Apple and saved it from certain death), starts, “The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley sits alone on many weekday mornings, drinking coffee at II Fornaio, an Italian restaurant on Cowper Street in Palo Alto”

Cringely (or, rather, his real persona, Mark Stephens) produced a video series, “The Triumph of the Nerds(also pre-Jobs-as-Lazarus) which is basically a summary of the book, and is well worth watching – episode 2 covers the PC history; ep1 deals with the origin story of MITS and Apple, while ep3 covers the Apple Mac and Windows rivalry.

It’s absolutely brilliant. If you only read one book on the backstory of Silicon Valley and the PC industry which grew out of it, make it this one.


Showstopper! was an exceptional under-the-covers story of how Microsoft went from relying on a pretty flaky Windows-built-on-DOS offering, to building out a “proper” operating system which initially went into serious and professional environments. Guided by legendary ex-DEC operating system guru, Dave Cutler, Windows NT was fundamental to Microsoft’s push into the enterprise, finished off Novell on the server estate, went toe-to-toe with Unix in Workstations, and subsequently underpinned Windows XP and every Windows version since.


The first chapter of Microserfs started as a series of articles in Wired, before being published in a book in 1995. It charts a story about a software startup which grew from Microsoft; that first chapter starts by talking about Bill like some kind of mythological figure. The book name-checks lots of mid-90s references in the Redmond area, building numbers, local food outlets and so on. Anyone who was familiar with that region at that time must read this book.

The main character is Dan Underwood, and a few pages into the book he says “I am danielu@microsoft.com”. Years later, there really was a danielu and he used to get several emails a month saying things like “I read your book…”

He’s not there any more so don’t bother (or maybe he got MSIT to change his alias).

You had me at EHLO


Others worth a look

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates by Jennifer Edstrom – from 1998, just as the anti-trust heavies  were getting involved. This is a warts-and-all hatchet job from people who were inside at the time, or connected closely to the top brass.

Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace – A follow up to “Hard Drive”, dealing with Microsoft in the Netscape era.

Other recommendations from ex-Microsoftie David Gristwood


Oh, and for the real origin story, check out Celebrating 50 years of Microsoft from Bill Gates himself, charting how he and Paul Allen were inspired to found the company to write BASIC for that original 1975 computer, the MITS Altair 8800. The Personal Computer industry began 50 years ago, and marked a profound change from being mostly dependent on hardware innovation – as previous computers did – to one being all about the value and magic of software.

Happy Anniversary, Microsoft! Many of us were lucky to fall into the ecosystem you created, and have built happy and successful careers working with brilliant people ever since.