My personal brush with this was in a startup I was at 3 years before RFC 2616 (HTTP compression)

I should say it was 3 years before RFC 2068 (2616 superseded). When Microsoft came out with their extension, and then it eventually ended up in HTTP/1.1 (or at least some version of it), we pivoted to a primarily client-side product that offered read-ahead caching, metasearch (could perform a query on multiple search engines like Hotbot, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. -- this was pre-Google) and save and integrate the results. It would also then rerun those queries periodically and highlight new results, and you could save or bookmark. We also used that search technology in a product that would monitor trademark use, which companies used to keep track of where and how their trademarks or brand names were being used. We never made enough to keep that side of the business running, while the web consulting/development side grew and grew. These were pre-2000 days when businesses were wanting to "…

This happens with any sufficiently large platform. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon all offer large platforms and the developers develop a "feature" on that platform. They might come up with the same idea independently, or more likely the big one steals the small one's lunch. And the "scouting interview" happens at every level, even the smallest players dangle nice offers to goad some useful info from candidates. Sometimes the features are obvious though. I remember developers complaining when Android got a built in flashlight toggle making almost every flashlight app redundant - and thank God for that, this is a legitimate feature of the platform. I can't read the full article but on one hand Apple poached employees which sounds legal on the face of it. On the other hand the patents for the technology that Apple filed were not legitimate [0] according to the courts. So the issue here se…

Just wanted to chime in, that today is not 1990s and is in fact 2023. It's OK to use Apple as the new example. It's time to put linux whining to rest.

An oldie but goodie: https://www.davar.net/HUMOR/STORIES/MS-CUISN.HTM