Tripod was a third party interface builder toolkit, sold (in prototype form) to Microsoft to be included in Windows 3, daringly rewritten instead of polished, but not then shipped after all even though it arrived on time whereas Windows was delayed. Passed off to a junior team, but eventually succeeded wildly (as one part of the VB product, and almost completely rewritten in the process)
Alas, the final product horrified Cooper—who loathed BASIC—when he heard about it. When Visual Basic 1.0 was released in 1991—just a year after Windows 3.0—Cooper flew up to Redmond and sat in the front row at the event, frustrated with what Microsoft had done to his baby.
Luckily for Microsoft, the market didn’t share Cooper’s opinion. Visual Basic was an immediate hit.
Earlier:
Officially, Ruby wasn’t included as the default Windows 3.0 shell because it wasn’t keystroke-for keystroke, pixel-for-pixel, identical to the OS/2 shell. The more likely reason, though, was that Ruby was political collateral damage inside of Microsoft. Few remember that Microsoft was at this time simultaneously developing Windows and jointly developing the OS/2 operating system with IBM. Tensions between the teams—OS/2 was originally considered the more strategic product and Windows the underdog—boiled over with Ruby as a proxy fight. Cooper suspects that the root issue was professional jealousy; some of the engineers on the Windows team had been present at the 1988 demo when Gates had been ever so effusive about Tripod. “He was making all those guys hate me,” Cooper suggests, “because I showed them up, really badly.”
Whatever the cause, Ruby was now orphaned inside of Microsoft less than a year after it was delivered. Frustrated, Cooper flew to Redmond, met with Bill Gates, and offered to buy the software back. “I said, ‘I’ll release it myself, as a shell construction set for Windows’.”
Gates refused.
Edit: HN discussion here
Thanks to @Maurici_Carbo for the link!