Microsoft is Dead (2007)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
If someone wants to look at opinions over time, here are the past submissions, all with user discussions.
2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179
5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085601
6 years ago: "Paul Graham revisits "Microsoft is Dead" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554295
9 years ago (8.5 actually, algolia rounds that up it seems): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770
Sigh. It's clear that PG, as good a writer as he is, is the one in another world.
Certainly PG isn't the only one who doesn't see very many Windows computers, and I think this has probably been increasingly true over the last ~9 years since this piece was written.
When you're talking new personal devices, its mostly a mix of various tablets (non-MS), OSX, ChromeOS and Windows ultrabooks...
When you talk development, its almost always on Linux or OSX, and deployed to a Linux server.
MS still holds on to a few markets, and still makes money and does cool things, but they're just not dominant anymore...
A year ago I wouldn't have imagined myself saying this, but once they started open sourcing their stuff, I decided to take a look.
If I can keep using my existing server for this new project, for now, then that's great. I know I'll eventually have to migrate it onto its own thing (it's a startup that is taking off, go me! :) ), but until I absolutely have to, I want to keep costs down and processes simple.
Still, if I've got to deploy to an MS-based VPS, that's certainly not the end of the world, not by a long shot. Just a different thing to learn.
IIS performance on the other hand is amazing these days, Apache really needs to find a way to use http.sys.
Really? Even in the server space, Windows still occupies a third of the market, and desktop statistics are somewhere more along the lines of 70%. For every "cool" startup developer, I can promise you there is an entire army of "not cool" developers doing things in Windows (or whatever).
Office 365 is huge. Even the europeans are fleeing from the corpse of the IBM/Lotus stack like rats from a sinking ship. Obviously, I work in a Microsoft shop, but none of our customers (some serious financials, insurance corps, notable Fortune 500s) use Google Docs, and anyone big enough to need to run their own mail infrastructure is bailing on Domino for Exchange, or even going into the cloud with Office 365.
That's where the money is. You have to chase a metric shit-ton of $10 a month consumers to equal a million $ a year business contract.
they also think there is a starbucks every 30ft all around the world. and that everyone has unlimited data plans for hundreds of dollar a month like they have running water.
dream on, SF.
All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
Obviously, pg is exaggerating slightly here for effect, but if you go to a conference for a "cool" language like Elixir or Go—or even for a more established but still slightly edgy language like Python or Ruby—what you'll see in the audience is a few islands of Windows in a sea of Linux and Macs. Go to a more corporate-y conference and you'll see a lot more Windows. So—which world is the past, and which is the future? (Hint: At the corporate-y conference, are there more or fewer Macs than there were five years ago?)
Windows is the one and only OS that runs video games well.
Same with a lot of other industries dealing with professionals who are not programmers. Example is modeling software (https://www.rhino3d.com/mac-feature-compare).
Maybe Valve will succeed with their Steam Boxes, but it's not the case yet.
For lots of people, that's Linux. For lots of other people, that's Windows.
A similar thing happened a few years ago when Subversion was still the dominant version control system and SourceForge was still the main repository for open-source projects. It was 2008, and I was at a dinner seated between the CEO of CollabNet, principal corporate backer of Subversion, and the outgoing CEO of SourceForge. I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git. His view was that there was a winner among open-source VCSes, and that winner was Subversion. Then I asked the SourceForge CEO if he'd heard of GitHub. He had, but was unconcerned, since SourceForge was was cutting million-dollar deals while GitHub was still relatively small, having launched only in April of that year.
Now, I was in Y Combinator at the time, so I definitely shared pg's "myopia", and at that point basically everyone I knew had switched to Git and GitHub. I thought to myself, "These guys have already lost, and they don't even know there's a war." And indeed things have played out exactly as I expected, with Git and GitHub crushing Subversion and SourceForge into irrelevance.
So you see that there's a fundamental asymmetry between what pg sees in front of him and what you might see. Being in YC means you're "living in the future" [1], which is why pg writes with such confidence about the direction things are going. Subversion, SourceForge, Windows; Git, GitHub, Mac, Linux. The latter may still be big in absolute numbers, but the derivative tells you that the smart money is on the latter going forward.
I myself have always had both Windows and Linux (and occasionally OSX) boxen around to help me do what I need to do - so what's right in front of me doesn't seem so one-dimensional as what PG writes about. I've also been in and out of some radically different industries (for example, appdev consulting vs aerospace & defense), and it seems pretty obvious to me that "best tool for the job" is the future and it always has been. That means there will always be a place for Windows and BSD/Linux+derivatives (I throw OSX in this bucket), and there will always be engineers of many stripes using each one (or multiples).
I mean, seriously: even Git - which really does seem to have utterly won the VCS wars from a certain perspective, is still just one of many in reality. Lots of people use Perforce. Legion upon legion still use TFS. BitKeeper is still kicking around. Subversion still has substantial usership. Even CVS is still around. Pretty much the only VCS technology that has truly been defeated is RCS/SCCS, and probably only because they never figured out how to handle directories or else they'd still be around too.
That's why I find these kinds of prognostications to be very silly (although fertile ground for gathering up fake internet points and/or blog readership).
I wrote "slightly edgy", which obviously changes the meaning, or else you wouldn't have deleted a word. And yes, Python and Ruby are slightly edgy compared to, say, Java or C++.
So PG was right in a strict sense, but not if you narrowly take "computer" to mean "desktop" or "laptop".
Desktops in most applications are locked down to the point where they're dumb terminals to run Office and a browser, this is where MS rules, or creative/technical workstations, where Apple currently has a better story and is the only desktop maker growing market-share for the past couple years.
Microsoft has been around a long time. Any company that can continue to adapt will also continue to stay in business. Microsoft has shown a capacity to do this. Today's news and products reflects this well.
This seems to be the quote that sums up the sentiment. Not that they're technically going out of business anytime soon.
But that doesn't make parent's quote wrong.
For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read about the history), Microsoft was legendary for "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." an internal credo that became known outside the company and came to represent the ruthlessness with which Microsoft flexed its muscle in new technology markets.
Microsoft was notorious for changing the way Windows works to stymie competitors, one of the most well known of these tactical maneuvers being the integration of IE into Windows which eventually killed Netscape. That particular bit of integration eventually led to their conviction under US anti-trust laws.
Microsoft's culture has since changed. Microsoft no longer seems as interested in blocking all competitors. They are building products that leverage standardized platforms and the present-day Microsoft even meaningfully contributes to open source projects and refrains from promoting incompatible work-alikes.
In other words, Microsoft is becoming once again a formidable company, this time with the that they tolerate (and increasingly collaborate with) other companies that develop technology to benefit users.
Microsoft is discovering that being successful does not mean shutting everyone else out and for this reason they are not "dangerous" in the sense they were in the 1990s when their efforts and "success" in many ways prevented the industry from advancing.
EDIT: Readability and style.
The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser (Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla).
Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty broken software.
Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6 months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6.
Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.
Today I think the industry is evolving to where companies like Microsoft and IBM need to be scared of the industry and its perception of how they behave, and whether and how much they contribute back to the community at large (whether by open source projects, or simply an undying and palpable desire to push the industry forward with innovation that will improve everyone's lives).
Downvoters: obviously, self driving cars are a hugely positive development overall. But some players in the economy will lose.
And now in the post "Web 2.0" era, monopolies may be out, but walled gardens, superspy databases, and DRM'd things (tractors, coffeemakers, etc.) that you don't really own are in. What's the next wave of euphoria?
Possibly re-decentralizing the internet? Doesn't sound like a Microsoft thing.
Giving control back to the user? That sounds more Microsofty. Given the choice between using local software that you choose and control vs a remote app (from the the only walled garden you can access) that spies on you, rifles through your data, and may delete it at any time without your permission... They could find a market.
At the moment, Microsoft is kind of unique in having an OS that's not tied to a walled garden app store by default, and which is centered around local desktop software (that usually doesn't have a lot of spying built-in) designed to work with local data. (other than Linux of course)
The privacy issues of Windows 10 (in the default settings) do not indicate that they're going that route.
Admittedly, it is a long shot, but could Microsoft start to matter again?
This is an interesting quote. Who's the big man in town in 2015? It's probably still not Microsoft. But I'm not sure it's Google either - maybe it is, though. Is it Facebook? Apple? Amazon? Uber?
I think you could make an interesting, but not overly convincing, case for each of those companies. I wonder who pg considers the big man in town.
The Microsoft of the early 2000s is dead, and we have have (imo) a new Microsoft which is again producing some very interesting bits of technology and have evolved Windows into something, which whilst not necessarily better, is certainly more fitting for how we use technology today.
Microsoft was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and google was that for the web. For the reasons addressed in PG's article Microsoft is Dead, it is evident that needs change but utilities usually don't. If you read What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? after this article, it is super short and basically says, the burden of proof is on you to not miss the next big idea.
So much crazy shit is happening now it is difficult to say what will kill google. This essay was in 07', but it was too eary or too obvious, as he closes with. If 4 things killed google I would say they are:
hardware: Hardware is definitely important, and we can argue about how and what context, but google doesn't build any. All their infrastructure, while massive, will be deprecated.
privacy:"Don't be evil" is !== "Be Good".
Advertising: Advertising is going to be A LOT less valuable, and the places it will be valuable have banned google.
Decentralized Tech: No idea what the interim search engines will look like but it will be __________ then Artificial Intelligence. I think it is private search, where you buy computational resources and algorithims from a network but supply the seed data for your preferences and retain them. Probably BTC/PGP will replace DNS and you will send or lease your own googlebot and people will sell distributed search algorithims. While Chrome and the v8 engine make a pretty good google bot, people don't really trust google anymore which is why microsoft lost. No idea what it looks like, but it feels like someone is building it now.
[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html
[9]If you know what I am talking about, and you know what he means by saying the name for it is "a byword for the impossible", I have been trying to figure out what he meant for ages.
All this doom and gloom a decade ago was a great chance to pick up a delicious dividend paying stock.
I wouldn't say they pose a danger to anybody who wants to make money making games. There will be no Embrace, Extend, Extinguish scenarios on the horizon which is what I think people mean by dangerous.
Some people think VR is going to be big, but I think it's just a passing fad like 3DTV. The new minecraft stuff will be big, but I don't think World of Warcraft big.
Indie PC games was all about Steam, but everybody is talking about the indie-apocalypse because steam recently got flooded with a lot of titles so nobody is making money there any more.
Similar things are happening in iOS where production values are very high now which means the stakes are very high. It's still very much a lottery.
The consoles are pretty much dead to me personally. I don't know what published think about it all.
Then ofcourse there is the raging debate around free-to-play and premium games on every platform.
those numbers are from September. Microsoft is claiming 110 million devices running windows 10.not dead at all
Microsoft, Rebirth.
Microsoft, Part 2.
Microsoft, the Comeback.
Personally I don't think it was as obvious in 2007 as it is now, that all apps would be on the web. Whats stranger is that Microsoft still doesn't seem to understand this.
The classic Microsoft is dead, the Post-Gates Microsoft does Windows 10 and uses Cloud services.
But no, totally true, especially after today.
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/
Apple was at the forefront after their revival. Google caught steam in the early 2Ks. Now they're both busy sustaining their model and Microsoft is eager for fresh love so their grabbing the ball. And that ball is half of the Apple style of product design and communication. That's the first time MS is so deep into aesthetics, glamour, engineering and talks. Before that it was a lot more nerd oriented.
> Are reposts ok?
> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.