Microsoft is Dead (2007)

> They can't hire smart people anymore, but they could buy as many as they wanted.

> Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.

> Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

Instead, Microsoft did the exact opposite. They picked Satya Nadella who had worked there since 1992. He has driven the innovation right out of Redmond, WA with no lead shielding required.

I feel like we as a society haven't really entirely got a handle on this yet. Things emerge, like trusts, and it takes a while for people to understand what has happened.

But, with things like Windows 10 telemetry you can't turn off, and Windows turning into a service, they've gotten back on board with how Big Tech runs these days.

This pattern seems to hold really well. The giants mostly amass data and manipulate people. If they don't do this sort of thing, they don't really seem that threatening, regardless of their size. HP, IBM, Dell. Apple seems interesting, as a hold-out on just selling a product, but in the meta game, just direct manipulation of people really looks like a step up, and I don't predict they'll continue as anything approaching a "scary tech giant" in coming decades unless they change like Microsoft did.

> The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. 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.

If you live in a forest you'll think the world is made of trees.

Paul Graham is a very clever man, and I have a lot of respect for him, but he lives in a high tech bubble. People in high-tech start-ups use apple; people who work in creative industries (mostly) use apple; most of the rest of the world use Windows PCs. So to declare the desktop (does this include laptop?) "dead", especially back in 2005, is most definitely premature.

Question: has anyone out there come across a non-high-tech multinational corporation that uses apples instead of PCs?

This sounds like a very ignorant thing to state. Wherever I worked, the best programmers used Windows and Linux desktops. Why? Because they too busy coding to get caught up in the Apple hype is my best guess. You know just like he talks about being ignorant to what was going on in Microsoft world, many coders I worked with did not know or care about what was going on in Apple world. There was one group of people who I did notice flock to Apple OS's, wannabe developers. The type that talk a lot about new tech but never wrote code that got deployed to production.

The last sentence is ironically funny now that MS is back on top and Apple is slipping, and the article is about the "death" of MS.

> Microsoft closed Friday with a larger market cap than Apple’s, making the Redmond software giant the most valuable U.S. stock.

http://fortune.com/2018/11/30/microsoft-bumping-apple-is-now...

To counter this with my own dubious and oversimplified explanation, Microsoft did not fail because it has created a monopoly, a walled-off ecosystem they control, and they managed to protect it in most desktop segments. Google has it's own monopolies, as do all of the successful companies that are still around. Microsoft's failure to extend their monopolies into mobile and web costed them the crown of the tech industry, but they're far from dead.

Apple rebooted solley on it's iPhone walled garden - their desktop was moribund and the iPod, while an inovative product and short term cash cow, was not conducive to a monopoly, so it was quickly duplicated and made obsolete. Yahoo was not able to create and maintain its monopolies, so it's dead.

Microsoft has changed a lot since, and still putting much of an effort and money to gain trust amongst the community. Just remind yourself the reaction when GitHub acquisition announced. For three weeks I read blog posts filled broadcasting fear and loathing as if the government of China has bought Facebook, Twitter and Slack altogether.

I wish I'd bought the book, or at least remembered its title.

Maybe that’s when Microsoft started gaining traction.

It was 10 years before Microsoft managed to drag itself up and do something useful with itself.

It's really remarkable that Microsoft managed such a big turn around after such epic failures (like mobile); others (like IBM...) are still struggling to do it.

Just goes to show, competitive pressure is a good thing. :)

I felt the same way that Paul did, Microsoft had calcified into this Office/Enterprise crust, living off their contracts with big businesses, while the real world was cruising to a new, agile, and open source beat. I had also been at Sun when it was still small, and cringed when bad news from IBM put a big negative impact on Sun's nascent stock price, even though, at the time, IBM's pain was coming from Sun not that we'd share in it.

But the trap that I had fallen into, and this essay expresses, is that "Today is every day" or more precisely, now that the world is to my liking, it will cease changing in ways that I disapprove. :-) I felt like the puzzle is figured out, I "get it" now, I can see the strings going from the puppets to the puppeteers and now I can see how the world is working.

But the cruel trick is that in systems, the puppets are recursive, or in mathematical terms, the forces influencing the future direction of technology are nonlinear at best, and likely chaotic. Everyone is changing in response to the changes they perceive around them, and in response some of their changes change those around them. Like the traffic analyst who figured out you could stomp your brakes going West on Interstate 10, and have the 'wave' of your braking effect roll south on the Harbor, get picked up going north on the 405, only to have it come back and hit you from the front as its echo headed east back along the 10. Sun made Workstations and Microsoft only cared about PCs except the echo of what a workstation was suddenly came back and hit Sun in the face as a big PC. Or Sun's prophetic, if ill fated slogan that "The Network is the Computer", which turned out to be literally true as clusters of Linux machines took out big iron symmetric multiprocessing systems. And then again, as Paul points out, when the Web browser ran its "programs" on the "network." Where did the computer start and the network end? It was no longer possible to tell.

Take away from this the certain knowledge that Google, Facebook, and Apple will all "die" (Apple for the second time :-)) at some point in the next 5 to 20 years. What we care about today will seem silly in the future, and the there will be technologies that enable completely different things to consume our time and resources than the things that do so today.

People create startups and dream new dreams for the same reason a surfer starts paddling their board toward shore, waves come up, and you have to be in position to get a good ride.

Maybe Apple, MS, Google, etc already die several times.

Is just that enough of it survive and learn from the past, even a little.

Maybe is easier to present the new king as the same old king, long live the king.

The present news just says Microsoft's market valuation is higher than apple's (today). Not sure if it really affects the central thesis of the article.

EDIT: literally the first paragraph of the article

"I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them."

People fear Facebook and Google and Amazon, if only for the immense amounts of damage they do to societies and polities. Who is afraid of MS (or IBM)? Do startup founders even think of MS as a factor in their plans (which seems to be what the article is about)

Ironically, In 2007 Microsoft’s market cap was more than twice that of Apple’s ($270B vs $100B). That company’s staying power is truly amazing.

Microsoft is to computing as Ford is to automobiles. Both are still there if you want them to be your choice, but by the same token, if you don't need them in your life, they aren't forced upon you.

Me? I haven't owned a Ford since 1985. I switched to Unix/Linux in 1991.

> They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

And now, I bet a vast majority of people funded by YC use VS Code. Maybe even Azure.