Ok, thanks for letting me know.
> Microsoft's Windows was the dominant desktop operating system (OS) worldwide as of February 2024, with a market share of around 72 percent.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
> Microsoft's Windows was the dominant desktop operating system (OS) worldwide as of February 2024, with a market share of around 72 percent.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
Microsoft changed. And for the better. The death was short lived, but in many ways, especially in the cultural zeitgeist of software engineers and tech folk, Microsoft did die there for a bit. Satya did a great job of resurrecting it. He has been masterful in his role (I worked at a company that was acquired by Microsoft).
Companies who were once the 900 pound gorilla can die, despite making a lot of money. Oracle still prints money, but how many people under 50 use Oracle on a day to day basis when they are building a company? I would venture to say approaching zero. Google is still printing money, but in many ways it is dead (or dying).
I just don't believe this. It's like saying that Apple "did die there for a bit" when they were selling shitty Intel Macs; it's not true. They were still alive, well, and had a significant market share of incredibly enthusiastic customers.
Microsoft had been a Department of Defense contractor for more than 20 years at the time PG published this. His conclusion was narrow-minded then, and it's narrow-minded today.
> I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.
Funny how PG didn't have enough perspective to realize that he himself could be the one in a different world. A bright guy, but like you say - narrow-minded.
It’s purely a cultural thing, but from where I’ve worked and what I’ve seen, companies who choose Microsoft stacks and services (azure, C#, windows server, etc) are very management heavy and most are hostile towards their engineers, whom they see as cost centers.
I think that stigma still clings to Microsoft today
Witness how C# has a toehold in games development (via Unity) and that isn't seen as incogruous at all.
And then look at the prevalence of VS Code, and the market penetration of GitHub...
Microsoft’s XNA framework was quite good early on.
But unity alone really popularized c# in gamedev.
Also Xamarin allowing a single codebase for android and iOS was a driving factor as well.
So c# is a must, but teams, office, and exchange, and windows server are not.
Don't forget GitHub, NPM, and VSCode. Microsoft has entrenched themselves deeper than it first appears.
And yes npm and github as well, but both of those were fairly recent acquisitions.
how many people are using relational databases in their companies?
or even how many accounting systems are using RDBMSs behind the scenes?
I would venture every single last one of them
I don’t think he did. They are not the innovative company they were under Satya. Sure the stock price is up by what are they actually doing? Office isn’t the force it was, teams and azure are just copying others and they utterly enshitified Windows. Xbox has also gone backwards.
Oracle is having something of a resurrection moment lately, with Oracle Cloud becoming a surprisingly popular option for startups.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startups-find-an-...
"At least six venture-backed AI startups, including Character.ai and Adept AI Labs, primarily rely on Oracle for cloud computing, according to the companies. Two founders of AI startups who have used various cloud providers told The Information that Oracle can run complex machine-learning models more economically than Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud."
But better for whom?
Sometime after 2007, Microsoft:
(1) rolled out unstoppable, inscrutable "telemetry" in Windows,
(2) decided that "opt-out" was appropriate for privacy-invading features, and
(3) decided it was okay to silently reset such opt-outs.
(4) most recently, decided it's okay to violate copyright for any material they can scrape off the web, except for victims who can afford to fight Microsoft in court.
I don't know any of their actual reasons for those policies, but as an end-user their reasons are indistinguishable from "because we can".
IIRC, in the MS-DOS / Windows 2 up through ~early Windows 10 days, Microsoft's sleazy behavior was mostly limited to their interactions with other software companies.
A wooden desk with a PC, a keyboard, mouse and monitor is likely to run Windows: until it's replaced by someone who isn't at a desk.