Microsoft Is Dead (2007)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...
In 2004, outside of education and desktop publishing it was extremely rare to see an Apple computer at all. Apple was the iPod company by that point. Almost all software of note ran only on Windows, and Office was required for all documents.
That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web. That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...it's not the same company at all. In fact, there is no company today even fractionally as dominant. Google's search monopoly or Apple's App Store monopoly just don't compare.
It appears all the critical commenters think PG was unaware of these facts, but they critically misunderstand the truth on the ground. There was no way for PG to not know that Microsoft was dominant everywhere because Windows ran everything (even digital signage) and Word documents were a more accepted interchange format than even PDFs. He was invoking Gibson's observation that the future is unevenly distributed, and he was right: The movement of almost all applications to the web absolutely annihilated Microsft's ability to dictate what software smaller companies could or could not publish.
Edit: Also, it seems unthinkable today, but back then we all had a large number of devices like printers and digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers. Microsoft essentially dictated what hardware you could buy too.
MS owns github, linkedin, and it's cloud services in azure, etc, are outside the initial desktop OS business model. Not to mention it being one of the biggest contributors to the linux kernel (to my chagrin). All of this is because of the slide in significance and dominance of it's windows OS business.
This OS business is still quite present though, such as in the h/w upgrades being pushed on users now in migrating to win11. The big h/w OEMs pay windows OS royalties for all those new computers.
Also, WRT your mention of the h/w driver dominance of MS, it's ironic to note that in the modern world h/w peripherals still often come with a custom windows driver, when their use on linux is almost always supported by standard USB class device drivers. A notable failure to evolve.
I am not too young to remember the old Microsoft. To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic. Despite Tesla, GM is still relevant. Despite AWS, DB2 mainframes are still relevant. Heck, I have to work with EBCDIC data, a format designed to not produce holes in punchcards that are too close together. Even when we eventually move to a modern db, decades of archival data is not going to be converted from EBCDIC.
Windows might be irrelevant to FAANG or MANGA or GAMMA or whatever, but how many Fortune 500 companies don’t have a significant Microsoft presence?
Apple computers are pretty nice, but they’re expensive, and the vast majority of employees do fine with a cheap PC and Microsoft 365—why would a company pay more for unnecessary hardware that also requires rebuilding a bunch of IT systems, not to mention retraining thousands of employees.
> To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic.
That quote you quoted does not claim that Microsoft is irrelevant, it claims that the fact that Microsoft is a giant company today, is irrelevant.
The industry in question being the union of personal desktop and laptop computers, associated software, and internet-related technologies.
What actually happened was the internet-related sector broadened to include new sub-sectors - mobile, search, social, media, cloud, e-commerce, and ad tech - all of which Microsoft either ignored, failed at, or didn't dominate.
The old industries are still there but they're the tail, not the dog.
The dog is far more consumer and consumer-adjacent. MS culture was always more aligned with corporate goals and office productivity. MS never got social and lifestyle computing, which is where the industry was heading. It still doesn't, even in gaming.
AI is going to see a similar shift to a completely different mode of computing, but it's too early to tell how that will work out. At a guess it's going to be much more directly political than anything we've seen so far. (Not in a good way, IMO.)
There's more free energy in growing things.
Leave shrinking things to private equity.
There might be a lot of money in programming COBOL, but who wants to do that? It's not exciting to be a buzzard and subsist on carcasses.
It is also highly visible in nerd Linux circles where some people still think they fight to have Linux on Desktop.
Linux on Desktop is irrelevant just as Microsoft pre 2005 is irrelevant.
MSFT saw that cloud is the future and they are in that business and O365 is flagship product where Windows just a support nice to have part because they need OS so people can run their browser.
People who want to beat Microsoft with Linux on the desktop should stop worrying and enjoy our nice ecosystem of little programs for what it is.
> That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web
The slap on the wrist that Microsoft got had nothing to do with them first losing the MP3 player market which led to Apple’s resurgence (remember the plays4Sure platform and then the Zune?) or their failed efforts in mobile.
> digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers
I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs
The decoupling of IE from Explorer is what really killed Microsoft, nothing to do with with MP3s. Remember, Microsoft was producing a bunch of proprietary extensions to Javascript and HMTL to lock vendors into their ASPX nightmare. It took many years to undo the damage, but at least PC vendors were allowed to ship with a non-IE web browser.
> I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs
As an admitted hoarder of all my old tech, I can assure you I am still in possession of several floppy disks with Windows drivers from my first digital cameras. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact timing, but I think the last digital camera I had to install drivers for was circa 2007 (Vista!). I still miss the days of my Sony laptops coming with i.Link, but I don't remember being able to connect my Sony cameras to many non-Sony PCs. I do remember having to install drivers to get Sony's ridiculous memory stick readers to work with other PCs (and Linux) though.
"The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward"
Is Google dying or dead in this sense now too? I can't think of any company they've bullied recently but maybe I'm just not in their space. All the excitement seemed to move over to social media companies and Apple, then Nvidia and all the industries it spawned. Google certainly aren't driving commercial innovation in the way they were when Gmail was a hot new topic.
And then they just didn't? They just gave up, only small companies use google workspace these days and excel is as entrenched as ever.
I suppose the google meet/google talk/google hangouts explains a lot of why this hypothetical future didn't happen. If google had a serious person in the helm doing long-term strategy microsoft would already be dead and buried (or worse IBM-fied). Instead the CEOs stock market min-maxers took over.
There is no way a competitor could sustainably price a competing product against a low monthly or annual cost Excel/Office/OneDrive SAAS option, since the majority of the workforce was already trained on Office products, and everyone is using an edge feature that a new competing product might be missing.
The teenagers at the time (me included) were all using google sheets and google docs instead of MS products for _years_ before being introduced to the workforce. So the "trained on Office" argument was just an obstacle, not a breaking point if they kept at it for years.
> There is no way a competitor could sustainably price a competing product against a low monthly or annual cost Excel/Office/OneDrive SAAS option
If google had taken on microsoft heads-on they could have sued them into oblivion for anti-competitive practices in pricing if they tried that.
No, they just decided to not execute on the strategy, they did start but didn't finish. Arguably it was to focus on mobile and Android, but I see no reason why google couldn't do both considering all the wasted products they had over the years.
And if anyone could sustain an office suite until it runs profitably in these circumstances, it must surely be Google...
But the problem for competitors is say you are able to make a product just as good as Excel. You start selling it $x, but Microsoft can almost always go down to $x-1 since their marginal cost is near zero.
Maybe Google or some other big company has the cash flow to plow money into subsidizing this bet for many years, I can understand not wanting to make that bet.
Google Docs and whatnot came out all the way back in the late 2000s, but it still didn’t see any measurable adoption by the time office 365 was out. Maybe it is because Google didn’t stick with it and develop it, but I still think it was a long shot.
It didn't stick because google did not pursue the strategy to take over enterprise. Google Docs by itself is not going to displace Office 365 and IT management tools, you need the whole suite of products.
From my (limited) experience google workspace doesn't really offer the level of control over employee computers that microsoft solutions do (like limiting what you can install or tuning settings). So it is a non-starter for any big company.
Amazon is the second largest employer in the US.
https://www.enclyne.com/3-reasons-why-companies-are-migratin...
But yeah, Google had no long term strategy, or ever gave any impression of a road map.
If they had bought a video-call company instead of doing inhouse with google meet they would probably have monopoly on that too.
> Is Google dying or dead in this sense now too? I can't think of any company they've bullied recently ...
Such a great summary for judging corporate America.
The other was on Apple Invite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940852 "[they've] started making money, their product is going to become awful"
One could say he actually destroyed MSFT to build something new.
And 1TB of storage per user.
From an iPhone or iPad, you connect a USB drive to it using the USB C port, the USB drive shows up in the Files along with your OneDrive storage location and you move files to your drive.
The same way you would with GDrive, iCloud Drive or Dropbox
I love being able to both do all of my web application work in a deeply integrated NixOS WSL VM and develop my own desktop environment power tools against a stable DWM using an officially supported Win32 API crate in Rust.
Honestly I dread booting up my M1 MacBook Pro for work, the experience feels sluggish, slow and unresponsive in comparison. In particular the experience of using a wireless mouse is like dragging the cursor through heavy sludge.
If you needed to buy software, my entire life, chances are the software you needed was made for Windows.
I use Linux for a desktop, use it professionally, but I keep a Windows laptop around because every time a hobby butts up against software -- for instance, the control software for a CNC -- that software is written for Windows. (Yes, yes, there are open source alternatives, it's just codegen and largely generic APIs, but the software everyone uses runs on Windows.)
Joel Spolsky was on the Excel team at MS, and was the lead on VBA. He prudently couches his doomsaying with this disclaimer:
> Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off
I find this absolutely shocking. Was this a west coast thing? I graduated and got my first job around that time and never met a single developer who used an apple laptop. My CS department was entirely unix/linux/bsd and windows. All my internships and jobs post graduation was windows or linux. My experience was that the hacker community, cs community, developer community all looked down on apple laptops, especially back then.
I guess we all live in our own little bubbles.
Edit: Also, the worry back then wasn't so much that microsoft is dead, but that microsoft was expanding so much that even if you preferred to develop on a linux stack, you still wanted to get some background in C#, VB, tsql, etc to improve your chances at landing a job.
Macs weren't something I saw that often at this time, just like now most computers were PCs.
Many "regular" folks have Mac machines because they no longer "have" to use Microsoft-specific software. Also, Microsoft doesn't have any phone OS (anymore) either - that's all Apple and Google.
That definitely doesn't mean Microsoft is truly "dead", but they're no longer the giant that you can't avoid. Companies can afford to ignore them, and that's a far cry from the absolute and total utter market dominance they had in the nineties (which is how I read this article).
Netflix dropped out of that a long time ago, but FAANG is still sometimes used since it is catchier than MAMAA or whatever a 7 letter acronym would be if including Nvidia and Tesla.
The disconnect between SV and the rest of the world is as wide today as it has ever been.
So nearly all of the (relatively) very few people that are funded by YC have Apple and that's proof of Apple's complete victory over a dead MS. In a year when MS was still on an upward trend, growing by 20% market cap to become double that of Apple.
Reading rich people's blogs reminds me every time that there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else. And by luck I mean a family golden nugget, or lucky first investment, or both. A superpower that allows one to fail many times and still be able to try again until they hit the next fortune. Most people in the world can't even afford to try. Most of the rest can't afford to fail.
If you're a person who is at one end of a funnel (in this case; new tech companies) and you see a 100% adoption which is contrary to the mainstream: you would think you have good insight.
You might forget that you're looking at:
A) A cargo culture
B) a homogeneous cohort.
This is the same way that people knew ahead of time that Microsoft Office would kill off Lotus notes. Since all school's were transitioning (or had transitioned) to Microsofts products.
It's also why people knew AWS would be so popular ahead of time, because new tech companies were not renting compute anymore, they were passing their credit cards to Amazon - even causing some companies to bet their products on making tooling to make AWS easier.
If you're at one end of the funnel, you can see the future.
Was this the future? or was it a false positive based on a cohort? - I definitely think the market dominance of Windows on the Desktop has been thoroughly challenged since 2008, and it's rare I see people elect to use Windows for <10yo companies unless the founders are only used to Microsoft products.
and I work in AAA games, which is insanely Microsoft dominated.
I can't resolve the cognitive dissonance of that making a ton of sense or none.
In 2008, the IT department couldn't even handle Macs at all, now it's a standard deployment among managers, designers, brand and even some programmers who only work with backend code. (though usually they'll have a gaming PC too for testing the game).
That was literally unthinkable back then.
[1] "https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/linux-share-on-steam-b...
That’s not wishful thinking, thats reality. Computers do more than play games.
There are probably about an equal number of people living in a home with a garage in China too, though it’s wealthier suburban areas as opposed to lower and middle class people.
They’re common in Japan, too, outside of the densest few cities. And of course there are plenty of other countries where garages are common, like Canada and Australia.
Very quotable
At some point they lose touch with reality. I've found their "advice" often doesn't work for young people who wanna become successful like them. Another example is Jensen:
"Nvidia doesn't have a long-term strategy, we just think about what to do next.
I don't wear a watch, because NOW is important"
and a lot of crap like that.
See every rich person telling young people to follow their passion.
That doesn't imply that Jensen thinks he's successful because he doesn't wear a watch. He's not that delusional.
I have no idea whether he is or not. However I suspect it is very hard to remain grounded when you have so much wealth. Every interaction with the outside world is going to be clouded by it. People will be subservient in a way that us peons don't experience when we dine in McDonalds or shop in Walmart.
People who do not want a computer at all will have neither PC or Mac. The majority of people do not want to have a computer – they see enough of them at work, and they are happy with their smart phones.
Europeans are in general very weird about money. They are as greedy as anybody, but what do they do then with that money? They think turning on the air conditioner will ruin them financially and they count how many cents each person owes each other.
Literally laughed out loud at this, it’s so accurate.
It's amazing that PG looked around in his bubble, saw MacBooks and decided to write that Microsoft is dead.
FYI, this guy is a troll.
Yes, I think that a graphical user interface would be excellent for a server. And I'm probably not the only one who would like that idea: Apple invested a bunch of money trying to do just that with their Mac OS X Server.
I have worked for an awful lot of people over the years, and given they could afford my services, I would guess they fall into the "people who can choose what kind of computer they will choose" category. Some could choose what kind of Ferrari they wanted, lol.
Your intuition is anecdotal. Plenty of people either don't care, or gasp prefer Windows. They are not stupid (I'm one of them, which I'd be happy to discuss with anyone, up to and including Mr. Torvalds).
An operating system is a tool to allow you to use your computer hardware and to run software. What fits your needs may not fit everyone's. There's nothing wrong with that.
You're one of who?
> Your intuition is anecdotal.
Absolutely. I'm talking about what I've seen around the world in the past decade or so. When I have visitors who have never used a MacBook, they want to touch it and try it, they comment on how nice it is. And this is a design that hasn't changed much in 10 years.
In airports and cafés, I see more people using MacBooks than PC laptops, but this could be related to that PC laptop battery life generally doesn't allow you to bring the computer far from home without a cord.
> Plenty of people either don't care
Yes, as I've mentioned. And they usually don't buy a computer at all, and are happy with their smart phone and/or tablet. Some people buy the cheapest laptop they can find because their job demanded it. They won't care either, the computer is just an extension of their job and they hate the device.
And of course, a whole lot of people cannot afford anything but a cheap laptop if they need a laptop. But Apple is dangerously close to approaching these customers' budget with the Mac Mini. And if you consider re-sale value, there is even less reason to buy any other brand.
Instead, people take loans to buy Apple to show how cool and rich they are.
No, we will not.
Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today
Microsoft had 0% of hosting then and has the world’s second largest share, 23%, today
Microsoft had, in 2007, 18% presence share in console gaming. Today they have 65%
They were one of the four tech orgs present at the presidential inauguration
They have grown enormously in the time this essay claims they were dying
PS4 sold 117M and PS5 sold 61.7M by mid 2024.
Nintendo claims 150.9M Switch consoles sold as of the end of 2024.
That puts Microsoft at around 20.7%, Sony at 43%, and Nintendo at about 36.3%.
Even if you exclude Nintendo with a "no-true-gamer" fallacy, Microsoft still has just 32.5% of the market.
Windows was over 90% in 2007 and is just 72% today. If you include the super-important mobile market, Windows actual marketshare is something like 10-15% and even less if you include servers (where even most Azure servers run Linux).
Three total customers exist worldwide. All three have red square, two have yellow square, and one has blue square
Blue square sold one in six items, so it has one sixth market share. Blue square is one in three households, so it has one third presence share
Microsoft owns PC, and even Valve has forced to emulate Windows/DirectX to have any games on SteamDeck.
The amount of office worker typing Excel sheets on mobile phones is rather tiny.
If you include the massive mobile gaming market, Windows gaming is an even tinier percentage of the overall market (maybe even <10%).
That would be a first.
What matters is where money is, and how much of those games trace back to Microsoft owned studios.
Good example with mobile games though, as it is a good example of Valve's failure to capitalise on 80% of mobile games being run with OpenGL/Vulkan, on a Linux like platform, and yet they have to translate Win32/DirectX, as means to get games on SteamDeck.
Guesswork is rarely helpful
Source for this ? Also what do you mean by "presence" ? I had the impression that Sony was in a way better position than Microsoft, and they were both dwarfed by Nintendo by a substantial margin.
(not that this invalidate your overall point).
Microsoft lost the plot afterwards with XBox ONE against the Playstation 4, and even with the Series S|X, they never recovered on the hardware side.
However this is kind of relative now, even if they don't public admit yet, the hardware is gone, they are going SEGA, and by being one of the largest game publishers, it hardly matters if the XBox console isn't going that well.
In one year they already recovered all the money lost in the ABK deal and litigations.
Whenever someone writes a provocative article about something being "dead", they are almost always talking about influence and mindshare -- rather than business statistics.
Yes, Microsoft is still a huge behemoth being a $3+ trillion cap company with a overwhelming marketshare of Windows & Office installations but the apex of their "industry influence" was the 1990s during the "Wintel" days before the internet came along. That 1980s/1990s was the time period when Bill Gates was CEO and "everybody was scared of Microsoft". Since, then they ... lost the browser wars (both old IE and new IE with Trident engine failed), lost the mobile shift (Windows phones failed), is a distant #2 in search engine market. Microsoft is somewhat back in the influence game with AI but that's because they partnered with OpenAI rather than build something internally. Arguably, it's Meta that gets more noise with LLAMA, and China's High-Flyer getting everybody's attention with DeepSeek-R1. That's the type of "alive vs dead" PG is writing about.
The "dead" being a writer's rhetorical flourish rather than a business status is the same when applied to "IBM is dead". In pure business metrics, IBM is still a giant company with $65 billion in revenue and $7 in profits. The airlines, major banks, and credit-card companies still run millions of transactions through IBM Z mainframes. Companies are still buying and upgrading expensive new Z mainframes. But the rhetorical "dead" means IBM's apex of influence was 1960s & 1970s. The later IBM trying to relevant with the newer tech like Watson and blockchain service doesn't matter to people.
Maybe writers should stop using "dead" as rhetorical technique because it just confuses readers. E.g. saying something like "DirecTV is dead" makes people scratch their head when they just watched a game on the satellite service last night. How would that be possible if it was truly dead?!?
There is a reason it's market cap is bigger than Google's and Amazon's, and its downfall has been long overturned.
>with a overwhelming marketshare of Windows & Office installations
It's interesting that you mention it, as none of these are very important on their own to today's Microsoft if you check their latest quarterly reports.
I didn't list them because they're not "relevant" (scare quotes) to PG's rhetorical angle of "dead". Yes, of course those Microsoft components are still relevant and still being updated and modernized. That said, even though I personally use VSCode, Visual Studio, Github every day, and have upgraded too many MS SQL Server databases... my point is those examples of Microsoft's current usage is not what PG is talking about. I'm not saying readers have to agree with PG. They just have to understand that he's using "dead" as a provocative shorthand about "influence" rather than business stats.
Same confusion as IBM coming out with new Z mainframe models in 2025 and IBM Red Hat just released a new RHEL 9.5 a few months ago and yet people will say "IBM is dead". How can IBM be dead if Red Hat Linux is still relevant?!? That's the problem with different readers' interpretation of the word "dead".
EDIT reply to: >Then what is he talking about when he says "dead"? [...] I mean for vast majority GitHub is a synonym for Git and VSCode is nearly a de-facto IDE for frontend development,
Github (2008 acquired by MS in 2018) and VSCode (2015) didn't exist in 2007 when PG wrote his "Microsoft is Dead" essay. It's possible those are "influential" enough to change his opinion. Maybe not. The examples of millions of people using MS Excel and Word every day back in 2007 with no meaningful competition from Google Docs or LibreOffice didn't stop him form writing "Microsoft is Dead". Therefore, we must conclude he's using "dead" in a very particular way.
Then what is he talking about when he says "dead"?
Also comparing those MS softwares with Z-mainframe & RHEL feels a bit off. If you take a 90th percentile of s/w developer starting career today they are more likely to have heard or used those MS tools than IBM's. I mean for vast majority GitHub is a synonym for Git and VSCode is nearly a de-facto IDE for frontend development, TypeScript I don't need to say much.
If you want to understand my reaction, take two steps:
1. Note which companies do in fact have mindshare
2. Check which of those are owned by Microsoft
Microsoft had 90%+ of desktop penetration in 2008; in fact, it made news that it had slipped to below that at the end of 2008.[0][1]
Now it's around 70%, but seems to be improving?[2]
[0]: https://www.osnews.com/story/20605/windows-market-share-slip...
[1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367310/windows-market...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
That's only counting the latest version, if you include all Windows versions, it was in the high 90%. Today it's in the mid 90%.
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
It was around 2011 that Apple had a higher market cap.
He did predict the iPhone. That basically cemented Microsoft’s fate. Sure MS is still dominant in the “enterprise”. But no one is investing money to make great Windows apps.
He was talking about cultural dominance among people developing new tech, not revenue.
There was a time when being a programmer essentially meant writing C++ on Windows. I still remember getting a Mac as late as ~2013 and having my normie (non-engineer) friends chastise me for it -- "how are you going to get any serious coding done?" -- because that was their genuine impression of Windows vs Macs. Meanwhile, imagine you're the founder of YC in 2007 in a city where all the new tech startups are happening. Everyone's using Macs. Surely it's at least a valid argument or hypothesis that this is a leading indicator of where the forefront of tech is going.
And now if you go to any modern fast-growing tech company, you look around, everyone uses Macs. Even lots of Microsoft employees use Macs. It seems the hypothesis wasn't completely wrong. Incidentally, it's only with hindsight that we're able to refute this somewhat: Microsoft made a nice comeback in the tech world after Nadella became CEO. But that was a big surprise when it happened.
Was it really necessary to turn this into a talking point about rich people and their sins?
Nobody implied he meant "dead dead" so that's a straw man, just that he completely missed the mark with his observation. Everything else is a backsplanation. PG even acknowledges he may look like a fool in retrospective.
> He was talking about cultural dominance among people developing new tech [...] Everyone's using Macs
So... a cultural thing you say, not connected to performance? Correlation not causation. The investor expects to see a Mac because that's part of the impression and everyone conformed. People showed up with a Mac to ask for money much like people show up in a suit to ask for a job. The interviewer expects the suit. It has no impact on the job performance or quality. It's just the "cultural" expectation. Wall Street people aren't more profitable due to the suits, and casual attire isn't dead.
> Was it really necessary to turn this into a talking point about rich people and their sins?
Was it really necessary to come to his defense? Was PG's opinion of MS really necessary? Would you have let it slide if I was praising instead?
I don't think Macs are popular in tech merely due to frivolous or circular fashion. Basically no one used Windows to do 2009-2016 era web dev. Not because founders were pushing employees to use Macs so investors would see when they came to visit; Microsoft genuinely lost a lot of reputation among programmers prior to the WSL stuff due to how bad their stuff was. Am I the only one who remembers this? People complaining and giving each other a look if they had to use "Winblows" and so on? (I still see this today.)
> Was it really necessary to come to his defense? ...
I mean, no, but why does every PG essay posted on here spawn a bunch of comments about basically how rich and pretentious he is? Why does this matter? If he's wrong, why not just say why?
Billionaires also genuinely lost a lot of reputation. Present discussion and times stands proof. "Billionaires are dead", to mirror PG's sentiment. Surely you agree that having an opinion on rich people's predictive powers is at least as relevant and justified as having an opinion on MS's future.
PG called MS dead by observing a cultural/fashion trend among a sliver of the IT crowd and predicted a larger shift that never happened to any meaningful degree. He missed that what he was looking at wasn't truly of interest to MS. The 90% of regular users were and they had way more inertia than what PG though the few people in his line of sight could oppose.
> how rich and pretentious he is
Rich yes. "Pretentious" is your assessment. I made no moral judgement on the man. Just counterbalancing the common narrative seen even here that rich people have a superior intellects, they see things others don't even in the dark uncertainty of the future. In reality it's mostly bias, successes are praised, failures downplayed. It tricks people into believing rich people are oracles, or that not rich means not intelligent. You don't object to the praising and you'll fight to support that bias? That looks disingenuous.
> If he's wrong, why not just say why?
I did, repeatedly. You just cared more about responding than about understanding. No amount of "saying why" will change your mind because there's always some other place to shift the goal posts. "It's cultural but actually technical. It's dead but just dead for some coders. It's just a few coders but SV is all that matters. Time proved it wrong but it surprised everyone." You'll also put words in my mouth that I absolutely never suggested hoping it brings my argument low enough that you think you have a chance of fighting it. Not in a million throwaway accounts ;).
It was never that complete. Gamers used pcs. Paul grahams surprise missed an entire segment of the market.
Additionally Mac usage statistically never exceeded windows. Paul lived a bit in a rich persons world and he’s around a lot web developers who like osx because it’s unixy without the issues of old Linux.
I've been commenting about this here for YEARS with constant pushback and excuses for him from the community. "He's a billionaire so he must be smart", "He personally wrote the entire HN codebase", "Nobody really needs a valid SSL cert on their website in 2023". Dang has even cited me for "personal attacks" for daring to point out PG's most visible shortcomings and knowledge gaps.
I guess the inflection point was PG turning to X to screech about "wokism" in support of oligarchs like Trump and Musk to snap this community out of it's pro-PG trance. Watching a billionaire cheer on the billionaire class as we plummet into technofeudalism is a hell of a wake up call.
Glad to see criticism of PG finally going mainstream here, especially digging back 18 years and concluding that he's always been like this. It's a shame he financially runs this place and these comments are short-lived due to platform manipulation.
I appreciate there are people out there who have chosen PG to emotionally glom onto, positively or negatively, and perhaps you're probably an extreme case of the latter, so I would have to challenge a little. "Criticising someone loads" isn't a good thing. Just neutrally challenging their ideas individually is all that's needed.
In hindsight his (and Andreessen's techno-bullshit) have won a bet with Trump, those tweaker writings are very much aligning with the zeitgeist that's being imposed by Trump, Musk and their lackeys, they may even brag about having get there earlier than every other rich techbro.
Is this true? Did Paul Graham have outside money to fall back on that was given to him to sustain him through all his failures?
Note that most people can't even afford to go to one university, let alone four. That definitely seems like someone who had a safety net that allowed him to focus on acquiring wealth, instead of acquiring shelter or food.
In 1986 a smart person who was willing to live cheaply could definitely do this. Doing a PhD is not evidence of a "family golden nugget", in my view. I don't know when he did his art studies, but still. Giant numbers of middle class people do not do what Paul Graham did, even though they had enough "safety net" to do that studying.
"...father worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors, then was named the Director of Nuclear Safety for Atomic Energy of Canada"
They may have had to compete with other people in the same advantages in the same business - which may not be very many.
There is an overlap between people who build businesses and heirs of fortunes. Far more people increase an existing fortune than become rich from scratch.
There were so many threads on this website alone about how much extra Meta was paying and how they would ever see a return.
Right now they're embracing open source and Linux, which has proven to be a very good idea.
I'm still not convinced.
Google is being much better at that game with Linux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta
> Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava), nor upon tradition (paramparā), nor upon rumor (itikirā), nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna) nor upon surmise (takka-hetu), nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu), nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka), nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā), nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya), nor upon the consideration 'The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)' Kalamas, when you yourselves know 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.
Every single startup Paul's company funds uses a Microsoft product one way or another. YCombinator is giving out Azure credits to their funded startups. When Sam Altman pivoted OpenAI from non-profit, he did it with Microsoft money. Microsoft is relevant as hell, just as it was in 2007, when it was busily providing productivity software to the entire US federal government without breaking a sweat -- a contract it still holds nearly two decades later.
From Paul Graham's perspective, detached from the actual world people live in, doing as he pleases with his fuck-you money, sure, maybe Microsoft is dead. But the list of people who can get value out of this essay is "Paul Graham."
He's not wrong there, I once had to use my laptop to display Jeff Bezos's Powerpoint when he was at Startup School because I was the only person around they knew had Windows. I tried so hard to like OSX, using it as my daily driver for two years, and I still wish I did.
It is interesting perspective on how fast things can change in tech. Right now Intel seems doomed and Nvidia unbeatable, but it could all change in a few years time.
They are doomed
Since advent of smartphone, its been 13 yrs my desktop/laptop are unused covered in dust,
All my needs are fulfilled by hybrid android+linux ecosystem
Who among average users needs laptop, for daily usage when phone can be thrice fast and 100times more features
And I still respectfully disagree with you
This money is sort of "weaponized".
If you are not "them", if you stick to the basic "economic rules", you are already gone as you cannot exist.
If you make something people want you can sell it. When I started our company 4 years ago I'd have considered $1m ARR a massive achievement. Now I'm here in my heart I feel a need to grow and raise or we'll die - but In my head I don't think this is actually true.
I don't think there has been a time in human history before where a company of our size (30x median wages) could have been built without needing a great deal of capital.
If Microsoft/Google et al want to use Blackrock/Vanguard's money to buy up small companies that creates more incentive for the young and idealistic to start such companies. While economic security is of sufficient value that resisting a first buyout would be hard for most (hence Sergey and Larry trying to sell for $1m) once a first buyout has been achieved a second buyout can never be forced.
If you want to exist in that case:
1 - you must have the will to resist them (for how long, since they will always be around in some shape due to unlimited funding).
2 - you must have some kind of mechanism to be 'outside of the basic economic rules' (usually subsidies or similar).
Yes most people would struggle to resist a $5m buyout (e.g. Larry and Sergey) but if you had $5m in the bank you would be quite robust in your ability to resist further economic pressure - if you wanted to.
Most 20 year olds can get by on <$20k a year if they are willing to flat share, move home, eat noodles etc, given SWE make $150k+ most can generate this short of revenue on their own in short order.
The vast, vast amount of software is unbelievably bad. It does the task it's designed for just barely, the idea there isn't massive opportunity for improvement, fun and profit is patently absurd.
Not sure what part of this is delusional.
Yes, this is delusional. You would need infinite subsidies, an iron will, hardcore regulation, all that for forever to have a little chance at being significant.
(side note: on HN, many are aware than most software, open source or not, are brain diarrhea).
Hint: It's from average people investing in their retirement...
1 - they have their own cash from huge racketering (forced) monetary streams. 2 - then, you still have the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock.
Those gigantic amounts of money are 'economically weaponized' to 'economically destroy' any sane alternatives, at worldwide scale. RIP "ecomonic competition" (who thinks nowadays this thing is not a scam).
So you say the very average people investing there are plainly aware their money is engaged in 'economic tyrany' which forces down the throat of nearly all average people, that worldwide, the _amazing_ msft software ? mmmmh....
- Google was, for a while, the "gorilla in the room" - their decline is recent. But Paul Graham got it right, that Google was more scary than MS.
- Microsoft was "dead" in 2007, same as Apple was before Steve Jobs came back. The revival started with Satya Nadella, 7 years later. It is still a shadow of its former self, MS dominated the industry like no other player ever did (or is likely to do, again).
- The 4 forces that lead to MS' demise are likely spot-on. And again "demise" in the same sense of IBM, "still exists, still makes money, nobody really cares".
Did the "all ycombinator founders use Macs" rub me the wrong way, when used as an argument as he did? Yes. But I also kinda' understand it(*), even though I still think he should've steered away from that argument.
(*) you can interpret it in the sense of "the future is already here - it is just very unevenly distributed"; that's probably what he meant. He knew full well the market share.
MacOS has so many problems or unsupported features it isn't funny, while Windows was fine.
>> I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly
Hmm. The lesson here is probably don't assume you understand a competitor's strengths and weaknesses via secondhand experience.
And the things MacOS historically did better, having a shell and integrating with unix-like software, have been evened with PowerShell/.NET, WSL2, and HyperV.
Furthermore, a few companies started making Windows laptops that weren't bricks. While Apple's software budget is now mostly iOS/device-focused.
WSL2 is... ugh, ok, much better that WSL. And actually decent. But, as the name implies, is a linux environment. Not a native Windows terminal.
> a few companies started making Windows laptops that weren't bricks
I am honestly, genuinely interested in a windows-based laptop that is as good as a Macbook Pro (or at least very close). Would like the flexibility to move away from Apple. Am interested in battery life, compute power (i.e. internal processor speed, ssd speed, memory size, decent gpu), screen, keyboard & touchpad, and overall build quality (the last one is almost guaranteed if it is close in quality on all the other dimensions).
Dell XPSs were a decent option for the last decade+ (especially the refurbs), but Dell seems to be going through a rebranding exercise [0], so those will now be Dell Pro/Premium models? Maybe?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/the-end-of-an-era-de...
This experience has kept me from spending money on any portable windows machine.
I'm gonna need a source for that quote because no, no one besides a couple of Windows admins ever acknowledged parity, just "meh, if I have to".
Still, obviously, this is anecdotal evidence at best.
IBM shareholders and employees can only dream their demise was in the same sense as Microsoft’s.
The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human. Makes sense given where we are. This incubator is founded by him so there’s a bit of that irrational hero worship there.
In quite some essays, Paul Graham portraits himself this way. You will either be annoyed by this, or you will like his essays. In the latter case, you will likely self-select yourself for this unwitting bias.
However, there are people that have the intellect and the information to do it better than others.
Btw, it contains stuff like this "The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.". Microsoft (or Satya did) also predicted the future, or read this post, and refocused (to online service such as MS365). There still correct, insightful stuff in this post.
There is also "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." also radically different now they have GitHub and WSL, etc
The Outlook Web team @ Microsoft; it shipped with IE5.
I have a very complicated history with Microsoft products, but they have introduced a lot of technologies over the years that we all use, even die-hard MS haters.
This was a lot more accurate when it was published in 2007.
(Others have pointed out that 2007 wasn't even a particularly bad year for MSFT.)
Todays Microsoft is not the same as 2007, back then it was windows, excel, exchange etc. Nowdays its Azure and cloud services.
The only thing they tried and failed, that would make them a real dangerous company was mobile.
What frame are you trying to put here? Do you think there is something wrong with the essay?
Of course. This is why you go to a university to learn to analyze the evidence for a claimed statement as scientifically as possible instead of practicing hero worship.
kakistocracy, kakistocrat.
I hope the shock of witnessing Microsoft Windows in the wild has subdued with time lol.
It didn't kill Microsoft. Microsoft isn't dead. However Microsoft does now have competitors. The takeaway here is that antitrust is fantastic for consumers and innovation.
> So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: 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.
Thats just HN though, a subset of redditors who are gonna "change the world" and also become a billionaire with their CRUD app.
In the end I did the work and move the new API, I am not sure how much this new one will work, maybe the nice guys at MS will want to restart things again with some new even more shiny thing.
Some fanboy will claim this is just a mistake and MS team are just incompetent and have no tests, and support if busy with other stuff.
We can't say "no big deal" tbf, because for example Office files had fairly good longevity across updates (not perfect, a lot of file broke).
BUT anything else (embedded, cloud, AI, when they poisoned web standards, etc) isn't really under that much lauded backwards compatibility AFAIK.
VC backed tech bros with their dumb bullshit get rich quick web apps and crypto probably sounded way more exciting back in 2007 than Microsoft collecting rent. I guess PG did ok.
Along with this
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-d...