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Comment by bkfunk | Hacker News Reader

“That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...”

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.

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> "That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant..."

> 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.

I didn't say Microsoft is irrelevant. I said the fact that it's still a huge company is irrelevant when judging whether the old Microsoft was in fact dead or not. The new Microsoft is highly relevant, but Microsoft's philosophy of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" to maintain a grip on consumer compute is dead. If anything is the heir to that, it would be AWS.

I think you misread that. What ghc wrote was that the fact (that Microsoft is giant today) is irrelevant, not that Microsoft is irrelevant.

"Dead" apparently means "no longer the unquestioned industry leader" - which seems like an odd definition of "dead" to me, but ok.

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.)

The amount of effort apparently required to satisfy all the checkboxes around "a cheap PC and Microsoft 365" is astounding. My Fortune 250 laptop runs 3 different security "endpoint" products, and literally dozens of scripts fire each day/hour to make sure that things are "correct" according to every suggestion any consultant ever made towards our senior IT staff. And they replace the entire fleet every 3 years. I believe that starting with longer lived hardware with an inherently more secure environment that didn't need to be groomed like this would be a net savings, but I don't have the numbers to prove it.

> 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.

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.

Microsoft is irrelevant as far as the platform and where most development energy is focused. Can you imagine trying to get funding for a Windows application?

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