Paul Graham revisits "Microsoft is Dead"
thestandard.com
thestandard.com
Microsoft is not "dead" any more than Apple was dead in the mid to late nineties (and boy, was that a popular statement at the time).
Microsoft still has cash, people, and a position in the industry that, with the right leadership, can be turned around to be competitive with Google, Amazon and Apple.
Please back up all prognostications with evidence, or submit yourself to wrongtomorrow.com :)
The "Microsoft" in the title means the "Microsoft as bogeyman of the tech industry". This is implied. That Microsoft "still has cash, people, and ... position" is neither here nor there.
Specifically:
"Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web - not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now."
I couldn't possibly disagree with this more. The idea of being forced to use all software through a browser sounds bloody awful to me. Photoshop through a browser? DO NOT WANT.
What we're more likely to see is cloud-based apps, which deliver the portability and connectivity we've come to expect from web apps. I can absolutely see myself using a cloud based version of Photoshop, but it would still be "desktop" software. Not surprisingly MS is heavily invested in the virtualization and server markets.
Surprisingly, I think PG forgot this basic point: products succeed because people want them, not because of their underlying technology. Gmail became popular not because it employed AJAX or was based online, but because it solved a hair-on-fire problem: tiny inbox sizes.
"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."
This statement I also find ridiculous. If anything, increased broadband availability has made computers even more of a must-have product. And I've seen absolutely nothing to back up a claim that of these new computers less of them are running Windows.
"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."
Dude, come on. Yes, Apple made an amazing comeback. No, they haven't had anything close to a "complete victory."
Now, I say this as someone who makes custom web apps for small businesses, and someone whose father had an app completely ripped off and suffocated by MS circa 2000. A big part of me wants this to be true, but I know it isn't.
In conclusion:
The revolution in web apps was making them behave more like desktop apps. So why is it surprising to see desktop apps enjoy a renaissance by acting more like web apps?
What you seem to fail to see is that you're an outlier.
Most people want photoshop through a browser. Most people already do most of their stuff through a browser. It's funny to even debate, because it's happening/happened for large amounts of people out there already. Ask your parents what they do on the computer, and it's likely to be 90%+ web, with perhaps a couple of desktop apps. If that.
Ironically, it's the techie usually early adopters that are lagging here, preferring to stick with desktop software. The people leading the webapp charge are people who don't want the fuss of downloading desktop software, with potential spyware etc, and just go to google and find a webapp instead.
The same phenomenon exists when some people discuss advertising. "No one clicks on ads anymore" - it's easy to say, if you install adblock, or just don't click on ads, but this is a total minority. The majority do click on ads. Just like the majority want, and use webapps over desktop apps.
>> "Gmail became popular not because it employed AJAX or was based online, but because it solved a hair-on-fire problem: tiny inbox sizes."
I think actually the reason it succeeded was because it had ridiculously fast searching, and unlike a desktop app, you don't have to worry about your storage. I don't think the majority of people really cared about inbox size. The fact you could easily search for things in a simple and blazingly fast webapp was key. For most people, it is better than a desktop app.
>> "This statement I also find ridiculous. If anything, increased broadband availability has made computers even more of a must-have product."
The fact that broadband access has increased etc means there's less need to have a thick client. Where previously you needed to download a video, click on it, watch it, we all now just watch videos streamed to us by a webapp. When we all have 1Gbps connections, why would we need a full powerful computer each? Why would it not be in most persons better interest to just have a very thin power conserving client that connects up to the big servers doing the grunt work.
The fact is, it's happening, and will continue to happen. You can't stop it. It's inevitable. You might prefer to stick with your computer and desktop apps, but you'll be a small minority, like the people who still buy records on vinyl.
>> "The revolution in web apps was making them behave more like desktop apps."
I disagree with that. The revolution in webapps is making them work BETTER than desktop apps. Gmail can search my mail much faster than my computer can. Mibbit can do things impossible with desktop IRC clients. etc etc
The reason Microsoft are 'dead' is that they don't get it. They're dead in a similar sense to the music industry IMHO - the market changed around them and they completely failed to adapt.
I too do not want Photoshop in a browser. I shoot Canon 5D and 5DMkII. My RAW images are HUGE. I'd either have to upload them to the server to "edit", or download a fairly hefty app to run locally. Photoshop (true photoshop) is processor and bandwidth intensive when used as intended. It won't live in the cloud for a very long time.
Now, what my parents and similar folks want is a way to reduce red-eye, crop and convert photos and apply some simple effects. Sure, THAT can be a web-app. But, the cloud is not killing photoshop.
I also personally do a lot of business travel. Until planes have free, good wifi, then "cloud apps" suck for me. I want to be able to read emails and queue responses while in-flight. I want to be able to edit and organize docs and presentations. I want to be able to look up an address or phone number from my inbox QUICKLY, without having to establish a wifi connection, accept some TOS for the free access, go to gmail, find the message, etc. Just pop open my MBP, give it 8 seconds to "wakeup", go to mail.app and pull the message I want.
In a few years time those will likely take less than a second to upload though.
I agree, video editing, large photo editing will take longer to move over.
>> "Until planes have free, good wifi"
It'll certainly happen, it's just a matter of how quickly. I'd bet maybe 5 years :/
Some things are simply not meant to be done in the cloud. I think the right answer is to not fight the cloud OR the desktop appropriate applications. Developers should realize that for many markets, they may have to support both models to gain significant market share. Most companies have gained marketshare by customers what they want instead of forcing a particular model upon them...
Thin clients too- I don't think you can honestly expect that. The difference between using google docs and a native application is night and day. Docs is slow, prone to pauses, and has lots of bugs related to the poor mapping between html and page layout. Either the browser is going to get a lot faster, we're going to need /thicker/ clients, or people will stay with the status quo:
writing their documents in word, copying and pasting them into google docs only when they need an easy wiki.
If anything, Internet has been getting slower and slower due to congestion and server overloads. Upload speeds still haven't reached 100Kb/sec for 90% of the population after 10 years of affordable broadband arrival.
Pushing everything into a centralized location makes absolutely no sense. Not every byte on my hard drive needs to be shared with other people.
Instead we'll be moving towards rich browser runtimes, to allow on-the-fly downloaded&installed code to effectively work with local data.
We merely settled on a standardized approach to networked GUIs. Instead of proliferation of 3rd party networking apps like usenet/email clients, ftp clients, various VB/Oracle business forms apps, people simply use HTTP-based UI stack. Frankly, not that big of a deal. People _feel_ like that's a big deal because this opened networking to the masses, presented a lot of business opportunities, but fundamentally, this hasn't changed anything.
The type of applications people are running hasn't changed. If your data needs to be shared with others, you need an application with a network access and it means a web site. If not - why does it need to be in a browser?
Yes, people waste time online a lot, that only means they aren't really using their computers. It's like watching TV: most of them have CPUs and RAM and stuff,yet you aren't seeing "TV evangelists" screaming that new era of computing has arrived: with 50" screens and remotes instead of keyboards. That, however, is happening with the iPhone: look how excited everybody is about "desktop apps" you can run on it.
Paul is right: new website founders have no reason to fear Microsoft because they aren't competing with them. But that's not new: it is exactly like starting a landscaping or dog walking business in the 90s: Microsoft couldn't care less.
If anything, they have won. They have such a strong grip on Windows platform that it takes big balls to start a company in that space. My deepest respect to Xobni for taking on the challenge.
I disagree though, the 'windows platform' is irrelevant for most people for the reasons in the article. Most people don't care what OS it is, as long as it has a web browser.
The 'windows platform' is about as relevant as the computers BIOS is - it's there to allow them to start a web browser.
I work at a web startup myself, we sell SaaS to businesses and, unfortunately, they deeply care about their Windows-dependent data,
Companies move ridiculously slowly - one of the reasons for there still being IE6 usage out there. So obviously they are going to stick with Microsoft/desktop apps etc, but the general population won't.
When PG says stuff like "I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows", I think he's more of an outlier than the parent poster.
Gmail can search my mail much faster than my computer can.
There's no technological reason for this to be true. Gmail takes a second or two to answer search queries over my mail; that is plenty of time for a typical desktop machine to process full-text search queries over a few GB of indexed and largely static data.
The reason Microsoft are 'dead' is that they don't get it.
I think most of my objection to the original PG article is the shameless hyperbole it engages in. Microsoft isn't "dead" by any stretch of the imagination -- they are poorly positioned for cloud computing, but the game is certainly not over yet. Claiming that Microsoft is "no longer a factor one has to consider when doing something in technology" is simply wrong -- even if you narrow your focus to consumer-facing web apps, Microsoft still provides the dominant client platform (IE), and a very popular backend infrastructure (SQL + ASP.NET + CLR + ...).
For most startups I don't think they give ms backend a second thought. It's a no brainer to use free open source.
Also, amongst webapps, IE is no longer the dominant client platform at all in my experience.
Different kind of outlier though: when you're an outlier because you spend an inordinate amount of time among people creating new technology, then your anomalous experience makes you better at predicting the future, not worse.
Sometimes, but not always. If you spent all your time hanging out with people creating new technology in the mid 1980s, you might have been convinced that Lisp machines would soon become the dominant computing platform.
The advantages of browser apps - standard and ubiquitous deployment target, potential use of cloud - are all improving over time.
The disadvantages of browser apps are all in factors like bandwidth and connectivity - factors which are steadily giving way to the advance of technology.
I'm betting on the future of browser-based apps. PG was right.
>> you'll be a small minority, like the people who still buy records on vinyl.
You got me there, I totally do buy my records on vinyl.
Cheers!
Anybody who does want Photoshop does not want it in a browser.
The reason Microsoft is in much less of a leadership position is that there are a lot more people who want Picassa than Photoshop. That doesn't mean desktop software is dead (the people who want Photoshop pay handily for it) but it does mean they're no longer as important as they were.
To me too. I never understood, ten years ago, why on earth most people would prefer a web-based email client to a native desktop app but they did. And today that percentage is just increasing. Most people just don't have the same concerns you and I do.
>>Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.
Yeah, this one didn't make sense. If you're surprised when you come across a computer running the desktop OS used by more than 75% ([citation needed]) of the populace, then you clearly move in very narrow circles.
For me it had more to do with the fact that GMail's minimalist UI ended up being more responsive than the likes of Outlook.
"Yeah, this one didn't make sense. If you're surprised when you come across a computer running the desktop OS used by more than 75% ([citation needed]) of the populace, then you clearly move in very narrow circles."
I'm fairly certain that it's still more than 75%. It's also very likely that Dell's monthly sales still exceed Apple's annual sales of computers. Apple's sales have been higher than usual, but still hasn't managed to make much of a dent in the Windows market -- and don't forget that mac users are buying Windows licences so that they can run Windows-only software also... so even though those are probably the minority of mac buyers, it does suggest that Apple's non-victory is even less complete than PG is implying. :)
That sounds like "3d games in Windows?" in 1995, or any other "$perf_sucking_app in $new_environment".
The "browser" that's going to run Photoshop 2015 won't be Netscape 3. It'll have a JIT'd JS engine (so it'll be really fast), it'll have local storage (so you don't need to upload anything), it'll have efficient graphics libraries (so it can use your video card), it'll have native-feeling controls, and so on.
It's a "browser" only in that it's a continuous upgrade from our beloved Netscape, but it won't look much like Netscape at all. In terms of user experience, it'll be basically like the Photoshop you know and love, except without the adventure that is the Adobe installer.
Now I am intrigued: an OS that is its own browser. Not eyeOS and the like: I mean the window manager is the browser. You browse a VFS which is mounted, locally or remotely; the browser doesn't see a difference. XUL is the default UI language. The browser handles threading, even. You have no desktop but you have a homepage. Exit the browser, power down.
Am I talking about something that exists? Stripped-down single-app systems like kiosks don't count... or should they count?
So, if you are building a web app you can probably ignore Microsoft, but if you are building an OS, or Office product there is still a huge shark swimming in those waters.
My suspicion is that Sharepoint and Infopath will be the next generation of home-brewed company apps. Companies already have them, so they don't need to be buying X, Y or Z to start writing apps to keep their company going.
"Granted selling [products] to other companies seems to be what large organizations do when they die"
I couldn't disagree more. Could you please elaborate?
However, individuals require far more bang for the buck. So the margins tend to be far smaller and you need to sell to large numbers of people constantly to keep up.
At the same time selling to companies tends to focus on boring products so most of your innovative people tend to leave. It's not exactly a binary choice, but companies like AT&T often go from selling to individuals, to making money from companies, to making money from the government. In the end the quality of your competition tends to drop the closer you are to working for the government which is why I think it's a death spiral. Overtime the company becomes unable to deal with change and the next round of innovative companies tend to disrupt them.
PS: Which is not to say old companies like GM can't sell products to customers it's just they stop being able to make much money doing so unless they can leverage a monopoly.
As far as I can tell, all of their server-side software is or will be offered in a Microsoft-hosted-and-managed configuration. And, it won't be trivial to switch back and forth, but it will at least be possible to do so.
Additionally, Microsoft seems to be working with Amazon Web Services since AWS supports Windows Server. If you don't want Microsoft to host your applications then you can do it yourself on AWS or on your own servers.
to Ian Lamont
date Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 9:22 AM
subject Re: 2nd anniversary of "Microsoft is Dead" essay - new factors to consider?
A lot of people misunderstood that essay, and asked how I could claim a company making so much money was dead. Obviously I didn't mean Microsoft was bankrupt. What I meant was that they were no longer a factor one had to consider when doing something in technology.
That's still true today. The big stories in the 2 years since have been AWS and iPhone apps. Microsoft's mindshare has continued to slowly erode.
Thanks to AWS, someone starting a startup today thinks more about Amazon than Microsoft. An online retailer! It would have seemed almost impossible to people in 1999 that anyone would be saying that in 2009.
--pg
Now the question is "What if Google move into your market?"
Far from being a threat, Microsoft is now an opportunity target... "We're going to steal this market from Microsoft" is a plausible claim. And so, they are no longer a big worry.
And ultimately, it's for their own good! Microsoft's rapaciousness was hurting them, indirectly. Innovation in the Windows space dried up. Who wants to make the next big successful thing on Windows, when Microsoft will surely swoop in and eat your lunch for you?
What has Microsoft done in the last five years that has been copied by a competitor (the sincerest form of flattery and all)
Let's compare work that's being directly copied by competitors:
Microsoft: C#, actually for that matter the entire .NET Framework, Singularity, Gazelle, Visual Studio, Powershell, Office, WPF, Silverlight, Photosynth, the list goes on and on
Apple: iPhone
Microsoft is by no means "dead" or "irrelevant". Generally I like reading Paul Graham's essays, but I think this one is a bunch of gibberish.
What would be illuminating is if you would point to the competitor and the copied product instead of just listing Microsoft products.
also, what does the line "Apple:iPhone" have to do with this?
(admittedly, Singularity is very, very cool)
The companies copying Microsoft products:
C# -> Novell
Visual Studio -> Just about every other IDE out there rips off features that appear in Visual Studio first.Intellisense is the obvious example here.
Office -> Open Office, parts of Google Docs
Powershell -> Open source projects are directly copying this shell for linux
WPF -> KDE 4, Nokia
Gazelle -> Google is doing something very similar to this
As for the line: Apple: IPhone
I was trying to get the point across that this was the only product from apple that I could think of which has been copied by others. Perhaps you could make a case for parts of OSX as well. Either way my main point was that it's easy to find products that illustrate Microsoft's innovation.
I find it frustrating when people dismiss Microsoft's products as inferior to the alternatives when they haven't even given them a fair evaluation. I find I encounter a lot of people where I work that immediately dismiss Microsoft's products, just because it's Microsoft or because it costs more than the open source alternatives. In my mind this is nothing more than "software racism". It shows that these people are just closed minded.
I disagree however with your list. I'm not familiar with Gazelle or WPF, but the rest of these items were not "invented" by Microsoft either and can be sourced back to some other point of origin. So it's not fair to say Microsoft's technology is being copied in these cases because they themselves copied the ideas.
The frustrating part is that, similar to General Motors, Microsoft does have good engineering going on but most of the results that come from these efforts never see the light of day in commercial productions. This is the nature of a large company organized in this way, and why we tend to see innovation in newer, smaller companies that don't know any better.
To put it in perspective, I'll probably bring in more rev than iShoot this year, and I'm nowhere near Mob Wars in traffic numbers. There have to be hundreds of guys out there bigger than me. And unlike iShoot, I'll keep doing it indefinitely, not just until I fall off of the top 25 (which I never even had to hit).
When it comes to third party apps, Facebook is really the leader right now. In fact, I'd argue that in the tech world, they're setting the terms more than Apple at the moment, just in a different sphere.
This is what I mean by "evidence". The reason I ask is that most developers (other than publicly held companies) don't discuss these details with the general public.
Kidding aside, one other aspect to consider is the amount of investment required to get an application released on either platform (the true profit vs. just revenue). A game like iShoot can be put together by a single developer using commodity hardware in less than 100 hours. This application, once released incurs no maintenance cost in order to generate revenue (see note below). A developer can therefore turn out additional applications of this class with little support overhead required.
I haven't written a Facebook app yet, and perhaps a successful Facebook application can be created using the meager developer resources described above. However in addition to initial development costs, as I understand it, the developer must provide the infrastructure to run the application (web hosting, bandwidth, etc.). On an application which receives the volume of users you describe, this can add up to a significant ongoing expense.
You clearly know more and have more experience with the Facebook platform than I do, if I am incorrect in my statements please enlighten me.
*of course you can continue to spend money on promotion and advertising, but since this applies at least equally between both platforms, I consider it implicit.
We didn't have to worry about being accepted into any store. (Facebook has an app directory that takes a couple days to get reviewed for, but honestly there's very little benefit to even being in it.) After we launched, upgrading was as simple as any website. We didn't have to make some fairly hard to achieve top 25 list to get traffic, in fact, we're hoping for the reverse.
Developing for Facebook isn't that different than any other web development (in fact a lot of apps run in an iframe). It's far easier, and gives far less control to a third party. It's far more lucrative, doesn't have the "hit or miss" aspect of the app store.
You're right about the hosting cost. Only some iPhone apps need that, many do not. All Facebook/Myspace ones do. But the greater monetization potential more than makes up for it if you're doing games (I'm not so sure about other types of apps). eCPMs on offer pages are measured in the $100s. Many people I know (in a way that would be admissible in court) are pulling in north of $500. Even if that only amounts to 1% of your traffic, that's still ludicrously high, especially on the volume you can get very quickly.
The only way in which it is inferior is it isn't sexy and nobody is going to write lots of articles about you. The iShoot guy got more coverage in bigger media outlets for bringing in $600k than Zynga did for making $40-$50m last year.
Sorry PG I can't agree with you on this account.
(Since when do Web 2.0 people give a crap about mobile gaming?)
M$ is dead, nobody fears them anymore, their products are no longer required, for every M$ product there are many competing products that work as well or better.
Like saying IE is the best browser because it has 60% of market share without saying it had 90% a year before.
Nobody uses it anymore and nobody cares.
That's the real issue.
M$ (Microsoft): used to emphasize the allegation that Microsoft has business practices that focus on making money rather than producing good products or looking after the end user's needs and interests. Microsoft was convicted under United States anti-trust law of taking unfair advantage of its monopoly position. Also criticized for taking advantage of loyal customers and upgrading products annually for an expensive price, thus "shafting" the people who bought last year's products.
I don't see anything wrong with using M$ to imply all of the above in one simple and worldwide recognizable satiric misspelling.
See also, satire
If you'd like to draw attention to Microsoft's illegal behavavior in the market, you have to explicitly state it, a dollar sign won't be enough for most people, who think you might simply be poor and envious.
I would, however content that a company which is focusing on something other than making money for its shareholders is dishonest, as that is what is expected of a for-profit business.
No, it isn't. Toyota's products are not required, since they have many competitors for each. That doesn't mean that they can't make money, only that they're not a(n effective) monopoly.
It's not entirely dissimilar to a family that refuses to take a loved one off life support now that I think about.
I'm sure there are plenty of organizations that would love to move away from Microsoft, but its just reality that they can't. They are too invested in it. It would take too much money, too much time and too much political will to make a change. It's not their fault, its not even Microsoft's doing, other than being in the right place (on commodity PCs) at the right time (the '90s.) It's just the way it is.
C#? I'd much rather use C# over java.
Office? What's the alternative there? Open Office? Come on Open Office is far buggier, less user friendly, less productive, and has far less features. Google Docs? Missing tons of features, not to mention it's utterly useless when I don't have a network connection.
Visual Studio? Again nothing comes close to the features, speed, and stability. Eclipse is the nearest competitor imo - and it's still trailing behind a long ways.
Conversely there are practical, real gains to be had by using anything other that Microsoft products, but getting a large company to make any change before it is absolutely necessary is almost impossible, as current events demonstrate.
What is missing is a catalyst, something of an "energy crisis" of software, which will put this to rest.
Just look at the work that Live Labs is producing. No "Web 2.0" company can compete with the brilliance behind photosynth. They are kidding themselves if they think they can.
I'll tell you why Microsoft won't survive. It's because Microsoft isn't a leader in innovation. Steve Ballmer doesn't have any balls. He's simply satisfied with being #2 and playing it safe while letting Steve Jobs create new markets and dominating them (with style).
Again, Microsoft isn't dead. If anything, this whole "Web 2.0" and Ycombinator incubation thing is dead. If the big boys think that there is any serious competition coming out of these programs then they have another thing coming. The recession has reduced a lot of this noise, and the real animals have been let out of their cage.
The larger culture at Microsoft is still operating under the assumptions of the 1990's when they were large and in charge. They have been coasting on the monopoly for some time. But, they are not the hundred year computing culture; by their very nature they can't be.
Facebook and Twitter shows what the people really want.
No body cares about OS or PC anymore. Stay connected - it's a trend.
Did he write a follow-up I missed?