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Paul Graham Claims "Microsoft is Dead"
netbuzz writes "He doesn't mean dead as in six feet under, but rather that the software giant no longer instills the kind of fear — particularly among entrepreneurs — that it did back in the day when it was making road kill out of companies like Netscape. Microsoft obits have been around for almost as long as the company, but Graham's stature, style and devoted following are likely to make this one a classic."
I though people wanted MS to play nicer and I though MS theyself wanted to have a nicer image as well, because the old "aggressive" image was bad. So they do that and have a better nicer image now, and this is bad as well... hmm...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
As long as they keep making new proprietary protocols, formats, etc and people keep accepting them, Microsoft will continue to dominate the market. Sadly people on the whole are no more against them today, then they were ten years ago. Just look at how quickly .NET has become a popular.
and many things that die have a very loooong decline. ''When did the decline start?'', you can argue that for ever. Paul Graham will be proven right - eventually, but when? -- No one knows - but Paul will be there saying ''I told you so !''.
He waves his hands in the air and says that profitability doesn't matter. I won't argue that. What does matter is that they are still adding more business than companies like Google(though they are losing that lead). In 2006, Google added slightly over 4 Billion dollars of revenues; Microsoft added 4.5 Billion. If Google can maintain it's growth rate, Microsoft is indeed in trouble, but it seems that Google's growth is more and more tied to growth in online advertising, as they have most of that market and don't seem to have much other business.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
what is 4%?, new units, or upgraded, oem or new customers... I read some article not long ago about how you can make %'s look like you want to.
m10
I am a big fan of Paul Graham's essays, and have to admit that this one definitely ranks as the worst. Microsoft today has a lot of money - and i dont think businesses can simply die out in a few years, specially if they are not facing a steep downward slope. I mean, just look at M$'s profits/revenues (cant cite the source, sorry) they appear quite OK to me. I'll only start celebrating when they start posting huge losses, or when windows domination ceases.
I think Microsoft's fatal flaw is summed up in this quote:
Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.
And they never will. That's why they won't be able to adapt to changing climate conditions in technology and the nimble little warm-blooded creatures they barely notice will thrive and ultimately outlive them.
I mean look, they haven't even gotten rid of Ballmer yet. As long as he's on top it's going to remain the same stodgy old company it is now. MSFT reminds me of some 40 year old guy who thinks he's cool hitting on his daughter's college friends. He's the only one who doesn't realize he's creepy and pathetic.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Small companies don't fear being squashed by MS because that's not their primary game plan anymore. They have achieved the dominance that phase of their company wished for. Now, the new paradigm is to be acquired by them. MS doesn't innovate anymore, they assimilate.
There are thousands of small start-ups that have this as their primary goal. Get a good idea, build it up to where it shows up on some large company's radar, then be acquired by them. Then, retire. And MS is a leader in this area.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Presuming that you aren't 15 and with no historic context from which to compare, why don't you watch what friends and relatives actually do with their PCs these days. You might be surprised to find that the average user spends vastly more time in their browser than anywhere else.
I claim that the word 'dead' is dead. Not dead like 6 feet under, but dead as a meaningful word. It still applies to loss of life, empty batteries and forgotten projects but now it also means 'changed' now, which makes it more ambiguous.
You can't handle the truth.
Required disclaimer: I hate MS about as much as anyone else here, but...
This is a very strange blog piece and I'm wondering what part of the galaxy this guy lives in:
1) Since when does "dead" mean a company that is no longer feared? True, MS has lost it's fear factor, but that is nothing like being dead. "Dead" means dead, as in SCO.
2) I wish I had a dime for every time someone says the desktop is dead and all apps will from now on be web hosted. This is so old and isn't going to happen. Sure Ajax has made the web a lot more responsive and desktop-like but there is a long list of limtations having to do with availability, security, etc. It's not all about bandwidth.
3) Take a walk through the airport or just about any business office, the dentist, doctor's office, etc. How many Mac or Linux boxes do you see? Not that many. Sure Macs are a lot more popular now and growing, but to claim that he sees hardly anything but Macs and Linux makes me wonder about what planet he comes from.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Mr. Graham's definition of "dead" in this essay only encompasses the activity in his field of work (startups). What I would like to know is how much longer will we *normal people* have to put up with microsoft's influence and products?
.NET?
How much longer will we be forced to use their software at work, such as Windows and
How much more time of our life will be wasted having to fix some Visual Basic monstrosity and the like?
How much longer until they can no longer damage others through their inmoral and sometimes illegal business practices (SCO anyone?)
I know there are going to be hundreds of posts claiming Microsoft isn't dead and that they are still a very profitable company etc etc, but that's not what the article is about, so you might as well mod those posts down now. The idea is that Microsoft's throne as supreme monopoly that can do whatever they want and everyone will follow is over. I whole heartedly agree.
There was a time 5 years ago that if MS released a technology, now matter how bad, would become the de-facto standard for no other reason than MS released it. MS has yet to do anything new in about 2 years that has become the supreme technology just because they blessed it. Their game of catchup with Google has yielded nothing powerful. Their strategy has been mostly centered around Windows Live, which has yet to garner any real interest. All their Web 2.0 stuff is massively better than what they were releasing 5 years ago (their mapping software isn't half bad), but I've yet to interact with someone who's excited over it. I know a lot of web developers who get a boner over the Google maps API though. Even their desktop software hasn't yielded anything terribly popular. People will keep using Windows and Office, but be extremely slow to adopt any of their new technology.
I guess the real nail in the coffin is that there's no single company for MS to set their sights on. The entire web is surpassing them, not just Google. Google is giving important direction and acting sort of as a leader for the industry, but I see just as many interesting things coming from outside of Google as in. How can MS compete with that? They can keep trying to break IE as much as possible, but even there they are being forced by the market to become more standards compliant.
I don't think MS will just go away and they probably will be relegated to Windows and Office until those are slowly chipped at. The OS market will one day reach the maturity hardware has and there will be standards and most common software will be written in cross platform toolkits. It will happen so slowly that we'll step back and say "Remember Microsoft 15 years ago?" just as we are saying today "Remember Microsoft 5 years ago".
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Different businesses. Software has huge margins compared to autos. Microsoft can go from being the number one software company with 65% margins to an also ran with 30% margins and still be mighty profitable in comparison to many other businesses.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Maybe I'm a dinosaur (OK, I like BASIC and assembly, so that's a given) -- but I don't see the benefit to putting applications on the Web. I'm no paranoid tinfoil-hat cypherpunk, but I don't trust the reliability and security of running my applications via a connection to the great Out There. Downloading open-source solutions, compiling them, and running them over a LAN, perhaps, but I don't see the venerable hard drive (read: fast local storage) going away anytime soon.
I can see inherently Web-centric applications (email, searches, etc) as migrating to the Web -- but for things like word processing, circuit simulation, and (most dramatically) video editing, I can't imagine how running these over the Internet is going to work, let alone make them Better. Even with the new fiber-optic cable they just finished burying here.
Do I just not "get" it? Why should I use Web-based applications when OpenOffice works just as well? Why complicate things by introducing more points of failure (the whole Internet connection chain of devices, software, and protocols) into the mix?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
"I think that tells you a lot about Paul Graham's everyday environment. He's working with startups, he's trying to put together teams of the bright and innovative, and what he's finding is that most of these people are not using Microsoft software. "
Sure, "Bright and innovative" people only use Macs. Buy a Mac and you can be bright and innovative too!
Microsoft is bigger than ever, makes more money than ever (with a consistent double digit growth every quarter), and has its hads in more areas of peoples lives than ever before (PCs, business [large, midsize, small], gaming, mobile devices, cars, television, movies, etc...). At the same time, their marketing team for years has been working on making their company seem more 'friendly', not the beheamoth aggressive cut-throat company of times past, but a kinder, gentler, trustworthy Microsoft. This might not have a huge effect on real techie crowds like Slashdot, but you can see their effects on the general populous, where Microsoft shows up in near the top of the country's most trusted companies.
It would be a mistake for any company to think that Microsfot is dead.
Well, speaking as a died-in-the-wool penguin-head, I'd obviously have to dispute that :)
Tell you what, think of it in terms of zeitgeist. In the 90s MS had it, and the prospered, due in no small part to the fact that everyone wanted to use Windows. These days, I don't think they do, and I think the talent in the industry is starting to look elsewhere.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It is too late now. They have burnt too many bridges. Even the hardware makers hate MSFT because they changed VISTA just enough to break all the drivers. Millions of school kids are experiencing the richness of GNU/Linux. Dell and HP are getting serious about Linux machines (maybe). The EU may realize that mega-fines are not enough and outright ban MSFT. Even Uncle Sam is discouraging the use of Windows for security. MSFT is like a long-necked dinosaur trapped in a tar pit. The brain is so small and so far away that it has not received the final BSOD yet. The body is cooling slowly because of the large mass to surface ratio.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
What really sucks is that we're still talking about Unix and Windows.
Graham credits Google and Apple, but surely Linux deserves a tip of the hat.
In the mid-90's, when NT stabilized and swiftly sank the whole Unix workstation market, and started putting out real server products that slowly shut down Novell and Banyan, it began to look like Microsoft would soon own all levels of computing. From their secure base of total desktop ownership, they could leverage control of workstation, small server and soon, no doubt, large server markets. And on the other side, Windows CE was going to take over all the TV set boxes and music players and microwave ovens. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of a company that, like IBM, was not another fish but rather the Sea itself.
There was nothing that the minicomputer and Unix workstation companies like DEC and Sun could do to hold back the tide - Microsoft was cheaper software, had the unstoppable advantage of running on cheaper commodity hardware, and again, the desktop that could be tweaked to only work right with one server.
Then Linux came along, operating more efficiently on the same cheap commodity hardware and with even cheaper software. It shut them out of monopoly in the server market. Sure, they have a presence, but only as another competitor, not as a monopolist. And Linux is where everybody went for entertainment appliances, CE is a *minor* competitor there.
That left Microsoft with a monopoly ONLY on the desktop and no way to take over anything larger or smaller.
Credit here goes to a cluster of open-source projects - LAMP, basically, plus of course Java.
.NET) to get along with the desktop/IE monopoly and that open-Internet web sites would have to go along.
It also looked, around the time of the Netscape-killing, that Microsoft would inexorably make the Web an MS gated community. That internal corporate web apps would all surely be ASP (and then,
But between MySQL, PHP, Python, et al, and of course Java, an alternative held together that relegated Microsoft web solutions to merely another competitor - a strong one, maybe, but not a monopoly that can dictate the whole game. It was some years where it all seemed to hang in the balance, maybe MS would eventually grind them all down. Around the time most people felt that LAMP was here to stay and Java had a well-entrenched community of its own, Firefox came up out of Netscape's grave and started nibbling down IE's market share even on Windows.
That's when I realized that MS was in a box. A big, big box full of money, sure, but still, it had met its limits.
...Microsoft, if nothing else, still has the power it needs in order to take another (smaller) companies ideas and launch them themselves...
That's just the thing. The article is saying Microsoft has the power to do this, but not the ability. It used to be that Microsoft could look at a small product, and just announce they were doing something similar "due out soon" and that company was dead.
Now if Microsoft said "Oh, we're working on that" the effect would not kill a company. And there is a good chance that even if Microsoft did do all the work to build a new product, it would take them some time to deliver and being a Microsoft 1.0 product, it would suck - giving a small company pelnty of time to get a product through a few iterations, and have a good head start.
Microsoft does not have the ability to compete with quick and intelligently targeted iterations anymore.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As long as copying 1's and 0's is virtually free and unlimited, software business is very much different than any business that is limited by raw materials and labor to reproduce a product for sale.
If I write a piece of software, i can resell that software to as many people that want to buy it without much extra cost beyond the time it took come up with the initial source code. The margins on each copy are something like 99% (1% for packaging, distribution, bandwidth if you're letting people download it, etc...) This is why software/recording companies have to come up with ridiculous licenses and legislation to support their revenue streams. It is the reason piracy is so easy to justify for otherwise honest people. The tangible value of software is almost nothing. It is only worth the media is written on and/or the printed manual. If you can get it without media, then it has no real value. Well, it has value because you want it, but by copying it, you're not really stealing naything from the person who originally wrote it. At worst, your simply violating a contract which you never signed anyway. but I digress...
For an auto maker, the "source code" (R&D) is just the first step. Each automobile produced costs significant amount of money and resources, which cuts into the margins. When I buy a car, I'm paying for the raw materials and the construction of that particular object. If I could somehow make an exact copy of the Hyndai in my garage, I doubt anyone would consider that stealing as long as I paid for the raw materials and the construction. Maybe it would be dishonest to put a Hyndai label on it, but even that is only a problem if I'm selling it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You know, I was going to mention that Wall Street article as an exception. I was going to say, that is, except among investors. Of course they admire Microsoft. They'ed admire Hitler if he made them money. The Wall Street Journal, what a great cross section of the IT industry.
I guess I'm going on anecdotial evidence though. Everyone I know (that's tech savvy) hates Microsoft. Most tech sites I go to has a strong dislike of Microsoft; especially, the posters in the forums. Some article writers like Microsoft, but many dislike Microsoft. Many of them are forced to feign a respect for Microsoft to ensure their support.
I'm sure I could find many examples of the dislike for Microsoft if I'd take time to Google for them. But negative comments and attitudes towards Microsoft are so common, that if your unaware of them in the imaginary world you live in, who am I to disagree?
This ad space for rent.
we're over the hump so to speak... familiarity breeds contempt is what we're looking for, and M$ has it in spades.
He got rich writing lisp code. You don't think that's an impressive trick? Try it sometime.
The trouble -- in my opinion -- is that he got rich at his second job, which means he doesn't really have a very wide experience. He's always happy to give you advice on how to become rich exactly the way he did, but doesn't seem to be even conscious of possibilities like (a) maybe a lot of his success was luck, finding an angel to sell out to (yahoo) in the middle of Bubble 1.0 and (b) maybe some of us don't particularly care about getting rich. Some of my heroes are rich guys, but on the other hand I wouldn't object to be being "successful" like Richard Stallman or Tim Berners-Lee.
What is the business to do with Ubuntu? Does Ubuntu carry all the Linux applications on the planet?
The lack of a stable ABI means lack of commercial applications, and a big waste of open-source debelopers’ time on unnecessary porting and building. I still can run the Win32 applications published ten years ago, and even DOS applications published fifteen or more years ago—I call that an advantage.
As long as there is not a free alternative to Windows (and I doubt its possibility, given the technical and legal obstacles), I do not see the decline of Microsoft Windows in the near future.
What is the business to do with Ubuntu? Does Ubuntu carry all the Linux applications on the planet?
Very nearly so. Via apt repositories, most refined and stable applications (certainly the most popular ones) are available with a click. Furthermore, all the dependencies are automatically sorted out. That is a Really Big Thing when it comes to ease of use for the non-technical user. This is one of the main reasons I consider Ubuntu 'easier to use' than Windows. The other is that the naming of menu items and layout of admin UI components is more intuitive IMHO.
The lack of a stable ABI means lack of commercial applications, and a big waste of open-source debelopers' time on unnecessary porting and building. I still can run the Win32 applications published ten years ago, and even DOS applications published fifteen or more years ago--I call that an advantage.
I've been using both Windows and Linux almost since the origins of both, and my experience just does not match yours. The Linux API and ABI have remained very stable, usually more so than Windows. Just look at how much Vista breaks backwards compatibility to see what I mean. Do google search on the term 'DLL hell' for earlier examples. Even when Linux libraries do rev and break compatibility with binaries, it is often easily fixed by installing a 'legacy support' package (easily done with the point and click package management. But of course the whole point with Linux is that you don't have to run old binaries anyway; your package manager handles dependencies and keeps everything in sync as upgrades become available.
Sure, if you live on the bleeding edge and compile apps from source, you can run into troubles, but the whole point here is that the typical user is not going to do that (nor do the have to anymore). They can stick with the apps within the repositories and still have a huge library of to choose from, all easily installed and upgraded with a mouse click. Commercial software vendor that want their stuff to reach customers just need to put them in an apt repository or CNR or some such. This is the new model for software distribution, and Linux is way ahead of the game here.
Furthermore, this is not just my opinion as a computer guru; I've dropped Ubuntu in front of newbies and gotten very favorable responses. Yes, you have to make sure you select compatible hardware, and yes, you can't just run to to Best Buy and grab any old shrinkwrap software to run on it... but the same is true of a Mac and yet people still manage fine with those.
As long as there is not a free alternative to Windows (and I doubt its possibility, given the technical and legal obstacles), I do not see the decline of Microsoft Windows in the near future.
Perhaps not, but Windows does not have to tank for Linux to be a viable desktop. For a great many people, it is a better option than what they have now. Perhaps not if you play a lot of games, but certainly for Internet surfing and office productivity and such it is a stable, friendly, virus free alternative.
I'm not saying Ubuntu Linux is problem free, but lets be honest here, neither is Windows (there certainly seems to be plenty of problems reported with Vista). Linux has a few areas where it really shines compared to Windows. That includes security, stability, software installation, and now days even ease of use. But, hey, its free to try out, so I encourage people to be their own judge on this. Maybe it won't be for you... but then again you might be pleasantly surprised.
The Bolachek Journals
While I appreciate much the work done in Ubuntu, I do not think a centralized repository works all the time.
I do not want to argue with you that Vista is bad. However, most user-level applications are not affected. And I do not think 'DLL hell' is inherently a problem of Windows architecture (still, Microsoft may be to blame, or the other producers of DLLs).
On the other hand, have a look at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php to see how many packages are there for x86 Linus! That is what I think as bad as hell.
Maybe maybe. However, there is some doubt even on surfing (there are still a lot of IE-only sites around). No, I can tell you clearly that OOo is not as good as Microsoft Office, though I like very much the PDF output of OOo—even that is not for technical reasons, I believe. And you would need a lot more to exist in a business environment, which is the biggest source of Windows sales....