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."

Comments

The article sounded credible until I read. . .

[idesofmarch]

Thanks to OSX, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.

Come on, 4% market share and you are surprised when a computer does not run OSX?

Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . .

[ivan256]

I think the more disturbing trend is in the enterprise server environment. Until a few years ago, this was a Microsoft-free zone. Nobody took Microsoft seriously enough to install Windows on systems the "mattered". Now, Server 2003 and MS-SQL are in the door... They're not the dominant platform by any means, but they are conspicuously present, and the number of windows servers in the enterprise is growing.

How do you define "segments that matter"?

Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . .

[BlueStraggler]

The real trend in the server room is to commodity x86 servers, not Windows. Of course, Windows has benefited from that trend, but Linux has benefited more, and both have benefited by taking share from bigger iron.

How do you define "segments that matter"?

The creative sectors in computing are in academia, start-ups, and the high-end of the hobbyist community. These people define what we will be doing in 5-10 years. Every important new trend of the last 20 years has come out of this sector, including the Internet and Web itself. 20 years ago, most people in this sector used Microsoft OSes, because the IBM PC platform was the most open and hackable platform for expressing their creativity, and Microsoft had the hackable OS of choice for that platform. 10 years ago, Unix and Unix-like OSes were making inroads, but the Microsoft PC was still cheaper and easier to work with in most respects. Today, the PC is still the hackable hardware platform of choice, but the difference is that there are better hacker-friendly OSes to run on it. And not just one, but at least four (counting Linux, OS X, BSD, and OpenSolaris). Meanwhile, Windows is becoming less hackable, with all of its protected paths and DRM and unnecessary levels of complexity that even Microsoft can't seem to keep sorted out.

Seriously, when Apple makes an OS that is more friendly to hackers than yours is, you know you've taken the wrong path.

Not Yet

[kraemate]

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.

What killed the dinosaurs?

[HangingChad]

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.

I Claim

[roman_mir]

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.

Barbed wire

[$RANDOMLUSER]

But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

A beautiful turn of phrase, but he's forgetting how much barbed wire Microsoft has laid. Not just Outlook and IE and Word and Excel and Powerpoint, but the way IE renders HTML, and the .DOC format, and billions of lines of Excel macros, and hundreds of millions of vapid PowerPoint presentations. It's like the legacy Cobol codebase - it's never going to go away until some watershed event like Y2K makes it go away.

I actually RTFA

[porkThreeWays]

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".

The desktop is dead?!?

[FlyByPC]

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?

Re:It's not dead yet

[pogson]

The last gasp was 2001 when they brought out XP. It took them five years to fix its bugs and now they have to kill XP in order for Vista to have any chance. That last gasp brought in some oxygen to keep the beast barely alive, but it is all gone now. If they had done an Apple and put some UNIX underneath they would not have to be a bully to protect their turf. They would not need to throw out silly features to sell the stuff. It would be good. MSFT made it to monopoly by being in the right place at the right time and it would have kept monopoly if the product had been any good. Instead of improving it by using sound design, they kept on adding crap and using dirty tricks to keep the monopoly. You can only fool all of the people for a period of time and they wake up eventually.

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.

Microsoft cannot eptly launch new things

[SuperKendall]

...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.