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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."
But if it keeps releasing "upgrades" that serve to only make your computer slower and slower then it will be soon.
~= scwizard =~
While many large companies don't fear Microsoft as they used to, there are still multiple small ones who still have a fear of being swallowed whole or being beaten out of business. Microsoft, if nothing else, still has the power it needs in order to take another (smaller) companies ideas and launch them themselves, creating a hit and effectively driving their competition out of business.
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 !''.
I won't believe this untill it is confirmed by Netcraft
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
...it's just pining for the fjords.
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 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.
I suppose you have to allow for a bit of statistical bias there. Since Mr, Graham is (presumably) involved in selecting these people, it's entirely possible that a subconscious selection criteria might be "doesn't do windows" or something similar.
Even so, I think he's got a point. How much of that market share is down to corporations who bulk-order generic beige boxes based on buying guidelines that are fifteen to twenty years old? How much is down to private homes where someone wanted to "get a computer" without realising there was a choice, or where the major criteria was that it should be "the same as the one at work".
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the Microsoft market share among the up-and-coming wave of computer innovators is actually very slim. And if that is in fact the case, Microsoft should indeed be worried.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It is now official. Paul Graham confirms: Microsoft is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Redmond company when analysists confirmed that Windows market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all serious users desktops. Coming on the heels of a recent survey which plainly states that Windows has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Microsoft is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be Steve Jobs to predict Microsofts future. The hand writing is on the wall: Microsoft faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Microsoft because Microsoft is dying. Things are looking very bad for Microsoft. As many of us are already aware, Microsoft continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
All major surveys show that Microsoft has steadily declined in market share. Microsoft is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Microsoft is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Microsoft continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Microsoft is dead.
Fact: Microsoft is dying
If you read the actual article, Graham isn't actually claiming that Microsoft is dead (despite his provocative title) but that it is simply irrelevant -- that it's something startups don't need to worry about.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
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.
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.
Just press ctrl alt del until the task manager comes up and kill whatever's locked it up.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
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'm getting better."
"No you're not; you'll be stone dead in a moment."
"I think I'll go for a walk."
"Look, you're not fooling anyone."
"I feel happy..."
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
They can always wake up, decide to toss out the old OS code, or run it in virtual mode, then build a brand new OS from scratch. Maybe this time, they can let Cutler run wild without without the need for backward-compatibility and make something worth looking at? As Vista is quickly becoming this decade's Windows M.E, Microsoft is going to have to consider taking the big leap.
In the mean time, they can still just sue the crap out of any entreprenuer, right or wrong, because there are few with that kind of cash and time on their hands. Most if not all would just settle, giving Microsoft access to their inventions anyway.
It is official; Paul Graham: microsoft is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered microsoft community when IDC confirmed that microsoft market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 97 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that microsoft has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. microsoft is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict microsoft's future. The hand writing is on the wall: microsoft faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for microsoft because microsoft is dying. Things are looking very bad for microsoft. As many of us are already aware, microsoft continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Windows is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long timeWindows developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Microsoft is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Vista leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of Vista. How many users of windows are there? Let's see. The number of Vista versus windows xp posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Vista users. Vista posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of windows xp posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put windows at about 80 percent of the microsoft market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 WinXP users. This is consistent with the number of WinXP Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Hotmail, abysmal sales and so on, Windows NT went out of business and was taken over by the Vista team who sell another troubled OS. Now Windows Vista is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that microsoft has steadily declined in market share. microsoft is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If microsoft is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. microsoft continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, microsoft is dead.
Fact: microsoft is dying
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
You see, eventually these folks, flush with their startup money have to evolve into businesses with CUSTOMERS. This is the moment when all their foresight, vision and knowledge gets kicked in the ass by the reality of their target audience, who whether they like it or not, are generally using Windows in one form or another. I see this all the time. Awesome ideas, cool marketing strategies, beaten senseless by a a few basic questions: "This is cool, but will it work with Exchange? No? Damn, we cant switch. Sorry." "You mean we cant SSO with this?" Or "Okay, but can I control this through GPOs or can we LDAP it with Active Directory? No? Damn. Sorry, we cant switch."
No, Microsoft is not doing anything intreguing, but I think that for the moment(though not too much longer) they have enough entrenchment to fight off all but the most innovative of ideas. Microsoft can still zap Apple any time they want by stopping MS Office development on the MAC. This will change too, but if your business docs are in nothing but Word and Excel, you are not going anywhere soon.
One of the reasons for the dotcom bust was that too many startups never got around to the thought of what their customers WANTED, thinking that they could just convince them that their idea was so cool, so sweet, that they would just jump on it, without business considerations being a factor.
Its just like parental pride in a newborn baby. No matter what it looks like, they think the child is beautiful, when in reality, it could be a hideous creature and they would never know it.
If you are an Entreprenuer who believes that they have a target market large enough to pay back their VC without some form of Windows compatibility, they are headed for a fall, just like all the others before them. You dont find a Google every day of the week.
If you say "using a Web interface" instead of "putting applications on the Web" then there is a great advantage, at least for corporate applications. And it was in great part Microsoft who made it that way.
A typical example is a project I did a couple of years ago. There was an application in Access, about 2000 lines of code, that was a nightmare to maintain. Every time one of the 100+ users changed some configuration in his computer, the support people had to figure why that application had stopped working. I was given that application with detailed instructions: "fix this shit".
So I rewrote it, to a PHP application in a Linux server running Apache and a Postgres database. People now use it in several different browsers, with no problem at all. You can even tweak PHP to send Excel spreadsheets, by making Internet Exploder believe an HTML table is a spreadsheet and run Excel to open it.
You are right that CPU-heavy applications like video editing will remain at the desktop computer, but I see a definitive trend for most enterprise applications to migrate to Web-centric applications.
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
You must not have worked very hard looking for it. The default Ubuntu graphical shell is Nautilus. They've had scripting options for some time, and I figured SVN is popular enough elsewhere SOMEONE must have written such a thing. And lo and behold, via google:
s .pl?searchon=names&version=all&exact=1&keywords=na utilus-script-collection-svn
;) ). I hope I've helped your problem some. And God, don't bother with vista without good reason.
http://marius.scurtescu.com/node/85
Indeed, the same package shows up in Ubuntu repos from Dapper onward (as the first link describes):
http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_package
It seems that TortoiseSVN has problems with Vista. I haven't tried the svn nautilus integration yet, but there's no bugs filed against it. If you run into any, please do file a report. Personally, I choose to use editors that have SVN / CVS support built in. But I suppose some web developers may prefer a seperate client or something.
In my own experience, Windows has been about as bad as Linux with hardware. Vista's nvidia are only slightly better than Linux's with regard to suspend: instead of locking up during suspend to RAM, it fails to initialize the video on restart. Equally unusable, really. Feisty's due to make some changes with nvidia that should help alleviate restricted drivers like the nvidia closed source binary. I think it's important to stress that Linux is first and foremost an open system. If it also serves as a usable system for people who don't care, and continues to be that way, I'm willing to attribute that to the openness of the system, and so much the better. But as much as open source considerations get in the way of the user experience, they are a second class citizen in my sight. Linux makes a fantastic hacker's system.
For example, FUSE is a great idea that has several great examples with few / no comparable in Windows. Daemontools in Windows lets you present a file as if it were a cd in a drive. FUSEISO does the same thing for windows, though the GUI aspect is not quite finished. FUSE presents this mount globally, without the need for applications to know about it. And it doesn't require significant user privileges. But the greatest part about FUSE is that it's the core to several components, like gmailfs, and sshfs, ftpfs, you name it. NTFS support was written this way with good success. There's fuse modules to present Doom WAD files as a directory. There's one to access your blog. In contrast, whatever technology daemon tools is using remains cloistered.
So yea, there's a learning curve, but I'm not gonna start advocating compatiblity with Windows programs to solve it. Downloading crap from random internet sites is the modus operandi of Windows software distribution, and it's crazy insecure. Ubuntu takes the steps proprietary software can't, packaging and distributing tested and signed versions of software, without including spyware (unless you count popcon
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Let me start off by appologizing for this comment. I don't know why, but I am in a nit-picking mood and so I post...
Microsoft is killing Microsoft. They decided that they owned the developers and then they tried to milk them. It was only a matter of time that those who brought home the bread and butter would begin to let go and go somewhere else. It worked that way for Apple before them.
I bought an Apple II and upgraded the 48k memory to 64k way back in the stone age of computers. Then I decided to do some serious business programming and found that Apple owned programmers. They said if you want the chore done, hire Claris Works. Well I wasn't rich enough for them so I found a machine (Microsoft) OS that I could get data on.
Coincidently, I too started programming on an Apple II and eventually went to IBM PC development about the time that Borland sold their Turbo series of compilers. However, I just don't understand what point you are trying to make. Apple never owned me, and neither has Microsoft. I don't remember ever being "forced" to use (or even using) ClarisWorks. By the way for the young people out there, using ClarisWorks (which was for the early Macintosh) to program back then would be like using Microsoft Access to program today. The only reason I move to the IBM PC was because people tended to use the same computers at home that they had in the office (not to mention 80 columns of text and a hard drive - or hard card). I still have fond memories of the Apple II.
After microsoft came out with Visual Studio, I think developer support from Microsoft has been second to none. Of course, they are ensuring that you use their public API and not the ones that they themselves use. Overtime, I think this is becoming a non-issue. (Yes I know I criticize Microsoft in an earlier post, and I still think Microsoft is guilty of many sins, but overcharging for a compiler suite is not one of them.)
Well I wasn't rich enough for them so I found a machine (Microsoft) OS that I could get data on. That by the way was a difference produced by an Industrial Spy at IBM. When the PC came out the earliest design was stolen by a Japanese spy who had clones on the market ahead of the release.
WTF? Back in the 80's, I worked part-time selling those pieces of crap made by Sanyo. Those silver boxes were relatively sleeker than the "boxy" XT, but its compatibility was lacking. It was during this time, a distinction was made between PC compatible and MS-DOS compatible. I don't remember Sanyo coming out prior to the IBM PC, but it was initially more prevelant than IBM due to its cheaper price and IBM insistance of only allowing authorized retailers to actually sell thier product. Eventually IBM loosen this requirement. Oh the days of going to the local Entre' computers and looking at the ridiculously priced computers.
The PC market didn't really take off until the Compaq portable was released. This had more to do with the BIOS being independently developed using clean room techniques and allowing a sudden market of PC clones to materialize (line Bear PC, AST, Toshiba, etc). The abundance of more compatible machines finally killed off the POS Sanyos.
Only a few years ago, I noted that I could pay a horrid price for Visual Studio because I was an American but had I lived in China or India, MS had versions for sale at less than 1/10th the US price. Often they distributed in their development centers for free. This made me pay for my competition. That is a business model doomed to die. If I pay the price I pay for the end of my business. Figure this one out.
What's to figure out? Other than your point... After the introduction of Windows, Microsoft's compilers were always inexpensive when compared to what the competitors had to offer. I think today, they even have a "free" version. I don't know how China or India figured in your argument, but if I was making a Chinese or Indian wage the compiler, even at 1/10th the US price, would still have the same relative affordability that the US pricing gives American developers.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...