
Microsoft is Dead (2007) - luu
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
======
detaro
Everybody: please don't flag this, I don't think it deserves it (and vouched
it out of being flagged), especially since discussion threads have already
started

If someone wants to look at opinions over time, here are the past submissions,
all with user discussions.

2 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179)

5 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085601)

6 years ago: "Paul Graham revisits "Microsoft is Dead"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554295)

9 years ago (8.5 actually, algolia rounds that up it seems):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770)

~~~
cryptoz
Well, unfortunately this post has been flagged a few times I think. Weirdly, I
would have expected to see the "vouch" button show up that was recently added,
but I don't see it. Is it not implemented yet, or maybe I don't have access to
vouch?

~~~
dang
It only shows up on posts that are dead (marked [dead], [flagged], [dupe]
etc.).

------
aggieben
> Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a
> computer running Windows.

 _Sigh_. It's clear that PG, as good a writer as he is, is the one in another
world.

~~~
mhartl
When two worlds are different, each is "another world" to the other. What pg
means is—well, actually, he tells us later in the same paragraph:

 _All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like
Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no
one who cares about computers uses Microsoft 's anyway._

Obviously, pg is exaggerating slightly here for effect, but if you go to a
conference for a "cool" language like Elixir or Go—or even for a more
established but still slightly edgy language like Python or Ruby—what you'll
see in the audience is a few islands of Windows in a sea of Linux and Macs. Go
to a more corporate-y conference and you'll see a lot more Windows. So—which
world is the past, and which is the future? ( _Hint_ : At the corporate-y
conference, are there more or fewer Macs than there were five years ago?)

~~~
greggman
And if you go to anything game dev related, you know, that place where all the
cutting edge GPU related stuff happens, you'll see Windows everywhere.

~~~
mhartl
When virtually every dev _not_ in gaming is using a Mac, which is the future,
and which is the past?

~~~
aggieben
This is the same myopic view expressed by PG: you're only seeing what's right
in front of you. There are plenty of web developers who aren't in gaming and
use Windows on a day-to-day basis. This business of "future" and "past" is
exceedingly silly. The right choice is the tool that you can do your job best
with.

For lots of people, that's Linux. For lots of other people, that's Windows.

~~~
mhartl
The way to tell the difference between the past and the future is to look at
the derivative. For example, in an attempt to get to know Windows better, I
recently asked the only top Windows-using dev I know what his environment and
tooling look like. "Oh, I switched to a Mac last year," he said. That
migration is typical, and suggests that people who care about computers will
continue preferentially switching from Windows to Mac and Linux.

A similar thing happened a few years ago when Subversion was still the
dominant version control system and SourceForge was still the main repository
for open-source projects. It was 2008, and I was at a dinner seated between
the CEO of CollabNet, principal corporate backer of Subversion, and the
outgoing CEO of SourceForge. I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about
Git. His view was that there was a winner among open-source VCSes, and that
winner was Subversion. Then I asked the SourceForge CEO if he'd heard of
GitHub. He had, but was unconcerned, since SourceForge was was cutting
million-dollar deals while GitHub was still relatively small, having launched
only in April of that year.

Now, I was in Y Combinator at the time, so I definitely shared pg's "myopia",
and at that point basically everyone I knew had switched to Git and GitHub. I
thought to myself, "These guys have already lost, and they don't even know
there's a war." And indeed things have played out exactly as I expected, with
Git and GitHub crushing Subversion and SourceForge into irrelevance.

So you see that there's a fundamental asymmetry between what pg sees in front
of him and what you might see. Being in YC means you're "living in the future"
[1], which is why pg writes with such confidence about the direction things
are going. Subversion, SourceForge, Windows; Git, GitHub, Mac, Linux. The
latter may still be big in absolute numbers, but the derivative tells you that
the smart money is on the latter going forward.

[1]:
[http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

~~~
aggieben
This _reads_ persuasively, but the problem is that the same arguments have
been made consistently since as long as I can remember. When I was an
undergraduate, people were saying much the same thing, and almost nothing has
_really_ changed.

I myself have always had both Windows _and_ Linux (and occasionally OSX) boxen
around to help me do what I need to do - so what's right in front of me
doesn't seem so one-dimensional as what PG writes about. I've also been in and
out of some radically different industries (for example, appdev consulting vs
aerospace & defense), and it seems pretty obvious to me that "best tool for
the job" is the future and it always has been. That means there will always be
a place for Windows and BSD/Linux+derivatives (I throw OSX in this bucket),
and there will always be engineers of many stripes using each one (or
multiples).

I mean, seriously: even Git - which really does seem to have utterly won the
VCS wars from a certain perspective, is still just one of many in reality.
_Lots_ of people use Perforce. Legion upon legion still use TFS. BitKeeper is
still kicking around. Subversion still has substantial usership. Even CVS is
still around. Pretty much the _only_ VCS technology that has truly been
defeated is RCS/SCCS, and probably only because they never figured out how to
handle directories or else they'd still be around too.

That's why I find these kinds of prognostications to be very silly (although
fertile ground for gathering up fake internet points and/or blog readership).

------
pcunite
Paul may have been on to something during this time frame. It is nice to know
that Microsoft turned itself around if they were indeed headed the wrong way.

Microsoft has been around a long time. Any company that can continue to adapt
will also continue to stay in business. Microsoft has shown a capacity to do
this. Today's news and products reflects this well.

------
datashovel
"They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not
dangerous."

This seems to be the quote that sums up the sentiment. Not that they're
technically going out of business anytime soon.

~~~
dlp211
And you wouldn't say that the past year is directly contradictory to this?

~~~
mistersquid
I think the point of the word "dangerous" is a direct reference to the
Microsoft of yore.

For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read about the
history), Microsoft was legendary for "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." an
internal credo that became known outside the company and came to represent the
ruthlessness with which Microsoft flexed its muscle in new technology markets.

Microsoft was notorious for changing the way Windows works to stymie
competitors, one of the most well known of these tactical maneuvers being the
integration of IE into Windows which eventually killed Netscape. That
particular bit of integration eventually led to their conviction under US
anti-trust laws.

Microsoft's culture has since changed. Microsoft no longer seems as interested
in blocking all competitors. They are building products that leverage
standardized platforms and the present-day Microsoft even meaningfully
contributes to open source projects and refrains from promoting incompatible
work-alikes.

In other words, Microsoft is becoming once again a formidable company, this
time with the that they tolerate (and increasingly collaborate with) other
companies that develop technology to benefit users.

Microsoft is discovering that being successful does not mean shutting everyone
else out and for this reason they are not "dangerous" in the sense they were
in the 1990s when their efforts and "success" in many ways prevented the
industry from advancing.

EDIT: Readability and style.

~~~
dogma1138
Netscape killed itself, they lost the fight to Microsoft on several fronts,
including the quality of the browser. Chrome and Firefox fair quite well
against which was de-throned even tho it continued to be shipped as the
default browsers on most machines with pre-installed Windows.

~~~
RI_Swamp_Yankee
Firefox _is_ Netscape. There's a reason you download it from Mozilla.org. It's
an amazing demonstration of the power of open source to allow good software to
exist and thrive beyond its original mission.

~~~
dogma1138
Netscape kicked started Mozilla, the later versions of Netscape were built on
top of Firefox not vise versa.

The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser
(Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla).

Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them
over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That
combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under
Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years
in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty
broken software.

Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release
something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and
Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no
competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6
months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6.

Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really
hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because
Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.

------
calcsam
2007: Microsoft is dead because no one is afraid of them. 2015: Is anyone
afraid of Google?

~~~
huangc10
Not sure if your question is sarcasm or not. Realistically, any startup can be
afraid of Google, Facebook, Apple etc. If they decide to compete in your
market and you can't adapt fast enough, you'll get crushed.

------
Falkon1313
>One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has such an air of euphoria about it is the
feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.

And now in the post "Web 2.0" era, monopolies may be out, but walled gardens,
superspy databases, and DRM'd things (tractors, coffeemakers, etc.) that you
don't really own are in. What's the next wave of euphoria?

Possibly re-decentralizing the internet? Doesn't sound like a Microsoft thing.

Giving control back to the user? That sounds more Microsofty. Given the choice
between using local software that you choose and control vs a remote app (from
the the only walled garden you can access) that spies on you, rifles through
your data, and may delete it at any time without your permission... They could
find a market.

At the moment, Microsoft is kind of unique in having an OS that's not tied to
a walled garden app store by default, and which is centered around local
desktop software (that usually doesn't have a lot of spying built-in) designed
to work with local data. (other than Linux of course)

The privacy issues of Windows 10 (in the default settings) do not indicate
that they're going that route.

------
veidr
Enough time has elapsed in the 8 years since this was written that not only
does everybody already know Microsoft is dead in the sense meant here, but the
interesting question has now become:

 _Admittedly, it is a long shot, but could Microsoft start to matter again?_

~~~
doctaj
I am personally excited about what Microsoft is doing with Visual Studio, MVC
(Orchard, .NET), Surface, MS Band, Win10, and Azure. They continue to innovate
and improve their products.... What more can consumers and programmers ask
for?

------
phn
Microsoft is Dead. Long Live Microsoft.

------
bkjelden
> The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and
> they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both
> the good and bad senses of the word.

This is an interesting quote. Who's the big man in town in 2015? It's probably
still not Microsoft. But I'm not sure it's Google either - maybe it is,
though. Is it Facebook? Apple? Amazon? Uber?

I think you could make an interesting, but not overly convincing, case for
each of those companies. I wonder who pg considers the big man in town.

~~~
krick
My vote is for Facebook.

------
huangc10
It's interesting how the article mentions this: "The last nail in the coffin
came, of all places, from Apple." Funny how much the industry has changed in 8
years.

------
JamesMcMinn
It's an interesting view, and in some ways it is correct.

The Microsoft of the early 2000s is dead, and we have have (imo) a new
Microsoft which is again producing some very interesting bits of technology
and have evolved Windows into something, which whilst not necessarily better,
is certainly more fitting for how we use technology today.

------
on_
Paul Graham was talking about something that sounded like either a distributed
compiler or search/computing engine in 2008 at PyCon[9] and it can be argued
it is something like the decentralized computing trend happening now. He said
it would be "a byword for impossible" The thing about google is that, like
Microsoft, it is a highly diversified company that does one thing and that is
dangeroud. Peter Theil calls it a monopoly, maybe I would be a bit more
delicate. Google and Microsoft have a ton of different products but each
company really only sells 1 thing, a utility.

Microsoft was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and google was that for the
web. For the reasons addressed in PG's article _Microsoft is Dead_ , it is
evident that needs change but utilities usually don't. If you read _What
Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?_ after this article, it is super short
and basically says, the burden of proof is on you to not miss the next big
idea.

So much crazy shit is happening now it is difficult to say what will kill
google. This essay was in 07', but it was too eary or too obvious, as he
closes with. If 4 things killed google I would say they are:

hardware: Hardware is definitely important, and we can argue about how and
what context, but google doesn't build any. All their infrastructure, while
massive, will be deprecated.

privacy:"Don't be evil" is !== "Be Good".

Advertising: Advertising is going to be A LOT less valuable, and the places it
will be valuable have banned google.

Decentralized Tech: No idea what the interim search engines will look like but
it will be __________ then Artificial Intelligence. I think it is private
search, where you buy computational resources and algorithims from a network
but supply the seed data for your preferences and retain them. Probably
BTC/PGP will replace DNS and you will send or lease your own googlebot and
people will sell distributed search algorithims. While Chrome and the v8
engine make a pretty good google bot, people don't really trust google anymore
which is why microsoft lost. No idea what it looks like, but it feels like
someone is building it now.

[0][http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html)

[9]If you know what I am talking about, and you know what he means by saying
the name for it is "a byword for the impossible", I have been trying to figure
out what he meant for ages.

------
princetontiger
They have $100B in cash... They can make one or two transformative
acquisitions.

All this doom and gloom a decade ago was a great chance to pick up a delicious
dividend paying stock.

------
ksec
Well, Yes Microsoft is dead. Or the Old Microsoft is dead. The New Microsoft,
while not exactly in great shape, but at least they are learning and moving
forward.

------
iandanforth
Can someone in the games industry venture an opinion of the danger MS poses in
2015? It seems they are innovating and buying more in this realm than otheres.

~~~
jay_kyburz
I'm in the games industry as an indie and... well it's a big place and there
are lots of changes going on.

I wouldn't say they pose a danger to anybody who wants to make money making
games. There will be no Embrace, Extend, Extinguish scenarios on the horizon
which is what I think people mean by dangerous.

Some people think VR is going to be big, but I think it's just a passing fad
like 3DTV. The new minecraft stuff will be big, but I don't think World of
Warcraft big.

Indie PC games was all about Steam, but everybody is talking about the indie-
apocalypse because steam recently got flooded with a lot of titles so nobody
is making money there any more.

Similar things are happening in iOS where production values are very high now
which means the stakes are very high. It's still very much a lottery.

The consoles are pretty much dead to me personally. I don't know what
published think about it all.

Then ofcourse there is the raging debate around free-to-play and premium games
on every platform.

~~~
erikj
Minecraft is already bigger than World of Warcraft, even without VR.

------
Diabetus
does not look dead to me (at least in the home OS market)
[http://hwzone.co.il/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10/wwm.png](http://hwzone.co.il/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10/wwm.png)

those numbers are from September. Microsoft is claiming 110 million devices
running windows 10.not dead at all

------
colinbartlett
Can a mod update the title to say "(2007)"?

~~~
keyle
yes this just feels like link bait.

------
rokhayakebe
Micro.

Microsoft, Rebirth.

Microsoft, Part 2.

Microsoft, the Comeback.

------
joslin01
I secretly hope Microsoft and Windows dies. Then we can unite underneath a
common core -- Unix!

~~~
jaywunder
Well it's not so secret anymore haha. But why do you want Windows dead? I'm
not much of a fan either, but competition is good.

~~~
joslin01
I don't like that there has to be 2 ways to do one thing. For example:
[https://docs.python.org/2.0/ext/dynamic-
linking.html](https://docs.python.org/2.0/ext/dynamic-linking.html)

------
alexmuro
This is timely again, putting out new hardware and integrating every device
with windows, even open sourcing its development platform isn't going to bring
the developers back from the web.

Personally I don't think it was as obvious in 2007 as it is now, that all apps
would be on the web. Whats stranger is that Microsoft still doesn't seem to
understand this.

------
orionblastar
Dupe post it has been on Hacker News before. It is a 2007 article.

The classic Microsoft is dead, the Post-Gates Microsoft does Windows 10 and
uses Cloud services.

~~~
ycitera
I don't think it was true in 2007, but it appears to be true in 2015.

~~~
eggy
I haven't been as excited about MS in a long time. I don't root for any one
OS; I use what works for me. I have had, and still have them all: Mac OS X,
Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows 8 and 10. MS has open-sourced some really cool
stuff [1]. Microsoft Research [2] is amazing; just look at the front page (Z3
high-performance theorem prover for one, F# and dev tools, Typescript, Simon
Peyton Jones (Haskell) F* which has dependent types and compiles to F# or
OCaml). I cannot find a similar site for Apple. The Apple domain is just a big
online store for me selling product. MS Research is a cool site to browse just
to see what tech they are developing and open sourcing. I think Apple is
stagnating with the evolution of iOS like Android. I like the tiles in MS
Windows 8 and 10 with live updates vs. the Android, iOS widgets and icons. I
have owned Apple iPhones, Androids, but now I am looking at the MS Lumia 950XL
when it becomes available. Android is not where I think it should be at by
this iteration of the OS, and I am not locked in to any one eco-system, so the
iPhone is not an option, although it still is a great design.

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft](https://github.com/Microsoft) [2]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/)

~~~
agumonkey
Aren't there waves ? This is how I see it
[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SKfrICxISAo/U6H2fevDD_I/AAAAAAAAEA...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SKfrICxISAo/U6H2fevDD_I/AAAAAAAAEAg/-iQHMCc-
lRU/s1600/safari_absolute_statowl.png)

Apple was at the forefront after their revival. Google caught steam in the
early 2Ks. Now they're both busy sustaining their model and Microsoft is eager
for fresh love so their grabbing the ball. And that ball is half of the Apple
style of product design and communication. That's the first time MS is so deep
into aesthetics, glamour, engineering and talks. Before that it was a lot more
nerd oriented.

