
Microsoft is Dead (2007) - WisNorCan
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
======
WisNorCan
It's probably a good thing that Microsoft did not follow the advice:

> They can't hire smart people anymore, but they could buy as many as they
> wanted.

> Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of
> them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.

> Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding
> to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

Instead, Microsoft did the exact opposite. They picked Satya Nadella who had
worked there since 1992. He has driven the innovation right out of Redmond, WA
with no lead shielding required.

~~~
kirillzubovsky
This is almost entirely not true.

Under Satya, Microsoft went on a shopping spree. They bought a ton of
startups: Minecraft, Github, Skype, Sunrise, LinkedIn (tnx comments!), Yammer
... and along with those it bought a mapping company, a multitude of
ad/marketing companies, educational startups, AI startups...etc, etc. Those
are just the ones we know about.

Update: here's a list of all MS acquisitions. It's rather lengthly.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft)

Did you know they almost bought Twitch.tv, but Amazon had more money?

And as far as locking them in the same building, that's not exactly
operationally efficient in 2018. But they seemed to have done their best at
either merging the products right away, or letting the team run on their own.

So, they did pretty well, according to the plan.

~~~
WisNorCan
Hmm...

1) Skype was purchased by Ballmer.

2) Most of the ad tech companies were also purchased by Ballmer.

3) Minecraft and Skype are not Bay Area companies

4) LinkedIn was a public company when Microsoft acquired them. So it seems
like a stretch to call them a startup.

5) And finally it looks like Microsoft has done acquisitions throughout their
existence. In fact, they acquired as many companies in 2007 as they did in
2018 and more in 2007 than 2017.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft)

It doesn't seem like "buy lots of Bay Area Web 2.0 companies to infuse new
talent" is the secret ingredient. Yahoo was the company that probably closest
executed the strategy. That didn't go well as we all know.

~~~
tootie
Man, I worked at aQuantive when it got bought for $6B by Ballmer. They took a
$6B write down within a few years. They should have kept their money in the
services part of that business instead of the second-rate ad tech.

------
theonemind
It seems like Big Tech has switched over to amassing data and behavior
manipulation ("engagement", etc.) as their main business model. I think that
Microsoft didn't feel threatening because they still mostly just _sold a
product_.

I feel like we as a society haven't really entirely got a handle on this yet.
Things emerge, like trusts, and it takes a while for people to understand what
has happened.

But, with things like Windows 10 telemetry you can't turn off, and Windows
turning into a service, they've gotten back on board with how Big Tech runs
these days.

This pattern seems to hold really well. The giants mostly amass data and
manipulate people. If they don't do this sort of thing, they don't really seem
that threatening, regardless of their size. HP, IBM, Dell. Apple seems
interesting, as a hold-out on just selling a product, but in the meta game,
just direct manipulation of people really looks like a step up, and I don't
predict they'll continue as anything approaching a "scary tech giant" in
coming decades unless they change like Microsoft did.

~~~
userbinator
_But, with things like Windows 10 telemetry you can 't turn off, and Windows
turning into a service, they've gotten back on board with how Big Tech runs
these days._

Yes, I can confidently say that I _miss_ the old Microsoft. They were strongly
closed-source and proprietary (not that it didn't stop people from
understanding how things worked anyway...), but they did not do the sort of
data collection, behavioural analysis and advert-driven manipulation that the
others were doing, and still highly valued backward-compatibility and
stability.

Now they're going the same route as the other tech giants, silently collecting
information while also open-sourcing a lot of other things almost as a form of
distraction/diversion. You could consider the fact that they're open-sourcing
something to mean they're not interested in selling that as a product anymore,
and that's because their profit is coming from somewhere else.

~~~
belltaco
They tried to make the public care with the gmail man campaign.

[https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/2/2766215/gmail-
ma...](https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/2/2766215/gmail-man-video-
microsoft-google-privacy)

It was flagged dead on HN because the perception was "do no evil' Google good,
M$ bad.

They tried harder later on with the somewhat cringy Scroogled campaign and
found out the public didnt care while Google laughed all the way to the bank
while increasing data tracking, collection and usage. And here we are.

Edit: Found a thread discussing it, with one top 10 by karma HN user
explaining why they flagged it.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544309)

------
Digit-Al
I think this paragraph really sums up the whole article for me:

> 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. Nearly all the people we fund at Y
> Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup
> school. 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.

If you live in a forest you'll think the world is made of trees.

Paul Graham is a very clever man, and I have a lot of respect for him, but he
lives in a high tech bubble. People in high-tech start-ups use apple; people
who work in creative industries (mostly) use apple; most of the rest of the
world use Windows PCs. So to declare the desktop (does this include laptop?)
"dead", especially back in 2005, is most definitely premature.

Question: has anyone out there come across a non-high-tech multinational
corporation that uses apples instead of PCs?

~~~
ultrasounder
Even within FAANG as a developer You the developer gets a choice of MBP vs PC.
But PG was alluding to the specific fact that Macs outnumber PCs within the YC
bubble which still holds true.

------
jmartrican
> 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.

This sounds like a very ignorant thing to state. Wherever I worked, the best
programmers used Windows and Linux desktops. Why? Because they too busy coding
to get caught up in the Apple hype is my best guess. You know just like he
talks about being ignorant to what was going on in Microsoft world, many
coders I worked with did not know or care about what was going on in Apple
world. There was one group of people who I did notice flock to Apple OS's,
wannabe developers. The type that talk a lot about new tech but never wrote
code that got deployed to production.

~~~
diminoten
MacOS is, by _far_ the best generic developer OS.

The best developers I know don't really care what OS they're on, but MacOS is
what they'll pick if they get a choice.

~~~
jmartrican
> MacOS is, by far the best generic developer OS.

How so?

~~~
jmartrican
BTW, please note that on Windows I can use various types of Linux variants
right from the Windows App store. So the excuse of having a Nix shell on Mac
OS is no longer a point for Mac OS. In fact, because we use Ubuntu in prod,
and I run Ubuntu on Windows, that point might now be for Windows for many
users.

~~~
wilsonnb3
I still prefer using a real nix instead of the windows subsystem for Linux.
Mostly because the file system integration with WSL is still bad and Windows
still doesn’t come with a decent terminal emulator.

------
cronix
> 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.

The last sentence is ironically funny now that MS is back on top and Apple is
slipping, and the article is about the "death" of MS.

> Microsoft closed Friday with a larger market cap than Apple’s, making the
> Redmond software giant the most valuable U.S. stock.

[http://fortune.com/2018/11/30/microsoft-bumping-apple-is-
now...](http://fortune.com/2018/11/30/microsoft-bumping-apple-is-now-the-most-
valuable-u-s-company/)

~~~
kunai
> The last sentence is ironically funny now that MS is back on top and Apple
> is slipping, and the article is about the "death" of MS.

Well, yes, I'm assuming the irony is part of the reason this was posted here.

------
curiousDog
The funny thing is Google is the new Microsoft for precisely most of the
reasons he mentions. The worst part of Microsoft's culture (empire building by
middle managers) has now infected Google as well. Amazon is the only one that
has been able to stave it off which seems partly due to their insanely
customer obsessed culture.

------
yholio
The analysis fails because it looks only at technical and cultural
determinants for what is primarily an economic process.

To counter this with my own dubious and oversimplified explanation, Microsoft
did not fail because it has created a monopoly, a walled-off ecosystem they
control, and they managed to protect it in most desktop segments. Google has
it's own monopolies, as do all of the successful companies that are still
around. Microsoft's failure to extend their monopolies into mobile and web
costed them the crown of the tech industry, but they're far from dead.

Apple rebooted solley on it's iPhone walled garden - their desktop was
moribund and the iPod, while an inovative product and short term cash cow, was
not conducive to a monopoly, so it was quickly duplicated and made obsolete.
Yahoo was not able to create and maintain its monopolies, so it's dead.

------
nafizh
How time changes. It seems Microsoft is back from the dead. And what Microsoft
used to be, Google is trying their best to become.

------
gjmveloso
Microsoft was dead until 2014, when Satya Nadella becomes CEO and bring
company back to life, almost how Steve Jobs revamped Apple in the late 90’s

~~~
tehlike
It was surprising, coming from a non-founder in the company. It is welcome,
nonetheless.

~~~
apozem
Crisis is the time when people are most willing to accept changes, and
Microsoft was indeed in crisis. Still is in some ways, but their turnaround
has been impressive.

------
tzury
When PG wrote this down, perhaps the vast majority of Microsoft board agreed
with him. It was a giant company without a roadmap. A company that _always
behind_.

Microsoft has changed a lot since, and still putting much of an effort and
money to gain trust amongst the community. Just remind yourself the reaction
when GitHub acquisition announced. For three weeks I read blog posts filled
broadcasting fear and loathing as if the government of China has bought
Facebook, Twitter and Slack altogether.

------
WalterBright
I recall seeing a book in the cutout bin of a bookstore that made the case
that IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut that would inevitably take over the
world. It was written in the mid 80's. The irony was it was in the cutout bin
because it wasn't long after that IBM was well on its way in its slide to
irrelevancy.

I wish I'd bought the book, or at least remembered its title.

~~~
zokier
Well few decades later IBM is still generating billions in profits. So I'm not
so sure what to conclude from that, other than that juggernauts, while maybe
not unstoppable, do not die easily.

------
godelmachine
Satya Nadella once said, “Microsoft loves Linux”, the three most improbable
words that could be unfathomably put together.

Maybe that’s when Microsoft started gaining traction.

~~~
djmips
To me that signalled that Microsoft was now flexible, to go with what would
lead to success rather than doggedly holding onto the past.

------
shadowmint
It's easy to laugh now, but in 2007 this was spot on.

It was 10 years before Microsoft managed to drag itself up and do something
useful with itself.

It's really remarkable that Microsoft managed such a big turn around after
such epic failures (like mobile); others (like IBM...) are still struggling to
do it.

Just goes to show, competitive pressure is a good thing. :)

------
wvenable
In addition to other comments about Microsoft's current market cap and new
CEO, this article was posted also posted before Windows 7 was released;
arguably the best version of Windows ever made. In fact, that era of software
including Office and their server products was very solid.

~~~
craftyguy
> very solid.

You and I have a very different definition[0] of 'solid'. Unless you mean
'relatively', in which case I agree.

0\. [https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17153/Microsoft-
Windows-7...](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17153/Microsoft-
Windows-7.html?vendor_id=26)

~~~
wvenable
Doesn't seem particularly different from the competition:

[https://www.cvedetails.com/product/156/Apple-Mac-
Os-X.html?v...](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/156/Apple-Mac-
Os-X.html?vendor_id=49)

~~~
craftyguy
You're comparing an OS that has one major release (windows 7) to one that has
been essentially a rolling-ish release for ~10 years. (Mac)OSX (which you
linked to) has been going/supported far longer than windows 7.

Meanwhile, microsoft's track record over the same period, with quite a few
(major) OS releases, is..
[https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/26/Microsoft.html](https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/26/Microsoft.html)

~~~
wvenable
Yes but I'm also looking at the individual years. OS X has many releases and
Windows has many releases; they're both effectively one product. Windows bugs
are counted twice if they exist in different versions but are still
effectively the same bug.

------
consultutah
I would argue that MS WAS dead under Balmer, but not only for the reasons that
PG mentions. However, it has been resurrected under Satya.

~~~
ktamura
This is not entirely true. Yes, Ballmer made many mistakes, but he also
architected one of the most sustainably profitable enterprise software
businesses (on the heels of all MS software products we love to hate). These
enterprise customers are more than knees deep with Microsoft, and deep account
penetration bought at least 5 years for Satya to steer the ship in the right
direction (giving up on B2C mobile, Windows obsession, etc.)

One of the most common biases I see in how we assess leaders is how we try to
attribute success & failure to a single person at a discrete point in time
(ex: Here in the US, the extreme Left claims Trump is taking credit for
Obama's foundational effort for the economy while the extreme Right says it's
all Trump). In reality, it is never that simple nor discrete but rather
complex and continuous.

------
ChuckMcM
I really enjoyed re-reading that. It captures the very essence of "instant in
time" incorrectness, it is why I stopped believing anything I thought was
"definitely true" in the tech business actually was what I thought it was.

I felt the same way that Paul did, Microsoft had calcified into this
Office/Enterprise crust, living off their contracts with big businesses, while
the real world was cruising to a new, agile, and open source beat. I had also
been at Sun when it was still small, and cringed when bad news from IBM put a
big negative impact on Sun's nascent stock price, even though, at the time,
IBM's pain was coming from Sun not that we'd share in it.

But the trap that I had fallen into, and this essay expresses, is that "Today
is every day" or more precisely, now that the world is to my liking, it will
cease changing in ways that I disapprove. :-) I felt like the puzzle is
figured out, I "get it" now, I can see the strings going from the puppets to
the puppeteers and now I can see how the world is working.

But the cruel trick is that in systems, the puppets are recursive, or in
mathematical terms, the forces influencing the future direction of technology
are nonlinear at best, and likely chaotic. Everyone is changing in response to
the changes they perceive around them, and in response some of their changes
change those around them. Like the traffic analyst who figured out you could
stomp your brakes going West on Interstate 10, and have the 'wave' of your
braking effect roll south on the Harbor, get picked up going north on the 405,
only to have it come back and hit you from the front as its echo headed east
back along the 10. Sun made _Workstations_ and Microsoft only cared about
_PCs_ except the echo of what a workstation was suddenly came back and hit Sun
in the face as a big PC. Or Sun's prophetic, if ill fated slogan that "The
Network is the Computer", which turned out to be literally true as clusters of
Linux machines took out big iron symmetric multiprocessing systems. And then
again, as Paul points out, when the Web browser ran its "programs" on the
"network." Where did the computer start and the network end? It was no longer
possible to tell.

Take away from this the certain knowledge that Google, Facebook, and Apple
will all "die" (Apple for the second time :-)) at some point in the next 5 to
20 years. What we care about today will seem silly in the future, and the
there will be technologies that enable completely different things to consume
our time and resources than the things that do so today.

People create startups and dream new dreams for the same reason a surfer
starts paddling their board toward shore, waves come up, and you have to be in
position to get a good ride.

------
mamcx
Maybe death is good for a company.

Maybe Apple, MS, Google, etc already die several times.

Is just that enough of it survive and learn from the past, even a little.

Maybe is easier to present the new king as the same old king, long live the
king.

~~~
WalterBright
The computer landscape is littered with the carcasses of once great companies,
going back all the way back to RCA.

------
plinkplonk
Iirc (it's been a while since I read the article) I thought 'dead' was used to
mean "they are not the dominant power in the world of software (in terms of
tools, languages, leadership, driving change) etc, like they used to be in the
nineties" not in the sense of "they are a declining company in terms of
revenue or market value"

The present news just says Microsoft's market valuation is higher than apple's
(today). Not sure if it really affects the central thesis of the article.

EDIT: literally the first paragraph of the article

"I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from
Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of
Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company"
instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he
didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry
Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe
anyone would be frightened of them."

People fear Facebook and Google and Amazon, if only for the immense amounts of
damage they do to societies and polities. Who is afraid of MS (or IBM)? Do
startup founders even think of MS as a factor in their plans (which seems to
be what the article is about)

------
gwbas1c
Ironically, Azure is doing better than Google cloud services.

------
marcell
I assume this was posted in response to Microsoft passing Apple as the most
valuable tech company.

Ironically, In 2007 Microsoft’s market cap was more than twice that of Apple’s
($270B vs $100B). That company’s staying power is truly amazing.

------
simonblack
Not dead. Just irrelevant and/or non-essential.

Microsoft is to computing as Ford is to automobiles. Both are still there if
you want them to be your choice, but by the same token, if you don't need them
in your life, they aren't forced upon you.

Me? I haven't owned a Ford since 1985. I switched to Unix/Linux in 1991.

------
xg15
_Narrator: Microsoft was not dead._

------
gmosx
It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future...

------
Ice_cream_suit
Satya Nadela was the primary agent, for transforming Microsoft into the
profitable and successful business that it is now.

------
21
> _Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the
> same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or
> Linux now. Windows is for grandmas._

> _They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the
> standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago._

And now, I bet a vast majority of people funded by YC use VS Code. Maybe even
Azure.

~~~
xenospn
They use VSCode, but they use it on Linux or OSX.

~~~
Daegalus
I've switched back to Windows 10 with WSL running Ubuntu 18.04 in it. Works
well and gives me pretty great integrations.

~~~
jaxn
I also switched to Win 10 from Mac (and Linux before that).

My Surface Book has a faulty battery and I am using an MBP when I'm not at the
office. I not sure I will stick with Win 10 on my next computer, but I am sure
I'm not going back to OSX.

WSL isn't perfect, but it feel more open and more linux-like to me than OSX.
Maybe a Pixel Book,maybe straight Linux.

