181–190 of 237 posts
I’d argue Paul Graham’s relevance is what died. He’s not worth 3T Microsoft is. Sure they’re not sexy to startups but they survived and thrived and found cloud when they did and are worth buckets and buckets of money.
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I think they're still an 800 lb gorilla. It's just that now they're not the _only_ 800 lb gorilla.
Nope. Were you alive in the 1990's? It was completely different. Microsoft froze innovation in the industry. Nobody does that today.
And I still respectfully disagree with you
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I think Apple is a very American thing. Outside the US, which you may not care about, only the most aspirationally Americanised people I've known have gone for apple products. Im not sure what the reasons are.
Europeans generally don't purchase the things they want, they purchase the things they are supposed to be wanting, after having long deliberations together with relatives and friends. So then they'll only look at specs and price and not how useful a product is or how pleasant it is to use. Europeans are in general very weird about money. They are as greedy as anybody, but what do they do then with that money? They th…
Literally laughed out loud at this, it’s so accurate.
They are doomed
Since advent of smartphone, its been 13 yrs my desktop/laptop are unused covered in dust,
All my needs are fulfilled by hybrid android+linux ecosystem
Who among average users needs laptop, for daily usage when phone can be thrice fast and 100times more features
My favourite paragraph was "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. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward" Is Google dying or dead in this sense now too? I can't think of any company they've bullied recently but maybe I'm just not in their space. All the excitement seem…
> Is Google dying or dead in this sense now too? I can't think of any company they've bullied recently ...
Such a great summary for judging corporate America.
The other was on Apple Invite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940852 "[they've] started making money, their product is going to become awful"
VC backed tech bros with their dumb bullshit get rich quick web apps and crypto probably sounded way more exciting back in 2007 than Microsoft collecting rent. I guess PG did ok.
It's interesting to read comments about this today, written through the lens of the present. I suspect many commenters were too young to really understand the level of dominance Microsoft had in the market circa from 1995-2005. Just look at this chart: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar... In 2004, outside of education and desktop publishing it was extremely rare to see an Apple computer at…
> That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web
The slap on the wrist that Microsoft got had nothing to do with them first losing the MP3 player market which led to Apple’s resurgence (remember the plays4Sure platform and then the Zune?) or their failed efforts in mobile.
> digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers
I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs
It's interesting to read comments about this today, written through the lens of the present. I suspect many commenters were too young to really understand the level of dominance Microsoft had in the market circa from 1995-2005. Just look at this chart: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar... In 2004, outside of education and desktop publishing it was extremely rare to see an Apple computer at…
“That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...” I am not too young to remember the old Microsoft. To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic. Despite Tesla, GM is still relevant. Despite AWS, DB2 mainframes are still relevant. Heck, I have to work with EBCDIC data, a format designed to not produce holes in punchcards that are too close together . Even when we eventually move to a modern db, decades…
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To be fair in 2007 it really did seem like google could completely destroy microsoft monopoly on enterprise software with google docs, google sheets and google workspace. And then they just didn't? They just gave up, only small companies use google workspace these days and excel is as entrenched as ever. I suppose the google meet/google talk/google hangouts explains a lot of why this hypothetical future didn't happen…
very big companies use Workspace and the full suite of Google Docs products within.
https://www.enclyne.com/3-reasons-why-companies-are-migratin...
I’d argue Paul Graham’s relevance is what died. He’s not worth 3T Microsoft is. Sure they’re not sexy to startups but they survived and thrived and found cloud when they did and are worth buckets and buckets of money.
An incredibly irrelevant comparison which kind of ignores thinking and just reduces things to "haha I have more money than you so I'm more important" (a strange way to think).
Every single startup Paul's company funds uses a Microsoft product one way or another. YCombinator is giving out Azure credits to their funded startups. When Sam Altman pivoted OpenAI from non-profit, he did it with Microsoft money. Microsoft is relevant as hell, just as it was in 2007, when it was busily providing productivity software to the entire US federal government without breaking a sweat -- a contract it still holds nearly two decades later.
From Paul Graham's perspective, detached from the actual world people live in, doing as he pleases with his fuck-you money, sure, maybe Microsoft is dead. But the list of people who can get value out of this essay is "Paul Graham."