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Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

paulgraham.com

211–220 of 237 posts

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#211
post #81
post #66

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…

The amount of effort apparently required to satisfy all the checkboxes around "a cheap PC and Microsoft 365" is astounding. My Fortune 250 laptop runs 3 different security "endpoint" products, and literally dozens of scripts fire each day/hour to make sure that things are "correct" according to every suggestion any consultant ever made towards our senior IT staff. And they replace the entire fleet every 3 years. I believe that starting with longer lived hardware with an inherently more secure environment that didn't need to be groomed like this would be a net savings, but I don't have the numbers to prove it.

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#212
post #66

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…

For years I've said that if you could take corporate purchases out of the Gartner numbers, you'd see that Apple was better than 50/50 when it came to personal use. I sure would like to see an updated version of that dataset.

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you find these low monthly cost options? Using Office is considerably more expensive than it ever was for a business, and the profit margins are huge. And if anyone could sustain an office suite until it runs profitably in these circumstances, it must surely be Google...

Microsoft Office enterprise is $12 per seat.

Per?... month?

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#215
post #4

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…

Gemini is trash product

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know that office 365 is more expensive than before, if incorporating time and stress into the equation. Businesses get to dispense with all their IT staff basically and just let people access everything via a browser. And it’s a lot less technical for the managers to manage users and licenses. But the problem for competitors is say you are able to make a product just as good as Excel. You start selling it $x,…

> Google Docs and whatnot came out all the way back in the late 2000s, but it still didn’t see any measurable adoption by the time office 365 was out. Maybe it is because Google didn’t stick with it and develop it, but I still think it was a long shot. It didn't stick because google did not pursue the strategy to take over enterprise. Google Docs by itself is not going to displace Office 365 and IT management tools,…

Google Drive/Suite seems more of a way to get Google off of an external corporate dependency, Microsoft, rather than a way to enlighten users. All of their products do.

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He saved Microsoft's investers' pockets, but destroyed the soul of Windows, Windows Phone, the Nokia partnership, the Office suite, etc. One could say he actually destroyed MSFT to build something new.

The Office Suite is doing better than ever. I have no problem paying $129 a year for O365 with five users and each user can use it across Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web. The iPad version with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse is actually pretty good. And 1TB of storage per user.

It's not the ingress strategy, it's the egress one. How do you migrate 1TB of data OFF of OneDrive?

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Office Suite is doing better than ever. I have no problem paying $129 a year for O365 with five users and each user can use it across Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web. The iPad version with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse is actually pretty good. And 1TB of storage per user.

It's not the ingress strategy, it's the egress one. How do you migrate 1TB of data OFF of OneDrive?

From your computer you attach a USB drive to your computer and move files like any other drive.

From an iPhone or iPad, you connect a USB drive to it using the USB C port, the USB drive shows up in the Files along with your OneDrive storage location and you move files to your drive.

The same way you would with GDrive, iCloud Drive or Dropbox

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#219
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

"Dead" apparently means "no longer the unquestioned industry leader" - which seems like an odd definition of "dead" to me, but ok. The industry in question being the union of personal desktop and laptop computers, associated software, and internet-related technologies. What actually happened was the internet-related sector broadened to include new sub-sectors - mobile, search, social, media, cloud, e-commerce, and ad…

[dead]

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#220
post #4

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…

Gemini is trash product

Yeah, I even resubscribed to chatgpt. I have free Gemini, but it is really underwhelming
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