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Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#41

Post by virgilp »

baxtr wrote: post #9

What is this telling us about the stuff he writes with full conviction today?

Read all of it. Go beyond just the title, and it should tell you that Paul Graham was more right than wrong with this one.

- Google was, for a while, the "gorilla in the room" - their decline is recent. But Paul Graham got it right, that Google was more scary than MS.

- Microsoft was "dead" in 2007, same as Apple was before Steve Jobs came back. The revival started with Satya Nadella, 7 years later. It is still a shadow of its former self, MS dominated the industry like no other player ever did (or is likely to do, again).

- The 4 forces that lead to MS' demise are likely spot-on. And again "demise" in the same sense of IBM, "still exists, still makes money, nobody really cares".

Did the "all ycombinator founders use Macs" rub me the wrong way, when used as an argument as he did? Yes. But I also kinda' understand it(*), even though I still think he should've steered away from that argument.

(*) you can interpret it in the sense of "the future is already here - it is just very unevenly distributed"; that's probably what he meant. He knew full well the market share.

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #25
buran77 wrote: post #14

> Their [n.b Apple's] 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 So nearly all of the (relatively) very few people that are funded by YC have Apple and that's proof of Apple's complete victory over a dead MS. In a year when MS was still on an upward trend, growing by 20% market cap to become double that o…

Think of it in the inverse. If you're a person who is at one end of a funnel (in this case; new tech companies) and you see a 100% adoption which is contrary to the mainstream: you would think you have good insight. You might forget that you're looking at: A) A cargo culture B) a homogeneous cohort. This is the same way that people knew ahead of time that Microsoft Office would kill off Lotus notes. Since all school'…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#43

Post by dtquad »

baxtr wrote: post #9

What is this telling us about the stuff he writes with full conviction today?

He was wrong about Microsoft's death but correct about how AJAX making web apps feel more desktop-like would remove Microsoft's dominance in many categories and niches.

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#44

Post by lotsofpulp »

bediger4000 wrote: post #19

Not only is Microsoft not dead, they're almost never included in the "Big Tech" that gets shouted about and cursed. Which is weird, Microsoft makes an OS that has a 90+% desktop share, no real competitors, and pretty much extract money at will for its software.

Microsoft has long been included, they just didn’t happen to be in the catchy FAANG acronym that a tv show used for a set of companies with increasing stock prices all the way back in 2013.

Netflix dropped out of that a long time ago, but FAANG is still sometimes used since it is catchier than MAMAA or whatever a 7 letter acronym would be if including Nvidia and Tesla.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#46

Post by RIMR »

buran77 wrote: post #14

> Their [n.b Apple's] 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 So nearly all of the (relatively) very few people that are funded by YC have Apple and that's proof of Apple's complete victory over a dead MS. In a year when MS was still on an upward trend, growing by 20% market cap to become double that o…

It is an common theme with PG to write confidently about technology while also demonstrating that he has absolutely no understanding of what he's talking about.

I've been commenting about this here for YEARS with constant pushback and excuses for him from the community. "He's a billionaire so he must be smart", "He personally wrote the entire HN codebase", "Nobody really needs a valid SSL cert on their website in 2023". Dang has even cited me for "personal attacks" for daring to point out PG's most visible shortcomings and knowledge gaps.

I guess the inflection point was PG turning to X to screech about "wokism" in support of oligarchs like Trump and Musk to snap this community out of it's pro-PG trance. Watching a billionaire cheer on the billionaire class as we plummet into technofeudalism is a hell of a wake up call.

Glad to see criticism of PG finally going mainstream here, especially digging back 18 years and concluding that he's always been like this. It's a shame he financially runs this place and these comments are short-lived due to platform manipulation.

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#47

Post by dtquad »

bsnnkv wrote: post #37

It's quite impressive to see how much the Windows experience has improved for developers since this was written. I love being able to both do all of my web application work in a deeply integrated NixOS WSL VM and develop my own desktop environment power tools against a stable DWM using an officially supported Win32 API crate in Rust. Honestly I dread booting up my M1 MacBook Pro for work, the experience feels sluggis…

The de facto Linux game development workflow is now literally just to develop a Windows/DirectX game and making sure it works with Proton on Linux.

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#48

Post by JohnHaugeland »

buran77 wrote: post #14

> Their [n.b Apple's] 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 So nearly all of the (relatively) very few people that are funded by YC have Apple and that's proof of Apple's complete victory over a dead MS. In a year when MS was still on an upward trend, growing by 20% market cap to become double that o…

I’ve been hearing people say this since this incorrect essay was written almost 20 years ago

Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today

Microsoft had 0% of hosting then and has the world’s second largest share, 23%, today

Microsoft had, in 2007, 18% presence share in console gaming. Today they have 65%

They were one of the four tech orgs present at the presidential inauguration

They have grown enormously in the time this essay claims they were dying

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#49

Post by JohnHaugeland »

virgilp wrote: post #41
baxtr wrote: post #9

What is this telling us about the stuff he writes with full conviction today?

Read all of it. Go beyond just the title, and it should tell you that Paul Graham was more right than wrong with this one. - Google was, for a while, the "gorilla in the room" - their decline is recent. But Paul Graham got it right, that Google was more scary than MS. - Microsoft was "dead" in 2007, same as Apple was before Steve Jobs came back. The revival started with Satya Nadella, 7 years later. It is still a sha…

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

#50

Post by everyone »

leecommamichael wrote: post #11

More proof Hackernews is completely isolated from game development.

Yeah, game dev here.. The amount of articles on the front page here that are like "10 things every programmer should know" and then are hyper focused on only web dev specific things is cringe.

Thats just HN though, a subset of redditors who are gonna "change the world" and also become a billionaire with their CRUD app.

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