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Microsoft is Dead

paulgraham.com

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Re: Microsoft is Dead

#81

Post by danielha »

jellerbee wrote: post #64
pg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was never the place new ideas and true innovation came from. But they did once have the power to shut down people who had them. They no longer do; that's what's changed.

Can you explain the power Microsoft had to shut down people where "true innovation" came from? and who or what stopped them from doing this? What is the difference between "true innovation" and -- I don't even know how to ask this exactly -- "untrue innovation"?

They had the ability to throw their weight around -- and they did. One popular example: competing browsers such as Netscape or Opera hardly stood a chance against an integrated IE in Windows. What changed this landscape? A few things, one of which was US v Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#82

Post by theoutlander »

volida wrote: post #20

I think Microsoft is playing it safe. And don't forget everyone, that MSN Messenger is being used by as much x20 times the users of Facebook. Microsoft did the smartest acquisition in 1997 when they bought Hotmail and caught the train. What would it stop them from doing that again? I don't know. And what if they took PG's advice and their new move was his suggestion to buy all new startups?! They introduced VS.Net an…

Soapbox

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#83

Post by JMiao »

zach wrote: post #45
hello_moto wrote: post #10

Paul, I think you're being an ignorant a little bit in this case. Have you seen how Microsoft become the second major player in the game industry behind Sony PS brand? I think right now more people own XBOX 360 compare to Sony PS3. Of course there's Wii, the Apple of Console machine. Google is popular because people like Michael Arrington, Walleywag, and those biased non-professional bloggers-turned-online-reporters…

The Xbox is a red herring. Microsoft's "Home and Entertainment" division still loses millions a day, six years after the Xbox unveiling, and has very little to do with technology in the first place, much less software innovation.

This isn't a fair analysis. XBOX is probably one of the only groups that is moving in a positive direction at Microsoft. Yes, they've lost billions, but Microsoft expected that going in. The billions they've spent over the last few years is a small price to pay for making Windows technology the center of the home entertainment experience as well as owning a significant content pipeline into the living room.

However, despite my confidence in XBOX, Microsoft is still going to experience a lot of bleeding because XBOX at its best isn't enough to cover for the fact that the Desktop and Windows OS are becoming irrelevant.

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#84

Post by theoutlander »

Windows has its quirks, but it is still the OS regular users choose. Visual Studio (THE BEST PRODUCT FROM MSFT!) beats everything out there! Although, my startup is not using ANY Microsoft technology, I am using Windows to code! Unix is GREAT for server-side....terrible for client-side and Windows is GREAT for client-side, but terrible on server-side!

Google owns search but they are losing focus, just like MSFT. Remember that if it weren't for MSFT, Apple wouldn't have taken the PC market too far .... this is just the beginning of the IT revolution!

IBM - MSFT - GOOGLE - ADOBE - WHO'S NEXT?

They are all gonna slow down at some point.... I am not afraid of Google... Even if a company is a mammoth, it HAS its limitations!!!

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#85

Post by gommm »

lak wrote: post #3

I guess I must be old now, because I find it hard to believe that a company that still has their software running on 95% of the world's computers is "dead". I just don't get this argument. I totally agree that there's this very small, very insular part of the world that thinks it's dead, but that part of the world is apparently not working in large companies, or trading files with professionals in any profession othe…

Quick reply for architects, well here in japan it's the contrary... Try to find an architect that doesn't use mac based software - you can't. (and even though autodesk tools are nicer than vectorworks....)

They are dead in the sense that while they still keep their old monopoly, it's slowly crumbling away... Files in word format can be read on almost any plateform now (maybe not always perfectly but still good enough) and the file formats for texts or other things will change as people start using new software (web applications).

As a matter of fact, you can see the death of microsoft by the fact that it's not a problem to run another platform anymore (in 90% of the cases) and that it becomes more and more easier...

It's mostly because microsoft doesn't bring anything new to the table anymore... Before, they didn't really innovate but they often came with really good implementations of good ideas other people had (lotus 1-2-3 - excel, wordstar - word, netscape - internet explorer) and took the market. They don't seem to be able to do this anymore

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#86

Post by frobot »

flarosa wrote: post #79

Microsoft used to be my hero, ever since the day I turned on my first TRS-80 and saw the Microsoft Basic copyright notice. For 20 years Microsoft was my whole world. MS-DOS, old Windows, new Windows. DLLs, ODBC, IIS, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with Microsoft was a chore. I'd learn to program DLLs, and by the time I was good at it, they were pushing Active X. Or I'd learn to use named pipes, only to find that…

Java used to be my hero, ever since the day I learned it would manage memory for me, while still scaling to the heights demanded by the enterprise.

For 10 years, Java was my whole world. Servlets, old EJB, new EJB, JSP, JDBC, Spring, Hibernate, JSF, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with enterprise Java was a chore. I'd learn to program EJB 1 and by the time I finally figured it out, they were pushing EJB 2. Or I'd learn Entity Beans or Struts, only to find nobody was using it anymore. Everything was a confusing mismash of competing APIs, old code, new code, multiple, dogmatic ways of doing the same thing with no good explanation. Finding help with this J2EE crap was a nightmare. Somtimes they'd just repackage or rebrand the same technology for no good reason. Hibernate? EJB3? J2EE? JEE 5? WTF?

One day, in spite of my boss's mandate that we were strictly a Java shop, I started to rewrite a struggling project in Ruby on Rails. What an eye-opener. What took months and 5 people now took days and 1 person. Everything I needed was there, but without tons of redundant, repetitive lines of boilerplate code and XML -- and without endless compile-deploy-restart cycles.

Today I run Linux servers, program in Ruby, have abandoned JBoss, and use Apache and Mongrel with MySQL databases. I ditched Eclipse in favor of TextMate. I love working with this stuff. I feel truly sorry for people wo are forced to limit themselves to Java technology.

(Sorry for the too-obvious, too-easy parody. But I couldn't help myself -- it was the natural response to someone praising the virtues of Java during a discussion about a dying, irrelevant company.)

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#87

Post by BrandonM »

theoutlander wrote: post #84

Windows has its quirks, but it is still the OS regular users choose. Visual Studio (THE BEST PRODUCT FROM MSFT!) beats everything out there! Although, my startup is not using ANY Microsoft technology, I am using Windows to code! Unix is GREAT for server-side....terrible for client-side and Windows is GREAT for client-side, but terrible on server-side! Google owns search but they are losing focus, just like MSFT. Reme…

If you think that Unix is terrible for client-side, then I don't think you've been working in Linux for long. How about the ability to install any of 20,000 programs from a convenient package/portage/rpm directory for free in seconds? How about updating every single program on your computer, including the OS, and recompiling everything, with one command?

And as for programming, whenever I'm working in Visual Studio, I feel like I'm working in Notepad. Honestly, if you take the time to learn the keybindings for vi or emacs (I won't say which, I use both :-), you will find that a much more lightweight program can manage projects just as well, and you can code many times faster.

Honestly, it's hard to get away from what you're used to, but immerse yourself in a non-Microsoft environment for a few months (I've been using Unix heavily for less than a year), and you'll realize that Microsoft is the one with the bad interfaces. For years they have been catering to the lowest common denominator. The people who want true control over what they are doing use or write an open source program.

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#88

Post by BrandonM »

brett wrote: post #40
BobG wrote: post #32

Being nearly 50years old, what frightens me about MS is that they think they can sell an OS which they can remotely turn off without out a court warrant and then its up to you if your business hasn't gone bankrupt to sue them . This just shows complete and utter contempt for their customers.Which will do for them in the long run.My next box will be linux. Maybe the apple setup etc looks attractive to the younger gene…

You bring up a hilarious caveat to "No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore." The people now afraid of MSFT are not their competitors but instead their customers.

I did a presentation a few months ago on Microsoft's DRM technology in Vista: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~mintern/601/presentation.pdf

It was when I first read about that and researched it that I realized just how bad it was. It's like the customer isn't even #2 or 3 anymore. It goes something like:

1. Money

2. Killing competition (including open source)

3. Hollywood

4. Locking out hobbyists and increasing licensing restrictions

...I'm sure I'm missing some...

n. Serving the customer

Re: Microsoft is Dead

#89

Post by BrandonM »

hello_moto wrote: post #11
gibsonf1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PG's point isn't that MS will vanish or is vanishing from the current installed user base point of view (mainly their OS), but that they no longer control the direction of software development. This is a major opening for us Entrepreneurs that, as PG pointed out, has never happened before. MS Office is clearly under serious attack now, and I'm sure the OS will follow in a few years unless MS takes a major tac…

May I know whom attacking MS Office? Last time I checked, none of the online web two point ooh software can open big documents. These web-apps only match probably 20% of MS Office features and it's simply not enough these days when people are more tech-savvy than in the past.

If you haven't heard about a free program that does everything that Microsoft Office does and more, then you should really be looking at OpenOffice.

1. It's free

2. It can read all Microsoft and open formats

3. It can export as PDF

4. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, ... (written in Java I believe)

5. It's open source

6. Various other features have been added which MS now adds to MS Office in order to catch up (like auto-completion).

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