11 ms·

Microsoft Is Dead (2007)

135 points by aamederen 2y ago

sylware 2y ago
Those toxic companies have billions of cash, then backed by the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock. This money is sort of "weaponized". If you are not "them", if you stick to the basic "economic rules", you are already gone as you cannot exist.
- nova22033 2y ago
  How did vanguard and blackrock get the money they invest in Microsoft? Hint: It's from average people investing in their retirement...
  - sylware 2y ago
    This is not what I said: 1 - they have their own cash from huge racketering (forced) monetary streams. 2 - then, you still have the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock. Those gigantic amounts of money are 'economically weaponized' to 'economically destroy' any sane alternatives, at worldwide scale. RIP "ecomonic competition" (who thinks nowadays this thing is not a scam). So you say the very average people investing there are plainly aware their money is engaged in 'economic tyrany' which forces down the throat of nearly all average people, that worldwide, the _amazing_ msft software ? mmmmh....
- etothepii 2y ago
  The real difference with tech is that this isn't true. If you make something people want you can sell it. When I started our company 4 years ago I'd have considered $1m ARR a massive achievement. Now I'm here in my heart I feel a need to grow and raise or we'll die - but In my head I don't think this is actually true. I don't think there has been a time in human history before where a company of our size (30x median wages) could have been built without needing a great deal of capital. If Microsoft/Google et al want to use Blackrock/Vanguard's money to buy up small companies that creates more incentive for the young and idealistic to start such companies. While economic security is of sufficient value that resisting a first buyout would be hard for most (hence Sergey and Larry trying to sell for $1m) once a first buyout has been achieved a second buyout can never be forced.
  - sylware 2y ago
    This is delusional: If you bother them and you are to follow the basic 'economic rules', you have zero chance. If you want to exist in that case: 1 - you must have the will to resist them (for how long, since they will always be around in some shape due to unlimited funding). 2 - you must have some kind of mechanism to be 'outside of the basic economic rules' (usually subsidies or similar).
    - etothepii 2y ago
      Which part is delusional? Yes most people would struggle to resist a $5m buyout (e.g. Larry and Sergey) but if you had $5m in the bank you would be quite robust in your ability to resist further economic pressure - if you wanted to. Most 20 year olds can get by on <$20k a year if they are willing to flat share, move home, eat noodles etc, given SWE make $150k+ most can generate this short of revenue on their own in short order. The vast, vast amount of software is unbelievably bad. It does the task it's designed for just barely, the idea there isn't massive opportunity for improvement, fun and profit is patently absurd. Not sure what part of this is delusional.
      - sylware 2y ago
        Huh? This is much more complicated than a ridiculous $5m buyout. They will spend you out of business, financially chock you if you follow the 'basic economic rules', they even won't know you exist. Yes, this is delusional. You would need infinite subsidies, an iron will, hardcore regulation, all that for forever to have a little chance at being significant. (side note: on HN, many are aware than most software, open source or not, are brain diarrhea).
Etheryte 2y ago
I wonder who you'd put in that bucket today, who is the looming incumbent who might just show up and eat your lunch. For some time it was Meta, they definitely strong armed a bunch of small upstarts to sell out rather than compete. Right now I'm not so sure, there isn't any single name that comes to mind.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  What upstarts did Meta strong arm? From my recollection, they paid enormous amounts of money for websites and apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. There were so many threads on this website alone about how much extra Meta was paying and how they would ever see a return.
roenxi 2y ago
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 seemed to move over to social media companies and Apple, then Nvidia and all the industries it spawned. Google certainly aren't driving commercial innovation in the way they were when Gmail was a hot new topic.
- gadders 2y ago
  I think google are in the enshittification phase of their corporate development and are currently in a cycle of making 0.1% more revenue on search changes at the expense of making it 5% shittier for users each time.
  - DanielHB 2y ago
    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. If google had a serious person in the helm doing long-term strategy microsoft would already be dead and buried (or worse IBM-fied). Instead the CEOs stock market min-maxers took over.
    - gadders 2y ago
      Yes, I don't disagree. Microsoft did seem to be going the way of IBM. But yeah, Google had no long term strategy, or ever gave any impression of a road map.
      - DanielHB 2y ago
        It is funny how it is easier for google to acquire companies than do strategy in-house. Like they buy Youtube and Android and then pump them with resources instead of trying to do in-house. If they had bought a video-call company instead of doing inhouse with google meet they would probably have monopoly on that too.
karterk 2y ago
Satya saved Microsoft by doubling down on Azure and Cloud. Something that Balmer failed to do with Mobile.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Meanwhile he allowed desktop development to become a mess, he was the one killing mobile, and now Microsoft is dependent on Google and Apple for mobile endpoints, other than laptops.
- breadwinner 2y ago
  ... by becoming OSS friendly, and especially Linux friendly. Prior to that Microsoft and Azure were irrelevant because nobody wanted to run their backends on Windows.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Azure always had a very large and devoted following of corps who were all in on Windows, even in the early days when everything Azure ran on Windows. They had a very deep fanbase which caused them to not see things from the Silicon Valley perspective
    - incrudible 2y ago
      Yes, the same nerds who would balk at using Windows would have balked at using Azure, but when it was time to choose clouds, that foot that Microsoft had in the door with corporate paid off big time. Many people have the privilege of working detached from the corporate world, but that also leads to warped perceptions like that of Paul in 2007.
      - aprilthird2021 2y ago
        Yep, I do think Paul was presciently observing a powerful class of people who would end up making the decisions in big companies that would not end up being all in MS customers, but I also remember being shocked seeing the demand for Azure when it first released (we wrote add-on software for cloud deployments for the big 3 clouds, and some smaller ones)
baxtr 2y ago
What is this telling us about the stuff he writes with full conviction today?
- discordance 2y ago
  That times change? This was a lot more accurate when it was published in 2007.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    I think a key aspect of calling a thing "dead" is that it implies permanency. In other words, it can't have been more accurate in 2007 if it isn't accurate now, which it appears to not be. Maybe if pg had said "irrelevant" instead. (Others have pointed out that 2007 wasn't even a particularly bad year for MSFT.)
- teekert 2y ago
  That nobody can predict the future? However, there are people that have the intellect and the information to do it better than others. Btw, it contains stuff like this "The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.". Microsoft (or Satya did) also predicted the future, or read this post, and refocused (to online service such as MS365). There still correct, insightful stuff in this post. There is also "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." also radically different now they have GitHub and WSL, etc
  - deleted 2y ago
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- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  It tells us that he’s only human. That’s what fans of him will say and they’re right. The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human. Makes sense given where we are. This incubator is founded by him so there’s a bit of that irrational hero worship there.
deleted 2y ago
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deadlast2 2y ago
[Zero to One](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0...) book by Peter Thiel. One thing I took from this book is that Google Micrsoft, Meta are all monopolies. There is no competition. Look even in [Russia](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/russian-federation https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/russian-feder...), [China](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china) they all use thsi stuff.
leecommamichael 2y ago
More proof Hackernews is completely isolated from game development.
- everyone 2y ago
  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.
  - jmholla 2y ago
    In case you missed it, someone posted on HN a few days ago to try and get a similar site and culture up here: https://gamedev.city/ https://gamedev.city/
- taurknaut 2y ago
  [dead]
- badgersnake 2y ago
  It’s completely isolated from the real world.
  - dang 2y ago
    "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - deleted 2y ago
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nova22033 2y ago
This belongs in the Hall of Infamy Along with this https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-dell-says-hed-shut-apple-refund-shareholders https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-d...
buran77 2y ago
> 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 of Apple. Reading rich people's blogs reminds me every time that there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else. And by luck I mean a family golden nugget, or lucky first investment, or both. A superpower that allows one to fail many times and still be able to try again until they hit the next fortune. Most people in the world can't even afford to try. Most of the rest can't afford to fail.
- hliyan 2y ago
  Whenever I read these types of writing, it reminds me that just because a narrative is elegant, doesn't mean its true, especially when you're operating at very high levels of abstraction. Same problem I have with many pop psychology writings.
- dijit 2y ago
  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's were transitioning (or had transitioned) to Microsofts products. It's also why people knew AWS would be so popular ahead of time, because new tech companies were not renting compute anymore, they were passing their credit cards to Amazon - even causing some companies to bet their products on making tooling to make AWS easier. If you're at one end of the funnel, you can see the future. Was this the future? or was it a false positive based on a cohort? - I definitely think the market dominance of Windows on the Desktop has been thoroughly challenged since 2008, and it's rare I see people elect to use Windows for <10yo companies unless the founders are only used to Microsoft products. and I work in AAA games, which is insanely Microsoft dominated.
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bediger4000 2y ago
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.
- luma 2y ago
  I think it's largely because SV tech bros have almost zero intersection with enterprise compute as it's used in the rest of the world. PG sees nothing but Apple laptops around him, because everyone holding them has never worked for a diesel engine manufacturer in Michigan or a wood panel plant in North Carolina. The disconnect between SV and the rest of the world is as wide today as it has ever been.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
  - cb321 2y ago
    How about MANTFANG (for microsoft, apple, nvidia, tesla, facebook, amazon, netflix, google)? If you drop Tesla, you can have "MANFANG" which fits 2025 Hollywood's year of the werewolf or if you reorder them you could have "FATMANNG", a bit like the infamous FatMan and Little Boy. Or "GFATMANN". If you go by Google's "Alphabet" you could do "MANTAFAN". And probably many others WAY catchier AND slightly more complete than "FAANG", IMO.
codr7 2y ago
Given their trajectory at the time, they probably would be. Right now they're embracing open source and Linux, which has proven to be a very good idea. I'm still not convinced.
- ptdorf 2y ago
  EEE
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Android and ChromeOS. Google is being much better at that game with Linux.
mattmaroon 2y ago
"[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" He's not wrong there, I once had to use my laptop to display Jeff Bezos's Powerpoint when he was at Startup School because I was the only person around they knew had Windows. I tried so hard to like OSX, using it as my daily driver for two years, and I still wish I did.
taurknaut 2y ago
[flagged]
pwillia7 2y ago
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gigatexal 2y ago
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.
- sealeck 2y ago
  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).
  - stonogo 2y ago
    Paul Graham lives in a bubble. This article ignores the entirety of the actual real world because he talked to one person who didn't understand a reference to ancient history. Microsoft's entire business model has changed, but Paul Graham's bubble hasn't. 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."
    - gigatexal 2y ago
      You said it better than I did. I was trying to say just this.
bsnnkv 2y ago
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 sluggish, slow and unresponsive in comparison. In particular the experience of using a wireless mouse is like dragging the cursor through heavy sludge.
- thijson 2y ago
  I've stuck with windows due to better power management support. Native Linux hasn't supported my hardware very well. Also my kids occasionally want to play Roblox or other games on my computers. Apple products are too expensive for me.
- dtquad 2y ago
  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.
  - bsnnkv 2y ago
    Relevant article from a few years ago: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
- saalweachter 2y ago
  I too love the WSL, but at the same time-- If you needed to buy software, my entire life, chances are the software you needed was made for Windows. I use Linux for a desktop, use it professionally, but I keep a Windows laptop around because every time a hobby butts up against software -- for instance, the control software for a CNC -- that software is written for Windows. (Yes, yes, there are open source alternatives, it's just codegen and largely generic APIs, but the software everyone uses runs on Windows.)
simion314 2y ago
Just a rant about MS , people here claim how good they are with backwards compatibility. Bullshit, we were using an MS Azure TTS API, MS also had anew similar API but in alpha so we could not use that one back then. The old API has still more then 1 year of support but the MS "very nice guys" /sarcasm started breaking it, like one day one end point returns a different response structure, I fix it and next weak other endpoint changes the response structure, and the results start to bug out, returns success but transcription is incomplete etc . In the end I did the work and move the new API, I am not sure how much this new one will work, maybe the nice guys at MS will want to restart things again with some new even more shiny thing. Some fanboy will claim this is just a mistake and MS team are just incompetent and have no tests, and support if busy with other stuff.
- foul 2y ago
  MS in fact is good with backwards compatibility only under windows/related software and maybe xbox, those bragging about MS' love of legacy aren't wrong, they are just focused on their almost historical product, what made Microsoft. We can't say "no big deal" tbf, because for example Office files had fairly good longevity across updates (not perfect, a lot of file broke). BUT anything else (embedded, cloud, AI, when they poisoned web standards, etc) isn't really under that much lauded backwards compatibility AFAIK.
  - simion314 2y ago
    Right, but in my case the API still has 1 year of support , so is negative backwards compatibility, MS devs break things before it;s end of life. Maybe I should be sorry, soem poor guy is tasked too work on the old API while the "cool" devs play with the new toys and maybe sabotage the other guy.
ghc 2y ago
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-share-of-the-consumer-market-has-dropped-from-95-to-20-in-8-years#:~:text=Taking%20a%20closer%20look%20at,of%20the%20consumer%20compute%20market. 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 all. Apple was the iPod company by that point. Almost all software of note ran only on Windows, and Office was required for all documents. That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web. That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...it's not the same company at all. In fact, there is no company today even fractionally as dominant. Google's search monopoly or Apple's App Store monopoly just don't compare. It appears all the critical commenters think PG was unaware of these facts, but they critically misunderstand the truth on the ground. There was no way for PG to not know that Microsoft was dominant everywhere because Windows ran everything (even digital signage) and Word documents were a more accepted interchange format than even PDFs. He was invoking Gibson's observation that the future is unevenly distributed, and he was right: The movement of almost all applications to the web absolutely annihilated Microsft's ability to dictate what software smaller companies could or could not publish. Edit: Also, it seems unthinkable today, but back then we all had a large number of devices like printers and digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers. Microsoft essentially dictated what hardware you could buy too.
- bkfunk 2y ago
  “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 of archival data is not going to be converted from EBCDIC. Windows might be irrelevant to FAANG or MANGA or GAMMA or whatever, but how many Fortune 500 companies don’t have a significant Microsoft presence? Apple computers are pretty nice, but they’re expensive, and the vast majority of employees do fine with a cheap PC and Microsoft 365—why would a company pay more for unnecessary hardware that also requires rebuilding a bunch of IT systems, not to mention retraining thousands of employees.
stuaxo 2y ago
I remember reading this at the time, and thinking how much of a bubble he seemed to be in. Macs weren't something I saw that often at this time, just like now most computers were PCs.
- sjamaan 2y ago
  I dunno man. I just went on a tour of two schools for my daughter here in the Netherlands. They both use Chromebooks for their students as cheap machines that can be easily replaced. Those don't run Windows. Many "regular" folks have Mac machines because they no longer "have" to use Microsoft-specific software. Also, Microsoft doesn't have any phone OS (anymore) either - that's all Apple and Google. That definitely doesn't mean Microsoft is truly "dead", but they're no longer the giant that you can't avoid. Companies can afford to ignore them, and that's a far cry from the absolute and total utter market dominance they had in the nineties (which is how I read this article).
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rayiner 2y ago
Microsoft isn’t dead. It’s just become IBM. The gas giant phase of a dying star.
programmertote 2y ago
Whenever I see posts from famous people touted on Hacker News and Reddit, I always remind myself about this favorite quote of mine from Buddha (I'm a former Buddhist-turned-atheist, but I still agree with a few thinking and concepts from Buddhism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta > Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava), nor upon tradition (paramparā), nor upon rumor (itikirā), nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna) nor upon surmise (takka-hetu), nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu), nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka), nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā), nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya), nor upon the consideration 'The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)' Kalamas, when you yourselves know 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.
yellowstuff 2y ago
I'll admit that this is a charitable reading of the essay, but I think that MS was dead in 2007 and is still dead in 2025, in the sense that Graham was focused on. In the 90s startup founders were scared that if they started a software company MS would copy their idea and crush them. Bill Gates used to talk about how he wanted to "monopolize" software before the lawyers caught up with him. By 2007 MS was mostly irrelevant to startup founders, and with a few exceptions it's mostly irrelevant to them now. They're not in the business of crushing the life out of software startups anymore. Paul's a VC, and that's what he was focused on.
- deleted 2y ago
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- n4r9 2y ago
  That's a legit take. But I also think PG conveys his point poorly. He uses terms like "no one" and "dangerous" - and even "dead" - in a non-standard way without clarifying their meaning. Perhaps the meaning was more obvious to members of the startup scene in the 2000s, but then he's tying himself into a subcultures's perspective, which I feel is just as problematic.
INTPenis 2y ago
Paul got married in 2008 so maybe he has kids now, maybe they can tell him about a gaming PC that most likely runs Microsoft Windows. Or even an Xbox. I hope the shock of witnessing Microsoft Windows in the wild has subdued with time lol.
anothercoup 2y ago
> Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops I find this absolutely shocking. Was this a west coast thing? I graduated and got my first job around that time and never met a single developer who used an apple laptop. My CS department was entirely unix/linux/bsd and windows. All my internships and jobs post graduation was windows or linux. My experience was that the hacker community, cs community, developer community all looked down on apple laptops, especially back then. I guess we all live in our own little bubbles. Edit: Also, the worry back then wasn't so much that microsoft is dead, but that microsoft was expanding so much that even if you preferred to develop on a linux stack, you still wanted to get some background in C#, VB, tsql, etc to improve your chances at landing a job.
- shaftway 2y ago
  I haven't been issued a company laptop that wasn't OSX since 2009. Nowadays everyone makes a big deal about having the latest Apple M7.2 silicon.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
The OS-based Windows 98/2000 Microsoft is dead. The Enterprise Microsoft is very much alive and well.
- breadwinner 2y ago
  Sure they are alive, but they are not the 800 pound gorilla they used to be, who could freeze investments in an area just by announcing they are entering that area.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    I think they're still an 800 lb gorilla. It's just that now they're not the _only_ 800 lb gorilla.
    - breadwinner 2y ago
      Nope. Were you alive in the 1990's? It was completely different. Microsoft froze innovation in the industry. Nobody does that today.
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        I started coding in the early 80s, so yeah, indeed alive back then :) And I still respectfully disagree with you
_zagj 2y ago
I'm surprised no one posted this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... Joel Spolsky was on the Excel team at MS, and was the lead on VBA. He prudently couches his doomsaying with this disclaimer: > Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off
schmichael 2y ago
Alternative title: antitrust works. It didn't kill Microsoft. Microsoft isn't dead. However Microsoft does now have competitors. The takeaway here is that antitrust is fantastic for consumers and innovation.
umur 2y ago
As a side note, and to pg's point, Microsoft did make some very smart Web 2.0 acquisitions from Silicon Valley in the years since --most notably LinkedIn and Github--, and let them run relatively independently. > So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: 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.
ronyba 2y ago
Worst company ever no real tech all a bunch of salesman - CrowdStrike
G_o_D 2y ago
Now that windows 10 EOL has already been commited, forcing users to buy expensive new desktop/laptops to run heavy and extremely slow/laggy 'Shady' windows 11 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
shirro 2y ago
Like Oracle, their core competency for decades has been extracting rent from customers locked into their products. If they can't convincingly link a new product or service to their existing monopolies they don't tend to work out because they face more agile and directed competition. New product categories like mobile go through a boom and then they stabilise then some new hotness comes along. While other companies have to develop entire new product categories, Microsoft just keeps collecting rent money and locking people in harder. Get your new Office 365 now with ClippyPilot - soon people won't be able to wipe their own arses without consulting it. 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.
etempleton 2y ago
This was certainly near peak Microsoft malaise. The only interesting thing they were doing with the Xbox 360 and that was only interesting because the grown ups weren’t paying attention. (When they did start to pay attention we got the Xbox One). It is interesting perspective on how fast things can change in tech. Right now Intel seems doomed and Nvidia unbeatable, but it could all change in a few years time.

135 points by aamederen 2y ago

Those toxic companies have billions of cash, then backed by the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock. This money is sort of "weaponized". If you are not "them", if you stick to the basic "economic rules", you are already gone as you cannot exist.

nova22033 2y ago
How did vanguard and blackrock get the money they invest in Microsoft? Hint: It's from average people investing in their retirement...
- sylware 2y ago
  This is not what I said: 1 - they have their own cash from huge racketering (forced) monetary streams. 2 - then, you still have the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock. Those gigantic amounts of money are 'economically weaponized' to 'economically destroy' any sane alternatives, at worldwide scale. RIP "ecomonic competition" (who thinks nowadays this thing is not a scam). So you say the very average people investing there are plainly aware their money is engaged in 'economic tyrany' which forces down the throat of nearly all average people, that worldwide, the _amazing_ msft software ? mmmmh....
etothepii 2y ago
The real difference with tech is that this isn't true. If you make something people want you can sell it. When I started our company 4 years ago I'd have considered $1m ARR a massive achievement. Now I'm here in my heart I feel a need to grow and raise or we'll die - but In my head I don't think this is actually true. I don't think there has been a time in human history before where a company of our size (30x median wages) could have been built without needing a great deal of capital. If Microsoft/Google et al want to use Blackrock/Vanguard's money to buy up small companies that creates more incentive for the young and idealistic to start such companies. While economic security is of sufficient value that resisting a first buyout would be hard for most (hence Sergey and Larry trying to sell for $1m) once a first buyout has been achieved a second buyout can never be forced.
- sylware 2y ago
  This is delusional: If you bother them and you are to follow the basic 'economic rules', you have zero chance. If you want to exist in that case: 1 - you must have the will to resist them (for how long, since they will always be around in some shape due to unlimited funding). 2 - you must have some kind of mechanism to be 'outside of the basic economic rules' (usually subsidies or similar).
  - etothepii 2y ago
    Which part is delusional? Yes most people would struggle to resist a $5m buyout (e.g. Larry and Sergey) but if you had $5m in the bank you would be quite robust in your ability to resist further economic pressure - if you wanted to. Most 20 year olds can get by on <$20k a year if they are willing to flat share, move home, eat noodles etc, given SWE make $150k+ most can generate this short of revenue on their own in short order. The vast, vast amount of software is unbelievably bad. It does the task it's designed for just barely, the idea there isn't massive opportunity for improvement, fun and profit is patently absurd. Not sure what part of this is delusional.
    - sylware 2y ago
      Huh? This is much more complicated than a ridiculous $5m buyout. They will spend you out of business, financially chock you if you follow the 'basic economic rules', they even won't know you exist. Yes, this is delusional. You would need infinite subsidies, an iron will, hardcore regulation, all that for forever to have a little chance at being significant. (side note: on HN, many are aware than most software, open source or not, are brain diarrhea).

Etheryte 2y ago

I wonder who you'd put in that bucket today, who is the looming incumbent who might just show up and eat your lunch. For some time it was Meta, they definitely strong armed a bunch of small upstarts to sell out rather than compete. Right now I'm not so sure, there isn't any single name that comes to mind.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
What upstarts did Meta strong arm? From my recollection, they paid enormous amounts of money for websites and apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. There were so many threads on this website alone about how much extra Meta was paying and how they would ever see a return.

roenxi 2y ago

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 seemed to move over to social media companies and Apple, then Nvidia and all the industries it spawned. Google certainly aren't driving commercial innovation in the way they were when Gmail was a hot new topic.

gadders 2y ago
I think google are in the enshittification phase of their corporate development and are currently in a cycle of making 0.1% more revenue on search changes at the expense of making it 5% shittier for users each time.
- DanielHB 2y ago
  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. If google had a serious person in the helm doing long-term strategy microsoft would already be dead and buried (or worse IBM-fied). Instead the CEOs stock market min-maxers took over.
  - gadders 2y ago
    Yes, I don't disagree. Microsoft did seem to be going the way of IBM. But yeah, Google had no long term strategy, or ever gave any impression of a road map.
    - DanielHB 2y ago
      It is funny how it is easier for google to acquire companies than do strategy in-house. Like they buy Youtube and Android and then pump them with resources instead of trying to do in-house. If they had bought a video-call company instead of doing inhouse with google meet they would probably have monopoly on that too.

karterk 2y ago

Satya saved Microsoft by doubling down on Azure and Cloud. Something that Balmer failed to do with Mobile.

pjmlp 2y ago
Meanwhile he allowed desktop development to become a mess, he was the one killing mobile, and now Microsoft is dependent on Google and Apple for mobile endpoints, other than laptops.
breadwinner 2y ago
... by becoming OSS friendly, and especially Linux friendly. Prior to that Microsoft and Azure were irrelevant because nobody wanted to run their backends on Windows.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Azure always had a very large and devoted following of corps who were all in on Windows, even in the early days when everything Azure ran on Windows. They had a very deep fanbase which caused them to not see things from the Silicon Valley perspective
  - incrudible 2y ago
    Yes, the same nerds who would balk at using Windows would have balked at using Azure, but when it was time to choose clouds, that foot that Microsoft had in the door with corporate paid off big time. Many people have the privilege of working detached from the corporate world, but that also leads to warped perceptions like that of Paul in 2007.
    - aprilthird2021 2y ago
      Yep, I do think Paul was presciently observing a powerful class of people who would end up making the decisions in big companies that would not end up being all in MS customers, but I also remember being shocked seeing the demand for Azure when it first released (we wrote add-on software for cloud deployments for the big 3 clouds, and some smaller ones)

baxtr 2y ago

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

discordance 2y ago
That times change? This was a lot more accurate when it was published in 2007.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  I think a key aspect of calling a thing "dead" is that it implies permanency. In other words, it can't have been more accurate in 2007 if it isn't accurate now, which it appears to not be. Maybe if pg had said "irrelevant" instead. (Others have pointed out that 2007 wasn't even a particularly bad year for MSFT.)
teekert 2y ago
That nobody can predict the future? However, there are people that have the intellect and the information to do it better than others. Btw, it contains stuff like this "The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.". Microsoft (or Satya did) also predicted the future, or read this post, and refocused (to online service such as MS365). There still correct, insightful stuff in this post. There is also "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." also radically different now they have GitHub and WSL, etc
- deleted 2y ago
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ninetyninenine 2y ago
It tells us that he’s only human. That’s what fans of him will say and they’re right. The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human. Makes sense given where we are. This incubator is founded by him so there’s a bit of that irrational hero worship there.

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deadlast2 2y ago

[Zero to One](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0...) book by Peter Thiel. One thing I took from this book is that Google Micrsoft, Meta are all monopolies. There is no competition. Look even in [Russia](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/russian-federation https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/russian-feder...), [China](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china) they all use thsi stuff.

leecommamichael 2y ago

More proof Hackernews is completely isolated from game development.

everyone 2y ago
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.
- jmholla 2y ago
  In case you missed it, someone posted on HN a few days ago to try and get a similar site and culture up here: https://gamedev.city/ https://gamedev.city/
taurknaut 2y ago
[dead]
badgersnake 2y ago
It’s completely isolated from the real world.
- dang 2y ago
  "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 2y ago
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nova22033 2y ago

This belongs in the Hall of Infamy Along with this https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-dell-says-hed-shut-apple-refund-shareholders https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-d...

buran77 2y ago

> 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 of Apple. Reading rich people's blogs reminds me every time that there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else. And by luck I mean a family golden nugget, or lucky first investment, or both. A superpower that allows one to fail many times and still be able to try again until they hit the next fortune. Most people in the world can't even afford to try. Most of the rest can't afford to fail.

hliyan 2y ago
Whenever I read these types of writing, it reminds me that just because a narrative is elegant, doesn't mean its true, especially when you're operating at very high levels of abstraction. Same problem I have with many pop psychology writings.
dijit 2y ago
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's were transitioning (or had transitioned) to Microsofts products. It's also why people knew AWS would be so popular ahead of time, because new tech companies were not renting compute anymore, they were passing their credit cards to Amazon - even causing some companies to bet their products on making tooling to make AWS easier. If you're at one end of the funnel, you can see the future. Was this the future? or was it a false positive based on a cohort? - I definitely think the market dominance of Windows on the Desktop has been thoroughly challenged since 2008, and it's rare I see people elect to use Windows for <10yo companies unless the founders are only used to Microsoft products. and I work in AAA games, which is insanely Microsoft dominated.

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bediger4000 2y ago

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.

luma 2y ago
I think it's largely because SV tech bros have almost zero intersection with enterprise compute as it's used in the rest of the world. PG sees nothing but Apple laptops around him, because everyone holding them has never worked for a diesel engine manufacturer in Michigan or a wood panel plant in North Carolina. The disconnect between SV and the rest of the world is as wide today as it has ever been.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
- cb321 2y ago
  How about MANTFANG (for microsoft, apple, nvidia, tesla, facebook, amazon, netflix, google)? If you drop Tesla, you can have "MANFANG" which fits 2025 Hollywood's year of the werewolf or if you reorder them you could have "FATMANNG", a bit like the infamous FatMan and Little Boy. Or "GFATMANN". If you go by Google's "Alphabet" you could do "MANTAFAN". And probably many others WAY catchier AND slightly more complete than "FAANG", IMO.

codr7 2y ago

Given their trajectory at the time, they probably would be. Right now they're embracing open source and Linux, which has proven to be a very good idea. I'm still not convinced.

ptdorf 2y ago
EEE
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Android and ChromeOS. Google is being much better at that game with Linux.

mattmaroon 2y ago

"[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" He's not wrong there, I once had to use my laptop to display Jeff Bezos's Powerpoint when he was at Startup School because I was the only person around they knew had Windows. I tried so hard to like OSX, using it as my daily driver for two years, and I still wish I did.

taurknaut 2y ago

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pwillia7 2y ago

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gigatexal 2y ago

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.

sealeck 2y ago
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).
- stonogo 2y ago
  Paul Graham lives in a bubble. This article ignores the entirety of the actual real world because he talked to one person who didn't understand a reference to ancient history. Microsoft's entire business model has changed, but Paul Graham's bubble hasn't. 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."
  - gigatexal 2y ago
    You said it better than I did. I was trying to say just this.

bsnnkv 2y ago

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 sluggish, slow and unresponsive in comparison. In particular the experience of using a wireless mouse is like dragging the cursor through heavy sludge.

thijson 2y ago
I've stuck with windows due to better power management support. Native Linux hasn't supported my hardware very well. Also my kids occasionally want to play Roblox or other games on my computers. Apple products are too expensive for me.
dtquad 2y ago
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.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  Relevant article from a few years ago: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
saalweachter 2y ago
I too love the WSL, but at the same time-- If you needed to buy software, my entire life, chances are the software you needed was made for Windows. I use Linux for a desktop, use it professionally, but I keep a Windows laptop around because every time a hobby butts up against software -- for instance, the control software for a CNC -- that software is written for Windows. (Yes, yes, there are open source alternatives, it's just codegen and largely generic APIs, but the software everyone uses runs on Windows.)

simion314 2y ago

Just a rant about MS , people here claim how good they are with backwards compatibility. Bullshit, we were using an MS Azure TTS API, MS also had anew similar API but in alpha so we could not use that one back then. The old API has still more then 1 year of support but the MS "very nice guys" /sarcasm started breaking it, like one day one end point returns a different response structure, I fix it and next weak other endpoint changes the response structure, and the results start to bug out, returns success but transcription is incomplete etc . In the end I did the work and move the new API, I am not sure how much this new one will work, maybe the nice guys at MS will want to restart things again with some new even more shiny thing. Some fanboy will claim this is just a mistake and MS team are just incompetent and have no tests, and support if busy with other stuff.

foul 2y ago
MS in fact is good with backwards compatibility only under windows/related software and maybe xbox, those bragging about MS' love of legacy aren't wrong, they are just focused on their almost historical product, what made Microsoft. We can't say "no big deal" tbf, because for example Office files had fairly good longevity across updates (not perfect, a lot of file broke). BUT anything else (embedded, cloud, AI, when they poisoned web standards, etc) isn't really under that much lauded backwards compatibility AFAIK.
- simion314 2y ago
  Right, but in my case the API still has 1 year of support , so is negative backwards compatibility, MS devs break things before it;s end of life. Maybe I should be sorry, soem poor guy is tasked too work on the old API while the "cool" devs play with the new toys and maybe sabotage the other guy.

ghc 2y ago

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-share-of-the-consumer-market-has-dropped-from-95-to-20-in-8-years#:~:text=Taking%20a%20closer%20look%20at,of%20the%20consumer%20compute%20market. 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 all. Apple was the iPod company by that point. Almost all software of note ran only on Windows, and Office was required for all documents. That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web. That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...it's not the same company at all. In fact, there is no company today even fractionally as dominant. Google's search monopoly or Apple's App Store monopoly just don't compare. It appears all the critical commenters think PG was unaware of these facts, but they critically misunderstand the truth on the ground. There was no way for PG to not know that Microsoft was dominant everywhere because Windows ran everything (even digital signage) and Word documents were a more accepted interchange format than even PDFs. He was invoking Gibson's observation that the future is unevenly distributed, and he was right: The movement of almost all applications to the web absolutely annihilated Microsft's ability to dictate what software smaller companies could or could not publish. Edit: Also, it seems unthinkable today, but back then we all had a large number of devices like printers and digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers. Microsoft essentially dictated what hardware you could buy too.

bkfunk 2y ago
“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 of archival data is not going to be converted from EBCDIC. Windows might be irrelevant to FAANG or MANGA or GAMMA or whatever, but how many Fortune 500 companies don’t have a significant Microsoft presence? Apple computers are pretty nice, but they’re expensive, and the vast majority of employees do fine with a cheap PC and Microsoft 365—why would a company pay more for unnecessary hardware that also requires rebuilding a bunch of IT systems, not to mention retraining thousands of employees.

stuaxo 2y ago

I remember reading this at the time, and thinking how much of a bubble he seemed to be in. Macs weren't something I saw that often at this time, just like now most computers were PCs.

sjamaan 2y ago
I dunno man. I just went on a tour of two schools for my daughter here in the Netherlands. They both use Chromebooks for their students as cheap machines that can be easily replaced. Those don't run Windows. Many "regular" folks have Mac machines because they no longer "have" to use Microsoft-specific software. Also, Microsoft doesn't have any phone OS (anymore) either - that's all Apple and Google. That definitely doesn't mean Microsoft is truly "dead", but they're no longer the giant that you can't avoid. Companies can afford to ignore them, and that's a far cry from the absolute and total utter market dominance they had in the nineties (which is how I read this article).

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rayiner 2y ago

Microsoft isn’t dead. It’s just become IBM. The gas giant phase of a dying star.

programmertote 2y ago

Whenever I see posts from famous people touted on Hacker News and Reddit, I always remind myself about this favorite quote of mine from Buddha (I'm a former Buddhist-turned-atheist, but I still agree with a few thinking and concepts from Buddhism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta > Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava), nor upon tradition (paramparā), nor upon rumor (itikirā), nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna) nor upon surmise (takka-hetu), nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu), nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka), nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā), nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya), nor upon the consideration 'The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)' Kalamas, when you yourselves know 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.

yellowstuff 2y ago

I'll admit that this is a charitable reading of the essay, but I think that MS was dead in 2007 and is still dead in 2025, in the sense that Graham was focused on. In the 90s startup founders were scared that if they started a software company MS would copy their idea and crush them. Bill Gates used to talk about how he wanted to "monopolize" software before the lawyers caught up with him. By 2007 MS was mostly irrelevant to startup founders, and with a few exceptions it's mostly irrelevant to them now. They're not in the business of crushing the life out of software startups anymore. Paul's a VC, and that's what he was focused on.

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n4r9 2y ago
That's a legit take. But I also think PG conveys his point poorly. He uses terms like "no one" and "dangerous" - and even "dead" - in a non-standard way without clarifying their meaning. Perhaps the meaning was more obvious to members of the startup scene in the 2000s, but then he's tying himself into a subcultures's perspective, which I feel is just as problematic.

INTPenis 2y ago

Paul got married in 2008 so maybe he has kids now, maybe they can tell him about a gaming PC that most likely runs Microsoft Windows. Or even an Xbox. I hope the shock of witnessing Microsoft Windows in the wild has subdued with time lol.

anothercoup 2y ago

> Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops I find this absolutely shocking. Was this a west coast thing? I graduated and got my first job around that time and never met a single developer who used an apple laptop. My CS department was entirely unix/linux/bsd and windows. All my internships and jobs post graduation was windows or linux. My experience was that the hacker community, cs community, developer community all looked down on apple laptops, especially back then. I guess we all live in our own little bubbles. Edit: Also, the worry back then wasn't so much that microsoft is dead, but that microsoft was expanding so much that even if you preferred to develop on a linux stack, you still wanted to get some background in C#, VB, tsql, etc to improve your chances at landing a job.

shaftway 2y ago
I haven't been issued a company laptop that wasn't OSX since 2009. Nowadays everyone makes a big deal about having the latest Apple M7.2 silicon.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

The OS-based Windows 98/2000 Microsoft is dead. The Enterprise Microsoft is very much alive and well.

breadwinner 2y ago
Sure they are alive, but they are not the 800 pound gorilla they used to be, who could freeze investments in an area just by announcing they are entering that area.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  I think they're still an 800 lb gorilla. It's just that now they're not the _only_ 800 lb gorilla.
  - breadwinner 2y ago
    Nope. Were you alive in the 1990's? It was completely different. Microsoft froze innovation in the industry. Nobody does that today.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      I started coding in the early 80s, so yeah, indeed alive back then :) And I still respectfully disagree with you

_zagj 2y ago

I'm surprised no one posted this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... Joel Spolsky was on the Excel team at MS, and was the lead on VBA. He prudently couches his doomsaying with this disclaimer: > Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off

schmichael 2y ago

Alternative title: antitrust works. It didn't kill Microsoft. Microsoft isn't dead. However Microsoft does now have competitors. The takeaway here is that antitrust is fantastic for consumers and innovation.

umur 2y ago

As a side note, and to pg's point, Microsoft did make some very smart Web 2.0 acquisitions from Silicon Valley in the years since --most notably LinkedIn and Github--, and let them run relatively independently. > So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: 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.

ronyba 2y ago

Worst company ever no real tech all a bunch of salesman - CrowdStrike

G_o_D 2y ago

Now that windows 10 EOL has already been commited, forcing users to buy expensive new desktop/laptops to run heavy and extremely slow/laggy 'Shady' windows 11 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

shirro 2y ago

Like Oracle, their core competency for decades has been extracting rent from customers locked into their products. If they can't convincingly link a new product or service to their existing monopolies they don't tend to work out because they face more agile and directed competition. New product categories like mobile go through a boom and then they stabilise then some new hotness comes along. While other companies have to develop entire new product categories, Microsoft just keeps collecting rent money and locking people in harder. Get your new Office 365 now with ClippyPilot - soon people won't be able to wipe their own arses without consulting it. 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.

etempleton 2y ago

This was certainly near peak Microsoft malaise. The only interesting thing they were doing with the Xbox 360 and that was only interesting because the grown ups weren’t paying attention. (When they did start to pay attention we got the Xbox One). It is interesting perspective on how fast things can change in tech. Right now Intel seems doomed and Nvidia unbeatable, but it could all change in a few years time.