Paul Graham Claims "Microsoft is Dead" 536
netbuzz writes "He doesn't mean dead as in six feet under, but rather that the software giant no longer instills the kind of fear — particularly among entrepreneurs — that it did back in the day when it was making road kill out of companies like Netscape. Microsoft obits have been around for almost as long as the company, but Graham's stature, style and devoted following are likely to make this one a classic."
Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:2, Informative)
Not dead, but irrelivant (Score:5, Informative)
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:2, Informative)
I work outside Silicon Valley but in a service/technology company that "hangs" with Google, Yahoo, Redhat, MySQL (and Microsoft) on a regular basis. Our standard desktop is a Windows-based Dell. However, with a perfunctory sign-off from a manager any OS can be installed by the user. We have Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat, Fedora, SuSE, Slackware, and Vista (also requires a sign-off; very few of these, though) desktops. However the biggest buzz among the technical gurus is OS X on the Dell desktops. Once a reference installation was perfected many of us switched to OS X on our Dells. For years private laptops and home machines have been OS X among all classes of employees. Now there are efforts to get OS X regardless of the roadblocks. Why? Because it is intriguing.
What is intriguing to an early adopter gets noticed by people looking to invest in the the next generation of an industry. Nothing Microsoft is doing is intriguing today. Vista's selling point is its attempts to fix the security issues through Nannifying the UI. Yawn. The graphics? Yawn.
Before we started pirating OS X to our Dells we would gather and gawk at Beryl desktops... No one gathers and gawks at anything MS has done (besides the .ANI holes... it's fun to exploit that on the sales people's desktops...).
No one, except Miguel care about what MS does anymore. No one that matters to the next generation of computing, I mean.
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:5, Informative)
Have you tried Ubuntu? Your argument might have been true at one time, but it doesn't hold water anymore. Ubuntu is actually easier to install and manage than Windows, and installing software is waaaaay easier with their point and click Add/Remove Applications interface. It even trumps Vista in the eye candy department when you install Beryl. The only advantage Windows has at this point is availability of various popular applications and games, and that gap is steadily narrowing.
The truth is, most users have no loyalty to Windows; their loyalty is to applications. As the Linux application market matures (and it is, rapidly), arguments against migration dissolve.
Thad
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:5, Informative)
We're talking about UNIX and VMS.
Welcome back to 1987, only with smaller boxen that fit with your decor and have slicker UIs. Oh, and the games are better, for the most part.
Oh, and remember how UNIX vs. VMS turned out?
(Unfortunately, it's harder to turn your old computer into a bar [glendale.ca.us] now...)
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:5, Informative)
That little microcosm pretty much defines the limits of the industries that evolved around the commercial computer-on-a-chip.
Thirty years experience in programming for the micro computer.
90% of the world's desktops. Development tools for the PC. An office suite, a server OS.
The U.S. Navy's Off-The-Shelf "Smart Ship" OS. [Stop thinking about the Cruiser Yorktown - decommissioned in 2004 - and start thinking about the Carrier Ronald Reagan, in service now]
Synonymous with PC gaming. Strongly positioned in console gaming. Mobile devices. Etc, etc.
How much more "in touch" do you need to be?
Make the bad man stop, please (Score:4, Informative)
http://marius.scurtescu.com/node/85 [scurtescu.com]
Indeed, the same package shows up in Ubuntu repos from Dapper onward (as the first link describes):
http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_package
It seems that TortoiseSVN has problems with Vista. I haven't tried the svn nautilus integration yet, but there's no bugs filed against it. If you run into any, please do file a report. Personally, I choose to use editors that have SVN / CVS support built in. But I suppose some web developers may prefer a seperate client or something.
In my own experience, Windows has been about as bad as Linux with hardware. Vista's nvidia are only slightly better than Linux's with regard to suspend: instead of locking up during suspend to RAM, it fails to initialize the video on restart. Equally unusable, really. Feisty's due to make some changes with nvidia that should help alleviate restricted drivers like the nvidia closed source binary. I think it's important to stress that Linux is first and foremost an open system. If it also serves as a usable system for people who don't care, and continues to be that way, I'm willing to attribute that to the openness of the system, and so much the better. But as much as open source considerations get in the way of the user experience, they are a second class citizen in my sight. Linux makes a fantastic hacker's system.
For example, FUSE is a great idea that has several great examples with few / no comparable in Windows. Daemontools in Windows lets you present a file as if it were a cd in a drive. FUSEISO does the same thing for windows, though the GUI aspect is not quite finished. FUSE presents this mount globally, without the need for applications to know about it. And it doesn't require significant user privileges. But the greatest part about FUSE is that it's the core to several components, like gmailfs, and sshfs, ftpfs, you name it. NTFS support was written this way with good success. There's fuse modules to present Doom WAD files as a directory. There's one to access your blog. In contrast, whatever technology daemon tools is using remains cloistered.
So yea, there's a learning curve, but I'm not gonna start advocating compatiblity with Windows programs to solve it. Downloading crap from random internet sites is the modus operandi of Windows software distribution, and it's crazy insecure. Ubuntu takes the steps proprietary software can't, packaging and distributing tested and signed versions of software, without including spyware (unless you count popcon
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:4, Informative)
This is probably better than coming up with a badly designed API and having it flop.
Wikipedia has a list [wikipedia.org] of 60 companies acquired since 1994, along with investments in another 160
That compares similarly with (Yahoo's acquisition list [tomokeefe.com] and Google's acquisition list>/a> [wikipedia.org]
All corporations perform acquisitions. Microsoft's real crime is bundling (if not mashing) their applications with the OS (Internet Explorer as one example) and demanding that hardware vendors bundle Windows OS with all desktop/laptop systems.