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."
Interesting (Score:0, Insightful)
The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing lasts for ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It Depends, Really (Score:2, Insightful)
4% of what? (Score:3, Insightful)
m10
Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
"All the computer people use Macs or Linux now
Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're not spending your time working in Dilbert land, or maintaining the computers of your inexpert family and friends, then yes, absolutely. Windows is for PCs that don't matter to the future of computing, and its marketshare in the segments that do matter is nowhere remotely close to 96%.
And this is a relatively new trend.
Not Yet (Score:4, Insightful)
What killed the dinosaurs? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Microsoft's fatal flaw is summed up in this quote:
Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.
And they never will. That's why they won't be able to adapt to changing climate conditions in technology and the nimble little warm-blooded creatures they barely notice will thrive and ultimately outlive them.
I mean look, they haven't even gotten rid of Ballmer yet. As long as he's on top it's going to remain the same stodgy old company it is now. MSFT reminds me of some 40 year old guy who thinks he's cool hitting on his daughter's college friends. He's the only one who doesn't realize he's creepy and pathetic.
Because MS has a new strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
Small companies don't fear being squashed by MS because that's not their primary game plan anymore. They have achieved the dominance that phase of their company wished for. Now, the new paradigm is to be acquired by them. MS doesn't innovate anymore, they assimilate. [wikipedia.org]
There are thousands of small start-ups that have this as their primary goal. Get a good idea, build it up to where it shows up on some large company's radar, then be acquired by them. Then, retire. And MS is a leader in this area.
Re:Hype, hype, and more hype (Score:2, Insightful)
Presuming that you aren't 15 and with no historic context from which to compare, why don't you watch what friends and relatives actually do with their PCs these days. You might be surprised to find that the average user spends vastly more time in their browser than anywhere else.
I Claim (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing lasts for ever (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree, nothing does last forever. To my mind Bill Gates knew some time ago that MS needed to 'diversify' at a minimum away from simply providing desktop software. His activities acquiring rights to art of varying sorts, and net-aware businesses in general, hinted that he believed the future of MS lay in content provision on the net.
Whether the way MS finally becomes irrelevant in terms of software production is web apps (which they seem unwilling to attempt), the all-consuming adoption of Linux and open source software in the new economies of Africa, India and China or something else it seems inevitable that the older MS model of controlling the corporate software inventory is doomed. When most computers, globally, use Linux and the highly skilled Indian/Chinese techies establish global support companies for this same software why would Western businesses need to pay top dollar for MS ?
With so much money MS have opportunities to move into whatever type or style of business they want to, but for that they need to be able to relinquish (at least partially) their philosophy that has made them so powerful. This proved hard for IBM in the 70s/80s and may prove just as hard for MS. Many of the people in positions of influence within MS have arived since they became a huge company and do not necessarily have the fresh ideas necessary to significantly change direction, despite the very fluid nature of high tech business.
Although my personal favourite to knock MS from its position in control of global software is the rise of the new economies based on Linux I'm prepared to be proved wrong...I just don't think I'll be proved wrong by MS maintaining its position.
Odd definition of dead (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a very strange blog piece and I'm wondering what part of the galaxy this guy lives in:
1) Since when does "dead" mean a company that is no longer feared? True, MS has lost it's fear factor, but that is nothing like being dead. "Dead" means dead, as in SCO.
2) I wish I had a dime for every time someone says the desktop is dead and all apps will from now on be web hosted. This is so old and isn't going to happen. Sure Ajax has made the web a lot more responsive and desktop-like but there is a long list of limtations having to do with availability, security, etc. It's not all about bandwidth.
3) Take a walk through the airport or just about any business office, the dentist, doctor's office, etc. How many Mac or Linux boxes do you see? Not that many. Sure Macs are a lot more popular now and growing, but to claim that he sees hardly anything but Macs and Linux makes me wonder about what planet he comes from.
Barbed wire (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not Yet (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about whether it's "dead" or not... (Score:2, Insightful)
How much longer will we be forced to use their software at work, such as Windows and
How much more time of our life will be wasted having to fix some Visual Basic monstrosity and the like?
How much longer until they can no longer damage others through their inmoral and sometimes illegal business practices (SCO anyone?)
I actually RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a time 5 years ago that if MS released a technology, now matter how bad, would become the de-facto standard for no other reason than MS released it. MS has yet to do anything new in about 2 years that has become the supreme technology just because they blessed it. Their game of catchup with Google has yielded nothing powerful. Their strategy has been mostly centered around Windows Live, which has yet to garner any real interest. All their Web 2.0 stuff is massively better than what they were releasing 5 years ago (their mapping software isn't half bad), but I've yet to interact with someone who's excited over it. I know a lot of web developers who get a boner over the Google maps API though. Even their desktop software hasn't yielded anything terribly popular. People will keep using Windows and Office, but be extremely slow to adopt any of their new technology.
I guess the real nail in the coffin is that there's no single company for MS to set their sights on. The entire web is surpassing them, not just Google. Google is giving important direction and acting sort of as a leader for the industry, but I see just as many interesting things coming from outside of Google as in. How can MS compete with that? They can keep trying to break IE as much as possible, but even there they are being forced by the market to become more standards compliant.
I don't think MS will just go away and they probably will be relegated to Windows and Office until those are slowly chipped at. The OS market will one day reach the maturity hardware has and there will be standards and most common software will be written in cross platform toolkits. It will happen so slowly that we'll step back and say "Remember Microsoft 15 years ago?" just as we are saying today "Remember Microsoft 5 years ago".
Re:It Depends, Really (Score:3, Insightful)
The desktop is dead?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see inherently Web-centric applications (email, searches, etc) as migrating to the Web -- but for things like word processing, circuit simulation, and (most dramatically) video editing, I can't imagine how running these over the Internet is going to work, let alone make them Better. Even with the new fiber-optic cable they just finished burying here.
Do I just not "get" it? Why should I use Web-based applications when OpenOffice works just as well? Why complicate things by introducing more points of failure (the whole Internet connection chain of devices, software, and protocols) into the mix?
Re:Look at it from Graham's Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, "Bright and innovative" people only use Macs. Buy a Mac and you can be bright and innovative too!
Shows that MS marketing is effective (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be a mistake for any company to think that Microsfot is dead.
Re:Look at it from Graham's Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, speaking as a died-in-the-wool penguin-head, I'd obviously have to dispute that :)
Tell you what, think of it in terms of zeitgeist [wikipedia.org]. In the 90s MS had it, and the prospered, due in no small part to the fact that everyone wanted to use Windows. These days, I don't think they do, and I think the talent in the industry is starting to look elsewhere.
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:4, Insightful)
It is too late now. They have burnt too many bridges. Even the hardware makers hate MSFT because they changed VISTA just enough to break all the drivers. Millions of school kids are experiencing the richness of GNU/Linux. Dell and HP are getting serious about Linux machines (maybe). The EU may realize that mega-fines are not enough and outright ban MSFT. Even Uncle Sam is discouraging the use of Windows for security. MSFT is like a long-necked dinosaur trapped in a tar pit. The brain is so small and so far away that it has not received the final BSOD yet. The body is cooling slowly because of the large mass to surface ratio.
Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you define "segments that matter"?
Re:Look at it from Graham's Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Education has been playing with alternate OSs like BSD, Linux etc. forever. Macs have always had their strengths in certain graphics and design environments. Even in small businesses, particularly not IT-related, most use Windows because that's what they know either from past work experience or from home.
Don't underestimate the power of "That's neat, when is it coming to Windows?". It's been proven time and time again that even if you add new and innovative features, people resist change. Most people have little understanding, they have a fixed set of semi-memorized recipes for doing things. Do this, click that, select this, drag&drop that.
All I'm saying is that while they might be the "innovative" platforms, though I think you're ignoring a lot of mundane innovation going on in improving products for those 95%, but I'm hardly convinced we'll see any mass exodus from Windows all the same.
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:2, Insightful)
Credit Linux a bit, it prevented total monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
In the mid-90's, when NT stabilized and swiftly sank the whole Unix workstation market, and started putting out real server products that slowly shut down Novell and Banyan, it began to look like Microsoft would soon own all levels of computing. From their secure base of total desktop ownership, they could leverage control of workstation, small server and soon, no doubt, large server markets. And on the other side, Windows CE was going to take over all the TV set boxes and music players and microwave ovens. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of a company that, like IBM, was not another fish but rather the Sea itself.
There was nothing that the minicomputer and Unix workstation companies like DEC and Sun could do to hold back the tide - Microsoft was cheaper software, had the unstoppable advantage of running on cheaper commodity hardware, and again, the desktop that could be tweaked to only work right with one server.
Then Linux came along, operating more efficiently on the same cheap commodity hardware and with even cheaper software. It shut them out of monopoly in the server market. Sure, they have a presence, but only as another competitor, not as a monopolist. And Linux is where everybody went for entertainment appliances, CE is a *minor* competitor there.
That left Microsoft with a monopoly ONLY on the desktop and no way to take over anything larger or smaller.
Re:The article sounded credible until I read. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
The real trend in the server room is to commodity x86 servers, not Windows. Of course, Windows has benefited from that trend, but Linux has benefited more, and both have benefited by taking share from bigger iron.
The creative sectors in computing are in academia, start-ups, and the high-end of the hobbyist community. These people define what we will be doing in 5-10 years. Every important new trend of the last 20 years has come out of this sector, including the Internet and Web itself. 20 years ago, most people in this sector used Microsoft OSes, because the IBM PC platform was the most open and hackable platform for expressing their creativity, and Microsoft had the hackable OS of choice for that platform. 10 years ago, Unix and Unix-like OSes were making inroads, but the Microsoft PC was still cheaper and easier to work with in most respects. Today, the PC is still the hackable hardware platform of choice, but the difference is that there are better hacker-friendly OSes to run on it. And not just one, but at least four (counting Linux, OS X, BSD, and OpenSolaris). Meanwhile, Windows is becoming less hackable, with all of its protected paths and DRM and unnecessary levels of complexity that even Microsoft can't seem to keep sorted out.
Seriously, when Apple makes an OS that is more friendly to hackers than yours is, you know you've taken the wrong path.
Forgot to mention, they never took over the web (Score:4, Insightful)
It also looked, around the time of the Netscape-killing, that Microsoft would inexorably make the Web an MS gated community. That internal corporate web apps would all surely be ASP (and then,
But between MySQL, PHP, Python, et al, and of course Java, an alternative held together that relegated Microsoft web solutions to merely another competitor - a strong one, maybe, but not a monopoly that can dictate the whole game. It was some years where it all seemed to hang in the balance, maybe MS would eventually grind them all down. Around the time most people felt that LAMP was here to stay and Java had a well-entrenched community of its own, Firefox came up out of Netscape's grave and started nibbling down IE's market share even on Windows.
That's when I realized that MS was in a box. A big, big box full of money, sure, but still, it had met its limits.
Microsoft cannot eptly launch new things (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just the thing. The article is saying Microsoft has the power to do this, but not the ability. It used to be that Microsoft could look at a small product, and just announce they were doing something similar "due out soon" and that company was dead.
Now if Microsoft said "Oh, we're working on that" the effect would not kill a company. And there is a good chance that even if Microsoft did do all the work to build a new product, it would take them some time to deliver and being a Microsoft 1.0 product, it would suck - giving a small company pelnty of time to get a product through a few iterations, and have a good head start.
Microsoft does not have the ability to compete with quick and intelligently targeted iterations anymore.
Re:It Depends, Really (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as copying 1's and 0's is virtually free and unlimited, software business is very much different than any business that is limited by raw materials and labor to reproduce a product for sale.
If I write a piece of software, i can resell that software to as many people that want to buy it without much extra cost beyond the time it took come up with the initial source code. The margins on each copy are something like 99% (1% for packaging, distribution, bandwidth if you're letting people download it, etc...) This is why software/recording companies have to come up with ridiculous licenses and legislation to support their revenue streams. It is the reason piracy is so easy to justify for otherwise honest people. The tangible value of software is almost nothing. It is only worth the media is written on and/or the printed manual. If you can get it without media, then it has no real value. Well, it has value because you want it, but by copying it, you're not really stealing naything from the person who originally wrote it. At worst, your simply violating a contract which you never signed anyway. but I digress...
For an auto maker, the "source code" (R&D) is just the first step. Each automobile produced costs significant amount of money and resources, which cuts into the margins. When I buy a car, I'm paying for the raw materials and the construction of that particular object. If I could somehow make an exact copy of the Hyndai in my garage, I doubt anyone would consider that stealing as long as I paid for the raw materials and the construction. Maybe it would be dishonest to put a Hyndai label on it, but even that is only a problem if I'm selling it.
-matthew
Re:4% of what? (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Motorola's (and Freescale's) inability to produce higher performance PowerPC CPUs in an acceptable timeframe is what drive Apple to the x86 platform. Nothing else - and there needed to be nothing else, that's quite a problem by itself.
Re:What goes around come around (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess I'm going on anecdotial evidence though. Everyone I know (that's tech savvy) hates Microsoft. Most tech sites I go to has a strong dislike of Microsoft; especially, the posters in the forums. Some article writers like Microsoft, but many dislike Microsoft. Many of them are forced to feign a respect for Microsoft to ensure their support.
I'm sure I could find many examples of the dislike for Microsoft if I'd take time to Google for them. But negative comments and attitudes towards Microsoft are so common, that if your unaware of them in the imaginary world you live in, who am I to disagree?
Re:They never got nicer and were ignored. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not Yet (Score:1, Insightful)
Paul Graham is desperately trying to stay (become?) relevant. See, it worked, he got some coverage on slashdot.
Reminds me of John Dvorak or Marc Andreessen. Hey, for that matter, take all three of them, add in one "CmdrTaco", and you have FOUR people that no longer matter.
Re:Who is Paul Graham? (Score:3, Insightful)
He got rich writing lisp code. You don't think that's an impressive trick? Try it sometime.
The trouble -- in my opinion -- is that he got rich at his second job, which means he doesn't really have a very wide experience. He's always happy to give you advice on how to become rich exactly the way he did, but doesn't seem to be even conscious of possibilities like (a) maybe a lot of his success was luck, finding an angel to sell out to (yahoo) in the middle of Bubble 1.0 and (b) maybe some of us don't particularly care about getting rich. Some of my heroes are rich guys, but on the other hand I wouldn't object to be being "successful" like Richard Stallman or Tim Berners-Lee.
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the business to do with Ubuntu? Does Ubuntu carry all the Linux applications on the planet?
The lack of a stable ABI means lack of commercial applications, and a big waste of open-source debelopers’ time on unnecessary porting and building. I still can run the Win32 applications published ten years ago, and even DOS applications published fifteen or more years ago—I call that an advantage.
As long as there is not a free alternative to Windows (and I doubt its possibility, given the technical and legal obstacles), I do not see the decline of Microsoft Windows in the near future.
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Very nearly so. Via apt repositories, most refined and stable applications (certainly the most popular ones) are available with a click. Furthermore, all the dependencies are automatically sorted out. That is a Really Big Thing when it comes to ease of use for the non-technical user. This is one of the main reasons I consider Ubuntu 'easier to use' than Windows. The other is that the naming of menu items and layout of admin UI components is more intuitive IMHO.
The lack of a stable ABI means lack of commercial applications, and a big waste of open-source debelopers' time on unnecessary porting and building. I still can run the Win32 applications published ten years ago, and even DOS applications published fifteen or more years ago--I call that an advantage.
I've been using both Windows and Linux almost since the origins of both, and my experience just does not match yours. The Linux API and ABI have remained very stable, usually more so than Windows. Just look at how much Vista breaks backwards compatibility to see what I mean. Do google search on the term 'DLL hell' for earlier examples. Even when Linux libraries do rev and break compatibility with binaries, it is often easily fixed by installing a 'legacy support' package (easily done with the point and click package management. But of course the whole point with Linux is that you don't have to run old binaries anyway; your package manager handles dependencies and keeps everything in sync as upgrades become available.
Sure, if you live on the bleeding edge and compile apps from source, you can run into troubles, but the whole point here is that the typical user is not going to do that (nor do the have to anymore). They can stick with the apps within the repositories and still have a huge library of to choose from, all easily installed and upgraded with a mouse click. Commercial software vendor that want their stuff to reach customers just need to put them in an apt repository or CNR or some such. This is the new model for software distribution, and Linux is way ahead of the game here.
Furthermore, this is not just my opinion as a computer guru; I've dropped Ubuntu in front of newbies and gotten very favorable responses. Yes, you have to make sure you select compatible hardware, and yes, you can't just run to to Best Buy and grab any old shrinkwrap software to run on it... but the same is true of a Mac and yet people still manage fine with those.
As long as there is not a free alternative to Windows (and I doubt its possibility, given the technical and legal obstacles), I do not see the decline of Microsoft Windows in the near future.
Perhaps not, but Windows does not have to tank for Linux to be a viable desktop. For a great many people, it is a better option than what they have now. Perhaps not if you play a lot of games, but certainly for Internet surfing and office productivity and such it is a stable, friendly, virus free alternative.
I'm not saying Ubuntu Linux is problem free, but lets be honest here, neither is Windows (there certainly seems to be plenty of problems reported with Vista). Linux has a few areas where it really shines compared to Windows. That includes security, stability, software installation, and now days even ease of use. But, hey, its free to try out, so I encourage people to be their own judge on this. Maybe it won't be for you... but then again you might be pleasantly surprised.
Re:It's not dead yet (Score:2, Insightful)
While I appreciate much the work done in Ubuntu, I do not think a centralized repository works all the time.
I do not want to argue with you that Vista is bad. However, most user-level applications are not affected. And I do not think 'DLL hell' is inherently a problem of Windows architecture (still, Microsoft may be to blame, or the other producers of DLLs).
On the other hand, have a look at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php [sourceforge.net] to see how many packages are there for x86 Linus! That is what I think as bad as hell.
Maybe maybe. However, there is some doubt even on surfing (there are still a lot of IE-only sites around). No, I can tell you clearly that OOo is not as good as Microsoft Office, though I like very much the PDF output of OOo—even that is not for technical reasons, I believe. And you would need a lot more to exist in a business environment, which is the biggest source of Windows sales....