9 ms·
Microsoft is Dead (2007)
- huangc10 11y agoIt's interesting how the article mentions this: "The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple." Funny how much the industry has changed in 8 years.
- orionblastar 11y agoDupe post it has been on Hacker News before. It is a 2007 article. The classic Microsoft is dead, the Post-Gates Microsoft does Windows 10 and uses Cloud services.
- ycitera 11y agoI don't think it was true in 2007, but it appears to be true in 2015.
- 9935c101ab17a66 11y agoThere is very little value in you just dumping this here. So you think this wasn't valid in 2007, but is now. Why? I would be interested in why you feel that way. This would be a much stronger submission if you added value.
- freehunter 11y agoOddly enough, posted right after a Microsoft press conference where they announced a plethora of really nice devices that has many people on HN saying "wow" and proclaiming how they have reinvented themselves as a hardware company on par with Apple. But no, totally true, especially after today.
- ycitera 11y agoI guess if you can install a Linux OS on those nice devices, it would be a different story.
- eggy 11y agoI haven't been as excited about MS in a long time. I don't root for any one OS; I use what works for me. I have had, and still have them all: Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows 8 and 10. MS has open-sourced some really cool stuff [1]. Microsoft Research [2] is amazing; just look at the front page (Z3 high-performance theorem prover for one, F# and dev tools, Typescript, Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell) F* which has dependent types and compiles to F# or OCaml). I cannot find a similar site for Apple. The Apple domain is just a big online store for me selling product. MS Research is a cool site to browse just to see what tech they are developing and open sourcing. I think Apple is stagnating with the evolution of iOS like Android. I like the tiles in MS Windows 8 and 10 with live updates vs. the Android, iOS widgets and icons. I have owned Apple iPhones, Androids, but now I am looking at the MS Lumia 950XL when it becomes available. Android is not where I think it should be at by this iteration of the OS, and I am not locked in to any one eco-system, so the iPhone is not an option, although it still is a great design. [1] https://github.com/Microsoft https://github.com/Microsoft [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/
- agumonkey 11y agoAren't there waves ? This is how I see it http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SKfrICxISAo/U6H2fevDD_I/AAAAAAAAEAg/-iQHMCc-lRU/s1600/safari_absolute_statowl.png http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SKfrICxISAo/U6H2fevDD_I/AAAAAAAAEA... Apple was at the forefront after their revival. Google caught steam in the early 2Ks. Now they're both busy sustaining their model and Microsoft is eager for fresh love so their grabbing the ball. And that ball is half of the Apple style of product design and communication. That's the first time MS is so deep into aesthetics, glamour, engineering and talks. Before that it was a lot more nerd oriented.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoQuite the opposite, this is reposted precisely because they are going through the same renaissance that IBM went through in the late 90's where they are clearly reinventing themselves. In 2007 they were not even a blip on the radar. In 2015 they are clearly awake and innovating again. To what end remains to be seen.
- detaro 11y agoDupes after a long time are fine, and the last submission was two years ago and had nearly 200 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179
- taspeotis 11y agoIndeed, from the Hacker News FAQ [1]: > Are reposts ok? > If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- calcsam 11y ago2007: Microsoft is dead because no one is afraid of them. 2015: Is anyone afraid of Google?
- huangc10 11y agoNot sure if your question is sarcasm or not. Realistically, any startup can be afraid of Google, Facebook, Apple etc. If they decide to compete in your market and you can't adapt fast enough, you'll get crushed.
- msabalau 11y agoEurope, evidently.
- Cheyana 11y agoNo one is afraid of Microsoft or Google the way some businesses are afraid of Amazon.
- vasilipupkin 11y agoWell, I don't know, just about anyone who stands to lose from self driving cars going mainstream. Downvoters: obviously, self driving cars are a hugely positive development overall. But some players in the economy will lose.
- BrainInAJar 11y agoIf you aren't afraid of Google you aren't paying attention. They're the collection arm of the NSA.
- colinbartlett 11y agoCan a mod update the title to say "(2007)"?
- pcunite 11y agoPaul may have been on to something during this time frame. It is nice to know that Microsoft turned itself around if they were indeed headed the wrong way. Microsoft has been around a long time. Any company that can continue to adapt will also continue to stay in business. Microsoft has shown a capacity to do this. Today's news and products reflects this well.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoMicro. Microsoft, Rebirth. Microsoft, Part 2. Microsoft, the Comeback.
- datashovel 11y ago"They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous." This seems to be the quote that sums up the sentiment. Not that they're technically going out of business anytime soon.
- dlp211 11y agoAnd you wouldn't say that the past year is directly contradictory to this?
- wodenokoto 11y agoI think that is the point behind the repost. MS seems almost rising from the ashes like a Phoenix. But that doesn't make parent's quote wrong.
- mistersquid 11y agoI think the point of the word "dangerous" is a direct reference to the Microsoft of yore. For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read about the history), Microsoft was legendary for "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." an internal credo that became known outside the company and came to represent the ruthlessness with which Microsoft flexed its muscle in new technology markets. Microsoft was notorious for changing the way Windows works to stymie competitors, one of the most well known of these tactical maneuvers being the integration of IE into Windows which eventually killed Netscape. That particular bit of integration eventually led to their conviction under US anti-trust laws. Microsoft's culture has since changed. Microsoft no longer seems as interested in blocking all competitors. They are building products that leverage standardized platforms and the present-day Microsoft even meaningfully contributes to open source projects and refrains from promoting incompatible work-alikes. In other words, Microsoft is becoming once again a formidable company, this time with the that they tolerate (and increasingly collaborate with) other companies that develop technology to benefit users. Microsoft is discovering that being successful does not mean shutting everyone else out and for this reason they are not "dangerous" in the sense they were in the 1990s when their efforts and "success" in many ways prevented the industry from advancing. EDIT: Readability and style.
- detaro 11y agoEverybody: please don't flag this, I don't think it deserves it (and vouched it out of being flagged), especially since discussion threads have already started If someone wants to look at opinions over time, here are the past submissions, all with user discussions. 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085601 6 years ago: "Paul Graham revisits "Microsoft is Dead" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554295 9 years ago (8.5 actually, algolia rounds that up it seems): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770
- cryptoz 11y agoWell, unfortunately this post has been flagged a few times I think. Weirdly, I would have expected to see the "vouch" button show up that was recently added, but I don't see it. Is it not implemented yet, or maybe I don't have access to vouch?
- dang 11y agoIt only shows up on posts that are dead (marked [dead], [flagged], [dupe] etc.).
- alexmuro 11y agoThis is timely again, putting out new hardware and integrating every device with windows, even open sourcing its development platform isn't going to bring the developers back from the web. Personally I don't think it was as obvious in 2007 as it is now, that all apps would be on the web. Whats stranger is that Microsoft still doesn't seem to understand this.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- phn 11y agoMicrosoft is Dead. Long Live Microsoft.
- veidr 11y agoEnough time has elapsed in the 8 years since this was written that not only does everybody already know Microsoft is dead in the sense meant here, but the interesting question has now become: Admittedly, it is a long shot, but could Microsoft start to matter again?
- doctaj 11y agoI am personally excited about what Microsoft is doing with Visual Studio, MVC (Orchard, .NET), Surface, MS Band, Win10, and Azure. They continue to innovate and improve their products.... What more can consumers and programmers ask for?
- muddi900 11y agoWell Apple just announced a device chasing the Microsoft Surface, so I'd say MS is back on track.
- iandanforth 11y agoCan someone in the games industry venture an opinion of the danger MS poses in 2015? It seems they are innovating and buying more in this realm than otheres.
- jay_kyburz 11y agoI'm in the games industry as an indie and... well it's a big place and there are lots of changes going on. I wouldn't say they pose a danger to anybody who wants to make money making games. There will be no Embrace, Extend, Extinguish scenarios on the horizon which is what I think people mean by dangerous. Some people think VR is going to be big, but I think it's just a passing fad like 3DTV. The new minecraft stuff will be big, but I don't think World of Warcraft big. Indie PC games was all about Steam, but everybody is talking about the indie-apocalypse because steam recently got flooded with a lot of titles so nobody is making money there any more. Similar things are happening in iOS where production values are very high now which means the stakes are very high. It's still very much a lottery. The consoles are pretty much dead to me personally. I don't know what published think about it all. Then ofcourse there is the raging debate around free-to-play and premium games on every platform.
- erikj 11y agoMinecraft is already bigger than World of Warcraft, even without VR.
- bkjelden 11y ago> 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. This is an interesting quote. Who's the big man in town in 2015? It's probably still not Microsoft. But I'm not sure it's Google either - maybe it is, though. Is it Facebook? Apple? Amazon? Uber? I think you could make an interesting, but not overly convincing, case for each of those companies. I wonder who pg considers the big man in town.
- krick 11y agoMy vote is for Facebook.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- aggieben 11y ago> Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Sigh. It's clear that PG, as good a writer as he is, is the one in another world.
- cryptoz 11y agoPerhaps many of us are living in "another world", but I haven't seen a computer in the wild running Windows in the last ~6 months. I've been working in a few different co-working spaces in that time - mostly the startup crowd, I suppose, which heavily tilts towards Mac and Linux. Certainly PG isn't the only one who doesn't see very many Windows computers, and I think this has probably been increasingly true over the last ~9 years since this piece was written.
- doctaj 11y agoIt's easy to get lost in your own bubble.
- meow_mix 11y agoI think most college students will agree that they see windows every single day
- rootlocus 11y agoThis is a nice example for the Bayes theorem: what's the probability of seeing a computer running Windows "in the wild", given that "the wild" comprises the computers of a startup crowd located in the same area. When you're limiting the universe to such a small fraction of similar samples, you're bound to get skewed results.
- doctaj 11y agoYeah, OSX has like 8% market share at best. A person paying attention would be more surprised seeing a Mac.
- cryptoz 11y agoOS X market share can be 0% if your sample is a corporate office, or it can be 100% if you're in a startup space, a university class, etc. It really really depends on the context and your surroundings. Some people will be surprised by Windows, some by Mac. I think that PG probably assumes that the people he is around are building the future, and therefore, when he doesn't see Windows, he makes a connection there.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- on_ 11y agoPaul Graham was talking about something that sounded like either a distributed compiler or search/computing engine in 2008 at PyCon[9] and it can be argued it is something like the decentralized computing trend happening now. He said it would be "a byword for impossible" The thing about google is that, like Microsoft, it is a highly diversified company that does one thing and that is dangeroud. Peter Theil calls it a monopoly, maybe I would be a bit more delicate. Google and Microsoft have a ton of different products but each company really only sells 1 thing, a utility. Microsoft was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and google was that for the web. For the reasons addressed in PG's article Microsoft is Dead, it is evident that needs change but utilities usually don't. If you read What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? after this article, it is super short and basically says, the burden of proof is on you to not miss the next big idea. So much crazy shit is happening now it is difficult to say what will kill google. This essay was in 07', but it was too eary or too obvious, as he closes with. If 4 things killed google I would say they are: hardware: Hardware is definitely important, and we can argue about how and what context, but google doesn't build any. All their infrastructure, while massive, will be deprecated. privacy:"Don't be evil" is !== "Be Good". Advertising: Advertising is going to be A LOT less valuable, and the places it will be valuable have banned google. Decentralized Tech: No idea what the interim search engines will look like but it will be __________ then Artificial Intelligence. I think it is private search, where you buy computational resources and algorithims from a network but supply the seed data for your preferences and retain them. Probably BTC/PGP will replace DNS and you will send or lease your own googlebot and people will sell distributed search algorithims. While Chrome and the v8 engine make a pretty good google bot, people don't really trust google anymore which is why microsoft lost. No idea what it looks like, but it feels like someone is building it now. [0]http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html [9]If you know what I am talking about, and you know what he means by saying the name for it is "a byword for the impossible", I have been trying to figure out what he meant for ages.
- JamesMcMinn 11y agoIt's an interesting view, and in some ways it is correct. The Microsoft of the early 2000s is dead, and we have have (imo) a new Microsoft which is again producing some very interesting bits of technology and have evolved Windows into something, which whilst not necessarily better, is certainly more fitting for how we use technology today.
- joslin01 11y agoI secretly hope Microsoft and Windows dies. Then we can unite underneath a common core -- Unix!
- jaywunder 11y agoWell it's not so secret anymore haha. But why do you want Windows dead? I'm not much of a fan either, but competition is good.
- joslin01 11y agoI don't like that there has to be 2 ways to do one thing. For example: https://docs.python.org/2.0/ext/dynamic-linking.html https://docs.python.org/2.0/ext/dynamic-linking.html
- princetontiger 11y agoThey have $100B in cash... They can make one or two transformative acquisitions. All this doom and gloom a decade ago was a great chance to pick up a delicious dividend paying stock.
- Falkon1313 11y ago>One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over. And now in the post "Web 2.0" era, monopolies may be out, but walled gardens, superspy databases, and DRM'd things (tractors, coffeemakers, etc.) that you don't really own are in. What's the next wave of euphoria? Possibly re-decentralizing the internet? Doesn't sound like a Microsoft thing. Giving control back to the user? That sounds more Microsofty. Given the choice between using local software that you choose and control vs a remote app (from the the only walled garden you can access) that spies on you, rifles through your data, and may delete it at any time without your permission... They could find a market. At the moment, Microsoft is kind of unique in having an OS that's not tied to a walled garden app store by default, and which is centered around local desktop software (that usually doesn't have a lot of spying built-in) designed to work with local data. (other than Linux of course) The privacy issues of Windows 10 (in the default settings) do not indicate that they're going that route.
- ksec 11y agoWell, Yes Microsoft is dead. Or the Old Microsoft is dead. The New Microsoft, while not exactly in great shape, but at least they are learning and moving forward.
- Diabetus 11y agodoes not look dead to me (at least in the home OS market) http://hwzone.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/wwm.png http://hwzone.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/wwm.png those numbers are from September. Microsoft is claiming 110 million devices running windows 10.not dead at all