8 ms·

Microsoft is Dead (2007)

111 points by WisNorCan 8y ago

consultutah 8y ago
I would argue that MS WAS dead under Balmer, but not only for the reasons that PG mentions. However, it has been resurrected under Satya.
- ktamura 8y ago
  This is not entirely true. Yes, Ballmer made many mistakes, but he also architected one of the most sustainably profitable enterprise software businesses (on the heels of all MS software products we love to hate). These enterprise customers are more than knees deep with Microsoft, and deep account penetration bought at least 5 years for Satya to steer the ship in the right direction (giving up on B2C mobile, Windows obsession, etc.) One of the most common biases I see in how we assess leaders is how we try to attribute success & failure to a single person at a discrete point in time (ex: Here in the US, the extreme Left claims Trump is taking credit for Obama's foundational effort for the economy while the extreme Right says it's all Trump). In reality, it is never that simple nor discrete but rather complex and continuous.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
nafizh 8y ago
How time changes. It seems Microsoft is back from the dead. And what Microsoft used to be, Google is trying their best to become.
theonemind 8y ago
It seems like Big Tech has switched over to amassing data and behavior manipulation ("engagement", etc.) as their main business model. I think that Microsoft didn't feel threatening because they still mostly just sold a product. I feel like we as a society haven't really entirely got a handle on this yet. Things emerge, like trusts, and it takes a while for people to understand what has happened. But, with things like Windows 10 telemetry you can't turn off, and Windows turning into a service, they've gotten back on board with how Big Tech runs these days. This pattern seems to hold really well. The giants mostly amass data and manipulate people. If they don't do this sort of thing, they don't really seem that threatening, regardless of their size. HP, IBM, Dell. Apple seems interesting, as a hold-out on just selling a product, but in the meta game, just direct manipulation of people really looks like a step up, and I don't predict they'll continue as anything approaching a "scary tech giant" in coming decades unless they change like Microsoft did.
- userbinator 8y ago
  But, with things like Windows 10 telemetry you can't turn off, and Windows turning into a service, they've gotten back on board with how Big Tech runs these days. Yes, I can confidently say that I miss the old Microsoft. They were strongly closed-source and proprietary (not that it didn't stop people from understanding how things worked anyway...), but they did not do the sort of data collection, behavioural analysis and advert-driven manipulation that the others were doing, and still highly valued backward-compatibility and stability. Now they're going the same route as the other tech giants, silently collecting information while also open-sourcing a lot of other things almost as a form of distraction/diversion. You could consider the fact that they're open-sourcing something to mean they're not interested in selling that as a product anymore, and that's because their profit is coming from somewhere else.
  - belltaco 8y ago
    They tried to make the public care with the gmail man campaign. https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/2/2766215/gmail-man-video-microsoft-google-privacy https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/2/2766215/gmail-ma... It was flagged dead on HN because the perception was "do no evil' Google good, M$ bad. They tried harder later on with the somewhat cringy Scroogled campaign and found out the public didnt care while Google laughed all the way to the bank while increasing data tracking, collection and usage. And here we are. Edit: Found a thread discussing it, with one top 10 by karma HN user explaining why they flagged it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544309
  - hakfoo 8y ago
    The interesting thing is, how battle-proven is the current ad/monitoring obsession as an actual business? It's trendy, but not every successful firm has to-- or should-- get on board. Microsoft's classic businesses are pretty comprehensible. Software (boxes or as a service) and cloud services are pretty solid business models. They don't require unrealistic expectations or gimmickry to work. There might be shifts within that market (the MSRP of a browser is 0, and that of an OS is plummeting towards 0 quickly), but you can realistically say "I want to sell a software package" or "I want to run a cloud service provider" and make a business case without fantastic assumptions. In contrast, much of the value of Google and Facebook and similar companies is based on anticipation of the future value of those big data stores, a largely unproven asset. Will consumers reach an "uncanny valley" moment for personalized marketing messages, resulting in a downturn in click-throughs? Will advertisers always be willing to pay a premium for improved targeting? I could see a competing product offering spray-and-pray banner ads with .01% click-through rates at a few cents per click outperforming hyper-targeted ads that draw a 5% click-through rate at several dollars a click. Will they be able to successfully retain, grow, and monetize their data hoard after the inevitable regulatory backlash? (I could imagine a sufficient data breach resulting in regulations that make the GDPR look small potatoes)
cronix 8y ago
> The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. The last sentence is ironically funny now that MS is back on top and Apple is slipping, and the article is about the "death" of MS. > Microsoft closed Friday with a larger market cap than Apple’s, making the Redmond software giant the most valuable U.S. stock. http://fortune.com/2018/11/30/microsoft-bumping-apple-is-now-the-most-valuable-u-s-company/ http://fortune.com/2018/11/30/microsoft-bumping-apple-is-now...
- kunai 8y ago
  > The last sentence is ironically funny now that MS is back on top and Apple is slipping, and the article is about the "death" of MS. Well, yes, I'm assuming the irony is part of the reason this was posted here.
21 8y ago
> Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas. > 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. And now, I bet a vast majority of people funded by YC use VS Code. Maybe even Azure.
- xenospn 8y ago
  They use VSCode, but they use it on Linux or OSX.
  - Daegalus 8y ago
    I've switched back to Windows 10 with WSL running Ubuntu 18.04 in it. Works well and gives me pretty great integrations.
    - dilap 8y ago
      I was playing around with this recently. I found myself really missing (1) homebrew (2) a decent terminal (I tried a bunch...) and (3) good trackpad drivers. Not huge things, but enough to make switching feel unappealing. (There are a few things similar to homebrew, but none seemed to have gained enough attraction to cover basically anything you could want, the way homebrew does.)
    - leetrout 8y ago
      I keep trying and I keep going back to Mac or VMWare workstation and running the full Linux kernel for "proper" docker. WSL is great and I'm learning to like cmder but I really miss iterm.
    - jaxn 8y ago
      I also switched to Win 10 from Mac (and Linux before that). My Surface Book has a faulty battery and I am using an MBP when I'm not at the office. I not sure I will stick with Win 10 on my next computer, but I am sure I'm not going back to OSX. WSL isn't perfect, but it feel more open and more linux-like to me than OSX. Maybe a Pixel Book,maybe straight Linux.
WisNorCan 8y ago
It's probably a good thing that Microsoft did not follow the advice: > They can't hire smart people anymore, but they could buy as many as they wanted. > 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. Instead, Microsoft did the exact opposite. They picked Satya Nadella who had worked there since 1992. He has driven the innovation right out of Redmond, WA with no lead shielding required.
- lainga 8y ago
  It sounded like Paul wanted them to become a second Oracle.
  - ultrasounder 8y ago
    And look where ORCL is in relation to M$FT.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  This highlights the magical thinking we can suffer from in Silicon Valley where we believe we’re inherently better at solving problems here. It sounds like what Paul was saying is good ideas can no longer come from Redmond and the best they can do is buy a chunk of Silicon Valley and hope to ride on whatever success that nets them.
  - WisNorCan 8y ago
    Agree. Two of three largest companies in the world are now in the Seattle area with both Microsoft (#1) and Amazon (#3) thriving. Apple (#2), Google (#4) and Facebook (#5) are in the Bay Area.
    - xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
      I don't know about Apple but Facebook and Google have pretty big offices in Seattle as well, along with many other startups (Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, etc.) It seems the play these days is to have the best of both worlds.
mamcx 8y ago
Maybe death is good for a company. Maybe Apple, MS, Google, etc already die several times. Is just that enough of it survive and learn from the past, even a little. Maybe is easier to present the new king as the same old king, long live the king.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  The computer landscape is littered with the carcasses of once great companies, going back all the way back to RCA.
- why_only_15 8y ago
  I don't think Google has ever really "died". You could potentially make an argument that when social came along Google was somewhat upstaged, but not really that much.
- ummonk 8y ago
  On the other hand, I don't think it's realistically possible for Yahoo to come back from the dead at this point (and same for the other Oath company, AOL).
WalterBright 8y ago
I recall seeing a book in the cutout bin of a bookstore that made the case that IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut that would inevitably take over the world. It was written in the mid 80's. The irony was it was in the cutout bin because it wasn't long after that IBM was well on its way in its slide to irrelevancy. I wish I'd bought the book, or at least remembered its title.
- zokier 8y ago
  Well few decades later IBM is still generating billions in profits. So I'm not so sure what to conclude from that, other than that juggernauts, while maybe not unstoppable, do not die easily.
- Wildgoose 8y ago
  I remember a newspaper article cut out and posted on the notice board in the Computer Science Dept at my University, probably around 1986, entitled "Looking forward to the day when IBM rules the World". Like you, this memory has stuck with me.
yholio 8y ago
The analysis fails because it looks only at technical and cultural determinants for what is primarily an economic process. To counter this with my own dubious and oversimplified explanation, Microsoft did not fail because it has created a monopoly, a walled-off ecosystem they control, and they managed to protect it in most desktop segments. Google has it's own monopolies, as do all of the successful companies that are still around. Microsoft's failure to extend their monopolies into mobile and web costed them the crown of the tech industry, but they're far from dead. Apple rebooted solley on it's iPhone walled garden - their desktop was moribund and the iPod, while an inovative product and short term cash cow, was not conducive to a monopoly, so it was quickly duplicated and made obsolete. Yahoo was not able to create and maintain its monopolies, so it's dead.
gjmveloso 8y ago
Microsoft was dead until 2014, when Satya Nadella becomes CEO and bring company back to life, almost how Steve Jobs revamped Apple in the late 90’s
- tehlike 8y ago
  It was surprising, coming from a non-founder in the company. It is welcome, nonetheless.
  - apozem 8y ago
    Crisis is the time when people are most willing to accept changes, and Microsoft was indeed in crisis. Still is in some ways, but their turnaround has been impressive.
godelmachine 8y ago
Satya Nadella once said, “Microsoft loves Linux”, the three most improbable words that could be unfathomably put together. Maybe that’s when Microsoft started gaining traction.
- djmips 8y ago
  To me that signalled that Microsoft was now flexible, to go with what would lead to success rather than doggedly holding onto the past.
Ice_cream_suit 8y ago
Satya Nadela was the primary agent, for transforming Microsoft into the profitable and successful business that it is now.
shadowmint 8y ago
It's easy to laugh now, but in 2007 this was spot on. It was 10 years before Microsoft managed to drag itself up and do something useful with itself. It's really remarkable that Microsoft managed such a big turn around after such epic failures (like mobile); others (like IBM...) are still struggling to do it. Just goes to show, competitive pressure is a good thing. :)
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I really enjoyed re-reading that. It captures the very essence of "instant in time" incorrectness, it is why I stopped believing anything I thought was "definitely true" in the tech business actually was what I thought it was. I felt the same way that Paul did, Microsoft had calcified into this Office/Enterprise crust, living off their contracts with big businesses, while the real world was cruising to a new, agile, and open source beat. I had also been at Sun when it was still small, and cringed when bad news from IBM put a big negative impact on Sun's nascent stock price, even though, at the time, IBM's pain was coming from Sun not that we'd share in it. But the trap that I had fallen into, and this essay expresses, is that "Today is every day" or more precisely, now that the world is to my liking, it will cease changing in ways that I disapprove. :-) I felt like the puzzle is figured out, I "get it" now, I can see the strings going from the puppets to the puppeteers and now I can see how the world is working. But the cruel trick is that in systems, the puppets are recursive, or in mathematical terms, the forces influencing the future direction of technology are nonlinear at best, and likely chaotic. Everyone is changing in response to the changes they perceive around them, and in response some of their changes change those around them. Like the traffic analyst who figured out you could stomp your brakes going West on Interstate 10, and have the 'wave' of your braking effect roll south on the Harbor, get picked up going north on the 405, only to have it come back and hit you from the front as its echo headed east back along the 10. Sun made Workstations and Microsoft only cared about PCs except the echo of what a workstation was suddenly came back and hit Sun in the face as a big PC. Or Sun's prophetic, if ill fated slogan that "The Network is the Computer", which turned out to be literally true as clusters of Linux machines took out big iron symmetric multiprocessing systems. And then again, as Paul points out, when the Web browser ran its "programs" on the "network." Where did the computer start and the network end? It was no longer possible to tell. Take away from this the certain knowledge that Google, Facebook, and Apple will all "die" (Apple for the second time :-)) at some point in the next 5 to 20 years. What we care about today will seem silly in the future, and the there will be technologies that enable completely different things to consume our time and resources than the things that do so today. People create startups and dream new dreams for the same reason a surfer starts paddling their board toward shore, waves come up, and you have to be in position to get a good ride.
marcell 8y ago
I assume this was posted in response to Microsoft passing Apple as the most valuable tech company. Ironically, In 2007 Microsoft’s market cap was more than twice that of Apple’s ($270B vs $100B). That company’s staying power is truly amazing.
gwbas1c 8y ago
Ironically, Azure is doing better than Google cloud services.
curiousDog 8y ago
The funny thing is Google is the new Microsoft for precisely most of the reasons he mentions. The worst part of Microsoft's culture (empire building by middle managers) has now infected Google as well. Amazon is the only one that has been able to stave it off which seems partly due to their insanely customer obsessed culture.
tzury 8y ago
When PG wrote this down, perhaps the vast majority of Microsoft board agreed with him. It was a giant company without a roadmap. A company that always behind. Microsoft has changed a lot since, and still putting much of an effort and money to gain trust amongst the community. Just remind yourself the reaction when GitHub acquisition announced. For three weeks I read blog posts filled broadcasting fear and loathing as if the government of China has bought Facebook, Twitter and Slack altogether.
wvenable 8y ago
In addition to other comments about Microsoft's current market cap and new CEO, this article was posted also posted before Windows 7 was released; arguably the best version of Windows ever made. In fact, that era of software including Office and their server products was very solid.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > very solid. You and I have a very different definition[0] of 'solid'. Unless you mean 'relatively', in which case I agree. 0. https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17153/Microsoft-Windows-7.html?vendor_id=26 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17153/Microsoft-Windows-7...
  - wvenable 8y ago
    Doesn't seem particularly different from the competition: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/156/Apple-Mac-Os-X.html?vendor_id=49 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/156/Apple-Mac-Os-X.html?v...
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      You're comparing an OS that has one major release (windows 7) to one that has been essentially a rolling-ish release for ~10 years. (Mac)OSX (which you linked to) has been going/supported far longer than windows 7. Meanwhile, microsoft's track record over the same period, with quite a few (major) OS releases, is.. https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/26/Microsoft.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/26/Microsoft.html
      - wvenable 8y ago
        Yes but I'm also looking at the individual years. OS X has many releases and Windows has many releases; they're both effectively one product. Windows bugs are counted twice if they exist in different versions but are still effectively the same bug.
jmartrican 8y ago
> Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway. This sounds like a very ignorant thing to state. Wherever I worked, the best programmers used Windows and Linux desktops. Why? Because they too busy coding to get caught up in the Apple hype is my best guess. You know just like he talks about being ignorant to what was going on in Microsoft world, many coders I worked with did not know or care about what was going on in Apple world. There was one group of people who I did notice flock to Apple OS's, wannabe developers. The type that talk a lot about new tech but never wrote code that got deployed to production.
- diminoten 8y ago
  MacOS is, by far the best generic developer OS. The best developers I know don't really care what OS they're on, but MacOS is what they'll pick if they get a choice.
  - jmartrican 8y ago
    > MacOS is, by far the best generic developer OS. How so?
    - jmartrican 8y ago
      BTW, please note that on Windows I can use various types of Linux variants right from the Windows App store. So the excuse of having a Nix shell on Mac OS is no longer a point for Mac OS. In fact, because we use Ubuntu in prod, and I run Ubuntu on Windows, that point might now be for Windows for many users.
      - wilsonnb3 8y ago
        I still prefer using a real nix instead of the windows subsystem for Linux. Mostly because the file system integration with WSL is still bad and Windows still doesn’t come with a decent terminal emulator.
    - 8y ago
plinkplonk 8y ago
Iirc (it's been a while since I read the article) I thought 'dead' was used to mean "they are not the dominant power in the world of software (in terms of tools, languages, leadership, driving change) etc, like they used to be in the nineties" not in the sense of "they are a declining company in terms of revenue or market value" The present news just says Microsoft's market valuation is higher than apple's (today). Not sure if it really affects the central thesis of the article. EDIT: literally the first paragraph of the article "I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who? Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them." People fear Facebook and Google and Amazon, if only for the immense amounts of damage they do to societies and polities. Who is afraid of MS (or IBM)? Do startup founders even think of MS as a factor in their plans (which seems to be what the article is about)
gmosx 8y ago
It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future...
xg15 8y ago
Narrator: Microsoft was not dead.
Digit-Al 8y ago
I think this paragraph really sums up the whole article for me: > The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their 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. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway. If you live in a forest you'll think the world is made of trees. Paul Graham is a very clever man, and I have a lot of respect for him, but he lives in a high tech bubble. People in high-tech start-ups use apple; people who work in creative industries (mostly) use apple; most of the rest of the world use Windows PCs. So to declare the desktop (does this include laptop?) "dead", especially back in 2005, is most definitely premature. Question: has anyone out there come across a non-high-tech multinational corporation that uses apples instead of PCs?
- ultrasounder 8y ago
  Even within FAANG as a developer You the developer gets a choice of MBP vs PC. But PG was alluding to the specific fact that Macs outnumber PCs within the YC bubble which still holds true.
simonblack 8y ago
Not dead. Just irrelevant and/or non-essential. Microsoft is to computing as Ford is to automobiles. Both are still there if you want them to be your choice, but by the same token, if you don't need them in your life, they aren't forced upon you. Me? I haven't owned a Ford since 1985. I switched to Unix/Linux in 1991.

111 points by WisNorCan 8y ago

I would argue that MS WAS dead under Balmer, but not only for the reasons that PG mentions. However, it has been resurrected under Satya.

ktamura 8y ago
This is not entirely true. Yes, Ballmer made many mistakes, but he also architected one of the most sustainably profitable enterprise software businesses (on the heels of all MS software products we love to hate). These enterprise customers are more than knees deep with Microsoft, and deep account penetration bought at least 5 years for Satya to steer the ship in the right direction (giving up on B2C mobile, Windows obsession, etc.) One of the most common biases I see in how we assess leaders is how we try to attribute success & failure to a single person at a discrete point in time (ex: Here in the US, the extreme Left claims Trump is taking credit for Obama's foundational effort for the economy while the extreme Right says it's all Trump). In reality, it is never that simple nor discrete but rather complex and continuous.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

nafizh 8y ago

How time changes. It seems Microsoft is back from the dead. And what Microsoft used to be, Google is trying their best to become.

theonemind 8y ago

It seems like Big Tech has switched over to amassing data and behavior manipulation ("engagement", etc.) as their main business model. I think that Microsoft didn't feel threatening because they still mostly just sold a product. I feel like we as a society haven't really entirely got a handle on this yet. Things emerge, like trusts, and it takes a while for people to understand what has happened. But, with things like Windows 10 telemetry you can't turn off, and Windows turning into a service, they've gotten back on board with how Big Tech runs these days. This pattern seems to hold really well. The giants mostly amass data and manipulate people. If they don't do this sort of thing, they don't really seem that threatening, regardless of their size. HP, IBM, Dell. Apple seems interesting, as a hold-out on just selling a product, but in the meta game, just direct manipulation of people really looks like a step up, and I don't predict they'll continue as anything approaching a "scary tech giant" in coming decades unless they change like Microsoft did.

userbinator 8y ago
But, with things like Windows 10 telemetry you can't turn off, and Windows turning into a service, they've gotten back on board with how Big Tech runs these days. Yes, I can confidently say that I miss the old Microsoft. They were strongly closed-source and proprietary (not that it didn't stop people from understanding how things worked anyway...), but they did not do the sort of data collection, behavioural analysis and advert-driven manipulation that the others were doing, and still highly valued backward-compatibility and stability. Now they're going the same route as the other tech giants, silently collecting information while also open-sourcing a lot of other things almost as a form of distraction/diversion. You could consider the fact that they're open-sourcing something to mean they're not interested in selling that as a product anymore, and that's because their profit is coming from somewhere else.
- belltaco 8y ago
  They tried to make the public care with the gmail man campaign. https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/2/2766215/gmail-man-video-microsoft-google-privacy https://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/2/2766215/gmail-ma... It was flagged dead on HN because the perception was "do no evil' Google good, M$ bad. They tried harder later on with the somewhat cringy Scroogled campaign and found out the public didnt care while Google laughed all the way to the bank while increasing data tracking, collection and usage. And here we are. Edit: Found a thread discussing it, with one top 10 by karma HN user explaining why they flagged it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544309
- hakfoo 8y ago
  The interesting thing is, how battle-proven is the current ad/monitoring obsession as an actual business? It's trendy, but not every successful firm has to-- or should-- get on board. Microsoft's classic businesses are pretty comprehensible. Software (boxes or as a service) and cloud services are pretty solid business models. They don't require unrealistic expectations or gimmickry to work. There might be shifts within that market (the MSRP of a browser is 0, and that of an OS is plummeting towards 0 quickly), but you can realistically say "I want to sell a software package" or "I want to run a cloud service provider" and make a business case without fantastic assumptions. In contrast, much of the value of Google and Facebook and similar companies is based on anticipation of the future value of those big data stores, a largely unproven asset. Will consumers reach an "uncanny valley" moment for personalized marketing messages, resulting in a downturn in click-throughs? Will advertisers always be willing to pay a premium for improved targeting? I could see a competing product offering spray-and-pray banner ads with .01% click-through rates at a few cents per click outperforming hyper-targeted ads that draw a 5% click-through rate at several dollars a click. Will they be able to successfully retain, grow, and monetize their data hoard after the inevitable regulatory backlash? (I could imagine a sufficient data breach resulting in regulations that make the GDPR look small potatoes)

cronix 8y ago

> The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. The last sentence is ironically funny now that MS is back on top and Apple is slipping, and the article is about the "death" of MS. > Microsoft closed Friday with a larger market cap than Apple’s, making the Redmond software giant the most valuable U.S. stock. http://fortune.com/2018/11/30/microsoft-bumping-apple-is-now-the-most-valuable-u-s-company/ http://fortune.com/2018/11/30/microsoft-bumping-apple-is-now...

kunai 8y ago
> The last sentence is ironically funny now that MS is back on top and Apple is slipping, and the article is about the "death" of MS. Well, yes, I'm assuming the irony is part of the reason this was posted here.

21 8y ago

> Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas. > 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. And now, I bet a vast majority of people funded by YC use VS Code. Maybe even Azure.

xenospn 8y ago
They use VSCode, but they use it on Linux or OSX.
- Daegalus 8y ago
  I've switched back to Windows 10 with WSL running Ubuntu 18.04 in it. Works well and gives me pretty great integrations.
  - dilap 8y ago
    I was playing around with this recently. I found myself really missing (1) homebrew (2) a decent terminal (I tried a bunch...) and (3) good trackpad drivers. Not huge things, but enough to make switching feel unappealing. (There are a few things similar to homebrew, but none seemed to have gained enough attraction to cover basically anything you could want, the way homebrew does.)
  - leetrout 8y ago
    I keep trying and I keep going back to Mac or VMWare workstation and running the full Linux kernel for "proper" docker. WSL is great and I'm learning to like cmder but I really miss iterm.
  - jaxn 8y ago
    I also switched to Win 10 from Mac (and Linux before that). My Surface Book has a faulty battery and I am using an MBP when I'm not at the office. I not sure I will stick with Win 10 on my next computer, but I am sure I'm not going back to OSX. WSL isn't perfect, but it feel more open and more linux-like to me than OSX. Maybe a Pixel Book,maybe straight Linux.

WisNorCan 8y ago

It's probably a good thing that Microsoft did not follow the advice: > They can't hire smart people anymore, but they could buy as many as they wanted. > 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. Instead, Microsoft did the exact opposite. They picked Satya Nadella who had worked there since 1992. He has driven the innovation right out of Redmond, WA with no lead shielding required.

lainga 8y ago
It sounded like Paul wanted them to become a second Oracle.
- ultrasounder 8y ago
  And look where ORCL is in relation to M$FT.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
This highlights the magical thinking we can suffer from in Silicon Valley where we believe we’re inherently better at solving problems here. It sounds like what Paul was saying is good ideas can no longer come from Redmond and the best they can do is buy a chunk of Silicon Valley and hope to ride on whatever success that nets them.
- WisNorCan 8y ago
  Agree. Two of three largest companies in the world are now in the Seattle area with both Microsoft (#1) and Amazon (#3) thriving. Apple (#2), Google (#4) and Facebook (#5) are in the Bay Area.
  - xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
    I don't know about Apple but Facebook and Google have pretty big offices in Seattle as well, along with many other startups (Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, etc.) It seems the play these days is to have the best of both worlds.

mamcx 8y ago

Maybe death is good for a company. Maybe Apple, MS, Google, etc already die several times. Is just that enough of it survive and learn from the past, even a little. Maybe is easier to present the new king as the same old king, long live the king.

WalterBright 8y ago
The computer landscape is littered with the carcasses of once great companies, going back all the way back to RCA.
why_only_15 8y ago
I don't think Google has ever really "died". You could potentially make an argument that when social came along Google was somewhat upstaged, but not really that much.
ummonk 8y ago
On the other hand, I don't think it's realistically possible for Yahoo to come back from the dead at this point (and same for the other Oath company, AOL).

WalterBright 8y ago

I recall seeing a book in the cutout bin of a bookstore that made the case that IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut that would inevitably take over the world. It was written in the mid 80's. The irony was it was in the cutout bin because it wasn't long after that IBM was well on its way in its slide to irrelevancy. I wish I'd bought the book, or at least remembered its title.

zokier 8y ago
Well few decades later IBM is still generating billions in profits. So I'm not so sure what to conclude from that, other than that juggernauts, while maybe not unstoppable, do not die easily.
Wildgoose 8y ago
I remember a newspaper article cut out and posted on the notice board in the Computer Science Dept at my University, probably around 1986, entitled "Looking forward to the day when IBM rules the World". Like you, this memory has stuck with me.

yholio 8y ago

The analysis fails because it looks only at technical and cultural determinants for what is primarily an economic process. To counter this with my own dubious and oversimplified explanation, Microsoft did not fail because it has created a monopoly, a walled-off ecosystem they control, and they managed to protect it in most desktop segments. Google has it's own monopolies, as do all of the successful companies that are still around. Microsoft's failure to extend their monopolies into mobile and web costed them the crown of the tech industry, but they're far from dead. Apple rebooted solley on it's iPhone walled garden - their desktop was moribund and the iPod, while an inovative product and short term cash cow, was not conducive to a monopoly, so it was quickly duplicated and made obsolete. Yahoo was not able to create and maintain its monopolies, so it's dead.

gjmveloso 8y ago

Microsoft was dead until 2014, when Satya Nadella becomes CEO and bring company back to life, almost how Steve Jobs revamped Apple in the late 90’s

tehlike 8y ago
It was surprising, coming from a non-founder in the company. It is welcome, nonetheless.
- apozem 8y ago
  Crisis is the time when people are most willing to accept changes, and Microsoft was indeed in crisis. Still is in some ways, but their turnaround has been impressive.

godelmachine 8y ago

Satya Nadella once said, “Microsoft loves Linux”, the three most improbable words that could be unfathomably put together. Maybe that’s when Microsoft started gaining traction.

djmips 8y ago
To me that signalled that Microsoft was now flexible, to go with what would lead to success rather than doggedly holding onto the past.

Ice_cream_suit 8y ago

Satya Nadela was the primary agent, for transforming Microsoft into the profitable and successful business that it is now.

shadowmint 8y ago

It's easy to laugh now, but in 2007 this was spot on. It was 10 years before Microsoft managed to drag itself up and do something useful with itself. It's really remarkable that Microsoft managed such a big turn around after such epic failures (like mobile); others (like IBM...) are still struggling to do it. Just goes to show, competitive pressure is a good thing. :)

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I really enjoyed re-reading that. It captures the very essence of "instant in time" incorrectness, it is why I stopped believing anything I thought was "definitely true" in the tech business actually was what I thought it was. I felt the same way that Paul did, Microsoft had calcified into this Office/Enterprise crust, living off their contracts with big businesses, while the real world was cruising to a new, agile, and open source beat. I had also been at Sun when it was still small, and cringed when bad news from IBM put a big negative impact on Sun's nascent stock price, even though, at the time, IBM's pain was coming from Sun not that we'd share in it. But the trap that I had fallen into, and this essay expresses, is that "Today is every day" or more precisely, now that the world is to my liking, it will cease changing in ways that I disapprove. :-) I felt like the puzzle is figured out, I "get it" now, I can see the strings going from the puppets to the puppeteers and now I can see how the world is working. But the cruel trick is that in systems, the puppets are recursive, or in mathematical terms, the forces influencing the future direction of technology are nonlinear at best, and likely chaotic. Everyone is changing in response to the changes they perceive around them, and in response some of their changes change those around them. Like the traffic analyst who figured out you could stomp your brakes going West on Interstate 10, and have the 'wave' of your braking effect roll south on the Harbor, get picked up going north on the 405, only to have it come back and hit you from the front as its echo headed east back along the 10. Sun made Workstations and Microsoft only cared about PCs except the echo of what a workstation was suddenly came back and hit Sun in the face as a big PC. Or Sun's prophetic, if ill fated slogan that "The Network is the Computer", which turned out to be literally true as clusters of Linux machines took out big iron symmetric multiprocessing systems. And then again, as Paul points out, when the Web browser ran its "programs" on the "network." Where did the computer start and the network end? It was no longer possible to tell. Take away from this the certain knowledge that Google, Facebook, and Apple will all "die" (Apple for the second time :-)) at some point in the next 5 to 20 years. What we care about today will seem silly in the future, and the there will be technologies that enable completely different things to consume our time and resources than the things that do so today. People create startups and dream new dreams for the same reason a surfer starts paddling their board toward shore, waves come up, and you have to be in position to get a good ride.

marcell 8y ago

I assume this was posted in response to Microsoft passing Apple as the most valuable tech company. Ironically, In 2007 Microsoft’s market cap was more than twice that of Apple’s ($270B vs $100B). That company’s staying power is truly amazing.

gwbas1c 8y ago

Ironically, Azure is doing better than Google cloud services.

curiousDog 8y ago

The funny thing is Google is the new Microsoft for precisely most of the reasons he mentions. The worst part of Microsoft's culture (empire building by middle managers) has now infected Google as well. Amazon is the only one that has been able to stave it off which seems partly due to their insanely customer obsessed culture.

tzury 8y ago

When PG wrote this down, perhaps the vast majority of Microsoft board agreed with him. It was a giant company without a roadmap. A company that always behind. Microsoft has changed a lot since, and still putting much of an effort and money to gain trust amongst the community. Just remind yourself the reaction when GitHub acquisition announced. For three weeks I read blog posts filled broadcasting fear and loathing as if the government of China has bought Facebook, Twitter and Slack altogether.

wvenable 8y ago

In addition to other comments about Microsoft's current market cap and new CEO, this article was posted also posted before Windows 7 was released; arguably the best version of Windows ever made. In fact, that era of software including Office and their server products was very solid.

craftyguy 8y ago
> very solid. You and I have a very different definition[0] of 'solid'. Unless you mean 'relatively', in which case I agree. 0. https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17153/Microsoft-Windows-7.html?vendor_id=26 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17153/Microsoft-Windows-7...
- wvenable 8y ago
  Doesn't seem particularly different from the competition: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/156/Apple-Mac-Os-X.html?vendor_id=49 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/156/Apple-Mac-Os-X.html?v...
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    You're comparing an OS that has one major release (windows 7) to one that has been essentially a rolling-ish release for ~10 years. (Mac)OSX (which you linked to) has been going/supported far longer than windows 7. Meanwhile, microsoft's track record over the same period, with quite a few (major) OS releases, is.. https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/26/Microsoft.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/26/Microsoft.html
    - wvenable 8y ago
      Yes but I'm also looking at the individual years. OS X has many releases and Windows has many releases; they're both effectively one product. Windows bugs are counted twice if they exist in different versions but are still effectively the same bug.

jmartrican 8y ago

> Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway. This sounds like a very ignorant thing to state. Wherever I worked, the best programmers used Windows and Linux desktops. Why? Because they too busy coding to get caught up in the Apple hype is my best guess. You know just like he talks about being ignorant to what was going on in Microsoft world, many coders I worked with did not know or care about what was going on in Apple world. There was one group of people who I did notice flock to Apple OS's, wannabe developers. The type that talk a lot about new tech but never wrote code that got deployed to production.

diminoten 8y ago
MacOS is, by far the best generic developer OS. The best developers I know don't really care what OS they're on, but MacOS is what they'll pick if they get a choice.
- jmartrican 8y ago
  > MacOS is, by far the best generic developer OS. How so?
  - jmartrican 8y ago
    BTW, please note that on Windows I can use various types of Linux variants right from the Windows App store. So the excuse of having a Nix shell on Mac OS is no longer a point for Mac OS. In fact, because we use Ubuntu in prod, and I run Ubuntu on Windows, that point might now be for Windows for many users.
    - wilsonnb3 8y ago
      I still prefer using a real nix instead of the windows subsystem for Linux. Mostly because the file system integration with WSL is still bad and Windows still doesn’t come with a decent terminal emulator.
  - 8y ago

plinkplonk 8y ago

Iirc (it's been a while since I read the article) I thought 'dead' was used to mean "they are not the dominant power in the world of software (in terms of tools, languages, leadership, driving change) etc, like they used to be in the nineties" not in the sense of "they are a declining company in terms of revenue or market value" The present news just says Microsoft's market valuation is higher than apple's (today). Not sure if it really affects the central thesis of the article. EDIT: literally the first paragraph of the article "I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who? Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them." People fear Facebook and Google and Amazon, if only for the immense amounts of damage they do to societies and polities. Who is afraid of MS (or IBM)? Do startup founders even think of MS as a factor in their plans (which seems to be what the article is about)

gmosx 8y ago

It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future...

xg15 8y ago

Narrator: Microsoft was not dead.

Digit-Al 8y ago

I think this paragraph really sums up the whole article for me: > The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their 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. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway. If you live in a forest you'll think the world is made of trees. Paul Graham is a very clever man, and I have a lot of respect for him, but he lives in a high tech bubble. People in high-tech start-ups use apple; people who work in creative industries (mostly) use apple; most of the rest of the world use Windows PCs. So to declare the desktop (does this include laptop?) "dead", especially back in 2005, is most definitely premature. Question: has anyone out there come across a non-high-tech multinational corporation that uses apples instead of PCs?

ultrasounder 8y ago
Even within FAANG as a developer You the developer gets a choice of MBP vs PC. But PG was alluding to the specific fact that Macs outnumber PCs within the YC bubble which still holds true.

simonblack 8y ago

Not dead. Just irrelevant and/or non-essential. Microsoft is to computing as Ford is to automobiles. Both are still there if you want them to be your choice, but by the same token, if you don't need them in your life, they aren't forced upon you. Me? I haven't owned a Ford since 1985. I switched to Unix/Linux in 1991.