6 ms·
Microsoft Is Dead (2007)
- talldayo 2y ago> I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news. With 17 years of hindsight to our benefit, my reaction is both of these things at the same time.
- skilled 2y agoOk, thanks for letting me know. > Microsoft's Windows was the dominant desktop operating system (OS) worldwide as of February 2024, with a market share of around 72 percent. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
- mattcantstop 2y agoWhat Paul wrote in 2007 could be true, while what you wrote about Microsoft in 2024 could also be true. Microsoft changed. And for the better. The death was short lived, but in many ways, especially in the cultural zeitgeist of software engineers and tech folk, Microsoft did die there for a bit. Satya did a great job of resurrecting it. He has been masterful in his role (I worked at a company that was acquired by Microsoft). Companies who were once the 900 pound gorilla can die, despite making a lot of money. Oracle still prints money, but how many people under 50 use Oracle on a day to day basis when they are building a company? I would venture to say approaching zero. Google is still printing money, but in many ways it is dead (or dying).
- talldayo 2y ago> Microsoft did die there for a bit. I just don't believe this. It's like saying that Apple "did die there for a bit" when they were selling shitty Intel Macs; it's not true. They were still alive, well, and had a significant market share of incredibly enthusiastic customers. Microsoft had been a Department of Defense contractor for more than 20 years at the time PG published this. His conclusion was narrow-minded then, and it's narrow-minded today.
- llm_trw 2y agoApple is only alive because Microsoft needed competition to keep the DOJ from going after them again.
- discreteevent 2y ago> but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world > I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Funny how PG didn't have enough perspective to realize that he himself could be the one in a different world. A bright guy, but like you say - narrow-minded.
- flohofwoe 2y agoIn the mid-90s, Apple was much deader than Microsoft ever was, and that was long before the transition to Intel.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dartos 2y agoAs a developer, I have a really poor view of companies that choose to go with Microsoft technologies (other than typescript) It’s purely a cultural thing, but from where I’ve worked and what I’ve seen, companies who choose Microsoft stacks and services (azure, C#, windows server, etc) are very management heavy and most are hostile towards their engineers, whom they see as cost centers. I think that stigma still clings to Microsoft today
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago> other than typescript Don't forget GitHub, NPM, and VSCode. Microsoft has entrenched themselves deeper than it first appears.
- dartos 2y agoVscode isn’t usually mandated in my experience. And yes npm and github as well, but both of those were fairly recent acquisitions.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoThose are my biases, too, but there's a generation under me (I'm a bit oldish) that doesn't see things that way. Witness how C# has a toehold in games development (via Unity) and that isn't seen as incogruous at all. And then look at the prevalence of VS Code, and the market penetration of GitHub...
- dartos 2y agoGames industry is a bit of an oddball. Microsoft’s XNA framework was quite good early on. But unity alone really popularized c# in gamedev. Also Xamarin allowing a single codebase for android and iOS was a driving factor as well. So c# is a must, but teams, office, and exchange, and windows server are not.
- ysofunny 2y agobut Oracle, in a certain (here) context, is just a RDBMS how many people are using relational databases in their companies? or even how many accounting systems are using RDBMSs behind the scenes? I would venture every single last one of them
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pavlov 2y ago> "Oracle still prints money, but how many people under 50 use Oracle on a day to day basis when they are building a company? I would venture to say approaching zero." Oracle is having something of a resurrection moment lately, with Oracle Cloud becoming a surprisingly popular option for startups. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startups-find-an-unlikely-friend-oracle https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startups-find-an-... "At least six venture-backed AI startups, including Character.ai and Adept AI Labs, primarily rely on Oracle for cloud computing, according to the companies. Two founders of AI startups who have used various cloud providers told The Information that Oracle can run complex machine-learning models more economically than Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud."
- badgersnake 2y ago> Satya did a great job of resurrecting it. I don’t think he did. They are not the innovative company they were under Satya. Sure the stock price is up by what are they actually doing? Office isn’t the force it was, teams and azure are just copying others and they utterly enshitified Windows. Xbox has also gone backwards.
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoAs someone with no skin in the game and also someone who thinks that MS, Google, Apple, etc are not really “better” from an ethical standpoint than each other/any other big tech company: I always get the impression that Satya is a brilliant CEO and on the other hand Sundar is really not that good. Is this the general consensus?
- CoastalCoder 2y ago> Microsoft changed. And for the better. But better for whom? Sometime after 2007, Microsoft: (1) rolled out unstoppable, inscrutable "telemetry" in Windows, (2) decided that "opt-out" was appropriate for privacy-invading features, and (3) decided it was okay to silently reset such opt-outs. (4) most recently, decided it's okay to violate copyright for any material they can scrape off the web, except for victims who can afford to fight Microsoft in court. I don't know any of their actual reasons for those policies, but as an end-user their reasons are indistinguishable from "because we can". IIRC, in the MS-DOS / Windows 2 up through ~early Windows 10 days, Microsoft's sleazy behavior was mostly limited to their interactions with other software companies.
- pjmlp 2y agoPlenty, if they use anything Java related, even if it is only Android phones, those Google SDKs don't run out of thin air.
- varjag 2y agoWhat is the share of desktop systems among users in 2024?
- Max-q 2y ago68%, February 2024
- aidenn0 2y agoA) it was closer to 90% in the 00s, and what's Microsoft's share of the smartphone OS market these days?
- chrisjj 2y agoAn 18% drop doesn't sound like death, does it?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- teknopaul 2y agoYou have to define "desktop" as not being a phone or tablet for that stat to be sane. I would argue the desktop itself changed. A wooden desk with a PC, a keyboard, mouse and monitor is likely to run Windows: until it's replaced by someone who isn't at a desk.
- skilled 2y agoYou forgot laptops.
- joelmichael 2y agoAmazing how wrong Paul Graham was on this despite claiming to be an expert in tech companies.
- Ygg2 2y agoTo be fair to Paul, Microsoft does seem to be a zombie like company, at least the Desktop division.
- dartos 2y agoIt’s a holdings company. The end state for all big tech.
- joelthelion 2y agoA zombie company ? Exactly what competition does windows +office have in the enterprise?
- slater 2y agoBYO + Google Docs...?
- gus_massa 2y agoA few years ago I thought Gmail was scarry. Now I'm more worry about Google Docs. Diaclaimer: I use both, and everyday I pray my Google account is not baned due to an error in their system.
- joelthelion 2y agoHow many fortune 500 companies primarily rely on that?
- xcv123 2y agoMicrosoft earned $22B net profit in the past quarter alone, and their debt is only $40B. That's not a zombie company.
- rheide 2y agoGoogle is dead.
- xyst 2y agoSummary: It’s not “dead” in the sense that it’s defunct but it’s a mere shadow of its former self. The leaked memo of between Bill Gates and his C-level executive(s) is an iota of the level of nightmare at MSFT. https://www.syracuse.com/technofile/2008/06/bill_gates_someone_decided_to.html https://www.syracuse.com/technofile/2008/06/bill_gates_someo...
- rossdavidh 2y agoI think the title was (perhaps intentionally) overstated, but the content of the essay is correct. The better title (in the sense of more accurate, perhaps not for getting clicks) would have been "Microsoft Is The New IBM". And that is still true.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoNo, it's not correct. MSFT is a $3+ trillion market cap company doing $200+ billion revenue which is growing mostly organically at a very good clip and has a product line people and companies use mostly by choice. IBM is 20x smaller by market cap, 4x smaller by revenue, they are shrinking organically because they forgot how to make anything and no one starting any business from scratch would use any of their products. He got it completely wrong. It is what it is. If you comment on enough things you are going to be very wrong sometimes.
- rossdavidh 2y agoMicrosoft in 2007 is where IBM was prior to that. Which, by the way, was once invoked as the prototypical example of the "old guard tech company reinvents itself". Also, the basic thesis of the essay is that new companies don't worry about Microsoft squashing them anymore, the way they once had (and did about IBM before that). That is, I believe, still true.
- TeaBrain 2y agoI don't think that is as true now. Microsoft has made in-roads in a number of markets, which has to concern some competitors. Within the last few years they left slack in the dust by bundling teams. They also bought github just a few years ago. A couple years before that linkedin, which there are still no real competitors to. Their cloud market share has been increasing and they're increasingly pushing the integration of the Microsoft 365 suite and github with azure, which has been pushing more enterprises towards their offerings. Microsoft has also started throwing money around to organizations which they want to work with, such as OpenAI and G42, effectively choosing winners.
- danielovichdk 2y agoPaul Graham is dead
- danielmarkbruce 2y agowho?
- newobj 2y ago> "So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook." "And I happen to have some Web 2.0 startups for sale, what a coincidence!"
- DonnyV 2y ago[flagged]
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoI agree that the antitrust lawsuit was significant! However, I don't think this conflicts with Graham's argument. If Microsoft had been free to act anti-competitively, it could probably have blocked the emergence of Google and the web, and possibly Apple.
- mattcantstop 2y agoThe antitrust issues were a small piece of a much larger puzzle. Microsoft wasn't dead because of anti-trust issues. They were dead because Ballmer took them in the wrong direction. He made lots of money, but killed the culture of Microsoft. If they wouldn't have had the eye of regulators on them they could have financially buried a bunch of startups. But that didn't make them turn their products into garbage. There were many issues.
- aj7 2y agoAbout two weeks ago, I had an epiphany that ‘Apple was dead’, since any cheap crappy device could act as a terminal to an AI infrastructure delivering a perfected and idiosyncratic user interface. Now, I’ve reconsidered.
- DarkmSparks 2y agowhat I think most people will miss is the Microsoft from the 90s is very dead. What they have now - office 365, linkedin and azure + a dose of minecraft and Marina Linux are nothing like those days. Days when to succeed in software you had to be 10x better than microsft or they would release a half arsed competitor and destroy your business just because they were microsoft.
- varjag 2y agoPaul is right though. It's dead in the same sense IBM been dead for many decades.
- ffgjgf1 2y agoBack in 2007 to early 2010s? Sure. Certainly not these days though they more or less reinvented themselves (e.g. Windows is basically a side gig at this point, much like Android is for Google).
- Max-q 2y agoYou are completely right. I think many people still think of Microsoft as Windows and Office.
- varjag 2y agoWell neither IBM is doing much in terms of business machines lately. They are still a second tier giant with enormous turnover. They own a few pieces of popular tech either via acquisitions or licensing agreements but none that came from within the business. Nobody in the industry particularly cares what they're up to.
- crop_rotation 2y agoPeople blame Steve Ballmer but I think he did great stuff. He built the huge enterprise salesforce and got Microsoft a leg in the enterprise, where margins are much higher and consumers much less fickle. He also chose a very good successor and removed all the old timers who would have made trouble for Nadella (Muglia, Sinofsky to name a few). Microsoft went from mostly an OS+ consumer software company to this enterprise gorilla which will now have an IBMesque lifetime (meaning will survive for very very long) regardless of whether their projects are very good or not. Sure he couldn't beat the iPhone, but the iPhone is the most successful consumer electronics product of all time.
- teknopaul 2y agoI have a chart I call "the Ballmer peak" which is the huge trough in earning that accompanied Ballmer's time at the helm.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoNo, you don't have that chart. Earnings went up under Ballmer.
- mattmaroon 2y agoHe didn’t say the chart was accurate, just that he has it :)
- crop_rotation 2y agoBy that kind of logic almost any argument can be made masquerading as the truth :)
- mattmaroon 2y agoIt’s a more humorous “no true Scotsman”.
- unethical_ban 2y ago
- ViktorRay 2y agoThis article was written just a few months before the iPhone was announced. That was the first thought that came into my mind when he said “It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.” Sometimes a new technology makes the inevitable quite evitable.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- TeaBrain 2y agoBack when Jobs thought all iphone apps were going to be web apps.
- protastus 2y agoIf you didn't tell me the author, I could've attributed to any random SV tech bro. It takes massive ego to proclaim dead a huge, well diversified business that has strong net revenue, product demand and well defined moats.
- vixen99 2y agoWhy bring personality into this? Paul Graham made certain observations, conclusions and predictions about a very successful company - to the point or not. That is not evidence of a causative agent in terms of a massive ego.
- protastus 2y agoBecause the essay radiates techbro tone, with minor adjustments for 2007. The author is an unapologetic believer in SV exceptionalism. "Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. [...] Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley" "Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house."
- stevebmark 2y agoPaul Graham has been getting a lot of criticism recently, both from this obviously bad take and because of his praise for the fraud-ridden Lambda School and Paul's hero worship of Austen. I personally appreciate the reality check that not everything these famous people think is worth writing down nor sharing.
- localfirst 2y agoim out of the loop on the Lambda School, what happened?
- alwa 2y agoTurned out to be fraudulent. Didn’t provide a meaningful education, lied about placement numbers, lied about their financial incentives aligning with the students'—the list went on. The CFPB, a federal regulatory body, came down on them (and the founder in particular) a few weeks ago [0] See e.g. the narrative and related discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40729501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40729501 [0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes-action-against-coding-boot-camp-bloomtech-and-ceo-austen-allred-for-deceiving-students-and-hiding-loan-costs/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes...
- localfirst 2y agoin 2019 - 743 folks are on the hook for the ISA - 516 graduated - 132 got a job I'm not sure what to make of this. What is ISA? Isn't this like 20% hire rate from taking Lambda course? Or was it that they attracted a lot of people who simply can't make that leap from student to developer because they never had the aptitude for that job? Not saying Lambda School wasn't a fraud but seems like they started out with some good intention but halfway got greedy and dishonest because Paul likes "edgy founders" Just a ton of broken dreams, financial ruin not unlike some of YC's backed companies.
- bitwize 2y agoISA = Income Sharing Agreement. The way Lambda School worked was, you didn't pay for the instruction up front. Rather, when you got a job, Lambda School was entitled to take a chunk of your income. It had the whiff of scam to me, as it reminded me of the payment arrangements for another outfit, variously called Unbounded Solutions, BrighterBrain, and EnhanceIT: you go to Atlanta for two months of "free" training, after which you were bound to indentured servitude to them for a period of two years. Attempt to break the contract and you would be billed a minimum of $20,000 for the "free" training they offered you.
- _xivi 2y agoPG wasn't wrong, it's just that Microsoft was resurrected later in 2014 by Satya Nadella. When Paul wrote this, the industry was witnessing a technological revolution across the board (smartphones, AWS, Google docs, etc) while Microsoft was drugged and lacking behind on all fronts. At the time, their latest product launch was probably Windows Vista. It was a different company back then and it's such an amazing feat of Satya to manage to steer a ship of Microsoft's size.
- Max-q 2y agoWhat Nadella did will be in the business school books!
- self_awareness 2y agoThis blog post is actually a good indicator of how ephemeral web applications are. The blog post contains a reference to some "Snipshot" webapp. But the domain is dead now, and it's impossible to get the software. It's even hard to see how the software ever looked like. In contrast, we can all install Lotus 1-2-3 on today's machines, via emulation. Writing webapps is writing something that will never exist in the future. At some point in time the server will be turned off, and nobody will see your work.
- jasoneckert 2y agoIt's really hard for a company to die once they reach a certain size because they have the resources to pivot, even if the pivot seems a bit late. The two most extreme examples of this are RIM (now BlackBerry) of the mid-2010s when it was clear the smartphone market was no longer viable for them, and Apple of the 1990s before the return of Steve Jobs and acquisition of NeXT. When asked what he'd do with Apple in 1997, Michael Dell famously said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." But both companies are still alive today (Apple more than BlackBerry) because they were large enough before they had to pivot. Other big tech companies like Microsoft were never close to death at any time. Sure, they had periods of stagnation where they had to pivot (as mentioned in this blog post), but it was more like a cold than a life threatening illness.
- FMecha 2y agoNot necessarily tech, but how/what about Sega when they left the console business and have to merge themselves with Sammy? I always find Windows Mobile/Phone as like Sega's console-making endeavors, by the way.
- sremani 2y agoThis is classic demonstration of the fact, you do not have to get most of the things right, but extract maximum value when you are right. We have the excellent advantage of hindsight but definitely in 2007 the general agreement was Microsoft was losing to Google and Apple, which were the darlings of the stock market while Microsoft remained stagnant.
- chucke1992 2y agoWell at that time Microsoft really felt like IBM. Though ironically right now Google feels like IBM.
- SideQuark 2y ago> definitely in 2007 the general agreement was Microsoft was losing to Google and Apple In 2007, [1] MS had market cap 274B (#4), revenue rank 49. Apple had market cap 80B(#33), revenue rank 121. Google had market cap 143B (#17), revenue rank 241. MS had, and still has, many billion dollar sub-businesses. Google and Apple have never had as many highly profitable lines as MS does (and did). I think only pop media sold the story that Microsoft was "losing," and maybe only that in areas MS didn't historically compete in or make much money in. Google had almost all revenue from ads (and still do, a very one trick pony), and Apple had a few lines (iPhones, iTunes, not much else), while MS had Client, Server and Tools, Online Services, Business Division, Entertainment and Devices, each with many billions in revenue (and many of them containing yet more billion+ subdivisions). Even Visual Studio had over a billion in revenue annually. Apple and Google had very little effect on any of these revenue streams in 2007. At best, Microsoft was late to the areas Apple and Google were in, yet took markets anyways in some areas (Azure vs google?). [1] https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/performers/companies/by_market_value/index.html https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/perf...
- localfirst 2y agoAged like milk.
- qsdf38100 2y agoIt’s ok to be wrong. I’m having wrong insights all the time. You just have to acknowledge it and move along. As long as you don’t try to make it look like you were actually right given some amount of mental gymnastic.
- stevebmark 2y agoWhat does it mean when you're often wrong and blast public thinkpieces about your wrong opinions? I think there's an uncomparable difference between between being wrong in your thoughts, vs openly lecturing others about what you're wrong about.
- qsdf38100 2y agoI completely agree. I was trying to say it’s okay to be wrong if you are able to acknowledge it instead of doing mental gymnastics to justify it. I don’t know where Paul Graham stands in this regard.
- dzonga 2y agotime has all answers. just like yc likes and other accelerators like to bet on founders - they too should look at company structures / incentives etc to evaluate the future of certain companies. from afar you can tell microsoft environment breeds killers, unlike google and other tech companies besides facebook i.e zuck & oracle. which is why is you can never count microsoft n the likes of intel or even in terms of other industries ford out. look at how microsoft came and knocked down the tools in terms of developer tools. look at slack. the rest of the world uses teams - it comes free. look at how they did in the cloud. look at so called 'AI' satya or not -- microsoft has the industry by the balls and they know it. fear of gvt is what keeps them at bay.
- thom 2y agoFascinating to me that this only mentions phones once in passing, and even if it had made a big deal about that seismic change in the industry, it would still be wrong. It doesn't mention Microsoft's struggles in the console market, but would still be wrong. It mentions Linux once, doesn't talk about servers, databases, S3 or EC2, but it'd still be wrong. Dunno what the lesson is, and obviously you can move the goalposts to make 'dead' mean something else. Maybe we'll see this again with all the companies that aren't quite AI enough today. Sure is nice having enormous amounts of cash on hand, though.
- mmaniac 2y agoIn 2007 Microsoft was on top of the console market, which was also a pretty new market for Microsoft in general. It doesn't factor into their argument much. In any case, the article is definitely hyperbolic. The overall statement that Microsoft is no longer an IBM-tier titanic bully is correct, "dead" is an aggressive overstatement.
- bitwize 2y agoMicrosoft is still here and still Microsofting. They've had a few setbacks to total dominance. They fumbled the mobile ball and found that they couldn't compete against Linux and open source, which enable new forms of computing at the largest (cloud) and smallest (embedded/Raspberry Pi) scales that don't fit with their business model. So they successfully pivot to co-opting the dev stack used in the open source world. That's their play with Azure, WSL, Visual Studio Code, and the GitHub and npm acquisitions: to make it impossible to do webdev on an open source stack without MSFT involvement, and hey, why not try out these other great MSFT products and services while you're at it? It's a clever play. But they're not dead, irrelevant, or your friend.
- 1oooqooq 2y agowhy people are assuming this essay main points are wrong? it's very correct. Microsoft windows and office only make money with kickbacks to govt buyers. see the documentary on Microsoft and EU. lots of money is moving under tables. azure is a joke that mostly gets sales based on price for people who need to buy a cloud just because. in this regard they are a walking corpse like ibm was in the 90s. then the money came from xbox, which they tried to kill several times and only got market share because they sold at loss early just because that's what they do without even thinking. Salesforce, and LinkedIn, which they bought after they were monopolies already (and owners only sold exactly because of the fear of saying no, which the article paints very well) and couldn't run to the ground no matter how bad and abusive it got. and lately openai related stock memes despite being the least protected player (as in no hand in chip design). what exactly paints the article as wrong? they just got a few luck hits on the way down.
- relaxing 2y agoEvery company is on the way down if not for a few luck hits.
- 1oooqooq 2y agonah. Believe it or not, some companies do have a mission that is not "break competitors leg" like microsoft.
- 1986 2y ago> Salesforce, and LinkedIn, which they bought after they were monopolies already (and owners only sold exactly because of the fear of saying no, which the article paints very well) Microsoft didn't buy Salesforce.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoyou are right. i don't even know which one i was thinking when my finger decided to type salesforce. well. I only know enough about MS for the occasional checks to keep it into the not buy pile.
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- vbezhenar 2y agoMicrosoft is dead indeed. Windows went straight downwards since Windows 7. All their products are not good. Can't remember a single MS software or service I'd use. They bought some companies like GitHub which are doing good, but that's not MS and they couldn't even buy OpenAI.
- WalterBright 2y agoMSFT is up something like 10x in the last 10 years. Incredible.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]