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It's interesting to read comments about this today, written through the lens of the present. I suspect many commenters were too young to really understand the level of dominance Microsoft had in the market circa from 1995-2005. Just look at this chart:
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...
In 2004, outside of education and desktop publishing it was extremely rare to see an Apple computer at all. Apple was the iPod company by that point. Almost all software of note ran only on Windows, and Office was required for all documents.
That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web. That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...it's not the same company at all. In fact, there is no company today even fractionally as dominant. Google's search monopoly or Apple's App Store monopoly just don't compare.
It appears all the critical commenters think PG was unaware of these facts, but they critically misunderstand the truth on the ground. There was no way for PG to not know that Microsoft was dominant everywhere because Windows ran everything (even digital signage) and Word documents were a more accepted interchange format than even PDFs. He was invoking Gibson's observation that the future is unevenly distributed, and he was right: The movement of almost all applications to the web absolutely annihilated Microsft's ability to dictate what software smaller companies could or could not publish.
Edit: Also, it seems unthinkable today, but back then we all had a large number of devices like printers and digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers. Microsoft essentially dictated what hardware you could buy too.
Your comments that MS is a completely differnt company are absolutely correct.
MS owns github, linkedin, and it's cloud services in azure, etc, are outside the initial desktop OS business model. Not to mention it being one of the biggest contributors to the linux kernel (to my chagrin). All of this is because of the slide in significance and dominance of it's windows OS business.
This OS business is still quite present though, such as in the h/w upgrades being pushed on users now in migrating to win11. The big h/w OEMs pay windows OS royalties for all those new computers.
Also, WRT your mention of the h/w driver dominance of MS, it's ironic to note that in the modern world h/w peripherals still often come with a custom windows driver, when their use on linux is almost always supported by standard USB class device drivers. A notable failure to evolve.
“That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...”
I am not too young to remember the old Microsoft. To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic. Despite Tesla, GM is still relevant. Despite AWS, DB2 mainframes are still relevant. Heck, I have to work with EBCDIC data, a format designed to not produce holes in punchcards that are too close together. Even when we eventually move to a modern db, decades of archival data is not going to be converted from EBCDIC.
Windows might be irrelevant to FAANG or MANGA or GAMMA or whatever, but how many Fortune 500 companies don’t have a significant Microsoft presence?
Apple computers are pretty nice, but they’re expensive, and the vast majority of employees do fine with a cheap PC and Microsoft 365—why would a company pay more for unnecessary hardware that also requires rebuilding a bunch of IT systems, not to mention retraining thousands of employees.
> "That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant..."
> To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic.
That quote you quoted does not claim that Microsoft is irrelevant, it claims that the fact that Microsoft is a giant company today, is irrelevant.
I didn't say Microsoft is irrelevant. I said the fact that it's still a huge company is irrelevant when judging whether the old Microsoft was in fact dead or not. The new Microsoft is highly relevant, but Microsoft's philosophy of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" to maintain a grip on consumer compute is dead. If anything is the heir to that, it would be AWS.
I think you misread that. What ghc wrote was that the fact (that Microsoft is giant today) is irrelevant, not that Microsoft is irrelevant.
"Dead" apparently means "no longer the unquestioned industry leader" - which seems like an odd definition of "dead" to me, but ok.
The industry in question being the union of personal desktop and laptop computers, associated software, and internet-related technologies.
What actually happened was the internet-related sector broadened to include new sub-sectors - mobile, search, social, media, cloud, e-commerce, and ad tech - all of which Microsoft either ignored, failed at, or didn't dominate.
The old industries are still there but they're the tail, not the dog.
The dog is far more consumer and consumer-adjacent. MS culture was always more aligned with corporate goals and office productivity. MS never got social and lifestyle computing, which is where the industry was heading. It still doesn't, even in gaming.
AI is going to see a similar shift to a completely different mode of computing, but it's too early to tell how that will work out. At a guess it's going to be much more directly political than anything we've seen so far. (Not in a good way, IMO.)
[dead]
The amount of effort apparently required to satisfy all the checkboxes around "a cheap PC and Microsoft 365" is astounding. My Fortune 250 laptop runs 3 different security "endpoint" products, and literally dozens of scripts fire each day/hour to make sure that things are "correct" according to every suggestion any consultant ever made towards our senior IT staff. And they replace the entire fleet every 3 years. I believe that starting with longer lived hardware with an inherently more secure environment that didn't need to be groomed like this would be a net savings, but I don't have the numbers to prove it.
> To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic. Despite Tesla, GM is still relevant. Despite AWS, DB2 mainframes are still relevant. Heck, I have to work with EBCDIC data, a format designed to not produce holes in punchcards that are too close together.
There's more free energy in growing things.
Leave shrinking things to private equity.
There might be a lot of money in programming COBOL, but who wants to do that? It's not exciting to be a buzzard and subsist on carcasses.
Microsoft is irrelevant as far as the platform and where most development energy is focused. Can you imagine trying to get funding for a Windows application?
Agree with this take.
It is also highly visible in nerd Linux circles where some people still think they fight to have Linux on Desktop.
Linux on Desktop is irrelevant just as Microsoft pre 2005 is irrelevant.
MSFT saw that cloud is the future and they are in that business and O365 is flagship product where Windows just a support nice to have part because they need OS so people can run their browser.
Linux on the desktop is irrelevant in the same way that a carpenter’s home woodworking projects are irrelevant. I mean they are but that’s sort of beside the point, right?
People who want to beat Microsoft with Linux on the desktop should stop worrying and enjoy our nice ecosystem of little programs for what it is.
For years I've said that if you could take corporate purchases out of the Gartner numbers, you'd see that Apple was better than 50/50 when it came to personal use. I sure would like to see an updated version of that dataset.
That article is not the greatest citation and is factually wrong. Even the article admitted that It was dubious to think that Microsoft only had such a small share of the “compute” market in 2005.
> That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web
The slap on the wrist that Microsoft got had nothing to do with them first losing the MP3 player market which led to Apple’s resurgence (remember the plays4Sure platform and then the Zune?) or their failed efforts in mobile.
> digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers
I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs
It's true that it's not the best article, but I'm not entirely sure the Goldman Sachs chart should be treated as factually wrong. The article misses that 2005 was the heyday of Blackberry and iPod (iPod sales did something like 10x that year), and it's conceivable that Goldman included those devices as "compute". At worst, it's just shifted for a couple of years.
The decoupling of IE from Explorer is what really killed Microsoft, nothing to do with with MP3s. Remember, Microsoft was producing a bunch of proprietary extensions to Javascript and HMTL to lock vendors into their ASPX nightmare. It took many years to undo the damage, but at least PC vendors were allowed to ship with a non-IE web browser.
> I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs
As an admitted hoarder of all my old tech, I can assure you I am still in possession of several floppy disks with Windows drivers from my first digital cameras. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact timing, but I think the last digital camera I had to install drivers for was circa 2007 (Vista!). I still miss the days of my Sony laptops coming with i.Link, but I don't remember being able to connect my Sony cameras to many non-Sony PCs. I do remember having to install drivers to get Sony's ridiculous memory stick readers to work with other PCs (and Linux) though.
Early webcams needed drivers before UVC, proper digital cameras used CF or SD, and often still do.
My favourite paragraph was
"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. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward"
Is Google dying or dead in this sense now too? I can't think of any company they've bullied recently but maybe I'm just not in their space. All the excitement seemed to move over to social media companies and Apple, then Nvidia and all the industries it spawned. Google certainly aren't driving commercial innovation in the way they were when Gmail was a hot new topic.
I think google are in the enshittification phase of their corporate development and are currently in a cycle of making 0.1% more revenue on search changes at the expense of making it 5% shittier for users each time.
To be fair in 2007 it really did seem like google could completely destroy microsoft monopoly on enterprise software with google docs, google sheets and google workspace.
And then they just didn't? They just gave up, only small companies use google workspace these days and excel is as entrenched as ever.
I suppose the google meet/google talk/google hangouts explains a lot of why this hypothetical future didn't happen. If google had a serious person in the helm doing long-term strategy microsoft would already be dead and buried (or worse IBM-fied). Instead the CEOs stock market min-maxers took over.
I think Google leaders were smart to not take on Excel, especially after it was clear Microsoft was moving things to the cloud and spinning up Office 365.
There is no way a competitor could sustainably price a competing product against a low monthly or annual cost Excel/Office/OneDrive SAAS option, since the majority of the workforce was already trained on Office products, and everyone is using an edge feature that a new competing product might be missing.
I completely disagree. Google was already cloud-native with docs and sheets in 2007 while people were emailing excel files back and forth. It took like 10 years for microsoft to get there. And one drive is still terrible compared to google drive to this day.
The teenagers at the time (me included) were all using google sheets and google docs instead of MS products for _years_ before being introduced to the workforce. So the "trained on Office" argument was just an obstacle, not a breaking point if they kept at it for years.
> There is no way a competitor could sustainably price a competing product against a low monthly or annual cost Excel/Office/OneDrive SAAS option
If google had taken on microsoft heads-on they could have sued them into oblivion for anti-competitive practices in pricing if they tried that.
No, they just decided to not execute on the strategy, they did start but didn't finish. Arguably it was to focus on mobile and Android, but I see no reason why google couldn't do both considering all the wasted products they had over the years.
Where do you find these low monthly cost options? Using Office is considerably more expensive than it ever was for a business, and the profit margins are huge.
And if anyone could sustain an office suite until it runs profitably in these circumstances, it must surely be Google...
I don’t know that office 365 is more expensive than before, if incorporating time and stress into the equation. Businesses get to dispense with all their IT staff basically and just let people access everything via a browser. And it’s a lot less technical for the managers to manage users and licenses.
But the problem for competitors is say you are able to make a product just as good as Excel. You start selling it $x, but Microsoft can almost always go down to $x-1 since their marginal cost is near zero.
Maybe Google or some other big company has the cash flow to plow money into subsidizing this bet for many years, I can understand not wanting to make that bet.
Google Docs and whatnot came out all the way back in the late 2000s, but it still didn’t see any measurable adoption by the time office 365 was out. Maybe it is because Google didn’t stick with it and develop it, but I still think it was a long shot.
> Google Docs and whatnot came out all the way back in the late 2000s, but it still didn’t see any measurable adoption by the time office 365 was out. Maybe it is because Google didn’t stick with it and develop it, but I still think it was a long shot.
It didn't stick because google did not pursue the strategy to take over enterprise. Google Docs by itself is not going to displace Office 365 and IT management tools, you need the whole suite of products.
Google Drive/Suite seems more of a way to get Google off of an external corporate dependency, Microsoft, rather than a way to enlighten users. All of their products do.
Microsoft Office enterprise is $12 per seat.
Per?... month?
Per seat per month
very big companies use Workspace and the full suite of Google Docs products within.
Examples? I right now work in one, but I wouldn't call my company big (<200 people).
From my (limited) experience google workspace doesn't really offer the level of control over employee computers that microsoft solutions do (like limiting what you can install or tuning settings). So it is a non-starter for any big company.
Of the recent places I've worked, both use it. Block was at ~14,000 employees, but I think they're currently at ~12,500. My current company uses it, and we're ~2,000.
My ~3000 person company (a subsidiary of Microsoft!) even uses Google workspace
Hell Amazon uses Microsoft Office internally and is pre-installed on all corporate computers and Outlook is the standard
Amazon is the second largest employer in the US.
Broadcom uses Google Workspace; 20k+ employees
It’s 90/10 Microsoft/Google
https://www.enclyne.com/3-reasons-why-companies-are-migratin...
Yes, I don't disagree. Microsoft did seem to be going the way of IBM.
But yeah, Google had no long term strategy, or ever gave any impression of a road map.
It is funny how it is easier for google to acquire companies than do strategy in-house. Like they buy Youtube and Android and then pump them with resources instead of trying to do in-house.
If they had bought a video-call company instead of doing inhouse with google meet they would probably have monopoly on that too.
This really been the day of people having great comparisons for companies.
> Is Google dying or dead in this sense now too? I can't think of any company they've bullied recently ...
Such a great summary for judging corporate America.
The other was on Apple Invite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940852 "[they've] started making money, their product is going to become awful"
The number one signal of the death of Microsoft was the emergence of a newcomer (Google) who took off in a world they didn't operate in. Who does that today? I can't think of a company like that personally...
Gemini is trash product
Yeah, I even resubscribed to chatgpt. I have free Gemini, but it is really underwhelming
Satya saved Microsoft by doubling down on Azure and Cloud. Something that Balmer failed to do with Mobile.
Meanwhile he allowed desktop development to become a mess, he was the one killing mobile, and now Microsoft is dependent on Google and Apple for mobile endpoints, other than laptops.
He saved Microsoft's investers' pockets, but destroyed the soul of Windows, Windows Phone, the Nokia partnership, the Office suite, etc.
One could say he actually destroyed MSFT to build something new.
The Office Suite is doing better than ever. I have no problem paying $129 a year for O365 with five users and each user can use it across Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web. The iPad version with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse is actually pretty good.
And 1TB of storage per user.
It's not the ingress strategy, it's the egress one. How do you migrate 1TB of data OFF of OneDrive?
From your computer you attach a USB drive to your computer and move files like any other drive.
From an iPhone or iPad, you connect a USB drive to it using the USB C port, the USB drive shows up in the Files along with your OneDrive storage location and you move files to your drive.
The same way you would with GDrive, iCloud Drive or Dropbox
don't forget the tons of cash destroyed and resources trying to make bing competitive with google
He saved Microsoft, but doomed the rest of us.
... by becoming OSS friendly, and especially Linux friendly. Prior to that Microsoft and Azure were irrelevant because nobody wanted to run their backends on Windows.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Azure always had a very large and devoted following of corps who were all in on Windows, even in the early days when everything Azure ran on Windows. They had a very deep fanbase which caused them to not see things from the Silicon Valley perspective
Yes, the same nerds who would balk at using Windows would have balked at using Azure, but when it was time to choose clouds, that foot that Microsoft had in the door with corporate paid off big time. Many people have the privilege of working detached from the corporate world, but that also leads to warped perceptions like that of Paul in 2007.
Yep, I do think Paul was presciently observing a powerful class of people who would end up making the decisions in big companies that would not end up being all in MS customers, but I also remember being shocked seeing the demand for Azure when it first released (we wrote add-on software for cloud deployments for the big 3 clouds, and some smaller ones)
It's quite impressive to see how much the Windows experience has improved for developers since this was written.
I love being able to both do all of my web application work in a deeply integrated NixOS WSL VM and develop my own desktop environment power tools against a stable DWM using an officially supported Win32 API crate in Rust.
Honestly I dread booting up my M1 MacBook Pro for work, the experience feels sluggish, slow and unresponsive in comparison. In particular the experience of using a wireless mouse is like dragging the cursor through heavy sludge.
The de facto Linux game development workflow is now literally just to develop a Windows/DirectX game and making sure it works with Proton on Linux.
Relevant article from a few years ago: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
I've stuck with windows due to better power management support. Native Linux hasn't supported my hardware very well. Also my kids occasionally want to play Roblox or other games on my computers. Apple products are too expensive for me.
I too love the WSL, but at the same time--
If you needed to buy software, my entire life, chances are the software you needed was made for Windows.
I use Linux for a desktop, use it professionally, but I keep a Windows laptop around because every time a hobby butts up against software -- for instance, the control software for a CNC -- that software is written for Windows. (Yes, yes, there are open source alternatives, it's just codegen and largely generic APIs, but the software everyone uses runs on Windows.)
I'm surprised no one posted this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
Joel Spolsky was on the Excel team at MS, and was the lead on VBA. He prudently couches his doomsaying with this disclaimer:
> Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off
> Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops
I find this absolutely shocking. Was this a west coast thing? I graduated and got my first job around that time and never met a single developer who used an apple laptop. My CS department was entirely unix/linux/bsd and windows. All my internships and jobs post graduation was windows or linux. My experience was that the hacker community, cs community, developer community all looked down on apple laptops, especially back then.
I guess we all live in our own little bubbles.
Edit: Also, the worry back then wasn't so much that microsoft is dead, but that microsoft was expanding so much that even if you preferred to develop on a linux stack, you still wanted to get some background in C#, VB, tsql, etc to improve your chances at landing a job.
I haven't been issued a company laptop that wasn't OSX since 2009. Nowadays everyone makes a big deal about having the latest Apple M7.2 silicon.
I remember reading this at the time, and thinking how much of a bubble he seemed to be in.
Macs weren't something I saw that often at this time, just like now most computers were PCs.
I dunno man. I just went on a tour of two schools for my daughter here in the Netherlands. They both use Chromebooks for their students as cheap machines that can be easily replaced. Those don't run Windows.
Many "regular" folks have Mac machines because they no longer "have" to use Microsoft-specific software. Also, Microsoft doesn't have any phone OS (anymore) either - that's all Apple and Google.
That definitely doesn't mean Microsoft is truly "dead", but they're no longer the giant that you can't avoid. Companies can afford to ignore them, and that's a far cry from the absolute and total utter market dominance they had in the nineties (which is how I read this article).
Not only is Microsoft not dead, they're almost never included in the "Big Tech" that gets shouted about and cursed. Which is weird, Microsoft makes an OS that has a 90+% desktop share, no real competitors, and pretty much extract money at will for its software.
Microsoft has long been included, they just didn’t happen to be in the catchy FAANG acronym that a tv show used for a set of companies with increasing stock prices all the way back in 2013.
Netflix dropped out of that a long time ago, but FAANG is still sometimes used since it is catchier than MAMAA or whatever a 7 letter acronym would be if including Nvidia and Tesla.
How about MANTFANG (for microsoft, apple, nvidia, tesla, facebook, amazon, netflix, google)? If you drop Tesla, you can have "MANFANG" which fits 2025 Hollywood's year of the werewolf or if you reorder them you could have "FATMANNG", a bit like the infamous FatMan and Little Boy. Or "GFATMANN". If you go by Google's "Alphabet" you could do "MANTAFAN". And probably many others WAY catchier AND slightly more complete than "FAANG", IMO.
I think it's largely because SV tech bros have almost zero intersection with enterprise compute as it's used in the rest of the world. PG sees nothing but Apple laptops around him, because everyone holding them has never worked for a diesel engine manufacturer in Michigan or a wood panel plant in North Carolina.
The disconnect between SV and the rest of the world is as wide today as it has ever been.
> Their [n.b Apple's] 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
So nearly all of the (relatively) very few people that are funded by YC have Apple and that's proof of Apple's complete victory over a dead MS. In a year when MS was still on an upward trend, growing by 20% market cap to become double that of Apple.
Reading rich people's blogs reminds me every time that there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else. And by luck I mean a family golden nugget, or lucky first investment, or both. A superpower that allows one to fail many times and still be able to try again until they hit the next fortune. Most people in the world can't even afford to try. Most of the rest can't afford to fail.
Whenever I read these types of writing, it reminds me that just because a narrative is elegant, doesn't mean its true, especially when you're operating at very high levels of abstraction. Same problem I have with many pop psychology writings.
Think of it in the inverse.
If you're a person who is at one end of a funnel (in this case; new tech companies) and you see a 100% adoption which is contrary to the mainstream: you would think you have good insight.
You might forget that you're looking at:
A) A cargo culture
B) a homogeneous cohort.
This is the same way that people knew ahead of time that Microsoft Office would kill off Lotus notes. Since all school's were transitioning (or had transitioned) to Microsofts products.
It's also why people knew AWS would be so popular ahead of time, because new tech companies were not renting compute anymore, they were passing their credit cards to Amazon - even causing some companies to bet their products on making tooling to make AWS easier.
If you're at one end of the funnel, you can see the future.
Was this the future? or was it a false positive based on a cohort? - I definitely think the market dominance of Windows on the Desktop has been thoroughly challenged since 2008, and it's rare I see people elect to use Windows for <10yo companies unless the founders are only used to Microsoft products.
and I work in AAA games, which is insanely Microsoft dominated.
So you're saying that new AAA game companies use macs or linux?
I can't resolve the cognitive dissonance of that making a ton of sense or none.
There are more non-windows PC's in AAA game companies than there were in 2008 by a wide margin. Though usually not directly for gamedev.
In 2008, the IT department couldn't even handle Macs at all, now it's a standard deployment among managers, designers, brand and even some programmers who only work with backend code. (though usually they'll have a gaming PC too for testing the game).
That was literally unthinkable back then.
Sure there are more non-windows PC's but it's still miniscule[1]. To claim Microsoft is anything other than dominant is fallacious. And I understand the desire to talk positively about the good things (linux adoption) and ignore the bad things (Microsoft dominance).
[1] "https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/linux-share-on-steam-b...
The amount of steam users is not at all what I’m talking about, I’m saying as a game developer (a windows *dominated* field) there are more people running around with Macs for general purpose computing than 2008.
That’s not wishful thinking, thats reality. Computers do more than play games.
Comment was deleted :(
This also reminds me of "garage startups". In fact, probably only a fraction of people around the world own a garage. If your family has a garage, it means you are probably among the top ~1% richest people on Earth.
That’s silly. When I was growing up, we always had a garage and my family was ~25% under the median income. Hundreds of millions of Americans have a garage at home and it’s not the richest 2/3 of the country. It’s basically the people outside the largest cities.
There are probably about an equal number of people living in a home with a garage in China too, though it’s wealthier suburban areas as opposed to lower and middle class people.
They’re common in Japan, too, outside of the densest few cities. And of course there are plenty of other countries where garages are common, like Canada and Australia.
Probably more like richest 10%, which applies to most people in the US
> there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else.
Very quotable
> Reading rich people's blogs reminds me every time that there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else.
At some point they lose touch with reality. I've found their "advice" often doesn't work for young people who wanna become successful like them. Another example is Jensen:
"Nvidia doesn't have a long-term strategy, we just think about what to do next.
I don't wear a watch, because NOW is important"
and a lot of crap like that.
> At some point they lose touch with reality.
See every rich person telling young people to follow their passion.
Yes, it's so frustrating to hear them talk. Everyone knows a great deal of their success was luck (as discussed in the book Outlier), but they still find it amusing to lecture the "lesser folks" about ways to get rich.
> I don't wear a watch, because NOW is important
That doesn't imply that Jensen thinks he's successful because he doesn't wear a watch. He's not that delusional.
oh he knows... you're telling me the CEO and co-founder of the most valuable company in history doesn't think he's successful?
NVIDIA was the most valuable stock for short period, before Apple took the record. It is now less valuable than Apple and Microsoft.
>He's not that delusional.
I have no idea whether he is or not. However I suspect it is very hard to remain grounded when you have so much wealth. Every interaction with the outside world is going to be clouded by it. People will be subservient in a way that us peons don't experience when we dine in McDonalds or shop in Walmart.
Almost everybody I know drives a Lamborghini. Toyota is so dead...
It's not about being rich or not. People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC. People who cannot choose will use work computers in their office with Windows installed, that corporate chose for them.
People who do not want a computer at all will have neither PC or Mac. The majority of people do not want to have a computer – they see enough of them at work, and they are happy with their smart phones.
I think Apple is a very American thing. Outside the US, which you may not care about, only the most aspirationally Americanised people I've known have gone for apple products. Im not sure what the reasons are.
Europeans generally don't purchase the things they want, they purchase the things they are supposed to be wanting, after having long deliberations together with relatives and friends. So then they'll only look at specs and price and not how useful a product is or how pleasant it is to use.
Europeans are in general very weird about money. They are as greedy as anybody, but what do they do then with that money? They think turning on the air conditioner will ruin them financially and they count how many cents each person owes each other.
> They think turning on the air conditioner will ruin them financially
Literally laughed out loud at this, it’s so accurate.
This is pretty dumb generalization. In baltics, where I live, nobody counts cents or limits appliance use, despite low overall income.
In 2007, when the article was written, I distinctly remember being at Amazon and Windows laptops were the default option. So was the entire office suite, their share point thing, not to speak about Outlook. In fact one had to beg to IT guys to allow us to use Linux laptops. MacBooks were still a few years away if I remember correctly.
It's amazing that PG looked around in his bubble, saw MacBooks and decided to write that Microsoft is dead.
100%
> People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC.
FYI, this guy is a troll.
You are just doing yourself a disfavor by dismissing anybody who doesn't think exactly like you as non-human (a troll, a bot, a Russian, a heretic!). On that route, you'll end up living your life much less than to the fullest. I think your example speaks for this.
Yes, I think that a graphical user interface would be excellent for a server. And I'm probably not the only one who would like that idea: Apple invested a bunch of money trying to do just that with their Mac OS X Server.
> People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC.
I have worked for an awful lot of people over the years, and given they could afford my services, I would guess they fall into the "people who can choose what kind of computer they will choose" category. Some could choose what kind of Ferrari they wanted, lol.
Your intuition is anecdotal. Plenty of people either don't care, or gasp prefer Windows. They are not stupid (I'm one of them, which I'd be happy to discuss with anyone, up to and including Mr. Torvalds).
An operating system is a tool to allow you to use your computer hardware and to run software. What fits your needs may not fit everyone's. There's nothing wrong with that.
> Your intuition is anecdotal. Plenty of people either don't care, or gasp prefer Windows. They are not stupid (I'm one of them, which I'd be happy to discuss with anyone, up to and including Mr. Torvalds).
You're one of who?
> Plenty of people either don't care, or gasp prefer Windows.
Your statement could have been interpreted a different way ;)
> Your intuition is anecdotal.
Absolutely. I'm talking about what I've seen around the world in the past decade or so. When I have visitors who have never used a MacBook, they want to touch it and try it, they comment on how nice it is. And this is a design that hasn't changed much in 10 years.
In airports and cafés, I see more people using MacBooks than PC laptops, but this could be related to that PC laptop battery life generally doesn't allow you to bring the computer far from home without a cord.
> Plenty of people either don't care
Yes, as I've mentioned. And they usually don't buy a computer at all, and are happy with their smart phone and/or tablet. Some people buy the cheapest laptop they can find because their job demanded it. They won't care either, the computer is just an extension of their job and they hate the device.
And of course, a whole lot of people cannot afford anything but a cheap laptop if they need a laptop. But Apple is dangerously close to approaching these customers' budget with the Mac Mini. And if you consider re-sale value, there is even less reason to buy any other brand.
Where I live, people buy apple because you can show it off. That's why you see these in cafes and airports.
Of course it's just for showing off, just like carpenters and plumbers buy expensive professional tools to show off. The worst I saw was an office worker who had a comfortable chair, when everybody knows you can work just as well sitting on a cheap stool. Show offs...
If this were true, people who have most money and need tools most would be people buying Apple.
Instead, people take loans to buy Apple to show how cool and rich they are.
| People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC.
No, we will not.
You would have to pay me considerable sum of money to pick anything Apple over other options.
I’ve been hearing people say this since this incorrect essay was written almost 20 years ago
Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today
Microsoft had 0% of hosting then and has the world’s second largest share, 23%, today
Microsoft had, in 2007, 18% presence share in console gaming. Today they have 65%
They were one of the four tech orgs present at the presidential inauguration
They have grown enormously in the time this essay claims they were dying
Xbox One sold 57.9M and Series family has sold 28.3M by mid 2024.
PS4 sold 117M and PS5 sold 61.7M by mid 2024.
Nintendo claims 150.9M Switch consoles sold as of the end of 2024.
That puts Microsoft at around 20.7%, Sony at 43%, and Nintendo at about 36.3%.
Even if you exclude Nintendo with a "no-true-gamer" fallacy, Microsoft still has just 32.5% of the market.
Windows was over 90% in 2007 and is just 72% today. If you include the super-important mobile market, Windows actual marketshare is something like 10-15% and even less if you include servers (where even most Azure servers run Linux).
I said presence share, not market share
Three total customers exist worldwide. All three have red square, two have yellow square, and one has blue square
Blue square sold one in six items, so it has one sixth market share. Blue square is one in three households, so it has one third presence share
Yes, if we are counting only game consoles, now if we count game studios owned by each company, and they earnings across all platforms, it is a complete different picture.
Microsoft owns PC, and even Valve has forced to emulate Windows/DirectX to have any games on SteamDeck.
The amount of office worker typing Excel sheets on mobile phones is rather tiny.
Even if you look at just computer games, Windows has a smaller share than any time since the 1980s.
If you include the massive mobile gaming market, Windows gaming is an even tinier percentage of the overall market (maybe even <10%).
Have you ever played Windows games on the 1980's?
That would be a first.
What matters is where money is, and how much of those games trace back to Microsoft owned studios.
Good example with mobile games though, as it is a good example of Valve's failure to capitalise on 80% of mobile games being run with OpenGL/Vulkan, on a Linux like platform, and yet they have to translate Win32/DirectX, as means to get games on SteamDeck.
The PC’s share of gaming, according to EA, by dollars spent, is 23%, the second largest slice behind iOS, larger than any of the consoles
Guesswork is rarely helpful
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> Microsoft had, in 2007, 18% presence share in console gaming. Today they have 65%
Source for this ? Also what do you mean by "presence" ? I had the impression that Sony was in a way better position than Microsoft, and they were both dwarfed by Nintendo by a substantial margin.
(not that this invalidate your overall point).
PlayStation 3 went down quite badly among game developers given how hard Cell was to program for, and users with the whole OtherOS fallout, this brought XBox 360 into the winning round.
Microsoft lost the plot afterwards with XBox ONE against the Playstation 4, and even with the Series S|X, they never recovered on the hardware side.
However this is kind of relative now, even if they don't public admit yet, the hardware is gone, they are going SEGA, and by being one of the largest game publishers, it hardly matters if the XBox console isn't going that well.
In one year they already recovered all the money lost in the ABK deal and litigations.
>I’ve been hearing people say this since this incorrect essay was written almost 20 years ago Microsoft had [...list of significant statistics...]
Whenever someone writes a provocative article about something being "dead", they are almost always talking about influence and mindshare -- rather than business statistics.
Yes, Microsoft is still a huge behemoth being a $3+ trillion cap company with a overwhelming marketshare of Windows & Office installations but the apex of their "industry influence" was the 1990s during the "Wintel" days before the internet came along. That 1980s/1990s was the time period when Bill Gates was CEO and "everybody was scared of Microsoft". Since, then they ... lost the browser wars (both old IE and new IE with Trident engine failed), lost the mobile shift (Windows phones failed), is a distant #2 in search engine market. Microsoft is somewhat back in the influence game with AI but that's because they partnered with OpenAI rather than build something internally. Arguably, it's Meta that gets more noise with LLAMA, and China's High-Flyer getting everybody's attention with DeepSeek-R1. That's the type of "alive vs dead" PG is writing about.
The "dead" being a writer's rhetorical flourish rather than a business status is the same when applied to "IBM is dead". In pure business metrics, IBM is still a giant company with $65 billion in revenue and $7 in profits. The airlines, major banks, and credit-card companies still run millions of transactions through IBM Z mainframes. Companies are still buying and upgrading expensive new Z mainframes. But the rhetorical "dead" means IBM's apex of influence was 1960s & 1970s. The later IBM trying to relevant with the newer tech like Watson and blockchain service doesn't matter to people.
Maybe writers should stop using "dead" as rhetorical technique because it just confuses readers. E.g. saying something like "DirecTV is dead" makes people scratch their head when they just watched a game on the satellite service last night. How would that be possible if it was truly dead?!?
You are missing a lot of stuff Microsoft is doing. Azure, .NET, server tools, databases, VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub, (yes, OpenAI), gaming, XBox, desktop, business tools, Surface, Microsoft 365, Teams and lots more. I'd say much of the things they are doing is quite "fresh" and it's more relevant as it has ever been.
There is a reason it's market cap is bigger than Google's and Amazon's, and its downfall has been long overturned.
>with a overwhelming marketshare of Windows & Office installations
It's interesting that you mention it, as none of these are very important on their own to today's Microsoft if you check their latest quarterly reports.
>You are missing a lot of stuff Microsoft is doing. Azure, .NET, server tools, databases, VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub, [...] and it's more relevant as it has ever been.
I didn't list them because they're not "relevant" (scare quotes) to PG's rhetorical angle of "dead". Yes, of course those Microsoft components are still relevant and still being updated and modernized. That said, even though I personally use VSCode, Visual Studio, Github every day, and have upgraded too many MS SQL Server databases... my point is those examples of Microsoft's current usage is not what PG is talking about. I'm not saying readers have to agree with PG. They just have to understand that he's using "dead" as a provocative shorthand about "influence" rather than business stats.
Same confusion as IBM coming out with new Z mainframe models in 2025 and IBM Red Hat just released a new RHEL 9.5 a few months ago and yet people will say "IBM is dead". How can IBM be dead if Red Hat Linux is still relevant?!? That's the problem with different readers' interpretation of the word "dead".
EDIT reply to: >Then what is he talking about when he says "dead"? [...] I mean for vast majority GitHub is a synonym for Git and VSCode is nearly a de-facto IDE for frontend development,
Github (2008 acquired by MS in 2018) and VSCode (2015) didn't exist in 2007 when PG wrote his "Microsoft is Dead" essay. It's possible those are "influential" enough to change his opinion. Maybe not. The examples of millions of people using MS Excel and Word every day back in 2007 with no meaningful competition from Google Docs or LibreOffice didn't stop him form writing "Microsoft is Dead". Therefore, we must conclude he's using "dead" in a very particular way.
> VSCode, Visual Studio, Github every day, and have upgraded too many MS SQL Server databases... my point is those examples of Microsoft's current usage is not what PG is talking about....
Then what is he talking about when he says "dead"?
Also comparing those MS softwares with Z-mainframe & RHEL feels a bit off. If you take a 90th percentile of s/w developer starting career today they are more likely to have heard or used those MS tools than IBM's. I mean for vast majority GitHub is a synonym for Git and VSCode is nearly a de-facto IDE for frontend development, TypeScript I don't need to say much.
I understood the writer's flourish.
If you want to understand my reaction, take two steps:
1. Note which companies do in fact have mindshare
2. Check which of those are owned by Microsoft
It is a pretty unhelpful way to say "Is not longer as incredibly dominant as it was". It's a stretch to apply it to "Is declining into irrelevence", even.
Watson has been around a long, long time, and they are still leaders in quantum computing IIRC.
> Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today
Microsoft had 90%+ of desktop penetration in 2008; in fact, it made news that it had slipped to below that at the end of 2008.[0][1]
Now it's around 70%, but seems to be improving?[2]
[0]: https://www.osnews.com/story/20605/windows-market-share-slip...
[1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367310/windows-market...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
>Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today
That's only counting the latest version, if you include all Windows versions, it was in the high 90%. Today it's in the mid 90%.
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
In 2005, it was actually closer to 4x - 60.79 vs 271B
It was around 2011 that Apple had a higher market cap.
He did predict the iPhone. That basically cemented Microsoft’s fate. Sure MS is still dominant in the “enterprise”. But no one is investing money to make great Windows apps.
The first time this essay made the rounds, a bunch of people misunderstood his point the same way you're doing: https://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html
He was talking about cultural dominance among people developing new tech, not revenue.
There was a time when being a programmer essentially meant writing C++ on Windows. I still remember getting a Mac as late as ~2013 and having my normie (non-engineer) friends chastise me for it -- "how are you going to get any serious coding done?" -- because that was their genuine impression of Windows vs Macs. Meanwhile, imagine you're the founder of YC in 2007 in a city where all the new tech startups are happening. Everyone's using Macs. Surely it's at least a valid argument or hypothesis that this is a leading indicator of where the forefront of tech is going.
And now if you go to any modern fast-growing tech company, you look around, everyone uses Macs. Even lots of Microsoft employees use Macs. It seems the hypothesis wasn't completely wrong. Incidentally, it's only with hindsight that we're able to refute this somewhat: Microsoft made a nice comeback in the tech world after Nadella became CEO. But that was a big surprise when it happened.
Was it really necessary to turn this into a talking point about rich people and their sins?
> a bunch of people misunderstood his point the same way you're doing
Nobody implied he meant "dead dead" so that's a straw man, just that he completely missed the mark with his observation. Everything else is a backsplanation. PG even acknowledges he may look like a fool in retrospective.
> He was talking about cultural dominance among people developing new tech [...] Everyone's using Macs
So... a cultural thing you say, not connected to performance? Correlation not causation. The investor expects to see a Mac because that's part of the impression and everyone conformed. People showed up with a Mac to ask for money much like people show up in a suit to ask for a job. The interviewer expects the suit. It has no impact on the job performance or quality. It's just the "cultural" expectation. Wall Street people aren't more profitable due to the suits, and casual attire isn't dead.
> Was it really necessary to turn this into a talking point about rich people and their sins?
Was it really necessary to come to his defense? Was PG's opinion of MS really necessary? Would you have let it slide if I was praising instead?
They implied that he meant Microsoft's financials were in trouble, when he was more saying that Microsoft had become the new IBM.
I don't think Macs are popular in tech merely due to frivolous or circular fashion. Basically no one used Windows to do 2009-2016 era web dev. Not because founders were pushing employees to use Macs so investors would see when they came to visit; Microsoft genuinely lost a lot of reputation among programmers prior to the WSL stuff due to how bad their stuff was. Am I the only one who remembers this? People complaining and giving each other a look if they had to use "Winblows" and so on? (I still see this today.)
> Was it really necessary to come to his defense? ...
I mean, no, but why does every PG essay posted on here spawn a bunch of comments about basically how rich and pretentious he is? Why does this matter? If he's wrong, why not just say why?
> genuinely lost a lot of reputation
Billionaires also genuinely lost a lot of reputation. Present discussion and times stands proof. "Billionaires are dead", to mirror PG's sentiment. Surely you agree that having an opinion on rich people's predictive powers is at least as relevant and justified as having an opinion on MS's future.
PG called MS dead by observing a cultural/fashion trend among a sliver of the IT crowd and predicted a larger shift that never happened to any meaningful degree. He missed that what he was looking at wasn't truly of interest to MS. The 90% of regular users were and they had way more inertia than what PG though the few people in his line of sight could oppose.
> how rich and pretentious he is
Rich yes. "Pretentious" is your assessment. I made no moral judgement on the man. Just counterbalancing the common narrative seen even here that rich people have a superior intellects, they see things others don't even in the dark uncertainty of the future. In reality it's mostly bias, successes are praised, failures downplayed. It tricks people into believing rich people are oracles, or that not rich means not intelligent. You don't object to the praising and you'll fight to support that bias? That looks disingenuous.
> If he's wrong, why not just say why?
I did, repeatedly. You just cared more about responding than about understanding. No amount of "saying why" will change your mind because there's always some other place to shift the goal posts. "It's cultural but actually technical. It's dead but just dead for some coders. It's just a few coders but SV is all that matters. Time proved it wrong but it surprised everyone." You'll also put words in my mouth that I absolutely never suggested hoping it brings my argument low enough that you think you have a chance of fighting it. Not in a million throwaway accounts ;).
That quote is so out of touch.
It was never that complete. Gamers used pcs. Paul grahams surprise missed an entire segment of the market.
Additionally Mac usage statistically never exceeded windows. Paul lived a bit in a rich persons world and he’s around a lot web developers who like osx because it’s unixy without the issues of old Linux.
And don't forget location. In 2007 not even the majority of developers in Europe had adopted the 'default developer mac', that only came a couple years later than in the US (afaik) and it never even reached that adoption rate (that is now in general, not only developers). If I look at my non-tech friends in Germany there is still just a tiny percentage using macs, and even iPhones are way outnumbered by Android.
I think I even saw Mac for the first time around 2004. Eastern europe.
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It is an common theme with PG to write confidently about technology while also demonstrating that he has absolutely no understanding of what he's talking about.
I've been commenting about this here for YEARS with constant pushback and excuses for him from the community. "He's a billionaire so he must be smart", "He personally wrote the entire HN codebase", "Nobody really needs a valid SSL cert on their website in 2023". Dang has even cited me for "personal attacks" for daring to point out PG's most visible shortcomings and knowledge gaps.
I guess the inflection point was PG turning to X to screech about "wokism" in support of oligarchs like Trump and Musk to snap this community out of it's pro-PG trance. Watching a billionaire cheer on the billionaire class as we plummet into technofeudalism is a hell of a wake up call.
Glad to see criticism of PG finally going mainstream here, especially digging back 18 years and concluding that he's always been like this. It's a shame he financially runs this place and these comments are short-lived due to platform manipulation.
> Glad to see criticism of PG finally going mainstream here
I appreciate there are people out there who have chosen PG to emotionally glom onto, positively or negatively, and perhaps you're probably an extreme case of the latter, so I would have to challenge a little. "Criticising someone loads" isn't a good thing. Just neutrally challenging their ideas individually is all that's needed.
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>I guess the inflection point was PG turning to X to screech about "wokism" in support of oligarchs like Trump and Musk to snap this community out of it's pro-PG trance. Watching a billionaire cheer on the billionaire class as we plummet into technofeudalism is a hell of a wake up call.
In hindsight his (and Andreessen's techno-bullshit) have won a bet with Trump, those tweaker writings are very much aligning with the zeitgeist that's being imposed by Trump, Musk and their lackeys, they may even brag about having get there earlier than every other rich techbro.
[dead]
> Reading rich people's blogs reminds me every time that there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else. And by luck I mean a family golden nugget, or lucky first investment, or both. A superpower that allows one to fail many times and still be able to try again until they hit the next fortune. Most people in the world can't even afford to try. Most of the rest can't afford to fail.
Is this true? Did Paul Graham have outside money to fall back on that was given to him to sustain him through all his failures?
From Wikipedia: Graham received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in philosophy from Cornell University in 1986. He then received a Master of Science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990, both in computer science from Harvard University. Graham has also studied fine arts and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.
Note that most people can't even afford to go to one university, let alone four. That definitely seems like someone who had a safety net that allowed him to focus on acquiring wealth, instead of acquiring shelter or food.
PG is from a middle class family AFAIK and probably benefited from some parental support. However, you may be missing the fact that graduate study in the US is typically funded. He would most likely have received a stipend or other funding covering living expenses while doing his PhD.
> Note that most people can't even afford to go to one university, let alone four. That definitely seems like someone who had a safety net that allowed him to focus on acquiring wealth, instead of acquiring shelter or food.
In 1986 a smart person who was willing to live cheaply could definitely do this. Doing a PhD is not evidence of a "family golden nugget", in my view. I don't know when he did his art studies, but still. Giant numbers of middle class people do not do what Paul Graham did, even though they had enough "safety net" to do that studying.
Jeez, I suppose we should only allow people in who grew up living under a bridge like you.
Yup, nepo kid
"...father worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors, then was named the Director of Nuclear Safety for Atomic Energy of Canada"
I don't understand. Are you saying Paul Graham got a job at Westinghouse due to nepotism?
"Nepotism is the act of granting an advantage, privilege, or position to relatives in an occupation or field."
I do not know about Paul Graham in particular, but it is true of many rich people.
I know it's an oft-recited thing in the last decade or so, but I don't really understand it. It's true that in markets with lots of value to provide someone will win, and probably make lots of money, but to do so they would have to out-compete all the other people. That is extremely difficult, and calling it luck just seems a bit silly. People who got rich through building businesses aren't like lottery winners or heirs of fortunes. Why pretend they are, and what's behind that mindset?
Because it is demonstrably true for many people that luck or family influence or money played a factor.
They may have had to compete with other people in the same advantages in the same business - which may not be very many.
There is an overlap between people who build businesses and heirs of fortunes. Far more people increase an existing fortune than become rich from scratch.
I wonder who you'd put in that bucket today, who is the looming incumbent who might just show up and eat your lunch. For some time it was Meta, they definitely strong armed a bunch of small upstarts to sell out rather than compete. Right now I'm not so sure, there isn't any single name that comes to mind.
What upstarts did Meta strong arm? From my recollection, they paid enormous amounts of money for websites and apps like Instagram and WhatsApp.
There were so many threads on this website alone about how much extra Meta was paying and how they would ever see a return.
Given their trajectory at the time, they probably would be.
Right now they're embracing open source and Linux, which has proven to be a very good idea.
I'm still not convinced.
EEE
Android and ChromeOS.
Google is being much better at that game with Linux.
Whenever I see posts from famous people touted on Hacker News and Reddit, I always remind myself about this favorite quote of mine from Buddha (I'm a former Buddhist-turned-atheist, but I still agree with a few thinking and concepts from Buddhism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta
> Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava), nor upon tradition (paramparā), nor upon rumor (itikirā), nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna) nor upon surmise (takka-hetu), nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu), nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka), nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā), nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya), nor upon the consideration 'The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)' Kalamas, when you yourselves know 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.
I’d argue Paul Graham’s relevance is what died. He’s not worth 3T Microsoft is. Sure they’re not sexy to startups but they survived and thrived and found cloud when they did and are worth buckets and buckets of money.
An incredibly irrelevant comparison which kind of ignores thinking and just reduces things to "haha I have more money than you so I'm more important" (a strange way to think).
Paul Graham lives in a bubble. This article ignores the entirety of the actual real world because he talked to one person who didn't understand a reference to ancient history. Microsoft's entire business model has changed, but Paul Graham's bubble hasn't.
Every single startup Paul's company funds uses a Microsoft product one way or another. YCombinator is giving out Azure credits to their funded startups. When Sam Altman pivoted OpenAI from non-profit, he did it with Microsoft money. Microsoft is relevant as hell, just as it was in 2007, when it was busily providing productivity software to the entire US federal government without breaking a sweat -- a contract it still holds nearly two decades later.
From Paul Graham's perspective, detached from the actual world people live in, doing as he pleases with his fuck-you money, sure, maybe Microsoft is dead. But the list of people who can get value out of this essay is "Paul Graham."
You said it better than I did. I was trying to say just this.
I'll admit that this is a charitable reading of the essay, but I think that MS was dead in 2007 and is still dead in 2025, in the sense that Graham was focused on. In the 90s startup founders were scared that if they started a software company MS would copy their idea and crush them. Bill Gates used to talk about how he wanted to "monopolize" software before the lawyers caught up with him. By 2007 MS was mostly irrelevant to startup founders, and with a few exceptions it's mostly irrelevant to them now. They're not in the business of crushing the life out of software startups anymore. Paul's a VC, and that's what he was focused on.
That's a legit take. But I also think PG conveys his point poorly. He uses terms like "no one" and "dangerous" - and even "dead" - in a non-standard way without clarifying their meaning. Perhaps the meaning was more obvious to members of the startup scene in the 2000s, but then he's tying himself into a subcultures's perspective, which I feel is just as problematic.
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"[Apple's] 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"
He's not wrong there, I once had to use my laptop to display Jeff Bezos's Powerpoint when he was at Startup School because I was the only person around they knew had Windows. I tried so hard to like OSX, using it as my daily driver for two years, and I still wish I did.
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This was certainly near peak Microsoft malaise. The only interesting thing they were doing with the Xbox 360 and that was only interesting because the grown ups weren’t paying attention. (When they did start to pay attention we got the Xbox One).
It is interesting perspective on how fast things can change in tech. Right now Intel seems doomed and Nvidia unbeatable, but it could all change in a few years time.
Now that windows 10 EOL has already been commited, forcing users to buy expensive new desktop/laptops to run heavy and extremely slow/laggy 'Shady' windows 11
They are doomed
Since advent of smartphone, its been 13 yrs my desktop/laptop are unused covered in dust,
All my needs are fulfilled by hybrid android+linux ecosystem
Who among average users needs laptop, for daily usage when phone can be thrice fast and 100times more features
The OS-based Windows 98/2000 Microsoft is dead. The Enterprise Microsoft is very much alive and well.
Sure they are alive, but they are not the 800 pound gorilla they used to be, who could freeze investments in an area just by announcing they are entering that area.
I think they're still an 800 lb gorilla. It's just that now they're not the _only_ 800 lb gorilla.
Nope. Were you alive in the 1990's? It was completely different. Microsoft froze innovation in the industry. Nobody does that today.
I started coding in the early 80s, so yeah, indeed alive back then :)
And I still respectfully disagree with you
Those toxic companies have billions of cash, then backed by the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock.
This money is sort of "weaponized".
If you are not "them", if you stick to the basic "economic rules", you are already gone as you cannot exist.
The real difference with tech is that this isn't true.
If you make something people want you can sell it. When I started our company 4 years ago I'd have considered $1m ARR a massive achievement. Now I'm here in my heart I feel a need to grow and raise or we'll die - but In my head I don't think this is actually true.
I don't think there has been a time in human history before where a company of our size (30x median wages) could have been built without needing a great deal of capital.
If Microsoft/Google et al want to use Blackrock/Vanguard's money to buy up small companies that creates more incentive for the young and idealistic to start such companies. While economic security is of sufficient value that resisting a first buyout would be hard for most (hence Sergey and Larry trying to sell for $1m) once a first buyout has been achieved a second buyout can never be forced.
This is delusional: If you bother them and you are to follow the basic 'economic rules', you have zero chance.
If you want to exist in that case:
1 - you must have the will to resist them (for how long, since they will always be around in some shape due to unlimited funding).
2 - you must have some kind of mechanism to be 'outside of the basic economic rules' (usually subsidies or similar).
Which part is delusional?
Yes most people would struggle to resist a $5m buyout (e.g. Larry and Sergey) but if you had $5m in the bank you would be quite robust in your ability to resist further economic pressure - if you wanted to.
Most 20 year olds can get by on <$20k a year if they are willing to flat share, move home, eat noodles etc, given SWE make $150k+ most can generate this short of revenue on their own in short order.
The vast, vast amount of software is unbelievably bad. It does the task it's designed for just barely, the idea there isn't massive opportunity for improvement, fun and profit is patently absurd.
Not sure what part of this is delusional.
Huh? This is much more complicated than a ridiculous $5m buyout. They will spend you out of business, financially chock you if you follow the 'basic economic rules', they even won't know you exist.
Yes, this is delusional. You would need infinite subsidies, an iron will, hardcore regulation, all that for forever to have a little chance at being significant.
(side note: on HN, many are aware than most software, open source or not, are brain diarrhea).
How did vanguard and blackrock get the money they invest in Microsoft?
Hint: It's from average people investing in their retirement...
This is not what I said:
1 - they have their own cash from huge racketering (forced) monetary streams. 2 - then, you still have the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock.
Those gigantic amounts of money are 'economically weaponized' to 'economically destroy' any sane alternatives, at worldwide scale. RIP "ecomonic competition" (who thinks nowadays this thing is not a scam).
So you say the very average people investing there are plainly aware their money is engaged in 'economic tyrany' which forces down the throat of nearly all average people, that worldwide, the _amazing_ msft software ? mmmmh....
What is this telling us about the stuff he writes with full conviction today?
Read all of it. Go beyond just the title, and it should tell you that Paul Graham was more right than wrong with this one.
- Google was, for a while, the "gorilla in the room" - their decline is recent. But Paul Graham got it right, that Google was more scary than MS.
- Microsoft was "dead" in 2007, same as Apple was before Steve Jobs came back. The revival started with Satya Nadella, 7 years later. It is still a shadow of its former self, MS dominated the industry like no other player ever did (or is likely to do, again).
- The 4 forces that lead to MS' demise are likely spot-on. And again "demise" in the same sense of IBM, "still exists, still makes money, nobody really cares".
Did the "all ycombinator founders use Macs" rub me the wrong way, when used as an argument as he did? Yes. But I also kinda' understand it(*), even though I still think he should've steered away from that argument.
(*) you can interpret it in the sense of "the future is already here - it is just very unevenly distributed"; that's probably what he meant. He knew full well the market share.
The problem with "all use Macs" is that Apple has always been a great hardware company with an underfunded software side.
MacOS has so many problems or unsupported features it isn't funny, while Windows was fine.
>> I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly
Hmm. The lesson here is probably don't assume you understand a competitor's strengths and weaknesses via secondhand experience.
And the things MacOS historically did better, having a shell and integrating with unix-like software, have been evened with PowerShell/.NET, WSL2, and HyperV.
Furthermore, a few companies started making Windows laptops that weren't bricks. While Apple's software budget is now mostly iOS/device-focused.
This was not meant to transform into "windows vs mac, which is better". But I happen to have used both, recently, and can tell: no, Windows got closer but is not quite there on the "having a shell" chapter. It still has too many, and too different. Powershell.NET is powerful, but is also "alien" to many people - you have to know .NET! Scripting is meant to be quick & hacky, not "real software that needs a release cycle", and in that sense Powershell.NET, while miles better than whatever MS previously had, still misses the mark. You know how you can tell? Because it works perfectly fine on Mac, but has 0 adoption there.
WSL2 is... ugh, ok, much better that WSL. And actually decent. But, as the name implies, is a linux environment. Not a native Windows terminal.
> a few companies started making Windows laptops that weren't bricks
I am honestly, genuinely interested in a windows-based laptop that is as good as a Macbook Pro (or at least very close). Would like the flexibility to move away from Apple. Am interested in battery life, compute power (i.e. internal processor speed, ssd speed, memory size, decent gpu), screen, keyboard & touchpad, and overall build quality (the last one is almost guaranteed if it is close in quality on all the other dimensions).
Any of the "ultrabooks" with decent IPS screens, keyboards, metal bodies, and battery life.
Dell XPSs were a decent option for the last decade+ (especially the refurbs), but Dell seems to be going through a rebranding exercise [0], so those will now be Dell Pro/Premium models? Maybe?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/the-end-of-an-era-de...
I've struggled for years with windows notebooks waking up from sleep/hibernate randomly, particularly the Dell models. Happens all the time, cooking itself inside my bag. Doesn't matter what sleep, power, etc settings I've messed with. Can explicitly put it to sleep and then stand there for 60 seconds and watch it wake itself back up. The built in power diagnostics features of windows are unable to explain why this happens, or in anyway prevent it.
This experience has kept me from spending money on any portable windows machine.
I don't think battery life is close. It was the number 1 criterion on my list.
the performance for electron apps on Windows is terrible, even my threadripper 7960X feels laggy in slack compared to my fanless macbook air M2.
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> have been evened with PowerShell/.NET, WSL2, and HyperV.
I'm gonna need a source for that quote because no, no one besides a couple of Windows admins ever acknowledged parity, just "meh, if I have to".
While I consider myself of being part of a Linux-y bubble, I can definitely see people around me, who are, or where, in the same bubble, using PowerShell more and more and more. And, this is the interesting part, every single one of them has been saying that PowerShell is way better than e.g. Bash, or whatever you wanna compare it to. This is also because of the much more modern architectural design of Windows NT, which is and has been miles ahead of Linux, because it could learn from it's failures when it was developed. Same for PowerShell. It could learn from the mistakes that Bash made, and still has to live with.
Still, obviously, this is anecdotal evidence at best.
I'm a fair hand with the Linux shell and utilities, and I can say that PowerShell provides a lot of useful analogous capability in the Windows environment. I don't totally understand the model for PowerShell but the times I've had to dip into it it's been pretty good.
> - The 4 forces that lead to MS' demise are likely spot-on. And again "demise" in the same sense of IBM, "still exists, still makes money, nobody really cares".
IBM shareholders and employees can only dream their demise was in the same sense as Microsoft’s.
I bet everyone on Linux that depend on stuff IBM and Red-Hat contribute to, really care, a lot.
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It tells us that he’s only human. That’s what fans of him will say and they’re right.
The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human. Makes sense given where we are. This incubator is founded by him so there’s a bit of that irrational hero worship there.
> The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human.
In quite some essays, Paul Graham portraits himself this way. You will either be annoyed by this, or you will like his essays. In the latter case, you will likely self-select yourself for this unwitting bias.
That nobody can predict the future?
However, there are people that have the intellect and the information to do it better than others.
Btw, it contains stuff like this "The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.". Microsoft (or Satya did) also predicted the future, or read this post, and refocused (to online service such as MS365). There still correct, insightful stuff in this post.
There is also "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." also radically different now they have GitHub and WSL, etc
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He was wrong about Microsoft's death but correct about how AJAX making web apps feel more desktop-like would remove Microsoft's dominance in many categories and niches.
As a bit of trivia (because web apps have clearly outpaced native/desktop for a long while now), who was it that invented the XMLHttpRequest that formed the basis for AJAX?
The Outlook Web team @ Microsoft; it shipped with IE5.
I have a very complicated history with Microsoft products, but they have introduced a lot of technologies over the years that we all use, even die-hard MS haters.
He just predicts what he wishes should happen... like most people. Makes him very ordinary.
That times change?
This was a lot more accurate when it was published in 2007.
I think a key aspect of calling a thing "dead" is that it implies permanency. In other words, it can't have been more accurate in 2007 if it isn't accurate now, which it appears to not be. Maybe if pg had said "irrelevant" instead.
(Others have pointed out that 2007 wasn't even a particularly bad year for MSFT.)
That 18 years are a long time, and companies can pivot and stay relevant. He was right about everything he said. The people at Microsoft agreed and here we are now.
Todays Microsoft is not the same as 2007, back then it was windows, excel, exchange etc. Nowdays its Azure and cloud services.
The only thing they tried and failed, that would make them a real dangerous company was mobile.
Nothing. It is a well written essay and makes some interesting points about how Microsoft was defanged.
What frame are you trying to put here? Do you think there is something wrong with the essay?
Of course not, as we all know dead companies add trillions in market cap all the time.
The part about startups is still true today. You don't fear Microsoft competing with you. Or really Google anymore.
Not very much. Who among is ever ALWAYS right? You have to consider his OVERALL accuracy.
That just because someone is a plutocrat doesn't make them experts in all things. We should not idolize celebrities and not accept their hot takes wholesale. Be wary of ultracrepidarians.
> That just because someone is a plutocrat doesn't make them experts in all things.
Of course. This is why you go to a university to learn to analyze the evidence for a claimed statement as scientifically as possible instead of practicing hero worship.
He's not a plutocrat.
plutocrat is newly discovered word of the day.
plutocrat, plutocracy.
kakistocracy, kakistocrat.
Paul got married in 2008 so maybe he has kids now, maybe they can tell him about a gaming PC that most likely runs Microsoft Windows. Or even an Xbox.
I hope the shock of witnessing Microsoft Windows in the wild has subdued with time lol.
Alternative title: antitrust works.
It didn't kill Microsoft. Microsoft isn't dead. However Microsoft does now have competitors. The takeaway here is that antitrust is fantastic for consumers and innovation.
As a side note, and to pg's point, Microsoft did make some very smart Web 2.0 acquisitions from Silicon Valley in the years since --most notably LinkedIn and Github--, and let them run relatively independently.
> 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.
>Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
Microsoft isn’t dead. It’s just become IBM. The gas giant phase of a dying star.
Worst company ever no real tech all a bunch of salesman - CrowdStrike
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More proof Hackernews is completely isolated from game development.
Yeah, game dev here.. The amount of articles on the front page here that are like "10 things every programmer should know" and then are hyper focused on only web dev specific things is cringe.
Thats just HN though, a subset of redditors who are gonna "change the world" and also become a billionaire with their CRUD app.
In case you missed it, someone posted on HN a few days ago to try and get a similar site and culture up here: https://gamedev.city/
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It’s completely isolated from the real world.
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
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Just a rant about MS , people here claim how good they are with backwards compatibility. Bullshit, we were using an MS Azure TTS API, MS also had anew similar API but in alpha so we could not use that one back then. The old API has still more then 1 year of support but the MS "very nice guys" /sarcasm started breaking it, like one day one end point returns a different response structure, I fix it and next weak other endpoint changes the response structure, and the results start to bug out, returns success but transcription is incomplete etc .
In the end I did the work and move the new API, I am not sure how much this new one will work, maybe the nice guys at MS will want to restart things again with some new even more shiny thing.
Some fanboy will claim this is just a mistake and MS team are just incompetent and have no tests, and support if busy with other stuff.
MS in fact is good with backwards compatibility only under windows/related software and maybe xbox, those bragging about MS' love of legacy aren't wrong, they are just focused on their almost historical product, what made Microsoft.
We can't say "no big deal" tbf, because for example Office files had fairly good longevity across updates (not perfect, a lot of file broke).
BUT anything else (embedded, cloud, AI, when they poisoned web standards, etc) isn't really under that much lauded backwards compatibility AFAIK.
Right, but in my case the API still has 1 year of support , so is negative backwards compatibility, MS devs break things before it;s end of life. Maybe I should be sorry, soem poor guy is tasked too work on the old API while the "cool" devs play with the new toys and maybe sabotage the other guy.
Like Oracle, their core competency for decades has been extracting rent from customers locked into their products. If they can't convincingly link a new product or service to their existing monopolies they don't tend to work out because they face more agile and directed competition. New product categories like mobile go through a boom and then they stabilise then some new hotness comes along. While other companies have to develop entire new product categories, Microsoft just keeps collecting rent money and locking people in harder. Get your new Office 365 now with ClippyPilot - soon people won't be able to wipe their own arses without consulting it.
VC backed tech bros with their dumb bullshit get rich quick web apps and crypto probably sounded way more exciting back in 2007 than Microsoft collecting rent. I guess PG did ok.
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This belongs in the Hall of Infamy
Along with this
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-d...
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[Zero to One](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0...) book by Peter Thiel. One thing I took from this book is that Google Micrsoft, Meta are all monopolies. There is no competition. Look even in [Russia](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/russian-feder...), [China](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china) they all use thsi stuff.
Crafted by Rajat
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