There is very little value in you just dumping this here. So you think this wasn't valid in 2007, but is now. Why? I would be interested in why you feel that way. This would be a much stronger submission if you added value.
Oddly enough, posted right after a Microsoft press conference where they announced a plethora of really nice devices that has many people on HN saying "wow" and proclaiming how they have reinvented themselves as a hardware company on par with Apple.
I haven't been as excited about MS in a long time. I don't root for any one OS; I use what works for me. I have had, and still have them all: Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows 8 and 10.
MS has open-sourced some really cool stuff [1]. Microsoft Research [2] is amazing; just look at the front page (Z3 high-performance theorem prover for one, F# and dev tools, Typescript, Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell) F* which has dependent types and compiles to F# or OCaml). I cannot find a similar site for Apple. The Apple domain is just a big online store for me selling product. MS Research is a cool site to browse just to see what tech they are developing and open sourcing. I think Apple is stagnating with the evolution of iOS like Android. I like the tiles in MS Windows 8 and 10 with live updates vs. the Android, iOS widgets and icons.
I have owned Apple iPhones, Androids, but now I am looking at the MS Lumia 950XL when it becomes available. Android is not where I think it should be at by this iteration of the OS, and I am not locked in to any one eco-system, so the iPhone is not an option, although it still is a great design.
Apple was at the forefront after their revival. Google caught steam in the early 2Ks. Now they're both busy sustaining their model and Microsoft is eager for fresh love so their grabbing the ball. And that ball is half of the Apple style of product design and communication. That's the first time MS is so deep into aesthetics, glamour, engineering and talks. Before that it was a lot more nerd oriented.
Quite the opposite, this is reposted precisely because they are going through the same renaissance that IBM went through in the late 90's where they are clearly reinventing themselves. In 2007 they were not even a blip on the radar. In 2015 they are clearly awake and innovating again. To what end remains to be seen.
Not sure if your question is sarcasm or not. Realistically, any startup can be afraid of Google, Facebook, Apple etc. If they decide to compete in your market and you can't adapt fast enough, you'll get crushed.
Paul may have been on to something during this time frame. It is nice to know that Microsoft turned itself around if they were indeed headed the wrong way.
Microsoft has been around a long time. Any company that can continue to adapt will also continue to stay in business. Microsoft has shown a capacity to do this. Today's news and products reflects this well.
It's interesting how the article mentions this: "The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple." Funny how much the industry has changed in 8 years.
I think the point of the word "dangerous" is a direct reference to the Microsoft of yore.
For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read about the history), Microsoft was legendary for "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." an internal credo that became known outside the company and came to represent the ruthlessness with which Microsoft flexed its muscle in new technology markets.
Microsoft was notorious for changing the way Windows works to stymie competitors, one of the most well known of these tactical maneuvers being the integration of IE into Windows which eventually killed Netscape. That particular bit of integration eventually led to their conviction under US anti-trust laws.
Microsoft's culture has since changed. Microsoft no longer seems as interested in blocking all competitors. They are building products that leverage standardized platforms and the present-day Microsoft even meaningfully contributes to open source projects and refrains from promoting incompatible work-alikes.
In other words, Microsoft is becoming once again a formidable company, this time with the that they tolerate (and increasingly collaborate with) other companies that develop technology to benefit users.
Microsoft is discovering that being successful does not mean shutting everyone else out and for this reason they are not "dangerous" in the sense they were in the 1990s when their efforts and "success" in many ways prevented the industry from advancing.
Netscape killed itself, they lost the fight to Microsoft on several fronts, including the quality of the browser.
Chrome and Firefox fair quite well against which was de-throned even tho it continued to be shipped as the default browsers on most machines with pre-installed Windows.
Firefox is Netscape. There's a reason you download it from Mozilla.org. It's an amazing demonstration of the power of open source to allow good software to exist and thrive beyond its original mission.
Netscape kicked started Mozilla, the later versions of Netscape were built on top of Firefox not vise versa.
The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser (Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla).
Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty broken software.
Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6 months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6.
Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.
I actually think the entire industry is changing. Historically speaking people in the industry were rightfully "scared" of companies like IBM and Microsoft.
Today I think the industry is evolving to where companies like Microsoft and IBM need to be scared of the industry and its perception of how they behave, and whether and how much they contribute back to the community at large (whether by open source projects, or simply an undying and palpable desire to push the industry forward with innovation that will improve everyone's lives).
Everybody: please don't flag this, I don't think it deserves it (and vouched it out of being flagged), especially since discussion threads have already started
If someone wants to look at opinions over time, here are the past submissions, all with user discussions.
Well, unfortunately this post has been flagged a few times I think. Weirdly, I would have expected to see the "vouch" button show up that was recently added, but I don't see it. Is it not implemented yet, or maybe I don't have access to vouch?
This is timely again, putting out new hardware and integrating every device with windows, even open sourcing its development platform isn't going to bring the developers back from the web.
Personally I don't think it was as obvious in 2007 as it is now, that all apps would be on the web. Whats stranger is that Microsoft still doesn't seem to understand this.
Enough time has elapsed in the 8 years since this was written that not only does everybody already know Microsoft is dead in the sense meant here, but the interesting question has now become:
Admittedly, it is a long shot, but could Microsoft start to matter again?
I am personally excited about what Microsoft is doing with Visual Studio, MVC (Orchard, .NET), Surface, MS Band, Win10, and Azure. They continue to innovate and improve their products.... What more can consumers and programmers ask for?
Can someone in the games industry venture an opinion of the danger MS poses in 2015? It seems they are innovating and buying more in this realm than otheres.
I'm in the games industry as an indie and... well it's a big place and there are lots of changes going on.
I wouldn't say they pose a danger to anybody who wants to make money making games. There will be no Embrace, Extend, Extinguish scenarios on the horizon which is what I think people mean by dangerous.
Some people think VR is going to be big, but I think it's just a passing fad like 3DTV. The new minecraft stuff will be big, but I don't think World of Warcraft big.
Indie PC games was all about Steam, but everybody is talking about the indie-apocalypse because steam recently got flooded with a lot of titles so nobody is making money there any more.
Similar things are happening in iOS where production values are very high now which means the stakes are very high. It's still very much a lottery.
The consoles are pretty much dead to me personally. I don't know what published think about it all.
Then ofcourse there is the raging debate around free-to-play and premium games on every platform.
> The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word.
This is an interesting quote. Who's the big man in town in 2015? It's probably still not Microsoft. But I'm not sure it's Google either - maybe it is, though. Is it Facebook? Apple? Amazon? Uber?
I think you could make an interesting, but not overly convincing, case for each of those companies. I wonder who pg considers the big man in town.
Perhaps many of us are living in "another world", but I haven't seen a computer in the wild running Windows in the last ~6 months. I've been working in a few different co-working spaces in that time - mostly the startup crowd, I suppose, which heavily tilts towards Mac and Linux.
Certainly PG isn't the only one who doesn't see very many Windows computers, and I think this has probably been increasingly true over the last ~9 years since this piece was written.
This is a nice example for the Bayes theorem: what's the probability of seeing a computer running Windows "in the wild", given that "the wild" comprises the computers of a startup crowd located in the same area. When you're limiting the universe to such a small fraction of similar samples, you're bound to get skewed results.
OS X market share can be 0% if your sample is a corporate office, or it can be 100% if you're in a startup space, a university class, etc. It really really depends on the context and your surroundings. Some people will be surprised by Windows, some by Mac. I think that PG probably assumes that the people he is around are building the future, and therefore, when he doesn't see Windows, he makes a connection there.
A lot (most?) Windows 'installations' come in the form of legacy computers that haven't been upgraded in nearly a decade, or corporate boxes that are basically just terminals running MS Office...
When you're talking new personal devices, its mostly a mix of various tablets (non-MS), OSX, ChromeOS and Windows ultrabooks...
Anecdotally, I've just moved over from Linux development to Microsoft, for web stuff. Visual studio and F# are sweet, in some ways I feel like I've been living in the dark ages of development.
A year ago I wouldn't have imagined myself saying this, but once they started open sourcing their stuff, I decided to take a look.
I second that. F* language from MS with dependent types, and compiles to F# and OCaml. I finally gave MS Visual Studio CE a try, and I am blown away. I come from an Emacs/Slime/Lisp(SBCL) on Windows, not Linux, and now that MS has open sourced a lot of it, I am going to stick with it and see if I hit any blocks. Popularity or cool are not my guides. I do have Linux and Mac OS X at home too, but I am always on my Windows notebook.
Don't know yet, I think it'll depend on how hard it is for me to get it running on Apache + mod_mono. Reason being, I do have a VPS with about 30 other sites (mostly Wordpress) right now.
If I can keep using my existing server for this new project, for now, then that's great. I know I'll eventually have to migrate it onto its own thing (it's a startup that is taking off, go me! :) ), but until I absolutely have to, I want to keep costs down and processes simple.
Still, if I've got to deploy to an MS-based VPS, that's certainly not the end of the world, not by a long shot. Just a different thing to learn.
Really? Even in the server space, Windows still occupies a third of the market, and desktop statistics are somewhere more along the lines of 70%. For every "cool" startup developer, I can promise you there is an entire army of "not cool" developers doing things in Windows (or whatever).
Office 365 is huge. Even the europeans are fleeing from the corpse of the IBM/Lotus stack like rats from a sinking ship. Obviously, I work in a Microsoft shop, but none of our customers (some serious financials, insurance corps, notable Fortune 500s) use Google Docs, and anyone big enough to need to run their own mail infrastructure is bailing on Domino for Exchange, or even going into the cloud with Office 365.
That's where the money is. You have to chase a metric shit-ton of $10 a month consumers to equal a million $ a year business contract.
they also think there is a starbucks every 30ft all around the world. and that everyone has unlimited data plans for hundreds of dollar a month like they have running water.
When two worlds are different, each is "another world" to the other. What pg means is—well, actually, he tells us later in the same paragraph:
All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
Obviously, pg is exaggerating slightly here for effect, but if you go to a conference for a "cool" language like Elixir or Go—or even for a more established but still slightly edgy language like Python or Ruby—what you'll see in the audience is a few islands of Windows in a sea of Linux and Macs. Go to a more corporate-y conference and you'll see a lot more Windows. So—which world is the past, and which is the future? (Hint: At the corporate-y conference, are there more or fewer Macs than there were five years ago?)
This is the same myopic view expressed by PG: you're only seeing what's right in front of you. There are plenty of web developers who aren't in gaming and use Windows on a day-to-day basis. This business of "future" and "past" is exceedingly silly. The right choice is the tool that you can do your job best with.
For lots of people, that's Linux. For lots of other people, that's Windows.
The way to tell the difference between the past and the future is to look at the derivative. For example, in an attempt to get to know Windows better, I recently asked the only top Windows-using dev I know what his environment and tooling look like. "Oh, I switched to a Mac last year," he said. That migration is typical, and suggests that people who care about computers will continue preferentially switching from Windows to Mac and Linux.
A similar thing happened a few years ago when Subversion was still the dominant version control system and SourceForge was still the main repository for open-source projects. It was 2008, and I was at a dinner seated between the CEO of CollabNet, principal corporate backer of Subversion, and the outgoing CEO of SourceForge. I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git. His view was that there was a winner among open-source VCSes, and that winner was Subversion. Then I asked the SourceForge CEO if he'd heard of GitHub. He had, but was unconcerned, since SourceForge was was cutting million-dollar deals while GitHub was still relatively small, having launched only in April of that year.
Now, I was in Y Combinator at the time, so I definitely shared pg's "myopia", and at that point basically everyone I knew had switched to Git and GitHub. I thought to myself, "These guys have already lost, and they don't even know there's a war." And indeed things have played out exactly as I expected, with Git and GitHub crushing Subversion and SourceForge into irrelevance.
So you see that there's a fundamental asymmetry between what pg sees in front of him and what you might see. Being in YC means you're "living in the future" [1], which is why pg writes with such confidence about the direction things are going. Subversion, SourceForge, Windows; Git, GitHub, Mac, Linux. The latter may still be big in absolute numbers, but the derivative tells you that the smart money is on the latter going forward.
This reads persuasively, but the problem is that the same arguments have been made consistently since as long as I can remember. When I was an undergraduate, people were saying much the same thing, and almost nothing has really changed.
I myself have always had both Windows and Linux (and occasionally OSX) boxen around to help me do what I need to do - so what's right in front of me doesn't seem so one-dimensional as what PG writes about. I've also been in and out of some radically different industries (for example, appdev consulting vs aerospace & defense), and it seems pretty obvious to me that "best tool for the job" is the future and it always has been. That means there will always be a place for Windows and BSD/Linux+derivatives (I throw OSX in this bucket), and there will always be engineers of many stripes using each one (or multiples).
I mean, seriously: even Git - which really does seem to have utterly won the VCS wars from a certain perspective, is still just one of many in reality. Lots of people use Perforce. Legion upon legion still use TFS. BitKeeper is still kicking around. Subversion still has substantial usership. Even CVS is still around. Pretty much the only VCS technology that has truly been defeated is RCS/SCCS, and probably only because they never figured out how to handle directories or else they'd still be around too.
That's why I find these kinds of prognostications to be very silly (although fertile ground for gathering up fake internet points and/or blog readership).
By "virtually every dev not in gaming", do you mean "virtually every dev not in gaming and living in an area of San Francisco known for its high rent and for producing small companies of dubious utility with crazy high valuations"?
N.B. Here I'm exaggerating for effect the same way pg was. Windows still has a huge market share among devs, but Macs dominate among those who are on the leading edge of technology development (such as those who attend, e.g., Elixir or Go conferences).
Game dev is 'cool' and you will see mainly Windows machines with people coding C++, Lua and some others in MS Visual Studio. A big money industry. larger than Hollywood, where Linux and Macs are not seen much.
I subscribe to quality over quantity: I love APL/J and Lisp. Lisp Flavored Erlang LFE over Elixir which is attractive to the Ruby crowd for its syntax. Ruby and Python as "edgy"?
I wrote "slightly edgy", which obviously changes the meaning, or else you wouldn't have deleted a word. And yes, Python and Ruby are slightly edgy compared to, say, Java or C++.
For the record, I quoted the word to isolate it, and frame a question instead of copying your entire paragraph. Fair enough though, you have answered with your opinion. Python has been around a while, is very popular and is used as the default language for the MIT course that once used Scheme for decades (with some dislike on choice of Python). IMO, Python is mainstream, and hardly "edgy". I was writing Blender 3D scripts in it in 2004. Ruby was novel when introduced, and perhaps you could have ascribed the word "edgy" then, but now Ruby is so mainstream with web dev, I don't see it.
I don't program for a living, so I have the luxury of studying whatever I want for coding. I play with J/APL, Scheme/Lisp (Lisp Flavored Erlang - LFE), and F# and F* just recently. Edgy to me is not even those languages, but something like the programming language NONE [1].
I'm working for an unusually Microsoft-intensive "corporate-y" customer, and even in my corner of the company the newest computers are Macs.
Development is done on several virtual machine images with fancy tool and server setups and old Windows versions anyway; the only difficulty is SSD capacity.
In the startup world, it's definitely dead, which is probably a decent indicator of a trend that will eventually engulf the entire business world. If my business goes huge, there's no way in hell we're running on Windows and I suspect a lot of other founders are thinking the same thing.
"Computer" is a very general term. Most computers people use on an everyday basis aren't running Windows. For instance, all of your tablets and phones are Android or iOS. Windows phones are virtually non-existent, and Windows tablets are more common, particularly for businesses, but not as common as the corresponding consumer tablets.
So PG was right in a strict sense, but not if you narrowly take "computer" to mean "desktop" or "laptop".
3rd world (and Europe) average user still uses Windows as main OS. When you're in contact with only coders/devs you'll see a lot of Linux and macBooks but outside that small bubble Microsoft rules.
This is incorrect. The average user, globally, uses Android as their main OS. Desktops in developing nations are never going to reach the same level of ubiquity as in the US and Europe. AAA Gaming there will be console-driven as well.
Desktops in most applications are locked down to the point where they're dumb terminals to run Office and a browser, this is where MS rules, or creative/technical workstations, where Apple currently has a better story and is the only desktop maker growing market-share for the past couple years.
Paul Graham was talking about something that sounded like either a distributed compiler or search/computing engine in 2008 at PyCon[9] and it can be argued it is something like the decentralized computing trend happening now. He said it would be "a byword for impossible" The thing about google is that, like Microsoft, it is a highly diversified company that does one thing and that is dangeroud. Peter Theil calls it a monopoly, maybe I would be a bit more delicate. Google and Microsoft have a ton of different products but each company really only sells 1 thing, a utility.
Microsoft was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and google was that for the web. For the reasons addressed in PG's article Microsoft is Dead, it is evident that needs change but utilities usually don't. If you read What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? after this article, it is super short and basically says, the burden of proof is on you to not miss the next big idea.
So much crazy shit is happening now it is difficult to say what will kill google. This essay was in 07', but it was too eary or too obvious, as he closes with. If 4 things killed google I would say they are:
hardware: Hardware is definitely important, and we can argue about how and what context, but google doesn't build any. All their infrastructure, while massive, will be deprecated.
privacy:"Don't be evil" is !== "Be Good".
Advertising: Advertising is going to be A LOT less valuable, and the places it will be valuable have banned google.
Decentralized Tech: No idea what the interim search engines will look like but it will be __________ then Artificial Intelligence. I think it is private search, where you buy computational resources and algorithims from a network but supply the seed data for your preferences and retain them. Probably BTC/PGP will replace DNS and you will send or lease your own googlebot and people will sell distributed search algorithims. While Chrome and the v8 engine make a pretty good google bot, people don't really trust google anymore which is why microsoft lost. No idea what it looks like, but it feels like someone is building it now.
[9]If you know what I am talking about, and you know what he means by saying the name for it is "a byword for the impossible", I have been trying to figure out what he meant for ages.
It's an interesting view, and in some ways it is correct.
The Microsoft of the early 2000s is dead, and we have have (imo) a new Microsoft which is again producing some very interesting bits of technology and have evolved Windows into something, which whilst not necessarily better, is certainly more fitting for how we use technology today.
>One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.
And now in the post "Web 2.0" era, monopolies may be out, but walled gardens, superspy databases, and DRM'd things (tractors, coffeemakers, etc.) that you don't really own are in. What's the next wave of euphoria?
Possibly re-decentralizing the internet? Doesn't sound like a Microsoft thing.
Giving control back to the user? That sounds more Microsofty. Given the choice between using local software that you choose and control vs a remote app (from the the only walled garden you can access) that spies on you, rifles through your data, and may delete it at any time without your permission... They could find a market.
At the moment, Microsoft is kind of unique in having an OS that's not tied to a walled garden app store by default, and which is centered around local desktop software (that usually doesn't have a lot of spying built-in) designed to work with local data. (other than Linux of course)
The privacy issues of Windows 10 (in the default settings) do not indicate that they're going that route.
Well, Yes Microsoft is dead. Or the Old Microsoft is dead. The New Microsoft, while not exactly in great shape, but at least they are learning and moving forward.
95 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadThe classic Microsoft is dead, the Post-Gates Microsoft does Windows 10 and uses Cloud services.
But no, totally true, especially after today.
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/
Apple was at the forefront after their revival. Google caught steam in the early 2Ks. Now they're both busy sustaining their model and Microsoft is eager for fresh love so their grabbing the ball. And that ball is half of the Apple style of product design and communication. That's the first time MS is so deep into aesthetics, glamour, engineering and talks. Before that it was a lot more nerd oriented.
> Are reposts ok?
> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Downvoters: obviously, self driving cars are a hugely positive development overall. But some players in the economy will lose.
Microsoft has been around a long time. Any company that can continue to adapt will also continue to stay in business. Microsoft has shown a capacity to do this. Today's news and products reflects this well.
Microsoft, Rebirth.
Microsoft, Part 2.
Microsoft, the Comeback.
This seems to be the quote that sums up the sentiment. Not that they're technically going out of business anytime soon.
But that doesn't make parent's quote wrong.
For those of us old enough to remember (and others who have read about the history), Microsoft was legendary for "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." an internal credo that became known outside the company and came to represent the ruthlessness with which Microsoft flexed its muscle in new technology markets.
Microsoft was notorious for changing the way Windows works to stymie competitors, one of the most well known of these tactical maneuvers being the integration of IE into Windows which eventually killed Netscape. That particular bit of integration eventually led to their conviction under US anti-trust laws.
Microsoft's culture has since changed. Microsoft no longer seems as interested in blocking all competitors. They are building products that leverage standardized platforms and the present-day Microsoft even meaningfully contributes to open source projects and refrains from promoting incompatible work-alikes.
In other words, Microsoft is becoming once again a formidable company, this time with the that they tolerate (and increasingly collaborate with) other companies that develop technology to benefit users.
Microsoft is discovering that being successful does not mean shutting everyone else out and for this reason they are not "dangerous" in the sense they were in the 1990s when their efforts and "success" in many ways prevented the industry from advancing.
EDIT: Readability and style.
The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser (Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla).
Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty broken software.
Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6 months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6.
Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.
Today I think the industry is evolving to where companies like Microsoft and IBM need to be scared of the industry and its perception of how they behave, and whether and how much they contribute back to the community at large (whether by open source projects, or simply an undying and palpable desire to push the industry forward with innovation that will improve everyone's lives).
If someone wants to look at opinions over time, here are the past submissions, all with user discussions.
2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182179
5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085601
6 years ago: "Paul Graham revisits "Microsoft is Dead" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554295
9 years ago (8.5 actually, algolia rounds that up it seems): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770
Personally I don't think it was as obvious in 2007 as it is now, that all apps would be on the web. Whats stranger is that Microsoft still doesn't seem to understand this.
Admittedly, it is a long shot, but could Microsoft start to matter again?
I wouldn't say they pose a danger to anybody who wants to make money making games. There will be no Embrace, Extend, Extinguish scenarios on the horizon which is what I think people mean by dangerous.
Some people think VR is going to be big, but I think it's just a passing fad like 3DTV. The new minecraft stuff will be big, but I don't think World of Warcraft big.
Indie PC games was all about Steam, but everybody is talking about the indie-apocalypse because steam recently got flooded with a lot of titles so nobody is making money there any more.
Similar things are happening in iOS where production values are very high now which means the stakes are very high. It's still very much a lottery.
The consoles are pretty much dead to me personally. I don't know what published think about it all.
Then ofcourse there is the raging debate around free-to-play and premium games on every platform.
This is an interesting quote. Who's the big man in town in 2015? It's probably still not Microsoft. But I'm not sure it's Google either - maybe it is, though. Is it Facebook? Apple? Amazon? Uber?
I think you could make an interesting, but not overly convincing, case for each of those companies. I wonder who pg considers the big man in town.
Sigh. It's clear that PG, as good a writer as he is, is the one in another world.
Certainly PG isn't the only one who doesn't see very many Windows computers, and I think this has probably been increasingly true over the last ~9 years since this piece was written.
When you're talking new personal devices, its mostly a mix of various tablets (non-MS), OSX, ChromeOS and Windows ultrabooks...
When you talk development, its almost always on Linux or OSX, and deployed to a Linux server.
MS still holds on to a few markets, and still makes money and does cool things, but they're just not dominant anymore...
A year ago I wouldn't have imagined myself saying this, but once they started open sourcing their stuff, I decided to take a look.
If I can keep using my existing server for this new project, for now, then that's great. I know I'll eventually have to migrate it onto its own thing (it's a startup that is taking off, go me! :) ), but until I absolutely have to, I want to keep costs down and processes simple.
Still, if I've got to deploy to an MS-based VPS, that's certainly not the end of the world, not by a long shot. Just a different thing to learn.
IIS performance on the other hand is amazing these days, Apache really needs to find a way to use http.sys.
Really? Even in the server space, Windows still occupies a third of the market, and desktop statistics are somewhere more along the lines of 70%. For every "cool" startup developer, I can promise you there is an entire army of "not cool" developers doing things in Windows (or whatever).
Office 365 is huge. Even the europeans are fleeing from the corpse of the IBM/Lotus stack like rats from a sinking ship. Obviously, I work in a Microsoft shop, but none of our customers (some serious financials, insurance corps, notable Fortune 500s) use Google Docs, and anyone big enough to need to run their own mail infrastructure is bailing on Domino for Exchange, or even going into the cloud with Office 365.
That's where the money is. You have to chase a metric shit-ton of $10 a month consumers to equal a million $ a year business contract.
they also think there is a starbucks every 30ft all around the world. and that everyone has unlimited data plans for hundreds of dollar a month like they have running water.
dream on, SF.
All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
Obviously, pg is exaggerating slightly here for effect, but if you go to a conference for a "cool" language like Elixir or Go—or even for a more established but still slightly edgy language like Python or Ruby—what you'll see in the audience is a few islands of Windows in a sea of Linux and Macs. Go to a more corporate-y conference and you'll see a lot more Windows. So—which world is the past, and which is the future? (Hint: At the corporate-y conference, are there more or fewer Macs than there were five years ago?)
Windows is the one and only OS that runs video games well.
Same with a lot of other industries dealing with professionals who are not programmers. Example is modeling software (https://www.rhino3d.com/mac-feature-compare).
Maybe Valve will succeed with their Steam Boxes, but it's not the case yet.
For lots of people, that's Linux. For lots of other people, that's Windows.
A similar thing happened a few years ago when Subversion was still the dominant version control system and SourceForge was still the main repository for open-source projects. It was 2008, and I was at a dinner seated between the CEO of CollabNet, principal corporate backer of Subversion, and the outgoing CEO of SourceForge. I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git. His view was that there was a winner among open-source VCSes, and that winner was Subversion. Then I asked the SourceForge CEO if he'd heard of GitHub. He had, but was unconcerned, since SourceForge was was cutting million-dollar deals while GitHub was still relatively small, having launched only in April of that year.
Now, I was in Y Combinator at the time, so I definitely shared pg's "myopia", and at that point basically everyone I knew had switched to Git and GitHub. I thought to myself, "These guys have already lost, and they don't even know there's a war." And indeed things have played out exactly as I expected, with Git and GitHub crushing Subversion and SourceForge into irrelevance.
So you see that there's a fundamental asymmetry between what pg sees in front of him and what you might see. Being in YC means you're "living in the future" [1], which is why pg writes with such confidence about the direction things are going. Subversion, SourceForge, Windows; Git, GitHub, Mac, Linux. The latter may still be big in absolute numbers, but the derivative tells you that the smart money is on the latter going forward.
[1]: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
I myself have always had both Windows and Linux (and occasionally OSX) boxen around to help me do what I need to do - so what's right in front of me doesn't seem so one-dimensional as what PG writes about. I've also been in and out of some radically different industries (for example, appdev consulting vs aerospace & defense), and it seems pretty obvious to me that "best tool for the job" is the future and it always has been. That means there will always be a place for Windows and BSD/Linux+derivatives (I throw OSX in this bucket), and there will always be engineers of many stripes using each one (or multiples).
I mean, seriously: even Git - which really does seem to have utterly won the VCS wars from a certain perspective, is still just one of many in reality. Lots of people use Perforce. Legion upon legion still use TFS. BitKeeper is still kicking around. Subversion still has substantial usership. Even CVS is still around. Pretty much the only VCS technology that has truly been defeated is RCS/SCCS, and probably only because they never figured out how to handle directories or else they'd still be around too.
That's why I find these kinds of prognostications to be very silly (although fertile ground for gathering up fake internet points and/or blog readership).
I wrote "slightly edgy", which obviously changes the meaning, or else you wouldn't have deleted a word. And yes, Python and Ruby are slightly edgy compared to, say, Java or C++.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/duangle/nonelang/src
So PG was right in a strict sense, but not if you narrowly take "computer" to mean "desktop" or "laptop".
Desktops in most applications are locked down to the point where they're dumb terminals to run Office and a browser, this is where MS rules, or creative/technical workstations, where Apple currently has a better story and is the only desktop maker growing market-share for the past couple years.
Microsoft was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and google was that for the web. For the reasons addressed in PG's article Microsoft is Dead, it is evident that needs change but utilities usually don't. If you read What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? after this article, it is super short and basically says, the burden of proof is on you to not miss the next big idea.
So much crazy shit is happening now it is difficult to say what will kill google. This essay was in 07', but it was too eary or too obvious, as he closes with. If 4 things killed google I would say they are:
hardware: Hardware is definitely important, and we can argue about how and what context, but google doesn't build any. All their infrastructure, while massive, will be deprecated.
privacy:"Don't be evil" is !== "Be Good".
Advertising: Advertising is going to be A LOT less valuable, and the places it will be valuable have banned google.
Decentralized Tech: No idea what the interim search engines will look like but it will be __________ then Artificial Intelligence. I think it is private search, where you buy computational resources and algorithims from a network but supply the seed data for your preferences and retain them. Probably BTC/PGP will replace DNS and you will send or lease your own googlebot and people will sell distributed search algorithims. While Chrome and the v8 engine make a pretty good google bot, people don't really trust google anymore which is why microsoft lost. No idea what it looks like, but it feels like someone is building it now.
[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html
[9]If you know what I am talking about, and you know what he means by saying the name for it is "a byword for the impossible", I have been trying to figure out what he meant for ages.
The Microsoft of the early 2000s is dead, and we have have (imo) a new Microsoft which is again producing some very interesting bits of technology and have evolved Windows into something, which whilst not necessarily better, is certainly more fitting for how we use technology today.
All this doom and gloom a decade ago was a great chance to pick up a delicious dividend paying stock.
And now in the post "Web 2.0" era, monopolies may be out, but walled gardens, superspy databases, and DRM'd things (tractors, coffeemakers, etc.) that you don't really own are in. What's the next wave of euphoria?
Possibly re-decentralizing the internet? Doesn't sound like a Microsoft thing.
Giving control back to the user? That sounds more Microsofty. Given the choice between using local software that you choose and control vs a remote app (from the the only walled garden you can access) that spies on you, rifles through your data, and may delete it at any time without your permission... They could find a market.
At the moment, Microsoft is kind of unique in having an OS that's not tied to a walled garden app store by default, and which is centered around local desktop software (that usually doesn't have a lot of spying built-in) designed to work with local data. (other than Linux of course)
The privacy issues of Windows 10 (in the default settings) do not indicate that they're going that route.
those numbers are from September. Microsoft is claiming 110 million devices running windows 10.not dead at all