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"Microsoft is Dead"
Microsoft might be in the center of many critics' sights for any number of reasons right now, but few serious, well-written detractors have made the leap to calling the company 'dead.' Sure, John C. Dvorak will say anything for a pageview, but Paul Graham, a partner in startup VC Y Combinator, just penned an intriguing essay titled Microsoft is Dead. Instead of trying to make some bizarre case that OpenOffice could destroy Microsoft Office (a - if not the - primary bread-winner for the company) in any near or realistic future, Paul more or less argues that the intimidating shadow Microsoft cast over the software world (carrying on IBM's torch) for the past 20 years is gone; that no one who matters or cares about the computing and web industries is afraid of Redmond anymore, nor are they interested in what the company is doing (case in point). Paul lists four specific reasons and companies which brought us to this new era where Microsoft likely matters not, and instead of ruining a great, concise essay by summarizing them, you should probably check them out for your self.
[via Daring Fireball]
Comments
21
Subscribe to commentsDave ChartierApr 10th 2007 6:52PM
"Wow, so many LONG comments:)
just one observation - http://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html has "Y!" logo as its favico..."
Everyone has a bias, and everyone has an agenda. From CNN to your mother's Vox blog - the important thing is to consider whether that bias is irrationally swaying the conversation, and then actually consider what is being said.
In Paul's case, I think he's spot on.
He isn't saying that Microsoft is no longer a profitable company, or that they're going to disappear by the end of 2007 because Mac OS X is teh r0x0r or cuz setting up some flavors of Linux sucks less now. He's simply saying that Microsoft doesn't lead the industry anymore. Most people still use Windows (though, last I checked, Apple has just hit a 10% market share), and Office isn't disappearing from business cubicles anytime soon.
Paul is simply trying to elaborate that Microsoft doesn't matter to the people who are pushing most other industries forward. They aren't the innovator anymore, and they aren't scaring others from entering the industry. Further, you don't see industry notables using their services unless they expressly need to. Virtually everyone keeps their online photos at Flickr now. Live.com is a flop, period. The company had to be *forced* into rewriting their Office doc formats to something that can actually be referred to as a 'standard,' signifying the death of the age when Microsoft could sneeze and force the industry to bend over to their file formats.
Microsoft certainly owns large portions of a few industries, and that's fine and good. There's a great argument that this is the way it needs to be. But people don't look to them to *lead* and innovate in most other industries anymore. Now it's web 2.0, Linux, Apple, Google and the plethora of startups that can afford, and perhaps more importantly: know how, to live on the bleeding edge.