Microsoft is Dead

[Nina DiBoy]

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to
a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I
said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of
Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media
company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and
realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls
liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter.
But they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as
late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less
dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know
when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as
competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even
invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to
investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies,
but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever
even sent us an email. They're in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back
to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the
debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the
things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than
search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax
is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate
with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally
the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to
make web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of
Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1]
But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript
libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows
over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to
OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare
in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised
when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we
fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience
at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now.
Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only
does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses
Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In
principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash
Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of
all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google
for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich
as Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how
they could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.
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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible.
All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're
a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is
exactly analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't
try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It
wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made
that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot
even dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Opus]

I really do wonder about people like this. From this and other articles on
his site, it is clear that while he may be savvy about a small group of
technologies and have some business acumen, he knows next to nothing about
economics and uses very poor reasoning.

There was a time very long ago when ancient people knew nothing about the
weather and climate, and they invented all manner of demons and gods to
explain what they could not fathom about winds and storms and tides. The
same is true today. Very few people really understand economics or can
explain the interactions of the forces working on the participants.
Widespread ignorance of the most basic laws of economics has made people's
minds fertile ground for bogeys of bugaboos galore. Myths and fallacies
dominate them, and their ignorance is promoted and pandered to by
politicians, educators, and the media and entertainment industries.
Elaborate conspiracy theories are created to guard their thoughts from the
light of truth, and slick argumentation dances around fundamental errors in
reasoning. It is not long until they are completely persuaded of utterly
false and even destructive ideas.

Here is a quote from one of this man's articles on his site, and it contains
a common fallacy of logic:

"In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working
fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very
fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea."

Did you spot it? Notice how working "slowly and meticulously" is associated
with "mistaken ideas" and "working fast" is associated with "good
craftsmanship". A false dichotomy is to erroneously oversimplify a matter
by casting it as a choice between two things or conditions or ideas when
others are possible. In this case, it is clearly possible for slow and
meticulous to produce good craftsmanship and for working fast to produce
only junk. Moreover, working fast can just as easily exist in context of
mistaken ideas as working slowly can correct ones. The associations that he
draws are in no way exclusive or even necessarily correct.

The fact that the Microsoft Corporation is of no consequence to him does not
mean that it is not of enormous consequence to the rest of the world. This,
too, is a false dichotomy. There is also the arbitrary assigning of evil
designs, means, and ends to the company as so many others do without
justification.

Here is a thought from his article here:

"All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a
big company, you produce in copious quantities."

Aside from the error "big=evil" that drips from this little gem, we can see
once again the sloppy reasoning at work here. Perfection is not possible
for anyone, and as big companies do much bigger things, they are bound to
produce many more imperfections than little companies. The simple fact is
that all but the most trivial computer programs are going to have bugs. The
bigger and more complex they are, the more they will have. But, most bugs
have no impact whatsoever on the usefulness of a program for the majority of
its users in a majority of their individual uses of it. If companies waited
to release software until there were no bugs left, they would never release
anything.

As one great philosopher once said, "There are many voices in the world, and
none are altogether unpersuasive." The unfortunate thing about people such
as the writer of this article, is that they are believed uncritically by
huge numbers of people who become utterly persuaded of erroneous ideas, and
their minds are absolutely closed and locked tight against all counter
arguments. Their view of the world is so parochial and jaundiced that no
apologia from their enemies can get a purchase on their thinking.

Opus

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a
young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said
that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That
was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a
technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't
understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow
in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But
they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late
as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous
than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started
Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the
startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo
days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and
Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to
invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're
in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to
their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate
then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that
put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that
now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is
from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with
the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only
way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make
web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript
and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually
the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew
over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS
X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in
technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I
come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y
Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup
school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for
grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no
longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle,
yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoft now
has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search
engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million
dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as
Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they
could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. 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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All
you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big
company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is exactly
analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't try to be
obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that
blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot even
dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Mark Rae]

As one great philosopher once said, "There are many voices in the world,
and none are altogether unpersuasive."

And who might that be? Whoever it was, it's a pity they didn't learn to
write grammatical English...

 

[MICHAEL]

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to
a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I
said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of
Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media
company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and
realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls
liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Interesting article, but the death of the desktop OS is greatly
exaggerated.... at least, for awhile to come.

Even Barry Manilow had a number one album last year. ;-)
He actually debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.
My mom's fan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Manilow

Now, all the mouth running about "Web 2.0"-
that's got exaggeration and "WTF is that anyway?",
written all over it... the next internet bubble to bust.


-Michael

 

[john]

Here is a quote from one of this man's articles on his site, and it
contains a common fallacy of logic:

"In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working
fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very
fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea."

Did you spot it? Notice how working "slowly and meticulously" is
associated with "mistaken ideas" and "working fast" is associated with
"good craftsmanship". A false dichotomy is to erroneously oversimplify a
matter by casting it as a choice between two things or conditions or ideas
when others are possible. In this case, it is clearly possible for slow
and meticulous to produce good craftsmanship and for working fast to
produce only junk. Moreover, working fast can just as easily exist in
context of mistaken ideas as working slowly can correct ones. The
associations that he draws are in no way exclusive or even necessarily
correct.

A long standing joke in my business these days is
"How do you want it? Good, Fast or Cheap? Pick two.

 

[Spanky deMonkey]

Microsoft may be dying a slow death, but I assure you it isn't dead. It
will be a major player for another 10 years. Guaranteed. Don't believe the
dribble you read.

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a
young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said
that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That
was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a
technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't
understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow
in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But
they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late
as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous
than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started
Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the
startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo
days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and
Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to
invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're
in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to
their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate
then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that
put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that
now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is
from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with
the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only
way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make
web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript
and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually
the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew
over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS
X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in
technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I
come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y
Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup
school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for
grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no
longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle,
yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoft now
has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search
engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million
dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as
Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they
could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. 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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All
you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big
company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is exactly
analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't try to be
obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that
blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot even
dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Alias]

Microsoft may be dying a slow death, but I assure you it isn't dead. It
will be a major player for another 10 years. Guaranteed. Don't believe the
dribble you read.

Sure. Wanna bet?

Alias

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a
young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said
that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That
was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a
technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't
understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow
in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But
they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late
as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous
than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started
Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the
startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo
days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahooand
Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to
invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're
in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to
their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate
then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that
put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that
now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is
from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with
the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only
way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted tomake
web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript
and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually
the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew
over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks toOS
X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in
technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I
come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y
Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup
school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for
grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no
longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle,
yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoftnow
has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search
engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million
dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as
Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they
could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. 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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All
you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big
company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is exactly
analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't try to be
obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that
blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot even
dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Spanky deMonkey]

It will probably take about 10 years for others to get "up to speed" and
then take over Microsoft's dominance in the industry. I am not saying that
they deserve to be a major player, but they are and that is a fact.
MicroSquish is on 90%+ of the desktops out there currently and even though
Linux, Unix, Mac OS are becoming more popular, I think it will take about 10
years before someone else becomes the major player and MicroSquish is
begging for scraps.

Microsoft may be dying a slow death, but I assure you it isn't dead. It
will be a major player for another 10 years. Guaranteed. Don't believe
the dribble you read.

Sure. Wanna bet?

Alias

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a
young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said
that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft.
That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of
a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't
understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow
in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But
they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late
as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous
than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we
started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for
the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the
demo days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite
Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never
bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an
email. They're in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back
to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the
debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the
things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than
search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that
now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax
is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate
with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally
the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make
web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript
and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually
the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew
over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS
X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in
technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when
I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund
at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at
startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is
for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the
desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses
Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In
principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash
Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of
all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google
for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as
Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they
could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.
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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All
you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big
company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is exactly
analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't try to
be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that
blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot
even dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Web 2.0]

http://www.web20searchengine.com has a huge list
of web 20 applications or you can search for other
apps not in the list, also add your own Web20 site.

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to
a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I
said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of
Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media
company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and
realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls
liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly-for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money-so does IBM, for that matter.
But they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as
late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less
dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know
when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as
competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even
invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to
investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies,
but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever
even sent us an email. They're in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back
to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the
debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the
things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than
search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web-not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax
is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate
with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally
the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too-in fact, to anyone who wanted to
make web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of
Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1]
But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript
libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows
over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to
OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare
in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised
when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we
fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience
at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now.
Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only
does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses
Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus-evil in the
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In
principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash
Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of
all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google
for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers-dangerously brilliant
hackers-can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich
as Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how
they could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.
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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible.
All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs-which, if you're
a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is
exactly analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't
try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It
wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made
that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot
even dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Charlie]

I remember 20 years ago when IBM and the mainframe was announced "dead".
Also the Cobol programming language.

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a
young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said
that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That
was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a
technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't
understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow
in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But
they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late
as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous
than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started
Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the
startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo
days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and
Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to
invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're
in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to
their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate
then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that
put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that
now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is
from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with
the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only
way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make
web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript
and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually
the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew
over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS
X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in
technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I
come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y
Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup
school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for
grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no
longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle,
yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoft now
has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search
engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million
dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as
Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they
could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. 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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All
you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big
company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is exactly
analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't try to be
obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that
blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot even
dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Nina DiBoy]

I really do wonder about people like this. From this and other articles
on his site, it is clear that while he may be savvy about a small group
of technologies and have some business acumen, he knows next to nothing
about economics and uses very poor reasoning.

There was a time very long ago when ancient people knew nothing about
the weather and climate, and they invented all manner of demons and gods
to explain what they could not fathom about winds and storms and tides.
The same is true today. Very few people really understand economics or
can explain the interactions of the forces working on the participants.
Widespread ignorance of the most basic laws of economics has made
people's minds fertile ground for bogeys of bugaboos galore. Myths and
fallacies dominate them, and their ignorance is promoted and pandered to
by politicians, educators, and the media and entertainment industries.
Elaborate conspiracy theories are created to guard their thoughts from
the light of truth, and slick argumentation dances around fundamental
errors in reasoning. It is not long until they are completely persuaded
of utterly false and even destructive ideas.

Here is a quote from one of this man's articles on his site, and it
contains a common fallacy of logic:

"In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working
fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very
fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea."

Did you spot it? Notice how working "slowly and meticulously" is
associated with "mistaken ideas" and "working fast" is associated with
"good craftsmanship". A false dichotomy is to erroneously oversimplify
a matter by casting it as a choice between two things or conditions or
ideas when others are possible. In this case, it is clearly possible
for slow and meticulous to produce good craftsmanship and for working
fast to produce only junk. Moreover, working fast can just as easily
exist in context of mistaken ideas as working slowly can correct ones.
The associations that he draws are in no way exclusive or even
necessarily correct.

Actually, I think he has a point there. Technology moves so fast that
speed is part of the equation. Why do you think MS was blasted so much
for releasing Vista so late?

The fact that the Microsoft Corporation is of no consequence to him does
not mean that it is not of enormous consequence to the rest of the
world. This, too, is a false dichotomy. There is also the arbitrary
assigning of evil designs, means, and ends to the company as so many
others do without justification.

Here is a thought from his article here:

"All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're
a big company, you produce in copious quantities."

Aside from the error "big=evil" that drips from this little gem, we can
see once again the sloppy reasoning at work here. Perfection is not
possible for anyone, and as big companies do much bigger things, they
are bound to produce many more imperfections than little companies. The
simple fact is that all but the most trivial computer programs are going
to have bugs. The bigger and more complex they are, the more they will
have. But, most bugs have no impact whatsoever on the usefulness of a
program for the majority of its users in a majority of their individual
uses of it. If companies waited to release software until there were no
bugs left, they would never release anything.

Big = evil does have some merit. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Once MS had their monopoly, they used shady/illegal means to maintain it
at almost any cost. Look at all of the lawsuits they've lost over the
years by stifling fair competition in the marketplace, and all of the
antitrust issues they have had with multiple gov'ts.

As one great philosopher once said, "There are many voices in the world,
and none are altogether unpersuasive." The unfortunate thing about
people such as the writer of this article, is that they are believed
uncritically by huge numbers of people who become utterly persuaded of
erroneous ideas, and their minds are absolutely closed and locked tight
against all counter arguments. Their view of the world is so parochial
and jaundiced that no apologia from their enemies can get a purchase on
their thinking.

Opus

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking
to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo.
I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of
Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media
company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face
and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much
girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them.
I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it
only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from
botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when
the shadow disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of
Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for
that matter. But they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as
late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less
dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know
when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as
competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even
invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to
investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet
companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has
anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it
back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms
of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one
of the things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do
more than search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if
you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that
was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the
desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live
on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even
Microsoft sees that now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in
Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser
communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page.
(Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for
a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s
because they needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that
it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who
wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of
Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1]
But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript
libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree
grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to
OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely
rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now
surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all
the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same
in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or
Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s.
So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about
computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in
the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the
Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM.
The software business was overhung by a monopoly from about the
mid-1950s to about 2005. For practically its whole existence, that is.
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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something
broken could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In
principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of
cash Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the
rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea
for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich
as Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how
they could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.
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.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the
readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable
company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions
based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0"
bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is
old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible.
All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if
you're a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation
is exactly analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most
don't try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear.
It wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made
that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are
we supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you
cannot even dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
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Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot
even dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Nina DiBoy]

Interesting article, but the death of the desktop OS is greatly
exaggerated.... at least, for awhile to come.

Even Barry Manilow had a number one album last year. ;-)
He actually debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.
My mom's fan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Manilow

Now, all the mouth running about "Web 2.0"- that's got exaggeration and
"WTF is that anyway?",
written all over it... the next internet bubble to bust.


-Michael

Yeah, they author could be a bit of a visionary ahead of his time. I
could totally see it happening though.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot
even dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Slap]

I remember 20 years ago when IBM and the mainframe was announced "dead".
Also the Cobol programming language.

Cobol still lives? Wow!

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

Very few people really understand economics or can explain the
interactions of the forces working on the participants. Widespread
ignorance of the most basic laws of economics has made people's
minds fertile ground for bogeys of bugaboos galore.

However, assumptions about how economics work, or should work, are a
problem too. Most admired breakthroughs occur when an unexpected gap
is found within the logic that everyone else is following.

Also, reverse/perverse incentives can apply, especially in senescent
business sectors. There are signs of that in IT, both because it may
be post-mature and "winding down" (even if only in contrast to
historical growth rates) and due to incumbancy ("monopoly") effects.

Here is a quote from one of this man's articles on his site, and it contains
a common fallacy of logic:

"In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working
fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very
fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea."

Did you spot it? Notice how working "slowly and meticulously" is associated
with "mistaken ideas" and "working fast" is associated with "good
craftsmanship". A false dichotomy ...

Yep. It reads as if he's trying to make too many different points at
once, perhaps trying too hard to be concise.

See "validation" vs. "verification" in this Wikipedia article...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification

Validation: "Are we building the right product?"
Verification: "Are we building the product right?"

What he describes is good verification of poor validation, and that
will miss the spot, yes. But a complication is that what was
originally well-validated can change due to external factors, by the
time verification is done - hence the need for speed.

I thought of them as just another vendor until closer to 1995. Before
then, Borland appeared to be a more significant force in programming
environments and applications, as their compilers and many
applications (e.g. Quattro Pro, Paradox) were often best-of-breed in
the DOS era. I used Quattro Pro, Paradox and MS Word, then.

That's a nice hook to get attention for a story (this article looks
like it's written by an eyes-hungry journo) but it's not really
credible. Also, the age of "Google envy" may be nearing an end.

Gmail could have marked the start of their overgrowth.

Search is what they're good at; I'm not convinced they are good at
anything else, and in a way, they are coming to resemble MS.

Search has made Google a well-resourced company, just as DOS and
Windows made MS a well-resourced company.

As a well-resourced company, Google could afford to offer massive
storage capacity for free email, and thus jump to the top of the free
web mail pile. Does this make them inherently better at email
service? Or are they just richer, and not having to see that
investment returned as revenue as smaller outfits would have to?

It's like someone walking into an auction and bidding $100 for a $5
box of teabags. Sure, they'll get the bags, but it's a gamble (or
luxury) that a smaller busines would not have been able to afford.

Bollocks. Yep, that's the song of the ABM (Anyone But Microsoft)
camp, and to understand this camp, you need to look at why MS are who
thay are today. In the old days, the model was "go to the Priests of
the Mainframe and beg for job time". MS blew that away when the PC
became everyone's computer.

Since then, we have Sun (big server iron), Oracle (big back-end
database), IBM (rapacious mainframe history) etc. singing the song
that "the network is the computer". Forget running your own PC, just
use a "thin client" and let us micro-bill you for time spent on our
application servers. Back to begging the priests? No thanks.

The grand-daddy of all big networks is the Internet. Yes, that works
very well as a "computer", with botnets acting as the world's most
powerful email "service". But would you park your data there? Would
you expose everything you do to the Internet?

There's such a "suspension of disbelief" where the Internet is
concerned. You have folks trying to clean infected PCs via "online
scanners", believing that the active malware they are trying to detect
will be unable to redirect the system to a malicious look-alike
"scanner" site. Any you have folks storing their data on someone
else's server, thus being at the mercy of how well that server is
maintained, secured, etc. Can you even backup to your own PC?

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript
and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually
the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew
over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

Javascript allows arbitrary web sites you automate or program my PC.

And why would I want to allow that?

If you have trouble trusting an installed code base from MS, how is it
you can happily swallow code of the day as pushed by some server? Are
you even sure the server you're logged into, is the right one?

A HD is faster than ADSL, and I don't have to pay to access it, and I
can access it no matter what's happening to the server (which is a
separate system outside my control).

That's like saying "cars are so much faster than walking, now we don't
have to keep tea bags and milk in the fridge, we can just buy them one
at a time as we need them from the mall". Makes no sense to me.

I'm sorry, I don't like "tin-pot dictator" monopolists.

I'll take claims of MacOS superiority seriously, once they have the
guts to release it for use on generic hardware, so it can compete
head-to-head with Windows and other *NIX derivatives.

But as long as they play the brand game, and force me to over-pay for
their "special" hardware even as they give up and switch to the Intel
hardware platform, I'll pass.

Maybe that says more about Y Combinator than anything else?

Yep. Slap a logic board on an obsolete laptop hard drive, stick it in
"happy plastic", make sure there's brand and DRM lock-in, then sell it
way over price as iPod. Then piously claim to be "against DRM".

I'd rather use a generic MP3 stick that can play stuff trasferred from
PC via Windows Explorer as plain MP3 and WAV, thanks.

You may applaud the branding-over-value sucess of iPod, but please
don't come over all preachy about "evil" MS and "good" Apple.

Let's see what Google is like in a few year's time...

Have you read "Big Blue" on monopolistic practices at IBM through the
mainframe era? They were huge, but they followed the business logic
of the time and they didn't see the gap that MS took.

The PC was supposed to be a toy, just as the cassette was supposed to
be a toy. Just as cassettes were expected to be too low-fi to take
sales away from open-reel tape, so the PC was expected to be too small
to threaten IBM's big-iron market.

MS and the PC made computing personal, not only because the PC could
do useful stuff, but because IBM didn't lock it down so that only they
could make the hardware and the OS. With generic hardware and
hardware-independent DOS from MS, it was "chocks away".

In contrast, Apple still have chocks in place. You buy their hardware
to run thier system, period, and ever shall it be. As such, they are
the last surviving dinosaur from the tribal age of home computing
(Atari GEM, AmigaOS, Archemedes RiscOS, Sinclair QL all had GUIs at
the birth of 32-bit computing).

That they have survived at all, is testimony to their success, but
they are still "old school" dressed in new bling.

In that Web 2.0 involves sites dropping code on visiting PCs and
automating them, I think "euphoria" is as misplaced at that MS were
feeling when IE 4 competed with Netscape to see who could give
webmasters the most powerful tools to control their visitors.

In everything that is written here, there's a complete denial of
malware that dominates concernes regarding the Internet.

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All
you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs

It's interesting to read an article critical of MS that doesn't look
at perverse incentives that charactarise a post-mature business
sector. I've joined those dots elsewhere; I won't repeat it here.

One question about all this wonderful Google Apps stuff: Can you get a
backup of all your data onto your own PC? If not, why not?

When folks gleefully thrill to chaining themselves to arbitrary
servers on the Internet, rather than their owbn systems, I say...

--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -

If you're happy and you know it, clunk your chains.

 

[MICHAEL]

Yeah, they author could be a bit of a visionary ahead of his time. I
could totally see it happening though.

Oh, I believe it, too.... one day. Microsoft will not maintain its
desktop monopoly forever. Perhaps, one day we'll see Microsoft
giving away its desktop OS, that would be the only way to extend
their monopoly. Or, giveaway their Office products. "Yes, you can
Office for free, but it only runs on Windows."


-Michael

 

[Alias]

It will probably take about 10 years for others to get "up to speed" and
then take over Microsoft's dominance in the industry. I am not saying that
they deserve to be a major player, but they are and that is a fact.
MicroSquish is on 90%+ of the desktops out there currently and even though
Linux, Unix, Mac OS are becoming more popular, I think it will take about 10
years before someone else becomes the major player and MicroSquish is
begging for scraps.

That's possible. It's also possible that more and more people are
becoming more computer savvy and open source may well be the next big
thing. After all, Windows spread the quickest when there was no
activation. I see, "I'm a newbie" a lot on Linux groups nowadays. Word
of mouth is the best advertising but can take awhile to gain hold but
when it does, it spreads like wildfire. "The times they are a-changin'".

Alias

Microsoft may be dying a slow death, but I assure you it isn't dead. It
will be a major player for another 10 years. Guaranteed. Don't believe
the dribble you read.

Sure. Wanna bet?

Alias

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a
young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said
that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft.
That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of
a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't
understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow
in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them.I
mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only
affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets.And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft
anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But
they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late
as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous
than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we
started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for
the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the
demo days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite
Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never
bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an
email. They're in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back
to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the
debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the
things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than
search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you
took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the
second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just
email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that
now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax
is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate
with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally
the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.)
XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they
needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be
useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make
web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript
and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually
the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew
over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS
X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in
technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when
I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund
at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at
startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is
for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the
desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses
Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and
phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil inthe
way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft
monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software
business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about
2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. 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.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken
could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In
principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash
Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the roundsof
all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google
for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as
Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they
could do it:

1. 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.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead
shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck.
They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, bythe
standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers
will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and
that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on whata
few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half,
the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

Notes

[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible.All
you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you'rea big
company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is exactly
analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't try to
be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.

[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way
that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that
blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"poor little MADAM albright still got your knickers twisted. how are we
supposed to believe you know anything about computers when you cannot
even dress your self. oh and pull that skirt down."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Doris Day]

Oh, I believe it, too.... one day. Microsoft will not maintain its
desktop monopoly forever. Perhaps, one day we'll see Microsoft
giving away its desktop OS, that would be the only way to extend
their monopoly. Or, giveaway their Office products. "Yes, you can
Office for free, but it only runs on Windows."

By the time Microsoft actually wakes up and smells the coffee, it'll be too
late. The computing world would have moved on and left Microsoft behind.
We're already getting close to the tipping point where good enough free
alternatives exist to Microsoft's bloatware Office suite that Microsoft
won't even be able to give it away and keep customer loyalty that way. You
see the larger the organization the less ability it has to quickly change
and adapt. Add to that the likes of Monkey Boy Ballmer at the head, and
Microsoft is doomed.

Love and Kisses,
Doris

 

[Doris Day]

And who might that be? Whoever it was, it's a pity they didn't learn to
write grammatical English...

You're so cute! "they" didn't?

Love and Kisses,
Doris

 

[Don]

Nina DiBoy wrote:
....

Just when I'm about to give up all hope for the human race, I
stumble across a conversation like this one -- and my hope is
re-ignited.

I've been frantically searching the list of bright people I
still know for someone (anyone) who would be able to grasp,
and benefit from, the collective wisdom available herein.

I can't think of a single soul.

Any encouragement would be welcome.

 

[Mark Rae]

You're so cute! "they" didn't?

;-)