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> "That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant..."

> To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic.

That quote you quoted does not claim that Microsoft is irrelevant, it claims that the fact that Microsoft is a giant company today, is irrelevant.

I didn't say Microsoft is irrelevant. I said the fact that it's still a huge company is irrelevant when judging whether the old Microsoft was in fact dead or not. The new Microsoft is highly relevant, but Microsoft's philosophy of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" to maintain a grip on consumer compute is dead. If anything is the heir to that, it would be AWS.

I think you misread that. What ghc wrote was that the fact (that Microsoft is giant today) is irrelevant, not that Microsoft is irrelevant.

"Dead" apparently means "no longer the unquestioned industry leader" - which seems like an odd definition of "dead" to me, but ok.

The industry in question being the union of personal desktop and laptop computers, associated software, and internet-related technologies.

What actually happened was the internet-related sector broadened to include new sub-sectors - mobile, search, social, media, cloud, e-commerce, and ad tech - all of which Microsoft either ignored, failed at, or didn't dominate.

The old industries are still there but they're the tail, not the dog.

The dog is far more consumer and consumer-adjacent. MS culture was always more aligned with corporate goals and office productivity. MS never got social and lifestyle computing, which is where the industry was heading. It still doesn't, even in gaming.

AI is going to see a similar shift to a completely different mode of computing, but it's too early to tell how that will work out. At a guess it's going to be much more directly political than anything we've seen so far. (Not in a good way, IMO.)

The amount of effort apparently required to satisfy all the checkboxes around "a cheap PC and Microsoft 365" is astounding. My Fortune 250 laptop runs 3 different security "endpoint" products, and literally dozens of scripts fire each day/hour to make sure that things are "correct" according to every suggestion any consultant ever made towards our senior IT staff. And they replace the entire fleet every 3 years. I believe that starting with longer lived hardware with an inherently more secure environment that didn't need to be groomed like this would be a net savings, but I don't have the numbers to prove it.

> To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic. Despite Tesla, GM is still relevant. Despite AWS, DB2 mainframes are still relevant. Heck, I have to work with EBCDIC data, a format designed to not produce holes in punchcards that are too close together.

There's more free energy in growing things.

Leave shrinking things to private equity.

There might be a lot of money in programming COBOL, but who wants to do that? It's not exciting to be a buzzard and subsist on carcasses.

Microsoft is irrelevant as far as the platform and where most development energy is focused. Can you imagine trying to get funding for a Windows application?

Linux on the desktop is irrelevant in the same way that a carpenter’s home woodworking projects are irrelevant. I mean they are but that’s sort of beside the point, right?

People who want to beat Microsoft with Linux on the desktop should stop worrying and enjoy our nice ecosystem of little programs for what it is.

It's true that it's not the best article, but I'm not entirely sure the Goldman Sachs chart should be treated as factually wrong. The article misses that 2005 was the heyday of Blackberry and iPod (iPod sales did something like 10x that year), and it's conceivable that Goldman included those devices as "compute". At worst, it's just shifted for a couple of years.

The decoupling of IE from Explorer is what really killed Microsoft, nothing to do with with MP3s. Remember, Microsoft was producing a bunch of proprietary extensions to Javascript and HMTL to lock vendors into their ASPX nightmare. It took many years to undo the damage, but at least PC vendors were allowed to ship with a non-IE web browser.

> I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs

As an admitted hoarder of all my old tech, I can assure you I am still in possession of several floppy disks with Windows drivers from my first digital cameras. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact timing, but I think the last digital camera I had to install drivers for was circa 2007 (Vista!). I still miss the days of my Sony laptops coming with i.Link, but I don't remember being able to connect my Sony cameras to many non-Sony PCs. I do remember having to install drivers to get Sony's ridiculous memory stick readers to work with other PCs (and Linux) though.

To be fair in 2007 it really did seem like google could completely destroy microsoft monopoly on enterprise software with google docs, google sheets and google workspace.

And then they just didn't? They just gave up, only small companies use google workspace these days and excel is as entrenched as ever.

I suppose the google meet/google talk/google hangouts explains a lot of why this hypothetical future didn't happen. If google had a serious person in the helm doing long-term strategy microsoft would already be dead and buried (or worse IBM-fied). Instead the CEOs stock market min-maxers took over.

Yeah, I even resubscribed to chatgpt. I have free Gemini, but it is really underwhelming

The Office Suite is doing better than ever. I have no problem paying $129 a year for O365 with five users and each user can use it across Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web. The iPad version with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse is actually pretty good.

And 1TB of storage per user.

don't forget the tons of cash destroyed and resources trying to make bing competitive with google

Embrace, extend, extinguish

Azure always had a very large and devoted following of corps who were all in on Windows, even in the early days when everything Azure ran on Windows. They had a very deep fanbase which caused them to not see things from the Silicon Valley perspective

Relevant article from a few years ago: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

How about MANTFANG (for microsoft, apple, nvidia, tesla, facebook, amazon, netflix, google)? If you drop Tesla, you can have "MANFANG" which fits 2025 Hollywood's year of the werewolf or if you reorder them you could have "FATMANNG", a bit like the infamous FatMan and Little Boy. Or "GFATMANN". If you go by Google's "Alphabet" you could do "MANTAFAN". And probably many others WAY catchier AND slightly more complete than "FAANG", IMO.

So you're saying that new AAA game companies use macs or linux?

I can't resolve the cognitive dissonance of that making a ton of sense or none.

That’s silly. When I was growing up, we always had a garage and my family was ~25% under the median income. Hundreds of millions of Americans have a garage at home and it’s not the richest 2/3 of the country. It’s basically the people outside the largest cities.

There are probably about an equal number of people living in a home with a garage in China too, though it’s wealthier suburban areas as opposed to lower and middle class people.

They’re common in Japan, too, outside of the densest few cities. And of course there are plenty of other countries where garages are common, like Canada and Australia.

Probably more like richest 10%, which applies to most people in the US

> At some point they lose touch with reality.

See every rich person telling young people to follow their passion.

> I don't wear a watch, because NOW is important

That doesn't imply that Jensen thinks he's successful because he doesn't wear a watch. He's not that delusional.

I think Apple is a very American thing. Outside the US, which you may not care about, only the most aspirationally Americanised people I've known have gone for apple products. Im not sure what the reasons are.

> People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC.

FYI, this guy is a troll.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41153109

| People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC.

No, we will not.

Xbox One sold 57.9M and Series family has sold 28.3M by mid 2024.

PS4 sold 117M and PS5 sold 61.7M by mid 2024.

Nintendo claims 150.9M Switch consoles sold as of the end of 2024.

That puts Microsoft at around 20.7%, Sony at 43%, and Nintendo at about 36.3%.

Even if you exclude Nintendo with a "no-true-gamer" fallacy, Microsoft still has just 32.5% of the market.

Windows was over 90% in 2007 and is just 72% today. If you include the super-important mobile market, Windows actual marketshare is something like 10-15% and even less if you include servers (where even most Azure servers run Linux).

> Microsoft had, in 2007, 18% presence share in console gaming. Today they have 65%

Source for this ? Also what do you mean by "presence" ? I had the impression that Sony was in a way better position than Microsoft, and they were both dwarfed by Nintendo by a substantial margin.

(not that this invalidate your overall point).

>I’ve been hearing people say this since this incorrect essay was written almost 20 years ago Microsoft had [...list of significant statistics...]

Whenever someone writes a provocative article about something being "dead", they are almost always talking about influence and mindshare -- rather than business statistics.

Yes, Microsoft is still a huge behemoth being a $3+ trillion cap company with a overwhelming marketshare of Windows & Office installations but the apex of their "industry influence" was the 1990s during the "Wintel" days before the internet came along. That 1980s/1990s was the time period when Bill Gates was CEO and "everybody was scared of Microsoft". Since, then they ... lost the browser wars (both old IE and new IE with Trident engine failed), lost the mobile shift (Windows phones failed), is a distant #2 in search engine market. Microsoft is somewhat back in the influence game with AI but that's because they partnered with OpenAI rather than build something internally. Arguably, it's Meta that gets more noise with LLAMA, and China's High-Flyer getting everybody's attention with DeepSeek-R1. That's the type of "alive vs dead" PG is writing about.

The "dead" being a writer's rhetorical flourish rather than a business status is the same when applied to "IBM is dead". In pure business metrics, IBM is still a giant company with $65 billion in revenue and $7 in profits. The airlines, major banks, and credit-card companies still run millions of transactions through IBM Z mainframes. Companies are still buying and upgrading expensive new Z mainframes. But the rhetorical "dead" means IBM's apex of influence was 1960s & 1970s. The later IBM trying to relevant with the newer tech like Watson and blockchain service doesn't matter to people.

Maybe writers should stop using "dead" as rhetorical technique because it just confuses readers. E.g. saying something like "DirecTV is dead" makes people scratch their head when they just watched a game on the satellite service last night. How would that be possible if it was truly dead?!?

> Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today

Microsoft had 90%+ of desktop penetration in 2008; in fact, it made news that it had slipped to below that at the end of 2008.[0][1]

Now it's around 70%, but seems to be improving?[2]

[0]: https://www.osnews.com/story/20605/windows-market-share-slip...

[1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367310/windows-market...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

>Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today

That's only counting the latest version, if you include all Windows versions, it was in the high 90%. Today it's in the mid 90%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...

> a bunch of people misunderstood his point the same way you're doing

Nobody implied he meant "dead dead" so that's a straw man, just that he completely missed the mark with his observation. Everything else is a backsplanation. PG even acknowledges he may look like a fool in retrospective.

> He was talking about cultural dominance among people developing new tech [...] Everyone's using Macs

So... a cultural thing you say, not connected to performance? Correlation not causation. The investor expects to see a Mac because that's part of the impression and everyone conformed. People showed up with a Mac to ask for money much like people show up in a suit to ask for a job. The interviewer expects the suit. It has no impact on the job performance or quality. It's just the "cultural" expectation. Wall Street people aren't more profitable due to the suits, and casual attire isn't dead.

> Was it really necessary to turn this into a talking point about rich people and their sins?

Was it really necessary to come to his defense? Was PG's opinion of MS really necessary? Would you have let it slide if I was praising instead?

And don't forget location. In 2007 not even the majority of developers in Europe had adopted the 'default developer mac', that only came a couple years later than in the US (afaik) and it never even reached that adoption rate (that is now in general, not only developers). If I look at my non-tech friends in Germany there is still just a tiny percentage using macs, and even iPhones are way outnumbered by Android.

> Glad to see criticism of PG finally going mainstream here

I appreciate there are people out there who have chosen PG to emotionally glom onto, positively or negatively, and perhaps you're probably an extreme case of the latter, so I would have to challenge a little. "Criticising someone loads" isn't a good thing. Just neutrally challenging their ideas individually is all that's needed.

>I guess the inflection point was PG turning to X to screech about "wokism" in support of oligarchs like Trump and Musk to snap this community out of it's pro-PG trance. Watching a billionaire cheer on the billionaire class as we plummet into technofeudalism is a hell of a wake up call.

In hindsight his (and Andreessen's techno-bullshit) have won a bet with Trump, those tweaker writings are very much aligning with the zeitgeist that's being imposed by Trump, Musk and their lackeys, they may even brag about having get there earlier than every other rich techbro.

[dead]

From Wikipedia: Graham received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in philosophy from Cornell University in 1986. He then received a Master of Science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990, both in computer science from Harvard University. Graham has also studied fine arts and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Note that most people can't even afford to go to one university, let alone four. That definitely seems like someone who had a safety net that allowed him to focus on acquiring wealth, instead of acquiring shelter or food.

Yup, nepo kid

"...father worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors, then was named the Director of Nuclear Safety for Atomic Energy of Canada"

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/16002

I do not know about Paul Graham in particular, but it is true of many rich people.

Android and ChromeOS.

Google is being much better at that game with Linux.

Paul Graham lives in a bubble. This article ignores the entirety of the actual real world because he talked to one person who didn't understand a reference to ancient history. Microsoft's entire business model has changed, but Paul Graham's bubble hasn't.

Every single startup Paul's company funds uses a Microsoft product one way or another. YCombinator is giving out Azure credits to their funded startups. When Sam Altman pivoted OpenAI from non-profit, he did it with Microsoft money. Microsoft is relevant as hell, just as it was in 2007, when it was busily providing productivity software to the entire US federal government without breaking a sweat -- a contract it still holds nearly two decades later.

From Paul Graham's perspective, detached from the actual world people live in, doing as he pleases with his fuck-you money, sure, maybe Microsoft is dead. But the list of people who can get value out of this essay is "Paul Graham."

I think they're still an 800 lb gorilla. It's just that now they're not the _only_ 800 lb gorilla.

This is delusional: If you bother them and you are to follow the basic 'economic rules', you have zero chance.

If you want to exist in that case:

1 - you must have the will to resist them (for how long, since they will always be around in some shape due to unlimited funding).

2 - you must have some kind of mechanism to be 'outside of the basic economic rules' (usually subsidies or similar).

This is not what I said:

1 - they have their own cash from huge racketering (forced) monetary streams. 2 - then, you still have the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock.

Those gigantic amounts of money are 'economically weaponized' to 'economically destroy' any sane alternatives, at worldwide scale. RIP "ecomonic competition" (who thinks nowadays this thing is not a scam).

So you say the very average people investing there are plainly aware their money is engaged in 'economic tyrany' which forces down the throat of nearly all average people, that worldwide, the _amazing_ msft software ? mmmmh....

The problem with "all use Macs" is that Apple has always been a great hardware company with an underfunded software side.

MacOS has so many problems or unsupported features it isn't funny, while Windows was fine.

>> I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly

Hmm. The lesson here is probably don't assume you understand a competitor's strengths and weaknesses via secondhand experience.

And the things MacOS historically did better, having a shell and integrating with unix-like software, have been evened with PowerShell/.NET, WSL2, and HyperV.

Furthermore, a few companies started making Windows laptops that weren't bricks. While Apple's software budget is now mostly iOS/device-focused.

> - The 4 forces that lead to MS' demise are likely spot-on. And again "demise" in the same sense of IBM, "still exists, still makes money, nobody really cares".

IBM shareholders and employees can only dream their demise was in the same sense as Microsoft’s.

I bet everyone on Linux that depend on stuff IBM and Red-Hat contribute to, really care, a lot.

[flagged]

> The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human.

In quite some essays, Paul Graham portraits himself this way. You will either be annoyed by this, or you will like his essays. In the latter case, you will likely self-select yourself for this unwitting bias.

As a bit of trivia (because web apps have clearly outpaced native/desktop for a long while now), who was it that invented the XMLHttpRequest that formed the basis for AJAX?

The Outlook Web team @ Microsoft; it shipped with IE5.

I have a very complicated history with Microsoft products, but they have introduced a lot of technologies over the years that we all use, even die-hard MS haters.

I think a key aspect of calling a thing "dead" is that it implies permanency. In other words, it can't have been more accurate in 2007 if it isn't accurate now, which it appears to not be. Maybe if pg had said "irrelevant" instead.

(Others have pointed out that 2007 wasn't even a particularly bad year for MSFT.)

Of course not, as we all know dead companies add trillions in market cap all the time.

> That just because someone is a plutocrat doesn't make them experts in all things.

Of course. This is why you go to a university to learn to analyze the evidence for a claimed statement as scientifically as possible instead of practicing hero worship.

He's not a plutocrat.

plutocrat is newly discovered word of the day.

In case you missed it, someone posted on HN a few days ago to try and get a similar site and culture up here: https://gamedev.city/

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Right, but in my case the API still has 1 year of support , so is negative backwards compatibility, MS devs break things before it;s end of life. Maybe I should be sorry, soem poor guy is tasked too work on the old API while the "cool" devs play with the new toys and maybe sabotage the other guy.