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The Death of Microsoft Debate

Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, posted an article about Microsoft being dead and Don Dodge, of the Microsoft Emerging Business Team, quickly posted a desprate response boasting Microsoft’s revenue growth figures as a rebuttal. Both article’s have pretty strong points but I feel like both are too extreme to be completely valid.

Graham claims Microsoft is dead basically because the desktop is not needed anymore. He says applications are moving to the Internet and utilizing tools like Ajax to achieve this. While I think this is a very valid point, it seems Graham thinks the way to save Microsoft is to buy up all the Web 2.0 start-ups, implying Web 2.0 (Google) is the killer of Microsoft. I think he’s giving Web 2.0 too much credit here. Like Dodge points out, Microsoft is a software company and if Web 2.0 was killing Microsoft, it’d be killing all software. This is highly unlikely.

There is a cycle here which will never fade. People want computing power on their desks. Even though the Internet is fast enough to host some basic desktop needs (like email and word processing), newer CPU bound applications will always be around to take the places of the Web 2.0 converts. Again, this brings me to my reoccurring point: hardware companies keep the software companies afloat. Even Graham inadvertently acknowledges this fact when he points out that “the Microsoft monopoly didn’t begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM.” Microsoft got the monopoly from IBM and it was sustained by companies like Dell and HP.

So Microsoft is not dead. They wont die. Like Graham says, they have enough money to just keep buying there way through the industry. That is until they have a resurgence of talent and clean up their products, just as Apple did with Mac OS X. I think what Graham really means is that Microsoft is not the superpower that they used to be and probably will never again be. Microsoft’s loss of danger to the other tech companies is a sign of this and is also how Dell can step up and start to support other OSs. Microsoft’s reign of terror is over.

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  • http://plug.student-orgs.purdue.edu Daniel Palacio

    [OFFTOPIC]Hey Luke, how is it going ? I’ve been preatty lost, but still on the game ;) , I recently took a couple of pictures of a linux cafe, downtown tokyo, preatty awesome Ill share them as soon as I figure how to get them out of my cellphone, which is in japanese ;(.
    [ONTOPIC]
    I recently had the chance of trying windows vista(bought a new laptop) home premium, and I must say I am preatty dissapointed. First, many years have passed since Windows XP came out, so I was expecting a big step in the OS advancement, but it came really short.

    First of all, one of the most sold things is windows AERO, which graphically speaking looks nice, but you could have the same thing 5 or 6 years ago on win XP using propietary software not mentioning that I could do much more a year ago in linux, see Linux XGL which beats the crap out of windows AERO.
    Second the Windows media center, which is a preatty dumb program still. Interface is slow and has little configuring options, I must say Linux media center does a better job, see: http://linuxmce.com/
    Then is Internet Explorer, which yes its now more safe and everything nad has tabbed browsing, but they took a product which had a 10 years old gap(comparing to say firefox) and they closed the gap 8 years. Yes its newer now, but does it bring anything new to the browsing experience ? no still obsolete.

    And in terms of security, well they did take much more time in trying to build a more robust system, with lots of anti spyware tools, a firewall and a little more administration, but in terms of 0day protection or state of the art security, I think the .ANI vulnerabilities and massive explotation speak for itself. Yes every system has security holes in them, but its been very long since Linux experiences a massively remote exploitable bug, I am just pointing that its just been a couple of months since its released, and its already possible to own most machines( See the exploit inside metasploit framework, it doesnt take you more that 2 minutes to set, and you can own every single windows machine outthere, at least a week ago, today I bet more than half).

    So all in all, windows vista doesnt bring anything new, is the same all windows trying to keep up with Linux, which has gone years ahead of windows in terms of security, graphics, developing, and internet experience.

    But I can deny windows still has something, and that is propietary software which only comes for windows, as in a huge amount of games and things like photoshop, msn live, skype video calls etx. Though linux can supply some of these things, shorthanded by a couple of features, I think in the gaming experience, windows still owns Linux big time, this is mainly only becouse games are shipped for windows only.

    Also there are drivers, which is essentially the same problem. Lots of device drivers are only shipped for windows, and the linux community although has been able to support almost all new hardware coming out, lots of functions are still lacking, here is probably were I want to see the most improvement to linux with the dell support. It is here were once its solved, will make Linux a full desktop OS for the masses.

  • http://openradix.org/ Luke Hoersten

    Hey Daniel. Thanks for the comment. I actually had a chance to try Vista from a beta tester and I came to some of the same conclusions as you.

  • http://openradix.org/ Luke Hoersten

    Hey Daniel. Thanks for the comment. I actually had a chance to try Vista from a beta tester and I came to some of the same conclusions as you.

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  • http://agoln.net/archives/12 Logan Buesching

    The future of the web…

    Luke posted a response to Paul Graham’s article and Don Dodge’s response. This got me thinking about my interview with Microsoft last semester. While I was there, I was able to talk with a manager with the WinForms API team. We got onto …