https://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
bg image(https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif)
[essays-5] * [essays-6]
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. They can't hire smart people
anymore, but they could buy as many as they wanted for only an
order of magnitude more. 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.
See also: Microsoft is Dead: the Cliffs Notes
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 analogous to the writing
of "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.
*
* * Portuguese Translation
*
*
*
* * Simplified Chinese Translation
*
*
*
* * Korean Translation
*
*
--------------------------------------------------------------