It's interesting to read comments about this today, written through the lens of the present. I suspect many commenters were too young to really understand the level of dominance Microsoft had in the market circa from 1995-2005. Just look at this chart:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...

In 2004, outside of education and desktop publishing it was extremely rare to see an Apple computer at all. Apple was the iPod company by that point. Almost all software of note ran only on Windows, and Office was required for all documents.

That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web. That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...it's not the same company at all. In fact, there is no company today even fractionally as dominant. Google's search monopoly or Apple's App Store monopoly just don't compare.

It appears all the critical commenters think PG was unaware of these facts, but they critically misunderstand the truth on the ground. There was no way for PG to not know that Microsoft was dominant everywhere because Windows ran everything (even digital signage) and Word documents were a more accepted interchange format than even PDFs. He was invoking Gibson's observation that the future is unevenly distributed, and he was right: The movement of almost all applications to the web absolutely annihilated Microsft's ability to dictate what software smaller companies could or could not publish.

Edit: Also, it seems unthinkable today, but back then we all had a large number of devices like printers and digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers. Microsoft essentially dictated what hardware you could buy too.

My favourite paragraph was

"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"

Is Google dying or dead in this sense now too? I can't think of any company they've bullied recently but maybe I'm just not in their space. All the excitement seemed to move over to social media companies and Apple, then Nvidia and all the industries it spawned. Google certainly aren't driving commercial innovation in the way they were when Gmail was a hot new topic.

Satya saved Microsoft by doubling down on Azure and Cloud. Something that Balmer failed to do with Mobile.

It's quite impressive to see how much the Windows experience has improved for developers since this was written.

I love being able to both do all of my web application work in a deeply integrated NixOS WSL VM and develop my own desktop environment power tools against a stable DWM using an officially supported Win32 API crate in Rust.

Honestly I dread booting up my M1 MacBook Pro for work, the experience feels sluggish, slow and unresponsive in comparison. In particular the experience of using a wireless mouse is like dragging the cursor through heavy sludge.

I'm surprised no one posted this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

Joel Spolsky was on the Excel team at MS, and was the lead on VBA. He prudently couches his doomsaying with this disclaimer:

> Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off

> Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops

I find this absolutely shocking. Was this a west coast thing? I graduated and got my first job around that time and never met a single developer who used an apple laptop. My CS department was entirely unix/linux/bsd and windows. All my internships and jobs post graduation was windows or linux. My experience was that the hacker community, cs community, developer community all looked down on apple laptops, especially back then.

I guess we all live in our own little bubbles.

Edit: Also, the worry back then wasn't so much that microsoft is dead, but that microsoft was expanding so much that even if you preferred to develop on a linux stack, you still wanted to get some background in C#, VB, tsql, etc to improve your chances at landing a job.

I remember reading this at the time, and thinking how much of a bubble he seemed to be in.

Macs weren't something I saw that often at this time, just like now most computers were PCs.

Not only is Microsoft not dead, they're almost never included in the "Big Tech" that gets shouted about and cursed. Which is weird, Microsoft makes an OS that has a 90+% desktop share, no real competitors, and pretty much extract money at will for its software.

> Their [n.b Apple's] 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

So nearly all of the (relatively) very few people that are funded by YC have Apple and that's proof of Apple's complete victory over a dead MS. In a year when MS was still on an upward trend, growing by 20% market cap to become double that of Apple.

Reading rich people's blogs reminds me every time that there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else. And by luck I mean a family golden nugget, or lucky first investment, or both. A superpower that allows one to fail many times and still be able to try again until they hit the next fortune. Most people in the world can't even afford to try. Most of the rest can't afford to fail.

I wonder who you'd put in that bucket today, who is the looming incumbent who might just show up and eat your lunch. For some time it was Meta, they definitely strong armed a bunch of small upstarts to sell out rather than compete. Right now I'm not so sure, there isn't any single name that comes to mind.

Given their trajectory at the time, they probably would be.

Right now they're embracing open source and Linux, which has proven to be a very good idea.

I'm still not convinced.

Whenever I see posts from famous people touted on Hacker News and Reddit, I always remind myself about this favorite quote of mine from Buddha (I'm a former Buddhist-turned-atheist, but I still agree with a few thinking and concepts from Buddhism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta

> Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava), nor upon tradition (paramparā), nor upon rumor (itikirā), nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna) nor upon surmise (takka-hetu), nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu), nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka), nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā), nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya), nor upon the consideration 'The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)' Kalamas, when you yourselves know 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.

I’d argue Paul Graham’s relevance is what died. He’s not worth 3T Microsoft is. Sure they’re not sexy to startups but they survived and thrived and found cloud when they did and are worth buckets and buckets of money.

I'll admit that this is a charitable reading of the essay, but I think that MS was dead in 2007 and is still dead in 2025, in the sense that Graham was focused on. In the 90s startup founders were scared that if they started a software company MS would copy their idea and crush them. Bill Gates used to talk about how he wanted to "monopolize" software before the lawyers caught up with him. By 2007 MS was mostly irrelevant to startup founders, and with a few exceptions it's mostly irrelevant to them now. They're not in the business of crushing the life out of software startups anymore. Paul's a VC, and that's what he was focused on.

This was certainly near peak Microsoft malaise. The only interesting thing they were doing with the Xbox 360 and that was only interesting because the grown ups weren’t paying attention. (When they did start to pay attention we got the Xbox One).

It is interesting perspective on how fast things can change in tech. Right now Intel seems doomed and Nvidia unbeatable, but it could all change in a few years time.

"[Apple's] 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"

He's not wrong there, I once had to use my laptop to display Jeff Bezos's Powerpoint when he was at Startup School because I was the only person around they knew had Windows. I tried so hard to like OSX, using it as my daily driver for two years, and I still wish I did.

Now that windows 10 EOL has already been commited, forcing users to buy expensive new desktop/laptops to run heavy and extremely slow/laggy 'Shady' windows 11

They are doomed

Since advent of smartphone, its been 13 yrs my desktop/laptop are unused covered in dust,

All my needs are fulfilled by hybrid android+linux ecosystem

Who among average users needs laptop, for daily usage when phone can be thrice fast and 100times more features

The OS-based Windows 98/2000 Microsoft is dead. The Enterprise Microsoft is very much alive and well.

Those toxic companies have billions of cash, then backed by the tens of thousands of billions from funds like vanguard and blackrock.

This money is sort of "weaponized".

If you are not "them", if you stick to the basic "economic rules", you are already gone as you cannot exist.

What is this telling us about the stuff he writes with full conviction today?

Paul got married in 2008 so maybe he has kids now, maybe they can tell him about a gaming PC that most likely runs Microsoft Windows. Or even an Xbox.

I hope the shock of witnessing Microsoft Windows in the wild has subdued with time lol.

Alternative title: antitrust works.

It didn't kill Microsoft. Microsoft isn't dead. However Microsoft does now have competitors. The takeaway here is that antitrust is fantastic for consumers and innovation.

As a side note, and to pg's point, Microsoft did make some very smart Web 2.0 acquisitions from Silicon Valley in the years since --most notably LinkedIn and Github--, and let them run relatively independently.

> So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: 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.

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

Microsoft isn’t dead. It’s just become IBM. The gas giant phase of a dying star.

Worst company ever no real tech all a bunch of salesman - CrowdStrike

More proof Hackernews is completely isolated from game development.

Like Oracle, their core competency for decades has been extracting rent from customers locked into their products. If they can't convincingly link a new product or service to their existing monopolies they don't tend to work out because they face more agile and directed competition. New product categories like mobile go through a boom and then they stabilise then some new hotness comes along. While other companies have to develop entire new product categories, Microsoft just keeps collecting rent money and locking people in harder. Get your new Office 365 now with ClippyPilot - soon people won't be able to wipe their own arses without consulting it.

VC backed tech bros with their dumb bullshit get rich quick web apps and crypto probably sounded way more exciting back in 2007 than Microsoft collecting rent. I guess PG did ok.

Just a rant about MS , people here claim how good they are with backwards compatibility. Bullshit, we were using an MS Azure TTS API, MS also had anew similar API but in alpha so we could not use that one back then. The old API has still more then 1 year of support but the MS "very nice guys" /sarcasm started breaking it, like one day one end point returns a different response structure, I fix it and next weak other endpoint changes the response structure, and the results start to bug out, returns success but transcription is incomplete etc .

In the end I did the work and move the new API, I am not sure how much this new one will work, maybe the nice guys at MS will want to restart things again with some new even more shiny thing.

Some fanboy will claim this is just a mistake and MS team are just incompetent and have no tests, and support if busy with other stuff.

IBM is Dead.

This belongs in the Hall of Infamy

Along with this

https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-d...

[Zero to One](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0...) book by Peter Thiel. One thing I took from this book is that Google Micrsoft, Meta are all monopolies. There is no competition. Look even in [Russia](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/russian-feder...), [China](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china) they all use thsi stuff.