Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Ding, dong, the empire is dead

In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he argues that Microsoft is dead:

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?

It’s funny how our own history in the industry can sometimes skew our perception of it. Paul has been in the industry much longer than I have, but for a vast majority of my time in the industry, Microsoft has been a juggernaut. Sure, there was a brief period where it looked like it might be Gary Kildall, and not Bill Gates, but now people just look at you like you’re talking fondly about Barry Manilow when you bring him up.

There was an era when the first thing any entrepreneur would worry about was: “What if Microsoft gets into the business?” The hope was either they’d just buy the company, or that the segment was too small to be interesting. I’ve not heard that thought-process in 4-5 years now, and it’s quite telling.

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.

I think the difference between Microsoft and IBM, in this case, could not be more stark. IBM had a near-death experience in 90s, and through a lot of very painful changes has to a large extent re-invented itself. IBM always had a huge intellectual property base to fall back on, whether it be in semiconductors, superconductors, lasers, or vast swaths of algorithms. I’m not sure that, even with all the really smart people that employ, Microsoft has the same kind of intellectual base to lean on. IBM has largely re-invented itself and shook off most of it’s historical baggage. I wonder if Microsoft can make the same kind of transformation, or whether they’ll see it before it’s too late.

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.

And this, at the end of the day is what’s wrong. Vista is the prime demonstration of the fact that the days of monstrous software projects is over. The rest of Paul Graham’s essay is equally interesting.