Paul Graham agrees: Microsoft is dead
April 7, 2007Paul Graham agrees with my earlier post regarding Microsoft’s impending doom:
What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.
The most obvious is Google.
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:
The third cause of Microsoft’s death was broadband Internet.
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.
Scot Finnie shared a similar sentiment.
As usual, a good read.
Update: It’s a “Microsoft is dead” weekend. Nick Carr op-ed in NYT from 2004:
.. much of Microsoft’s growth over the years has been fueled by upgrades to its two core products: the Windows operating system and the Office suite of basic business applications.
But now the software upgrade cycle is slowing
The majority of business users of PC’s rely on a well-established and fairly rudimentary set of programs – e-mail, word processing, Web browsing and spreadsheets – that use only a small fraction of the computing power built into today’s desktops and laptops. The case for continuing to upgrade these programs is weak and getting weaker
The prospects for the consumer market seem brighter in some ways. As more people come to employ their PC’s as entertainment centers, using them to edit movies, touch up photographs, and play games and music, they need to buy more powerful processors and install sophisticated new software. But the consumer market plays by different rules, and it is hard for software makers to charge much for their products.
.. now the industry is changing, and for the first time its managers, employees and investors are confronting an era of limits, with heightened challenges and lowered expectations.
Dead? Microsoft? Company exec doesn’t exactly agree.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/13582
Paul,
Thank you for your note.
Don Dodge’s opinion is suspect. This is a guy who claims to have 20+ years experience and just recently had an epiphany that things work better in Apple products because they own the entire stack. Duh! I believe it’s just that type of foresight that’s keeping Microsoft down.
And his claim that Microsoft never “meant” to scare anyone? How could I have misunderstood Ballmer’s violent language as anything but coded I love you’s.
Dodge’s main counter-point to Graham’s essay is that MSFT is growing by $4 billion a year. But strong marketshare and/or revenues are not indicative of a healthy firm, something I addressed in an earlier post.
Such myopic thinking really means that Microsoft is doomed.