by aamederen on 2/4/25, 11:32 AM with 220 comments
by ghc on 2/4/25, 1:11 PM
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.
by roenxi on 2/4/25, 12:20 PM
"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.
by karterk on 2/4/25, 12:20 PM
by bsnnkv on 2/4/25, 12:39 PM
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.
by anonnon on 2/4/25, 9:16 PM
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
by anothercoup on 2/4/25, 6:49 PM
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.
by stuaxo on 2/4/25, 1:11 PM
Macs weren't something I saw that often at this time, just like now most computers were PCs.
by bediger4000 on 2/4/25, 12:32 PM
by buran77 on 2/4/25, 12:30 PM
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.
by Etheryte on 2/4/25, 12:19 PM
by codr7 on 2/4/25, 12:33 PM
Right now they're embracing open source and Linux, which has proven to be a very good idea.
I'm still not convinced.
by programmertote on 2/4/25, 2:14 PM
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.
by gigatexal on 2/4/25, 12:39 PM
by yellowstuff on 2/4/25, 2:53 PM
by etempleton on 2/6/25, 3:53 AM
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.
by mattmaroon on 2/4/25, 12:36 PM
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.
by G_o_D on 2/5/25, 12:44 AM
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
by insane_dreamer on 2/4/25, 9:05 PM
by sylware on 2/4/25, 11:36 AM
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.
by baxtr on 2/4/25, 12:27 PM
by INTPenis on 2/4/25, 5:23 PM
I hope the shock of witnessing Microsoft Windows in the wild has subdued with time lol.
by schmichael on 2/4/25, 9:25 PM
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.
by umur on 2/4/25, 9:27 PM
> 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.
by rayiner on 2/4/25, 1:43 PM
by ronyba on 2/4/25, 9:29 PM
by leecommamichael on 2/4/25, 12:29 PM
by shirro on 2/5/25, 3:50 AM
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.
by simion314 on 2/4/25, 12:40 PM
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.
by tealpod on 2/4/25, 1:25 PM
by nova22033 on 2/4/25, 12:29 PM
Along with this
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-d...
by deadlast2 on 2/4/25, 12:26 PM