Scripting News: Is Microsoft dead? Feh.

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Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Is Microsoft dead? Feh.

Paul Graham posits that Microsoft is dead and the cause of death is:

1. Murder by Google.

2. Oh who cares, it's all bullshit.

In fact, Microsoft is not dead, because (come on get real) it's a company, and companies aren't living, and they don't die.

In 1983 I wanted to develop for the Mac and I had investors advising me, older guys who had been in the tech business probably about as long as I've been in it now. Everyone said that Apple was dead. They asked what Apple's sales were. About a billion dollars. They said it was safe to develop for them, because billion dollar companies don't go away. Same with Microsoft today.

What's happening with MS is not death, but being pulled back to earth by gravity. It's the cycle of tech companies, and it's like the cycle of world powers. You have a vast natural resource to exploit, your population grows, the air gets clogged, the resource starts to run out and you're left with a large population. You go from optimism and huge growth to reality and flat, even negative growth. It's completely natural and predictable. It's going to happen to Google too, bet on it.

BTW, Microsoft's natural resource was people who don't have personal computers. And that's what they're running out of now. So they have to sell people their fifth and sixth PC. They will. And they will suck. Like everything else does. And Microsoft will be a mediocre huge company, again like every other huge company.

Sorry, Graham has no clue about the cycles of technology. You never should fear the incumbent, any more than you fear the IRS. Keep your distance, unless you're trying to be the next one, in which case good luck to you.

Emailing with Ole Eichorn about this (I think he used to work at Intuit) -- he wonders if MS has become irrelevant. I volunteer that of course they are irrelevant. It's been going on for a long time. My diatribe continues.

Geez, it's as if he (Graham) discovered something new!

I would say MS jumped the shark right around the time of "write once run anywhere."

They fought that. Oooops. Mistake.

They also tried to bury the web to protect Office.

Instead the web just routed around them.

Google took advantage. For a while.

BIG FUCKING DEAL.

PS: I could use some help with Apache htaccess files. ";->"

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:38 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

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