skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is far too literal an interpretation of what pg's essay is saying. No one is claiming Microsoft is dead today - rather they are dying.

Saying "Since when does growing $4 Billion a year = Dead?" sounds a lot like a cancer patient in denial to me, "How can I have cancer, look I can still run and jump today so I must be fine".
Startup Advice: Default Is Power
Surprisingly eye opening to me, who is still trying to educate WinIdiots and WinMorons, by handing out free LiveCDs like http://pclinuxos.com in Costco, and WalMart.

CompUSA and BestBuy seem to be dead, ala Microsoft. They have a few devoted WinIdiots and WinMorons, but, most folks just shop on the Internet, now, for high tech. goodies, running upto 50X faster in GNU/Linux, on an old PC, so it all looks as great as Mac, at reduced investment, that recycles systems for another 10 years!

Anybody who knows a school kid, or, a geek, has heard of Linux, and probably even has at least one computer that runs it! Exception is School Boards in 10 remaining states who still support convicted felon Microsoft, desktop Windows, and the "trusted partner" protection racket, while Linux is faster, safer, runs on old equipment, and is FREE!

310 of the distros are at http://livecdlist.com
I lived in Scotland for a couple of years and in Dundee the natives would always refer to themselves (individually) as 'us'. For example:

"They hit us wi' a stane." == "They hit me with a stone."

I'm sure you have some scottish heritage somewhere in the family tree, right? ;)
You article sums up what I think as well. Microsoft no longer has an technical relevance, and many other companies have taken the lead in innovation. I blogged about this in December in an article I called "The Microsoft Bubble in 2006":

http://www.osxautomation.com/2006/12/10/the-microsoft-bubble-in-2006/
I adopted a rescue puppy, Ziggy, who had a lot of emotional problems from being abused and moved around as a baby. I was surprised to find that there was no free, interactive video training available online to teach me how to help him acclimate to a safe environment.
With a background as a film producer and media consultant I got to work finding like-minded individuals to help me build such a website.
Our product has gotten more complex than the original idea, but the heart of it is still there.
Ziggy is now a fairly well-adjusted one-and-a-half year old who has overcome his fear of everything except small children and people who wear hoods.
Fifth paragraph: if their is a kind of afterlife

should be

if there is a kind of afterlife

Boy, do I hate that kind of mistake. It's nearly as bad as s/you're/your/.
Heh, maybe in previous lifes Matt.
"Irrelevant" would have still been eye catching and more to the point.
Deep thoughts. Thanks for them.

Exeeding my goal since 1997, converting one computer and/or person each week to Open Source, usually GNU/Linux, but, have done some BSD (yes, there are some 25 of them!), I am fighting the lock-in monopolism of BOTH Apple/Macintosh and the multiple convicted felon Microsoft.

Major reasons people switch, from my experience:
1. Simplicity of use - GNU/Linux and BSD are immune to the "114,000 Microsoft Virus Definitions" and provide thousands of included applications: games, suites, browsers.

2. Users are tired of having to become a computer technician and spend 2 hours or more each week trying to clean or prevent Microsoft virus, trojan, malware infestations.

3. Disgruntled that Microsoft treats paying customers like criminals, but, now aware that convicted felons act that way, thus, WGA, and in Vista, corporate Microsoft spyware with a "shutdown feature"! Why would anyone accept this?

4. Realization that Microsoft and Mac will sell included free stuff, without proper conscience, and worry about the 'details' such as royalties, customer support, or customer satisfaction, "later"!

5. Awareness that 15 day TRIAL WARE is NOT a selling point for new Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway computers... it is a dis-incentive, thus the great migration to FOSS, where all the FREE software is self protecting, at no extra penalty to the customer.

Yeah, http://distrowatch.com has it, and http://livecdlist.com has it Live!
Microsoft recently came to my graduate school to recruit for user experience design and user experience research positions. 10 folks out of my program (about 25% of us) scored and interview.

Every single one of us had no intention of working for Microsoft and joked about it intensely. Microsoft had be relegated to the realm of other boring places to do our type of work but that you interview at for practice (and, you know, just in case that job at google doesn't pan out).

In my interview, the topic of digg.com came up and neither interviewer had heard of them. I said they were like a type of slahsdot, or maybe magnolia. Never heard of those either I quipped "oh, maybe you're not involve much in the web / web development world".

"Actually, I'm one of the project managers for Internet Explorer."

The interview went downhill, from Microsoft, from that point forward. My heart wasn't even in it "just in case" anymore.
That is how convicted felons think, everyone else is a felon, or is going to be one!

But, yep, you now deserve this for having anything to do with multiple convicted felon and pirate Microsoft.

Nobody of integrity openly deals with convicted felons, for the taint will corrupt our customer trust. We all switched a decade ago. Where were you?

Well, never too late!
I'm a little bit surprised that pg posted this article at all. It's probably a bad choice of words, as "dead" can mean lots of things other than what I think pg means: it's not as intimidating to startups as it use to be. It will not be the source of technical innovation that attracts the best minds in the world, as it once was.

In any case, a couple days ago, I was on the john, reading Hackers and Painters, and there's a chapter on "What you can't say" dealing with controversial thoughts. Apparently, this is one of them. pg's advice in the end of the article was not to say anything at all, so you don't have to deal with bickering with others, and go about your merry way.

But then again, I don't see pg here in the trenches. In fact, most of us have wasted our time (some more than others) posting 200+ posts here, instead of working on our startups.
You have been infected with the disease of Microsoft, rose colored glasses, greed in the marketplace, tunnel vision...

Wake up and shake off the shackles of corporate greed! Gnu/Linux processes upto 50X faster, runs on any platform, DEC Alpha to Sparc. Why else is Microsoft using 'Nix in front of all servers, on all Redmond networks, for all routers (Aruba leased routers are on all MS nets), and etc.?

Learn the new revenue streams, or go bankrupt with them.
As a developer of MS web solutions that people are happy with, and can be developed quite quickly, many of these points fail to resonate with me. Users pretty much don't care what the file extension of the page is serving up their content, they just want it to work. I can develop develop rich UI pages with the MS AJAX controls very easily and users are happy.

As a developer, working in the open source, 5 billion different products in various stages of non-existant support and working in a single consistent framework with fabulous support, it isn't a difficult decision which way to go... Unless you are one of those "software tools should be free" kind of people who doesn't mind not getting paid either.
At least they invented and marketed OLE. The importance of this technology seems to be underestimated. OLE for windowed environments is the same as the streams/pipes philosophy in UNIX. In fact OLE/COM is something that's still missing in UNIX (and don't tell me about gtk which is a shitty and buggy piece of software).

From GUI perspective MS did a lot of things that X and MacOS "adopted" or tried to adopt silently, so to say.

After all, MS does hire talented staff. Just don't underestimate them.
Table Tennis for Three (with video)
Old news! Death to Microsoft! The more interesting question is do they really not realize they suck? When you have Google as the #1 search engine being used within Microsoft and iPods as the #1 music players being used by Microsoft employees, I find it very hard to believe they don't know they suck.

http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189500876&cid=RSSfeed_TechWeb

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2005/02/66460
I find this unnecessary and to refer to Microsoft as being for Grandmas, I hope all the Grandmas land on this guys head and trample him. Such an unfortunate phrase for him to use. I sure hope Microsoft rises up and pounds h... out of such superegos.
Understanding Navigability of Social Tagging Systems (alt.chi 2007 paper with reviews, pdf)
Dear Paul,

While you lay out several interesting point and are right on the fact that Microsoft is facing some serious challenges. It is not dead by any means and still exists in the game.

You point out some reasons Microsoft why is "dead":

"AJAX and Javascript is the new programming model of choice"
I am currently developing a web 2.0 venture namely UReporting. Our Project is based almost entirely on Microsoft technologies. We had the option to use both LAMP based development or ASP.Net/ MS Sql. We chose Microsoft as it served all our needs and then some. Mapping, mobile, streaming, AJAX, Scalability, Community building you name it we are doing it.
I have nothing against Javascript or AJAX but I can assure you Microsoft technologies can do everything that AJAX or Javascripting can. Also Ajax for ASP.NET is widely avaialable and used. This is a view not from someone who funds ventures but an actual entreprenuer seeking to minimize costs and develop a scalable and efficient platform.

"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."

Interesting point especially coming from someone who funds such venture...

In conclusion, While microsoft is definately facing some challenges today (normal for all major businesses), there is no indication they are even close to where you claim them to be.

Have a Good Day

Danial Jameel
www.UReporting.com
I don't think the desktop is dead, but I will agree that it's retired: It will pick up new jobs(programs) just for something to do, but it will be part-time(eg Openoffice) whereas the real effort will go to vacations(games) and hobbies like collecting videos(YouTube) which won't even always need so much effort.
I'll stop because my thoughts aren't making sense anymore, but yes the Desktop is retired, and the desktop companies are dead. You can tell some of them(Adobe) know this because they're buying webtop application(Macromedia) companies to stay alive.

I just wish Flash would work better on Linux instead of worse.

And if I ever buy another prebuilt computer, it probably will be a Mac, since Linux doesn't get the same recognition or money for its similar market share.
Do anybody have a success to create product that uses principles of evolution? How social sites like YC news, reddit, etc. use evolution principles (e.g. voting up/down) to become better services?
i think this is fantastic,

i'm an israeli entrepenuer spending some time in NY now and would love to help.

a member of our group (www.garagegeeks.org), zvika netter, is thinking of doing the exact same thing in tel-aviv, building on the eco-system that will go on there, can be a great thing.

i'm at ohadpr@gmail.com if anyboy would like to chat and exchange ideas.

ohad
3D3R software studios
I run a startup in NYC with a distributed team (3 founders). My team is originally from the Bay Area so we do miss that community aspect of working around other techies. This sounds like a great idea but $250/month/pp would dig in a bit too deeply into the angel funding we've raised.
Slashdot only gives you moderation points some days, though. I read slashdot two or three times a week, still, and hardly ever have mod points. I dunno if you can use more than one mod point on a single comment, there.

My reference to site metrics assumed that you'd give out the same amount of mod points to each person, based on some calculation involving the number of articles, users, and how many you wanted on the front page each day.

I can imagine someone being annoyed that they don't have enough mod points to give a single point to each article they find interesting, though, and it would be a pain to have to constantly fine tune the calculation, so one way to mitigate that would be to allow everyone to mod up any article by one point (like on reddit) without using their pool of mod points, and then they could use the mod points for "extra" ups.
all the game-developers and 3d-technology-people use windows. they are pretty strong in this field. thats because osx and linux dont natively and fully support the gfx-hardware...
Beyond Pair Programming:  Open Individualistic Competitive Programming (do you think this can work well?)
Suppose you ask a team of developers to act individually to implement some system.

Each member of the team would be able to see what everyone else is doing in real time.

Each member can copy any code fragment from any other member as soon as that code fragment has been typed.

The goal of course is to end up with at least one member of the team with a solid code base that satisfies the spec.

Members are then paid based on code that made its way to that solid code base. Note that you would not be rewarded highly for mostly copying code from others even if you are the first one to end up with a working system.
Half the blogosphere, apparently. :) That title does create lots of buzz, but it's really polarized buzz. Not that that's a bad thing, necessarily.
I added a link to this and some other similar articles at the bottom of the essay.
There's food for thought at Justin.tv (Inside the YScraper)
Maybe this is silly, but the only sentence I didn't really understand was "The situation is analogous to the writing of "literary theorists." I've tried to understand literary theory and had zero success. I just assumed that either I wasn't trying hard enough or just wasn't smart enough. But you suggest they _could_ make it clearer, and simply _don't bother_?! That would be...disappointing? Inexplicable?
I disagree to some extend. I rather see it as things don't disappear; they transformed.

Microsoft realized it would die if they didn't react with their environment. They know they where gonna get hit in their software department, so... While people were concerned with Microsoft and its monopoly in the OS market, they realized they needed to expand and eventually transform.

People, may I say they own the gaming industry, and Nintendo. But according to reg stats whichever gaming system comes out firsts wins the market. Hello Xbox360 ~ Microsoft's new empire.

Windows is dead. That is true.
All - I'm not posing my question properly, only chris_i and neilc seem to understand my question. A lot of people present software implementations, but the choice of an implementation is step 5, and I'm still hung up on step 2 :)

I'm trying to figure out how people made the decision to use that implementation. What factors were weighed? gmail makes the claim that they store a lot of information in RAM, and don't use a DB server. Any good articles about gmail's architecture?

thank you!
n
Zell wants end to Web's "Free Ride"
Wow. Here's a guy who understands less than the record companies.
Paul Graham is the Ann Coulter of the Web 2.0 world.

Formula for success:
1) Write/say something controversial
2) Leverage the idea into a book
3) Profit!
Yeah. And if yc got 38 % on the dollar they had to have been holding common stock (or something like it I am unaware of) or they would have at least got their money back.

Preferred shares don't really make sense for YC given the amount they are investing and the valuation at which they are doing it. It would be like hedging against exits below 100k, at which point, why would they even care.

I'm guessing convertible debt would be odd for them as well for one of the reasons given by Costolo and others: as soon as YC invests they are concentrated on raising the valuation of the company as high as possible, convertible debt would put them slightly at odds with this.
I work for one of the $100B+ market cap companies that officially is windows only, but internally 20% of people have already replaced their windows with Linux or Mac for superior performance. The OP of this is all about the new breed of startups not the grandma companies you see or work for.
Paul,

I think Apple's resurgence required that Jobs be pushed out. I feel that his time in the wilderness helped him grow in ways that would not have been possible if he had stayed safely ensconced at Apple.

Instead of being at a hugely successful company like Apple, he spent 12 years focused on the challenges at NeXT and Pixar. And the challenges at NeXT were significant. Both companies brought him into contact with very different customer bases. For example, NeXT had a number of major investment banks as big clients. (Granted, Jobs would have had contact with them as CEO of Apple, but as their customer, which is rather different.)
Ycombinator and its progeny are getting an amazing amount of PR these days. It's certainly part of the Web2.0 zeitgeist now. Did you see the list of startups at the end of the article in the "Yscraper"? pg had an essay on this PR placement. I wonder which firm handles Y's PR.

After justin.tv has gone bust, its value will have been how much attention YC has received because of it. Kind of like a loss-leader for YC's stable of startups.
Also... I don't know why any company would use Windows for important machines. Requiring the use of Windows is like requiring that all key staff be recruited from drug rehabs.
It's buggy
Anyways since recently I've been such a stickler for user interface design. I feel it's often a neglected part in my opinion as I'm so used to programming the back end of web apps. Yet I feel that a really good UI will make a difference with your customers.
The viral manifesto
If you want to play games your still stuck with Microsoft. They have been fairly effective at marginalizing OpenGL. However, requiring Vista for DX10 will push many to looking for alternatives. Alas, the alternative seems to be the console currently. While games is may "fun", its still the main driver of PC hardware development. 3D cards for games have long since subsumed CAD cards.
If it's 'the Yscraper' (and not 'the Yscaper'), that article's got a couple typos. If it's 'the Yscaper'...I don't really get it.
Why have you chosen Death as your metaphor?

We should pay some credence to what Microsoft has done to computing. I think they have built industry leading applications and provided (in some cases) some vision for development. Hands down they once owned computing.

Certainly the business model allowed them to become very rich and powerful. Knowing what we know now - maybe we shouldn't have let it happen.

Does your article simply state, the industry has changed? Why is Google more important now than Microsoft?

Collaborative documents and its respective monetization - who are the leaders? Monetization and sustainability seem to me to be king.

What is important about your article? Doesn't Microsoft continue to be profitable, sustainable, and offer value to its customers? Is there something important about a loss of their lock (except the obvious)? Is there a social statement there?

How does this translate to me as a user, a developer, a business person?
what he actually means is that windows is Intuitive enough for even a grandma to use. That in my opinion is a tremendous compliment.

Ask yourself this : Can a grandma install Debian? Is a grandma interested in setting herself apart from the masses with a trendy powerbook? No and No. A grandma only wants something that works well. Like 99.999% of the world's population.

People want what is easy and intuitive. Geeks, hackers and trendy insecure people revel in the obscure and fashionable (Linux and Macs).
I'm interested in the relationship between the idea creator and the coder.

I have the idea, but I can't program for the life of me. I've outsourced to people in China but I need to have someone local who can take care of the small stuff.

It just seems that if I find somebody I'll just be telling them what to do while I sit and watch them code...

How do you deal with this?
Thanks very much for the pointers! I followed up on them and they led to some interesting reading... still leaning toward erlang.
He made a point when he said that these web 2.0 companies don't generate profits as much as MS smallest business units.

Last night a friend of mine said this to me: "these websites will be empty places 5 to 10 years later". That pretty much sums up the web 2.0. Sure it's not another dot-com bust but it still not a long-term thing. Only the biggies can survive while the niches will eventually died.
The Bee's Knees: Inspired by Marimba chapter in Founders At Work
important post with some meat to follow up.

Next Gen Search is exciting to think about.
Pervasive - I personally want to degadgetize and surround myself with inexpensive, pervasive technology. (Why isn't bluetooth inexpensive?)
Collaboration - If you listen to MS talk, they are significantly ahead in collaborative technologies. I can't speak to that, but would personally like a movement toward open document formats.
OpenID - why are they important? I should do more reading, I might not understand the scope of that project.
web 2.0 is bubblific. good luck to those hoping to make a quick buck. I wish better luck to those that aspire to create value, change computing and create sustainable business models.
Heh! Out of index with them.
"Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Exchange are the core software apps of 90+% of small businesses."

You forgot the CPU-sucking antivirus apps they need to run that still can't guarantee that the business won't be brought to a standstill by a worm.
This part is actually quite nontrivial, I found. I have a text file full of headlines, or copywriting, even though we're not quite at the point to use them just yet. It's mostly for us; I add to the list constantly, attempting to sell the project to myself every time, as if I was a user. When it seems too hard to describe it in such a way, it's a flag suggesting we might want to refocus.
IBM died in exactly the same way. They became a niche player in the market they had a hand in creating... all the way down to the actual hardware (desktop then laptop). They finally sold their interest in the personal computer market that they said would go nowhere. Now, Microsoft, with the same attitude towards open source and open standards is suffering the same climb towards obscurity. Google embraced open standards (POP, SMTP, HTTP, AJAX, Jabber, etc) and actually extended such to amazing utility (check out their stock market tools) and somehow free... the concept that undoes Microsoft. Microsoft crushed the browser market with "Free" IE and Google is crushing Microsoft with free computing. Do you need MS Vista? Heck no, just XP with a decent browser (Firefox) and most people are good to go. Microsoft creates the new terminals of the millennia and Google is the new mainframe. The king is dead, long live the king.
I think applied justin.tv would be compelling. That is, people would broadcast their life for a specific purpose, such as finding a job, date, etc.
Why big companies suck and startups should beat them
but ironically. the browser should be integrated in the core of the OS.
and Microsoft developed a superior office package. They were at one point behind 123 and WP.
I wouldn't discount large company innovation, but certainly acquisition becomes part of their innovation model.
A new cofounder has been offered a job with Google. Can Google own our software even if he works on it after hours? (he hasn't worked on it yet)
He said that as per his employee agreement. They can own anything he works on, even after hours and on his own computer.

(IMHO could potentially be a useful tool for youtube. http://juwo.com)