skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft isn't dead. They're still killing startups. There was a perfect DRM model evolving that would have killed Major Record labels while saving the local music stores... and Microsoft killed it with Windows Media Player updates and Vista.

What's sad is that now they've fallen below everyone's radar. Which makes it that much easier to get away with shit like this.
I somewhat agree with you.

However, it is obvious that hardware vendors still fear Microsoft. The day that they stop fearing Microsoft is the day that just about every PC will have the option of either Windows or Linux.

Last time a company tried something like this was IBM in the mid-90's and Microsoft made quite an example of them by increasing their annual Windows licensing charge by $200 million.
But is it unsucky enough in a "worse is better" sort of way?
It's intersting that you highlight GMAIL as the point where Google became scary. If anthing, GMAIL is another example of how Google's efforts outside of Search have largely failed...at least by the standard they set with Search. I used tried to find the latest marketshare numbers using Google but could't find anything current :) but as of the middle of last year they had about 2% of the Web mail market. Hmmm... Huge success?

I think their only real succcess outside of Search is mapping but even there they're trailing Microsoft (local.live.com) in innovation. Check out the 45 degree angle photos on local.live.com if you don't believe me.
Nice text. Did you take your medicines today ?
Oh, no problem. I thought that more people would notice that it's lifted directly from the article. On the other hand, I guess it's quite possible that it isn't funny. :)
Maybe there arn't any wizardly hackers applying for a job at Microsoft , but there are smart people interested in a steady pay check.
Please let's continue not to care about Mikrosopht (sorry, I don't recall the correct spelling, and I'm no slave of internet search either, but to me it sounds much antique, so I hope my guess is right...).

Instead, people of worth, let's help pushing stuff like this:
http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~dlong/software/kamen/index.php
(Note that I'm not the author, just heard of it recently.)
Well, you said Apple's board made a mistake - however, I think it was a necessary move. If you think about all the great movements in the history of mankind, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, etc, all of them had to be kicked out, suffer in the desert, receive enlightenment/burning bushes/next/pixar and then come on back as the conquering hero. Would Jobs be as good as he is now, if he didn't do Next and Pixar? Maybe, maybe not.

-Tai
If PG has something worthwhile to say, it is true whether he has a vested interested in the truth or not. If it is false, it can be debunked without questioning his motives.

Here is what I have observed about people. In general, people with vested interests do not lie. What they do is pick and choose the truths they want to share.

So someone with an investment in an online photo editor might say that "people are now writing online photo editing applications," but is unlikely to say, "that are faster and have more features than Photoshop."

Is that bad? Of course not. There are this other group of people with no alleged interest in the subject. They are called journalists. And you know what? My observation is that they are much less reliable than peopel with a "vested interest."
No, he is not saying microsoft is vulnerable, but that no one fears microsoft any more. In the past, if you were trying to get VC money, one of the questions they would ask you is - why should I fund you? Can't Microsoft do this?

That question is not asked today, even as a few years back. I was trying to get a patch management company going, and that 8 or so VCs I met didn't even asked if this is something Microsoft would get into.

And from what I understand, today's questions are more along the lines of - how can you beat google.

-Tai
Boston, 2, 22, 22
Loopster: all your friends in one place
Anything that Microsoft perceives itself to be bad at, and wants to be better at.

1) xbox (though, at this point it has not really been adsorbed back in yet)
2) IE
3) MS Office
4) MS Windows
5) MS-DOS
6) Hotmail
Yes. That's how this industry works: everything closed, expensive, and exclusive inexorably becomes open, cheap or even free, and inclusive.
old news. (just wanted to be young again.)
Is a business-type cofounder necessary for a startup to succeed?
dunno which place you pulled the Mac/Linux observation from but I can assure you that finally Microshaft are actually getting it right, and company IT departments are finally realising that TCO and facilities is tipped in MS's favour. I would thus say that your observation comes from clique formation, and perhaps doesn't reflect the overall industry. I freelance IT for organisations which go all the way from accountancy firms, to car sales chains, market chains, Art and Commercial offices, and realtime tracking/monitoring of heavy equipment. Out of all those (and there are often several under each heading,)I visit one Citrix office but they are going to Terminal Server ASAP. One company is busily switching from OSS server structures to Windows 2003 Servers. Cannot argue with it - MS often comes out cheaper, there is definitely more skill in the arena than there is skill in the Linux / OSX area, and tens of thousands of users still want a cute Window Start button. Out of some 20 businesses I do on demand IT for, one - only one - is a Mac shop, and a shambles it is too. They are graphics artists. One shop has custom boxes at the mineface talking to Windows 2003 Servers back at the office. One uses their own proprietary Application between mobile trucks and huge Wintel servers. The other 18 are MS shops doing everything from running fish markets all over town on RDP links, to monitoring, to aerial surveying, to good old accountancy under a wall to wall Windows environment. I see Linux boxes as routers and firewalls, Macs as the liberal arts students' foolproof workstation. Everyone I work for who is serious, runs Wintel machines. And I work across a wide sector of a fairly large city.
Mac OS X Server Free with Mac Pro?
MS isn't dead. People aren't afraid, but have accepted the reality of them being who they are. Just like oppressive governments; eventually they beat you down so much that you stop caring and just accept it.The fact that articles still bash them proves who is top dog. To quote a famous line,
"...we're better than you"
"...it doesn't matter..."

RT
Nice "Essay". I also bet that you dream in complete Eastman Color as well, right?
MS is to big - too powerful and has it's hands in too many things to simply "die"! I read somewhere that if MS decided to pay off all the share holders and close its doors tomorrow, may western governments have to scramble to hire all the MS staff just to maintain the status quoi!
As I guessed - you do dream in color...

PooPsTech
Sr. Software Eng.
This is the most valuable advice I've seen on YC News yet. Good luck rms on your startup pursuits. I think you definitely have the right attitude..

Dont know if we got an interview yet but we will start hardcore development of a demo right now.
Anyone else gotten a "We regret to inform you" from techstars yet?
Yeah, the reason this is going to take so long to shake out is that there can be only one dominant platform. And Microsoft is it. The Web interface even with Ajax is still kludgey in comparison. And things like Apollo from Adobe will take a long time to reach critical mass. The only thing I see chaniging the platform are endeavors like Nick Negroponte's one laptop per child (OLPC), which will force down hardware costs until it's eventually completely off-set by advertising. When PCs are free, a major platform shift can occur. Steve tried to get OSX on OLPC and was rebuffed by Nick, from what I hear.
We got ours yesterday.

At least it removes the problem of deciding what to do if accepted by TS and invited to an interview by YC. :)
Clearly not necessary, since the list of startups without such a person as a founder is long.
Hahahahaha.

What are you trying to do? Apply the John Dvorak method to Microsoft?

I can't seem to find any other way to account for that accumulation of the absurdest possible statements that this "essay" essentially is.

BTW: I suppose I am in the younger half.
Upgrading your customers to paying plans... all you gotta do is ask!
http://tinyurl.com/2kwrbo
Your story maybe correct, but I would not bet on majority of Americans supporting the theory, simply because Microsoft "remains" the largest, independent software company.
I will laugh beforehand at all the comments from Microsoft supporters, shills and apologists. They will inevitably content that because Microsoft products - Windows and Office have the "most market share" by far, they (automatically) are the best and bravest. Pretty sic thinking, but that which proliferates.
Your story maybe true, but probably unacceptable by most all the Microsoft supporters, shills and apologists, who content quite proudly that because Microsoft products, primarily Windows and Office have the "largest market share by far", the company is therefore the best, with the greatest products. Quite sick thinking really, but pervasive and illogical. I wonder if these same group think GM is the greatest car company compared to Honda, simply because of the disparate market share. Never mind the issues of quality, reliability, creativity or other important criteria.
I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody tries to make a "shell" that allows one at least semi-functionality across several different social networking/blogging sites.

It'll be successful as long as they can get a decent operating ability [can post as well as read "updates"], with out quickly being blocked by the sites themselves. Once the servers are kept away from the social networking sites, they must continually get new blocks of IP addresses to leach out the content, which really isn't all that hard.

(There's no magical javascript that will let the user's browser load what part of those site that you want. Normally the server goes in on the back end and acts like a proxy, spitting out content to a different interface. I always thought this approach wouldn't work for long without the social networking sites eventually blocking the servers, but then again, look at how meebo did it with all the messaging clients, and didn't get blocked.)

This is based off of the idea that many people will be members of several social networking sites at once. This notion of "facebook will have more users than myspace" doesn't mean that the users are completely different people. The majority of the users will be on both. I myself have a facebook and a myspace. Most of my friends just stay on myspace, so I find myself logging into both sites all the time.

I bet this will work. :)
Bill Gates a bigger hero that Alexander Magnus.
HE is the way...
You say: "Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people tooÂin fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones."

I think that's slightly off -- I think the folks who designed XMLHttpRequest fully understood its general utility. I think they're thrilled that lots of really interesting apps are being built on top of it. I think the problem was that the people writing apps at Microsoft didn't realize you could now use this to write compelling web-based apps.
"business-type" and having a Jobs to match against a Woz are two completely different things.

Business type qualities can be shared across several non-business types easily. When you see startups without the business type succeeding, its because it is there amongst all of the co-founders, inside of them.
I made this screencast for Songbird: http://songbirdnest.com/screencast

I thought it was pretty decent. I tried to make it fast and to-the-point and respectful of the viewer's time.
I think there's one more cause of death, tangentially related to "everyone can see the desktop is over." It is the reason Microsoft did so well in the first place: people will use seemingly arbitrarily bad software. Even with Ajax, the best web applications still fall far short of the best desktop applications. I guess even Microsoft underestimated users' ability (and willingness) to adapt to constrained or poorly-designed software, and thus use (relatively great) web software.

As a born-and-raised Mac user, I still think web apps suck, and for that matter, most Mac apps suck. But the few gems out there are phenomenal (or at least, approach the standard I hold). I wish more apps worked as well.
Mountain View, CA (bay area)
2
21, 23
I thought Steve Jobs's NeXT demo from 1992-1993 was pretty impressive. http://youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A

It certainly would have seemed space-age in 1992.
I always had the impression that most of the networking sites forbade this. Well, sounds good if not.
You might get alot greater response with some kind of presentation/video/plan on what you actually want to accomplish.
They're are easy target and i had this discussion over drinks with some friend last night. I actually think their software in the last few years and what is coming through is getting great respect from hackers.

Also, a few things to remember.

1. Search in only 10% done.

2. Pervasive devices are taking over as the key interface to systems.

3. Collaboration is the big wave on the web.

4. Privacy/Trust - things like google apps work for some data (and are a great addition) but add in trust and privacy in business and they're screwed. Open ID is thinking about identity, but there's a long way to go.

For these reasons there is a long way to go before anyone can be considered alive or dead. I for one think Google will be overtaken by someone in the not too distant future as well. It may be a resurgent Microsoft - remember Netscape.

Oh, the have an ace in their cards. Ray Ozzie is Chief Software Architect (a position Gates himself used to hold) and created probably the more powerful collaboration software in its time at Groove. He's been very quiet recently and his emergence may be their resurgence.

Not everyone is going to want to create 5 minute web 2.0 software to get bought by Google - a big change will emerge as happened with Netscape and AltaVista. Stay tuned.
North Carolina/Brazil, 3, 19/21/27
Now that I read this I realize that I haven't been paying any attention to Microsoft lately and that is because they don't matter anymore.

The clearest proof of their death is their failure to launch an improved operating system. Vista was a big failure and I think they are starting to realize it. I think this particular piece of software is going to kill them for good. (that being 6ft under) Though this process could take some time it has started and it's not going to stop.

Bye Bye Microsoft. Hope not to see any lookalikes any time soon.

Victor
Yes, I got mine yesterday as well.

You gotta roll with the punches.
Besides from talking about how young entrepreneurs like myself do not see Microsoft as a threat, a photo in the middle of the article links to my picture!

http://pieceofpaper.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/all_macs_and_all_writing.jpg
I think Im picking a pimple on my cheek
This is a poor way of representing the data. It distorts the data based on the overall population of the area. A better approach would be to look at all the job postings in a given area and measure the percentage that sound like startups.
No, but there should be at least one who is willing to do that kind of work initially, even if it doesn't feel natural.

Octopart, for example, was founded by a bunch of physicists. One is now doing sales. Sales is not the most natural work for a physicist, and maybe one day they'll have official sales guys doing it, but for now he is doing surprisingly well.
Hey that's good! I like the VP of Sales being forced on people.

Thanks for all of the good posts.
eh, I still find Windows 2000 perfectly adequate for everything I do - including reading your excellent essay. That said, VISTA may well be a coffin nail. R/G
I actually respected Paul Graham and linked to him in his article about starting a startup. Now I see he is basically not even serious enough to keep reading. What a dork.
I agree with everything you said, but there is one crucial bit more. MS is like the Soviet economic model competing against the "free trade" model. One is adaptive and the other isn't. Here it is the collaborative, adaptive model of software development (y-combinator like) versus the large monolithic MS development culture. Which is why MS will just not come back ever. They may be able to use Ajax, or other technologies, but they will never be able to change their culture. Doing so would require them to repudiate Bill Gates , et al and they are not going to do that.

We should thank them in a way, because rather than having to compete against a mob of dinosaurs, MS has killed the others off for us - Novell for example. Thanks Bill.
Ask the Wizard: Convertible Debt Jeopardy
Creating TechStars sounds like a great way for VCs to get the pulse on what the young entrepreneurs are thinking about. Even if they don't select anybody, they will have a lot of information on probably 10 to 20% of people who cross-applied to both YC and TS. But, the good part is there is more incentive on YC to select the best people, regardless of idea, including "no idea", before TS does.
Sounds great for the employer... not for the potential employee. Even in the role of an employer...

I don't want to know that much detail about someone. Day to day things about whether they get distracted or how they code isn't as important as week to week things... how well do they deliver on what they say they will. I could care less if someone was on mySpace most of the time, if they managed to get business taken care of, great.
Amazon Web Services Blog: MySQL Interface to Amazon S3
WOW! This is right on the money, the future of computing is getting even more interesting.
Its a strange irony that Microsoft's best products (Xbox, Natural Keyboards) are hardware.
Very cool, I'll check this out. I highly doubt it performs well enough to be useful yet (each row is a name/value in S3) but it's certainly a good direction to be heading.
It's not unusual for companies to sell game consoles at a large loss in hopes of increasing market share and making the money back on licensing. Pretty much everyone who isn't Nintnedo seems to do it that way.
Your observation that Macs and Linux machines outnumber computers running Windows is either humorously incorrect, or an outright lie. I work at a newspaper and the only people using Macs are the graphic designers. The rest of us, the vast majority of the company, use Windows.

You need look no further than any old web stats program to see who is online. (A quick look in Omniture at the stats for our newspaper web site shows that 74.4% of the operating systems are running Windows XP. Only 5.2% are using Macs. And just 3.9% are using other operating systems, i.e. Linux.) Or, for the less tech savvy, check the software shelves and see just how many programs support Macs.

It's really too bad. Your essay is otherwise very well written. It's just not founded in fact.
VI and emacs both have intellisense like features.
You nailed it - I think it is a cultural and mindset issue and unless they change at the core they are never going to intimidate anyone nor be the powerhouse they were once. Here is an interesting piece that complements yours...

http://republicofinternets.com/2007/03/17/is-microsoft-done/
Please tell all my customers for me so I can start making the switch to providing Apple and LINUX systems.

I'm confounded by the number of customers I run into who are convinced they either need a new Windows Vista computer, or worse, that they need to install Windows Vista on their old computer.
MS is no longer significant to startups because (at large companies):"No one was ever fired for buying Microsoft"

It's a value proposition that panders first to management's Fear Uncertainty and Doubt and second to actual results.
When did Microsoft die? That's simple. It is the day that Bill Gates decided to leave Microsoft. Not the day he left, but the day that privately, to himself, he decided to leave and devote his life to philanthropy. Everything since then has been just a desperate attempt to grip the sand as it flows through their fingers. The harder they sqeeze, the faster it flows through their fingers (cough Zune and PlaysForSure)
I suspect that you're right, but MS is not quite fully dead as yet, but they are dying a long, slow, lingering death because they have been so entrenched for so many years past.

Think of it as a layer of skin tissue. When the a layer of skin tissue is replaced by the body, it doesn't just disappear overnight. Rather, it starts cracking and peeling first, then over time, it is gradually replaced by a new fresh layer from underneath.

MS is currently peeling...
Paul,
As usual brilliantly written and fantastically succinct-even though it is indeed 'Old News'.
Forget web2.0- Where is your 3.0 startup?
"That thought, however, led me to consider the idea of making order of operations always evaluate left-to-right"

Smalltalk does something similar. In Smalltalk, any infix operator is just a binary message send, and they're parsed left to right. So for example, 12 + 6 / 3 results in 6 instead of 14. This result seems perfectly natural to most Smalltalkers, but it drives me nuts.

Personally, I think it's important to consider the audience when designing a programming language (or anything, really). Operator precedence is totally illogical and adds lots of unnecessary complexity - but it's drilled into people's heads from elementary school onwards. It's like Qwerty keyboards, American date formats, and English spelling. In most cases, though, it's better to work with people's illogical expectations than to say "No, you're wrong, here's a better way." Perhaps that's why Lisp never caught on.
Don't discount the impact of the antitrust suits. The lawyers get a veto on nearly everything within Microsoft now. A company simply cannot be agile when the balance of power is skewed like that.
Why on earth did you put that on scribd when a normal blog post would do? Now I just have a hard time reading the poorly rendered text...
Boston, 2, [25, 24]
I'd rather be black
This is what CRV does, right?

http://www.crv.com/AboutCRV/QuickStart.html
New Jersey, 2, 19/20
San Diego: 3: 20,20,19
Ironically, I find the article's Typography to be completely underwhelming. No attempt has been made to have the fonts visually represent the hierarchy of ideas being presented in the article, or to use the article as a showcase for how good great typography can be. If this article is supposed to be doing that, it radically undercuts the article's position.
I use emacs 23 just for DejaVu Sans Mono.
SFGate on Friendster Founder and Socializr
I feel like Steve had to get ousted and come back for the dramatic resurgence Apple has seen. It seems to me that both Apple and Steve needed to walk down their roads, and work things out for themselves, before they could both be ready to make the accomplishments they've made since 2000.

I don't think Apple would have allowed Steve such free reign as they did after his return, had he never left. Conversely, I don't think Steve had the contacts to do what was done with OS X, had he never met Avie and created NeXT.

That's just my $0.02, though. :-)
I suspect that PC vendors are actually being paid for installing Windows, too.