skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You think Microsoft can stop web app innovation by just ignoring it themselves?

Their incentive is to maintain their market share. IE7 is their attempt to get their ass in gear for precisely that reason. The market's not going to stick around and wait for IE and the web will progress whether MSFT wants it to or not.
I recently found Inconsolata, which I really enjoy for coding. As a bonus, it's free (as in freedom).
Hey all, was wondering about the greatest screencasts/demos you've seen recently. Trying to get in touch with interesting startups with demos for an app we're building. Also if you have an online demo or want to help me find people with cool demos email me, appreciate the help: sumon [at] zintilla [dot] com
Is IBM dead? Maybe Microsoft is just another IBM. In 30 years, they may even be backing free software.
Quote: "I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows". "Insular" indeed!
You bring up a hilarious caveat to "No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore."

The people now afraid of MSFT are not their competitors but instead their customers.
Wow. It's beautiful. Thanks for the link.
This one is easy for me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u3ekzwnYxw

The screencast for Scrybe was truly amazing. Cnet described as the "Demo of the Gods."
I prefer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_%28typeface%29
Well, apparently MS killed Java on the client:

http://java.sys-con.com/read/37121.htm

So yes, they could make life difficult for AJAX developers.
One of our co-founders is a wonderful web designer and, trends aside, the first question he asks his clients is 'who's going to be looking at this site?' The second question is 'who do you want to look at this site?' Everything from font to layout is designed to reflect the answers to these two questions.

I wonder about if websites in the future will be customized as the site loads to fit your personal tastes in color, font, style, content. An automated graphic design that can be deduced from your web behavior and that of others. All our Ycombinators would look different. Its seems both feasible and probable. Gate's recently talked about the 'personality' of the future computer.
Reminds me of the Psychology of Crowds work Aggregate Knowledge is doing (per an earlier post on Kleiner Perkins).
It depends on your software. In general, here are some questions I like to myself when I design a product in order to keep it simple:

1. What is the product supposed to do? A corollary is to ask, what can a user do with my product that he can't do without it? The answer to these questions should be a single, simple, focused answer.

2. What is the absolute minimum feature set we must have in order for the product to do what the user needs? Question EVERYTHING. If you're designing an email product, ask yourself if you even need folders. If you're designing a MS Word killer, ask yourself if you even need a Save. If you're designing a media player, ask yourself if even need a play/pause button.

After you have the minimum feature set, release the software and iterate quickly based on user feedback. Nothing can replace raw feedback from strangers who don't give a crap about you or your product. See what the users like and dislike about the product, based on first hand observation.

More tricky is keeping the product simple in response to user feature demands. Adding features is good, but only when you do it in such a way that it complements your answer to the original question: "What is the product supposed to do?"

You have to think about how each and every additional feature deeply integrates into your existing product, rather than tacking features on haphazardly. This is difficult to do. Google does this especially well (Search, Gmail).
He's complaining about PCs, but I've noticed similar issues with Mac apps. They don't have a system tray to go nuts in, but half of the mac apps I run check for updates at launch and bug me right when I'm trying to opens something. Some are smart enough to go ahead and do the update and tell me afterward, but they're in the minority.

This feels to me somewhat like the Vista shutdown menu. The programmers writing the individual apps aren't asking themselves "what if there were six apps like ours all asking to update constantly?" Come to think of it, this tends to be a pretty major theme in software development: ignoring user experience when other people's code is involved. Opportunity for improvement!
The architecture example is a bad one. While AutoCAD on Windows is by far the dominant setup there is a product for Macs called Vectorworks that is used by many firms. Several in the Boston area alone.
Once they have identified the promising ideas, they might look at the demos to narrow it down....
the fact that MS Atlas exists makes your AJAX hypothesis false.

Microsoft tried to kill XForms. The workaround of AJAX made Microsoft to open their eyes 10-12 months ago...
The Xbox is a red herring. Microsoft's "Home and Entertainment" division still loses millions a day, six years after the Xbox unveiling, and has very little to do with technology in the first place, much less software innovation.
When my software starts, it auto-updates itself if necessary (takes only a few seconds.) My software also checks for updates every half an hour. If there's an update, it puts a notification into the status bar (of the program, not taskbar). It checks to see if the software is idle. If it is, it saves everything, shuts down, downloads and installs the update, and runs again. It takes one click to go back to where the user was when they come back from being idle.

A user is also able to select "don't install updates automatically" in which case they will still be notified in the status bar and when the program first starts that they have an old version. By clicking one button, the new version is downloaded and the program is restarted. So, the user is aware they need an update.

Finally, the updates themselves add new features and don't introduce bugs.

This works better than iTunes (where you have to redownload the entire program), the anti-virus definition updaters (that popup a progressbar over your screen or fill up your system tray), and the Adobe Acrobat Reader downloader (a crazy screen that tells me to update a program I don't even use very often.)

The news page that shows when you start the program tells you any news, so the users are still aware that new features are being added, even though the process was seamless.
Sounds like an app I would like to use, and I don't even know what it does.

My only comment is the "and don't introduce bugs" statement ... that is a bit of a tough guarantee isn't it? =)
Come on, we're not talking about the homefront here, we're talking about the frontier. This is the startup news site; we're not here to talk about the current industry standard.
Paul, excellent article. I have two additional reasons behind why Microsoft is "dead."

Reason (5): Steve Ballmer took over from Bill Gates as CEO in Jan 2000. Chief Sales Guy takes over from Chief Egghead and the company stops building products for its real users.

Reason (6): Web 1.0 hiring. Microsoft hired a huge number of people in 1998-2001, people who were too stupid or incompetent to get a job pretty much anywhere else. The good people all went to web startups then. This was the first crack in Microsoft's "we have the world's best people" armor. B players hire C players, and it goes downhill from there.
Someone tell Paul Graham he's made a huge mistake -- I just called Microsoft's phone number and got through! Yup, Microsoft is as vital as they come.
I forgot to mention that the big use for "don't install updates automatically" is if a user has one of those firewall applications that likes to ask for permission all over again whenever a program has been updated. Also, it means those who use Windows in a priviledged environment will be on the computer (not idle) to confirm Windows request for elevated rights.
I came away from it thinking "Okay, yeah, I already knew that much. What's this nirvana you're talking about?" I suspect I'm not the only one who has been exposed to lisp but hasn't really comprehended it. This article did little to convince me or help me along the path to lisp enlightenment.
Thanks! Yes, that's more of the mental state I put myself in. :) But I have to say that I have developed a pretty good feel about when something is ready for release.

My program has to run all day. As soon as I release an update, I have to quickly run the old, installed version of my software to get the current update. Then, I make sure it actually starts. Let's say I add something that works great during testing, but crashes with a file access error on startup. That means the user will come back to the computer and see an error. At least if I introduce a bug that doesn't keep the program from loading, it means that I can then release another update later on which the update I just released will catch. That's what I meant. As long as the update doesn't make the program crash when it starts, the program will find any future updates to fix any bug I introduced, seamlessly.

I hope this helps somebody.
"As Google becomes more and more application-oriented, it will look more like MS. While MS is pushing itself to be more web-based, it is snapping up Google's market share as well and therefore more Google-ish. The clash of titans will definitely be interesting. The winner will rewrite the rule of future computing platforms, while the loser will be left in oblivion and soon forgotten."

Full text here:

http://not-your-cup-of-chai.blogspot.com/2007/03/distributed-vs-centralized-entities.html
Like an Oliver Stone movie, this entry is interesting and fun to read despite being entirely wrong in every major respect.
I no longer consult but if I had a small business or non-profit as a client today I would:

- Hook everyone up to a high speed connection.

- Not worry about OS or platform as long as they could run Firefox or IE

- Sign them up with Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/a/ )

- Sign them up with a web-based accounting system such as ACCPAC Online, ePeachtree, Oracle Small Business Suite, etc if they do in-house accounting

- Spend 45 minutes showing them how to admin the system via the web

- Present my bill

Of course Microsoft is dead.
Well, the first part of my comment was a joke, and the second part was only asserting that Microsoft wasn't going to go away soon, because they're a de facto standard.

I'm not saying that I worry about them for my own projects, or that you should for yours. :)
Ah. For even more control over what appears on the front page, it might be useful to have a certain pool of points for each user, derived from site metrics, which the users could then apportion as they saw fit, rather than only one per submission. You really want this story to reach the front page? Spend half of your 34 points on it, or whatever.
My apologies. I didn't get that "more seriously" indicated that the first part was completely tongue-in-cheek.
"[E]ventually the open source world triumphed, in the form of Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire."

${applause}

This is a beautiful simile, one I will repeat to others.
Also (I'm 32) this feels like old news but hearing it put so succinctly by you, well, it puts a big ol grin on my face. =D

Thanks, Paul -- and keep it up!
POTS is a good example. Despite the wording, I think Paul was saying that: Microsoft isn't interesting anymore. It's unavoidable, sure, but it's just more brain-damaged infrastructure to work around.

Microsoft is now a nuisance, not a competitor. They can make business painful, but they aren't scary anymore.
http://dabbledb.com/explore/7minutedemo/ re-ignited my enthusiasm for web-apps.
I recall it was specifically mentioned not to rely on an online demo. It's only a part of the overall process.

I suspect many of those questions reveal aspects of the applicants that aren't necessarily obvious. The questions on the app were all stimulating and I wouldn't recommend trying to second-guess any of it.
I have it on pretty good authority that at least two of the three Wufoos would prefer to move back to the valley.

Our company is also staying in the valley for a while...though we'll eventually need a presence back in Austin (where I moved from for WFP07), because about half of the largest companies we want to sell to are in Texas.
IBM basically did what PG says MS should do. They started concentrating on PCs.
Strategy Letter III: "Let Me Go Back!"
Joel on lowering the barriers to entry.
This one has actually been around for a while, but is still the coolest demo I've seen in years.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1ftJhDBZqss
Hence the Cathedral and the Bazaar rule "release early and often".
I read this comment multiple times, but I just couldn't understand what is it about.
Hey, no prob.
And s/OSX/OS X/
You missed the point. I was using it as an example of how the canonical application that's hard to make web-basd (and which I used as an example thereof in "The Other Road Ahead") can be made web-based. Adobe's making a web-based image editor themselves, but I can't link to that because the only trace of it so far are their FUD press releases.
Just two days ago I wrote an article about web server stats and noticed that a) Microsoft is almost nonexistent amongst the geek programming community and b) that contrary to Netcraft's numbers, Microsoft servers are in a small minority of sites frequented by geeks like myself.

http://hitesh-jasani.blogspot.com/2007/04/web-server-stats.html
Microsoft has the corporate desktop, but it's ripe for the taking. Google and various startups are trying to get their foot in the door. Big corporations don't do anything fast and no one expects windows to be wiped out. There are still mainframes out there running ancient software. In some cases simple terminal emulator front ends still outperform newer, browser-based alternatives.

And microsoft will still probably come out with new useful and popular products, but they won't be the sort that cause shockwaves throughout the whole industry (well maybe the Game Industry but that wasn't the point).
It's highly unlikely in the near term. The software my firm uses is Autodesk Revit's "Building Information Modeling", a highly evolved "intelligent" 3d modeling database system. The software uses every byte of ram, every hz of cpu, every byte & hertz of video interface on a users system - it takes serious horsepower to run a large model which is accessed over the network by multiple users. (Refreshing the model remotely via vpn over dsl can take 15 minutes) I don't see AJAX coming close to handling this kind of load for a long while. Also, the files can be huge, and in a web-hosted environment, the file storage would have to be absolutely massive and absolutely fast.

An interesting note is that Autodesk started out with Autocad, which they coded in lisp (eventually transformed into autolisp.) They took the MS model to software development and proceeded to make bigger and more complex versions with increasing quantities of bugs to the extent that multiple crashes per day were the norm. But they owned 80% of the world cad market, they became the 2nd largest software company in the world.

Revit was developed by a small company with an incredibly sound software architecture with a database at the core(without the massive bandaids that had piled up in Autocad and are still there today.) and developed a devoted cult following. Autodesk fought back with "Architectural Desktop", which I bought (before I knew about Revit). Their version: Cut a section through a building, wait 30 minutes. Revit, Cut a section through a building - instantly. Autodesk got very scared, then bought Revit. They saw the writing on the wall and undersood that Revit would be completely replacing Autocad in the next few years, which it is doing now.

So if MS can buy Google, they'll be all set :)
The Java language is so verbose that its programmers can tolerate hand-editing XML files for builds. This perhaps points out that it is not the parens that are holding back lisp. Maybe to test this someone should make XMLLisp where every expression is angle bracketed instead of parensed.
He's wondering if PG should have been the one to post this article, given that PG wrote it and also wrote this site.

And I dunno about news.YC, but Reddit at least doesn't work that way. I've written pieces that were picked up on Reddit and posted by other people. I found it rather flattering; it meant other folks thought it was interesting enough to post without my intervention.
Microsoft Is Dead. Long Live Microsoft.
Can you explain the power Microsoft had to shut down people where "true innovation" came from? and who or what stopped them from doing this?

What is the difference between "true innovation" and -- I don't even know how to ask this exactly -- "untrue innovation"?
"But even if you have positive cashflow, it generally makes sense for young companies to reinvest those earnings instead of taking debt investment."

Not necessarily - or rather, it's often rational to do both.

It's rational for a business to take out a loan if the interest rate of the loan is less than their expected return on capital. Interest rates for business loans are what, 6-8%? It's not uncommon for a well-run, growing business with a strong franchise to earn a ROC of about 25%.

Debt lets them grow faster, sooner, and then they can pay off the debt from future earnings. It's often far more capital-efficient than floating an equity offering, where the investors would get a share of all those additional profits.

It doesn't work for web startups because web startups often have far lumpier earnings. It's not uncommon for a web startup to be bought for multi-millions before they earn a dime of profit. That's because their real "customers" are big companies, who are paranoid about losing their market to an upstart. A web startups users are effectively an advertising expense: spend a few thousand on bandwidth to show that if you wanted, you could take over the world, and then get a big company to buy you to prevent that from happening.

There are some web startups that employ debt financing very effectively. For example, Akamai floated close to $300M of convertible bonds to fund its expansion. As a result, it effectively acquired a lock on the content-delivery business, which has allowed it to grow by leaps and bounds over the past 5 years. Without that debt financing, they'd either have to forgo their thousands of datacenters in strategically-placed locations, or they'd have diluted their equity so much that it wouldn't be worth it for them.
The point is not what Web 2.0 offers today, it's what Web 2.0 offers next year, and the year after. Whether you see it or not, the tide has turned.

Evolution:

-Mainframes as the computing platform (IBM)

--- PCs as the computing platform (Apple)

------- the OS as the computing platform (MS Windows) (Where Apple missed the boat by only offering their OS on proprietary hardware)

------------- the Internet as the computing platform (Google) (where MS will probably miss the boat)
Technically it isn't a legit copy of Windows. OEM versions are usually tied to the computer they are originally sold with.

Personally I don't think it is fair, but that's how licensing works under a monopoly.

Jonathan Allen
Have you taken a look at their developer toolkit?

ASP.NET is a really strong player in the web, and ATLAS has given them serious AJAX support. It is still pretty buggy now, but has the promise of the same easy drag and drop development that revolutionized Windows developement.

Or XNA? The next generation of game deveopers are already cutting their teeth on C# and XBox.

Or Robotics Studio? They are positioning themselves to corner the OS market for Robotics the same way they did for PCs back in the 80s.

As long as Microsoft has the hearts and minds of millions of developers, they aren't dead.
Doin' the startup, sans Y Combinator, Techstars, etc.
Well, after a long and arduous day at school, I came home to a nice letter from Techstars informing me of my rejection from their program. After about an hour or so of contemplation and in a slump of discouragement, it soon dawned on me that I might/will probably receive a similar answer from Y Combinator. However, I am still extremely confident in my idea(s). So, instead of banking on such programs to help me springboard my ideas into production, I'm probably going to have to do this alone.

I've read many of Paul's articles and others about starting startups, however many of them deal with the conceptual do's and don't's, and don't provide a methodical guide of how to go about getting things in motion.

I am a 20yr. old undergrad university student, so the entire startup scene is relatively new. However, do not mistake this for me having a lack of dedication. I have the drive and desires to do this.

It would be greatly appreciated if you guy could post helpful articles, your suggestions, advice, etc. of how to go about doing this alone.
Have a request for PG and YC
Since YC is attracting lots of talent..can YC provide a sort of virtual meeting place where information exchange between people of same frequency happens? Just like Saeed Amidi's carpet shop became center of startup activities, YC can also become one virtual nerve center!
Kyro dont worry, u r still young and have lots of time. Just keep the determination and dedication, you will make it asap. By the way ever read essay's on PG's page?
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
These are good enough to boot strap urself with the powerade to excel in future.
I agree strongly with reason (5) - whatever anyone thinks about Bill Gates, Microsoft was clearly a different company when Mr. Gates was at the helm.
Paul, I have great respect for you. But I think you contradit yourself a bit when you say this "..everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the webÂnot just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop". That by itself is a accuate and I can agree with. But you go on to rant about how Apple has put MS on the run and how you fund people that use Mac etc etc. Don't you consider Apple a desktop too??
"Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops."

I love "essays" where someone has experience from the last few years and says stupid things like this. "I'm surprised" when I see people using laptops their companies buy...and they run windows? That's just naive and foolish to say. Yes, Apple is cool, but that's like me saying I'm surprised when I DON'T see a laptop running Linux. Hey, I go to little conferences too, and everyone is using a Linux laptop. See how dumb it sounds? Now think that Linux and Mac have close to the same market share.
Secondly, I believe that this "essay" sounds young, and a bit smarmy. Like a first-year sophomoric newbie would write, trying to sound like they are so surprised that the students in dorm 13 haven't been going to the new dining hall, because everyone knows it's the best.
Total agreement here.
If you believe in your idea and it really has potential, then you can do it on your own!
I think this is an essay for people who want to be MS is dead, but it just ain't true.
Online Collaboration Site
Microsoft! LOL
There aren't too much articles with step-by-step guides on launching start-ups because there is no recipe. The best recipe is get on your feet and do it. Don't wait for dos and donts. This is what all the articles and experienced people recommend. So, start doing it and have fun while doing it.
When articles like this stop appearing on the web only then can one assume that Microsoft is dead. The barometer of a Organizations success can be gauged by the number of enemies they have.
old news.