Microsoft Is Dead (2007)
133 comments
·February 4, 2025buran77
hliyan
Whenever I read these types of writing, it reminds me that just because a narrative is elegant, doesn't mean its true, especially when you're operating at very high levels of abstraction. Same problem I have with many pop psychology writings.
dijit
Think of it in the inverse.
If you're a person who is at one end of a funnel (in this case; new tech companies) and you see a 100% adoption which is contrary to the mainstream: you would think you have good insight.
You might forget that you're looking at:
A) A cargo culture
B) a homogeneous cohort.
This is the same way that people knew ahead of time that Microsoft Office would kill off Lotus notes. Since all school's were transitioning (or had transitioned) to Microsofts products.
It's also why people knew AWS would be so popular ahead of time, because new tech companies were not renting compute anymore, they were passing their credit cards to Amazon - even causing some companies to bet their products on making tooling to make AWS easier.
If you're at one end of the funnel, you can see the future.
Was this the future? or was it a false positive based on a cohort? - I definitely think the market dominance of Windows on the Desktop has been thoroughly challenged since 2008, and it's rare I see people elect to use Windows for <10yo companies unless the founders are only used to Microsoft products.
and I work in AAA games, which is insanely Microsoft dominated.
jvanderbot
So you're saying that new AAA game companies use macs or linux?
I can't resolve the cognitive dissonance of that making a ton of sense or none.
dijit
There are more non-windows PC's in AAA game companies than there were in 2008 by a wide margin. Though usually not directly for gamedev.
In 2008, the IT department couldn't even handle Macs at all, now it's a standard deployment among managers, designers, brand and even some programmers who only work with backend code. (though usually they'll have a gaming PC too for testing the game).
That was literally unthinkable back then.
null
josefrichter
This also reminds me of "garage startups". In fact, probably only a fraction of people around the world own a garage. If your family has a garage, it means you are probably among the top ~1% richest people on Earth.
why_only_15
Probably more like richest 10%, which applies to most people in the US
pwillia7
> there's a reason wealth is also called "fortune". Because it's more about luck than anything else.
Very quotable
dist-epoch
Almost everybody I know drives a Lamborghini. Toyota is so dead...
ninetyninenine
That quote is so out of touch.
It was never that complete. Gamers used pcs. Paul grahams surprise missed an entire segment of the market.
Additionally Mac usage statistically never exceeded windows. Paul lived a bit in a rich persons world and he’s around a lot web developers who like osx because it’s unixy without the issues of old Linux.
wink
And don't forget location. In 2007 not even the majority of developers in Europe had adopted the 'default developer mac', that only came a couple years later than in the US (afaik) and it never even reached that adoption rate (that is now in general, not only developers). If I look at my non-tech friends in Germany there is still just a tiny percentage using macs, and even iPhones are way outnumbered by Android.
null
JohnHaugeland
I’ve been hearing people say this since this incorrect essay was written almost 20 years ago
Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today
Microsoft had 0% of hosting then and has the world’s second largest share, 23%, today
Microsoft had, in 2007, 18% presence share in console gaming. Today they have 65%
They were one of the four tech orgs present at the presidential inauguration
They have grown enormously in the time this essay claims they were dying
hajile
Xbox One sold 57.9M and Series family has sold 28.3M by mid 2024.
PS4 sold 117M and PS5 sold 61.7M by mid 2024.
Nintendo claims 150.9M Switch consoles sold as of the end of 2024.
That puts Microsoft at around 20.7%, Sony at 43%, and Nintendo at about 36.3%.
Even if you exclude Nintendo with a "no-true-gamer" fallacy, Microsoft still has just 32.5% of the market.
Windows was over 90% in 2007 and is just 72% today. If you include the super-important mobile market, Windows actual marketshare is something like 10-15% and even less if you include servers (where even most Azure servers run Linux).
pjmlp
Yes, if we are counting only game consoles, now if we count game studios owned by each company, and they earnings across all platforms, it is a complete different picture.
Microsoft owns PC, and even Valve has forced to emulate Windows/DirectX to have any games on SteamDeck.
The amount of office worker typing Excel sheets on mobile phones is rather tiny.
PetitPrince
> Microsoft had, in 2007, 18% presence share in console gaming. Today they have 65%
Source for this ? Also what do you mean by "presence" ? I had the impression that Sony was in a way better position than Microsoft, and they were both dwarfed by Nintendo by a substantial margin.
(not that this invalidate your overall point).
pjmlp
PlayStation 3 went down quite badly among game developers given how hard Cell was to program for, and users with the whole OtherOS fallout, this brought XBox 360 into the winning round.
Microsoft lost the plot afterwards with XBox ONE against the Playstation 4, and even with the Series S|X, they never recovered on the hardware side.
However this is kind of relative now, even if they don't public admit yet, the hardware is gone, they are going SEGA, and by being one of the largest game publishers, it hardly matters if the XBox console isn't going that well.
In one year they already recovered all the money lost in the ABK deal and litigations.
jasode
>I’ve been hearing people say this since this incorrect essay was written almost 20 years ago Microsoft had [...list of significant statistics...]
Whenever someone writes a provocative article about something being "dead", they are almost always talking about influence and mindshare -- rather than business statistics.
Yes, Microsoft is still a huge behemoth being a $3+ trillion cap company with a overwhelming marketshare of Windows & Office installations but the apex of their "industry influence" was the 1990s during the "Wintel" days before the internet came along. That 1980s/1990s was the time period when Bill Gates was CEO and "everybody was scared of Microsoft". Since, then they ... lost the browser wars (both old IE and new IE with Trident engine failed), lost the mobile shift (Windows phones failed), is a distant #2 in search engine market. Microsoft is somewhat back in the influence game with AI but that's because they partnered with OpenAI rather than build something internally. Arguably, it's Meta that gets more noise with LLAMA, and China's High-Flyer getting everybody's attention with DeepSeek-R1. That's the type of "alive vs dead" PG is writing about.
The "dead" being a writer's rhetorical flourish rather than a business status is the same when applied to "IBM is dead". In pure business metrics, IBM is still a giant company with $65 billion in revenue and $7 in profits. The airlines, major banks, and credit-card companies still run millions of transactions through IBM Z mainframes. Companies are still buying and upgrading expensive new Z mainframes. But the rhetorical "dead" means IBM's apex of influence was 1960s & 1970s. The later IBM trying to relevant with the newer tech like Watson and blockchain service doesn't matter to people.
Maybe writers should stop using "dead" as rhetorical technique because it just confuses readers. E.g. saying something like "DirecTV is dead" makes people scratch their head when they just watched a game on the satellite service last night. How would that be possible if it was truly dead?!?
donny2018
You are missing a lot of stuff Microsoft is doing. Azure, .NET, server tools, databases, VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub, (yes, OpenAI), gaming, XBox, desktop, business tools, Surface, Microsoft 365, Teams and lots more. I'd say much of the things they are doing is quite "fresh" and it's more relevant as it has ever been.
There is a reason it's market cap is bigger than Google's and Amazon's, and its downfall has been long overturned.
>with a overwhelming marketshare of Windows & Office installations
It's interesting that you mention it, as none of these are very important on their own to today's Microsoft if you check their latest quarterly reports.
nunez
Watson has been around a long, long time, and they are still leaders in quantum computing IIRC.
dijit
> Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today
Microsoft had 90%+ of desktop penetration in 2008; in fact, it made news that it had slipped to below that at the end of 2008.[0][1]
Now it's around 70%, but seems to be improving?[2]
[0]: https://www.osnews.com/story/20605/windows-market-share-slip...
[1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367310/windows-market...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
Clubber
>Microsoft had 74% of the desktop then and has 72% today
That's only counting the latest version, if you include all Windows versions, it was in the high 90%. Today it's in the mid 90%.
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
carlosjobim
It's not about being rich or not. People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC. People who cannot choose will use work computers in their office with Windows installed, that corporate chose for them.
People who do not want a computer at all will have neither PC or Mac. The majority of people do not want to have a computer – they see enough of them at work, and they are happy with their smart phones.
globalnode
I think Apple is a very American thing. Outside the US, which you may not care about, only the most aspirationally Americanised people I've known have gone for apple products. Im not sure what the reasons are.
vishnugupta
In 2007, when the article was written, I distinctly remember being at Amazon and Windows laptops were the default option. So was the entire office suite, their share point thing, not to speak about Outlook. In fact one had to beg to IT guys to allow us to use Linux laptops. MacBooks were still a few years away if I remember correctly.
It's amazing that PG looked around in his bubble, saw MacBooks and decided to write that Microsoft is dead.
carlosjobim
Europeans generally don't purchase the things they want, they purchase the things they are supposed to be wanting, after having long deliberations together with relatives and friends. So then they'll only look at specs and price and not how useful a product is or how pleasant it is to use.
Europeans are in general very weird about money. They are as greedy as anybody, but what do they do then with that money? They think turning on the air conditioner will ruin them financially and they count how many cents each person owes each other.
whobre
| People who can choose what kind of computer they have will choose Apple over PC.
No, we will not.
ghc
It's interesting to read comments about this today, written through the lens of the present. I suspect many commenters were too young to really understand the level of dominance Microsoft had in the market circa from 1995-2005. Just look at this chart:
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.
bkfunk
“That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant...”
I am not too young to remember the old Microsoft. To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic. Despite Tesla, GM is still relevant. Despite AWS, DB2 mainframes are still relevant. Heck, I have to work with EBCDIC data, a format designed to not produce holes in punchcards that are too close together. Even when we eventually move to a modern db, decades of archival data is not going to be converted from EBCDIC.
Windows might be irrelevant to FAANG or MANGA or GAMMA or whatever, but how many Fortune 500 companies don’t have a significant Microsoft presence?
Apple computers are pretty nice, but they’re expensive, and the vast majority of employees do fine with a cheap PC and Microsoft 365—why would a company pay more for unnecessary hardware that also requires rebuilding a bunch of IT systems, not to mention retraining thousands of employees.
teddyh
I think you misread that. What ghc wrote was that the fact (that Microsoft is giant today) is irrelevant, not that Microsoft is irrelevant.
ghc
I didn't say Microsoft is irrelevant. I said the fact that it's still a huge company is irrelevant when judging whether the old Microsoft was in fact dead or not. The new Microsoft is highly relevant, but Microsoft's philosophy of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" to maintain a grip on consumer compute is dead. If anything is the heir to that, it would be AWS.
ozim
Agree with this take.
It is also highly visible in nerd Linux circles where some people still think they fight to have Linux on Desktop.
Linux on Desktop is irrelevant just as Microsoft pre 2005 is irrelevant.
MSFT saw that cloud is the future and they are in that business and O365 is flagship product where Windows just a support nice to have part because they need OS so people can run their browser.
baxtr
What is this telling us about the stuff he writes with full conviction today?
virgilp
Read all of it. Go beyond just the title, and it should tell you that Paul Graham was more right than wrong with this one.
- Google was, for a while, the "gorilla in the room" - their decline is recent. But Paul Graham got it right, that Google was more scary than MS.
- Microsoft was "dead" in 2007, same as Apple was before Steve Jobs came back. The revival started with Satya Nadella, 7 years later. It is still a shadow of its former self, MS dominated the industry like no other player ever did (or is likely to do, again).
- The 4 forces that lead to MS' demise are likely spot-on. And again "demise" in the same sense of IBM, "still exists, still makes money, nobody really cares".
Did the "all ycombinator founders use Macs" rub me the wrong way, when used as an argument as he did? Yes. But I also kinda' understand it(*), even though I still think he should've steered away from that argument.
(*) you can interpret it in the sense of "the future is already here - it is just very unevenly distributed"; that's probably what he meant. He knew full well the market share.
ethbr1
The problem with "all use Macs" is that Apple has always been a great hardware company with an underfunded software side.
MacOS has so many problems or unsupported features it isn't funny, while Windows was fine.
>> I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly
Hmm. The lesson here is probably don't assume you understand a competitor's strengths and weaknesses via secondhand experience.
And the things MacOS historically did better, having a shell and integrating with unix-like software, have been evened with PowerShell/.NET, WSL2, and HyperV.
Furthermore, a few companies started making Windows laptops that weren't bricks. While Apple's software budget is now mostly iOS/device-focused.
virgilp
This was not meant to transform into "windows vs mac, which is better". But I happen to have used both, recently, and can tell: no, Windows got closer but is not quite there on the "having a shell" chapter. It still has too many, and too different. Powershell.NET is powerful, but is also "alien" to many people - you have to know .NET! Scripting is meant to be quick & hacky, not "real software that needs a release cycle", and in that sense Powershell.NET, while miles better than whatever MS previously had, still misses the mark. You know how you can tell? Because it works perfectly fine on Mac, but has 0 adoption there.
WSL2 is... ugh, ok, much better that WSL. And actually decent. But, as the name implies, is a linux environment. Not a native Windows terminal.
> a few companies started making Windows laptops that weren't bricks
I am honestly, genuinely interested in a windows-based laptop that is as good as a Macbook Pro (or at least very close). Would like the flexibility to move away from Apple. Am interested in battery life, compute power (i.e. internal processor speed, ssd speed, memory size, decent gpu), screen, keyboard & touchpad, and overall build quality (the last one is almost guaranteed if it is close in quality on all the other dimensions).
wink
> have been evened with PowerShell/.NET, WSL2, and HyperV.
I'm gonna need a source for that quote because no, no one besides a couple of Windows admins ever acknowledged parity, just "meh, if I have to".
pjmlp
I bet everyone on Linux that depend on stuff IBM and Red-Hat contribute to, really care, a lot.
lotsofpulp
> - The 4 forces that lead to MS' demise are likely spot-on. And again "demise" in the same sense of IBM, "still exists, still makes money, nobody really cares".
IBM shareholders and employees can only dream their demise was in the same sense as Microsoft’s.
JohnHaugeland
[flagged]
ninetyninenine
It tells us that he’s only human. That’s what fans of him will say and they’re right.
The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human. Makes sense given where we are. This incubator is founded by him so there’s a bit of that irrational hero worship there.
aleph_minus_one
> The problem is his fans subconsciously treat Paul graham as if he’s more right and more wise than a normal human.
In quite some essays, Paul Graham portraits himself this way. You will either be annoyed by this, or you will like his essays. In the latter case, you will likely self-select yourself for this unwitting bias.
teekert
That nobody can predict the future?
However, there are people that have the intellect and the information to do it better than others.
Btw, it contains stuff like this "The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.". Microsoft (or Satya did) also predicted the future, or read this post, and refocused (to online service such as MS365). There still correct, insightful stuff in this post.
There is also "They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago." also radically different now they have GitHub and WSL, etc
null
dtquad
He was wrong about Microsoft's death but correct about how AJAX making web apps feel more desktop-like would remove Microsoft's dominance in many categories and niches.
bambax
He just predicts what he wishes should happen... like most people. Makes him very ordinary.
throwawayffffas
That 18 years are a long time, and companies can pivot and stay relevant. He was right about everything he said. The people at Microsoft agreed and here we are now.
Todays Microsoft is not the same as 2007, back then it was windows, excel, exchange etc. Nowdays its Azure and cloud services.
The only thing they tried and failed, that would make them a real dangerous company was mobile.
discordance
That times change?
This was a lot more accurate when it was published in 2007.
woodruffw
I think a key aspect of calling a thing "dead" is that it implies permanency. In other words, it can't have been more accurate in 2007 if it isn't accurate now, which it appears to not be. Maybe if pg had said "irrelevant" instead.
(Others have pointed out that 2007 wasn't even a particularly bad year for MSFT.)
roenxi
Nothing. It is a well written essay and makes some interesting points about how Microsoft was defanged.
What frame are you trying to put here? Do you think there is something wrong with the essay?
intermerda
Of course not, as we all know dead companies add trillions in market cap all the time.
karterk
Satya saved Microsoft by doubling down on Azure and Cloud. Something that Balmer failed to do with Mobile.
pjmlp
Meanwhile he allowed desktop development to become a mess, he was the one killing mobile, and now Microsoft is dependent on Google and Apple for mobile endpoints, other than laptops.
everdrive
He saved Microsoft, but doomed the rest of us.
behnamoh
He saved Microsoft's investers' pockets, but destroyed the soul of Windows, Windows Phone, the Nokia partnership, the Office suite, etc.
One could say he actually destroyed MSFT to build something new.
roenxi
My favourite paragraph was
"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.
gadders
I think google are in the enshittification phase of their corporate development and are currently in a cycle of making 0.1% more revenue on search changes at the expense of making it 5% shittier for users each time.
DanielHB
To be fair in 2007 it really did seem like google could completely destroy microsoft monopoly on enterprise software with google docs, google sheets and google workspace.
And then they just didn't? They just gave up, only small companies use google workspace these days and excel is as entrenched as ever.
I suppose the google meet/google talk/google hangouts explains a lot of why this hypothetical future didn't happen. If google had a serious person in the helm doing long-term strategy microsoft would already be dead and buried (or worse IBM-fied). Instead the CEOs stock market min-maxers took over.
nunez
very big companies use Workspace and the full suite of Google Docs products within.
lotsofpulp
I think Google leaders were smart to not take on Excel, especially after it was clear Microsoft was moving things to the cloud and spinning up Office 365.
There is no way a competitor could sustainably price a competing product against a low monthly or annual cost Excel/Office/OneDrive SAAS option, since the majority of the workforce was already trained on Office products, and everyone is using an edge feature that a new competing product might be missing.
gadders
Yes, I don't disagree. Microsoft did seem to be going the way of IBM.
But yeah, Google had no long term strategy, or ever gave any impression of a road map.
nova22033
This belongs in the Hall of Infamy
Along with this
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-michael-d...
yellowstuff
I'll admit that this is a charitable reading of the essay, but I think that MS was dead in 2007 and is still dead in 2025, in the sense that Graham was focused on. In the 90s startup founders were scared that if they started a software company MS would copy their idea and crush them. Bill Gates used to talk about how he wanted to "monopolize" software before the lawyers caught up with him. By 2007 MS was mostly irrelevant to startup founders, and with a few exceptions it's mostly irrelevant to them now. They're not in the business of crushing the life out of software startups anymore. Paul's a VC, and that's what he was focused on.
null
leecommamichael
More proof Hackernews is completely isolated from game development.
taurknaut
how do they not simply kill themselves from having to deal with being unable to easily remap capslock? True mysteries of our time
badgersnake
It’s completely isolated from the real world.
everyone
Yeah, game dev here.. The amount of articles on the front page here that are like "10 things every programmer should know" and then are hyper focused on only web dev specific things is cringe.
Thats just HN though, a subset of redditors who are gonna "change the world" and also become a billionaire with their CRUD app.
programmertote
Whenever I see posts from famous people touted on Hacker News and Reddit, I always remind myself about this favorite quote of mine from Buddha (I'm a former Buddhist-turned-atheist, but I still agree with a few thinking and concepts from Buddhism.
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.
Etheryte
I wonder who you'd put in that bucket today, who is the looming incumbent who might just show up and eat your lunch. For some time it was Meta, they definitely strong armed a bunch of small upstarts to sell out rather than compete. Right now I'm not so sure, there isn't any single name that comes to mind.
codr7
Given their trajectory at the time, they probably would be.
Right now they're embracing open source and Linux, which has proven to be a very good idea.
I'm still not convinced.
stuaxo
I remember reading this at the time, and thinking how much of a bubble he seemed to be in.
Macs weren't something I saw that often at this time, just like now most computers were PCs.
sjamaan
I dunno man. I just went on a tour of two schools for my daughter here in the Netherlands. They both use Chromebooks for their students as cheap machines that can be easily replaced. Those don't run Windows.
Many "regular" folks have Mac machines because they no longer "have" to use Microsoft-specific software. Also, Microsoft doesn't have any phone OS (anymore) either - that's all Apple and Google.
That definitely doesn't mean Microsoft is truly "dead", but they're no longer the giant that you can't avoid. Companies can afford to ignore them, and that's a far cry from the absolute and total utter market dominance they had in the nineties (which is how I read this article).
> Their [n.b Apple's] 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
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.