The Death of Microsoft is Greatly Exaggerated

I had a good chuckle today at this naive screed from Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley renaissance man by any standards, whose shoelaces I am no doubt unworthy to tie. Still, I think he’s full of … himself on this one.

Graham’s basic thesis is that Microsoft “died” sometime in 2005, it has become irrelevant, and it sucks.

This “Microsoft sucks” mantra that Graham is so fond of is mostly a combination of sour grapes and pandering to the youthful hubris of his constituency. I am not going to claim that Microsoft is “cool”, but I’m not going to fight them, either. I’ve done very well by myself and my clients by just accepting them for what they are: a useful 800-lb Gorilla.

I’ll be the last person to mindlessly cheer-lead for a company that has produced the train-wreck that is Vista, but neither will I count out any company with tens of billions of dollars burning a hole in its pocket. Especially one that is still capable of doing a lot of things right — most importantly to me as a developer, their managed code initiative and superb developer tools and libraries.

Microsoft would never admit it, but at some level I think even they realize that fat client operating systems are collapsing under their own weight; they are unworkable. They are simply milking the last few billions of dollars out of it while they gestate other things. And the transition away from a Windows-centric world will take years; it isn’t going to happen in the blink of an eye. Inertia is Microsoft’s friend, as long as they recognize that it’s not going to benefit them forever.

Maybe it’s just the circles I move in, but I’ve yet to have a client approach me with “Hey! Dude! I want to sponsor an open source project in Rails!” It’s still uniformly along the lines of “I need an asphalt paving estimation system enhanced.” And those kinds of customers already have Microsoft technology, and no pressing reason to re-invent the wheel to satisfy my sense of elegance. Besides, a lot of Microsoft technology is elegant — C# and .NET, for example, are widely respected even by Java partisans.

Graham is right that the desktop era is coming to an end, and the instrument of its destruction is the convergence of widely available broadband with increasing acceptance of the idea of applications and services in the cloud. He even admits that Microsoft knows this. What he fails to understand is that Microsoft is perfectly capable of reinventing itself (again) and is already doing so. A day late and a dollar short as usual, but “embrace and extend” has served them well before.

There is potential for Microsoft to stumble to the point that it slides into irrelevance. It may be that they will never again enjoy unopposed market dominance. The Mantle of Invincibility in this industry may well have passed to Google. But I’m not willing to say that “Microsoft died sometime in 2005”. It’s far from a done deal. Let’s all reconvene in about five years and have another look, shall we? Maybe things will be clearer by then. And my guess is, we’ll all still be grousing about “how much Microsoft sucks” and Microsoft will still be ignoring us, and smiling all the way to the bank.

Whether you think that is good, bad or indifferent, you have to admit, it’s much more likely than that the world will be “Microsoft-less”.

Update: Paul Graham posted this clarification about his “Microsoft is Dead” assertion, partially in response to this critique from Don Dodge of Microsoft’s Emerging Business team. Graham asserts that all he means by “dead” is that people at the leading edge no longer have to think about Microsoft. I wonder though if startups have ever had to worry about Microsoft. A business plan that appeals to a start-up is probably not even on Microsoft’s radar. Inherently, a company the size of Microsoft isn’t going to pursue something on a startup scale unless they see huge potential in it. Even then, they have a history of acquiring startups after their ideas are proven.

Graham also asserts that he just wanted to be the first to call it. Well … I guess he succeeded at that!