It’s probably a bit too late for a April fool’s prank, but Paul Graham’s essay ‘Microsoft is Dead‘ has caused a bit of buzz over the weekend. Like most other pieces of anti-Microsoft blabber, it was on Slashdot earlier today.
I read the article with an open mind and ignored minor errors (for e.g. XMLHttpRequest was invented for Outlook Web Access i.e Exchange, not Outlook). But he really lost me when he mentioned point #4:
Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way
that is extremely rare in technology.
[2]
Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across
a computer running Windows.
Gee – I’m not sure what kind of people Paul Graham meets at Y-Combinator, but how can anyone be surprised when they meet someone with the 96% of computers that run Windows? Hell, Slashdot even reported yesterday that Apple’s marketshare had dropped by a bit last month because of Vista. I guess things are a little different in the real world than in web 2.0 bubbleland.
And the way to bring Microsoft back from the dead? According to Paul Graham:
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.
A better solution might be to ask Paul Graham to read through the archives of Microsoft Jobsblog…
Huh!
I have been noticing hell lot of Apple users now-a-days and adding to this, Ubuntu has ate quite a share of win 98, Me desktops with <256MB RAMs.
It is so easy to migrate users from Windows to Linux as the only tool they are using, made by MS, is MS Office and that too is easily being replaced by OpenOffice.org.
You too wait and watch!
Hey Ravi,
Your out of ur senses.. MIcrosofrt in the first places ixs beyond Windows and their income is from enterprices and that is where success lays.. By the way WIndows is much more than Office if you know.. Maybe ur the kinda guy using computer since yesterday but im proud to be a long time windows user from the 286 days.. Go check out Live Labs,Microsoft Research, MGI(Microsoft Government Initiatives) to see what true Microsoft is.. Idiots stop wasting time about presuming a company spending 6.5Billion $ just for research, much more than what Intel does… Wake up..
If you know Microsoft has silently captured 20% of Smartphone market.. Windows is rocking in yet another avenue my dear people.. Long Live Microsoft!!!
Regards
Ahmad
The point was that amongst hackers, the probability of a Microsoft laptop is nowhere near 96%. It’s closer to 10%.