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.
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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.