April 2007A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talkingto a young startup founder about how Google was different fromYahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start bytheir fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselvesas a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I lookedat his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'dtold him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid80s. Barry who?Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quitebelieve anyone would be frightened of them.Microsoft casta shadow over the software world for almost 20 yearsstarting in the late 80s.I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored thisshadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected meindirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. Andbecause I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadowdisappeared.But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid ofMicrosoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM,for that matter. But they're not dangerous.When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerousas late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they wereless dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005.I know when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoftas competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've nevereven invited them to the demo days we organize for startups topresent to investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some otherInternet companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft.Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in adifferent world.What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurringsimultaneously in the mid 2000s.The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town,and they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous companynow by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoftcan at best limp along afterward.When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to pushit back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting theterms of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in2005. Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge.Gmail showed they could do more than search.Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software,if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." Andthat was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see thedesktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications willlive on the web—not just email, but everything, right up toPhotoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The xin Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browsercommunicate with the server in the background while displaying a page.(Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90sbecause they needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize wasthat it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, toanyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programminglanguage that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger ofJavascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could.[1] But eventually the open source world won, by producingJavascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorerthe way a tree grows over barbed wire.The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyonewho cares can have fast Internet accessnow. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need thedesktop.The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a waythat is extremely rare in technology.[2]Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come acrossa computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at YCombinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startupschool. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is forgrandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does thedesktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers usesMicrosoft's anyway.And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in musictoo, with TV and phones on the way.I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evilin the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember,the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got itfrom IBM. The software business was overhung by amonopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005. For practicallyits whole existence, that is. One of the reasons "Web 2.0" hassuch an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not,that this era of monopoly may finally be over.Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how somethingbroken could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back?In principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amountof cash Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey makingthe rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sellthe idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned downby everyone.The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brillianthackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of acompany as rich as Microsoft. They can't hire smart people anymore,but they could buy as many as they wanted for only an order of magnitude more. So if they wanted to be a contenderagain, this is how they could do it: 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. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft'sbiggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much theysuck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe theycan, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world endeda few years ago.I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half thereaders will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitablecompany, and that I should be morecareful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people thinkin our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the youngerhalf, will complain that this is old news.See also: Microsoft is Dead: the Cliffs NotesNotes[1]It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible.All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, ifyou're a big company, you produce in copious quantities. Thesituation is analogous to the writing of "literarytheorists." Most don't try to be obscure; they just don't make aneffort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.[2]In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley ina way that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's boardhadn't made that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.
