[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.

[johnea]

Your comments that MS is a completely differnt company are absolutely correct.

MS owns github, linkedin, and it's cloud services in azure, etc, are outside the initial desktop OS business model. Not to mention it being one of the biggest contributors to the linux kernel (to my chagrin). All of this is because of the slide in significance and dominance of it's windows OS business.

This OS business is still quite present though, such as in the h/w upgrades being pushed on users now in migrating to win11. The big h/w OEMs pay windows OS royalties for all those new computers.

Also, WRT your mention of the h/w driver dominance of MS, it's ironic to note that in the modern world h/w peripherals still often come with a custom windows driver, when their use on linux is almost always supported by standard USB class device drivers. A notable failure to evolve.

[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.

[lelanthran]

> "That today Microsoft is a giant company is irrelevant..."

> To say that Microsoft is “irrelevant” is so myopic.

That quote you quoted does not claim that Microsoft is irrelevant, it claims that the fact that Microsoft is a giant company today, 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.

[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.

[TheOtherHobbes]

"Dead" apparently means "no longer the unquestioned industry leader" - which seems like an odd definition of "dead" to me, but ok.

The industry in question being the union of personal desktop and laptop computers, associated software, and internet-related technologies.

What actually happened was the internet-related sector broadened to include new sub-sectors - mobile, search, social, media, cloud, e-commerce, and ad tech - all of which Microsoft either ignored, failed at, or didn't dominate.

The old industries are still there but they're the tail, not the dog.

The dog is far more consumer and consumer-adjacent. MS culture was always more aligned with corporate goals and office productivity. MS never got social and lifestyle computing, which is where the industry was heading. It still doesn't, even in gaming.

AI is going to see a similar shift to a completely different mode of computing, but it's too early to tell how that will work out. At a guess it's going to be much more directly political than anything we've seen so far. (Not in a good way, IMO.)

[TheRealDunkirk]

The amount of effort apparently required to satisfy all the checkboxes around "a cheap PC and Microsoft 365" is astounding. My Fortune 250 laptop runs 3 different security "endpoint" products, and literally dozens of scripts fire each day/hour to make sure that things are "correct" according to every suggestion any consultant ever made towards our senior IT staff. And they replace the entire fleet every 3 years. I believe that starting with longer lived hardware with an inherently more secure environment that didn't need to be groomed like this would be a net savings, but I don't have the numbers to prove it.

[echelon]

> 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.

There's more free energy in growing things.

Leave shrinking things to private equity.

There might be a lot of money in programming COBOL, but who wants to do that? It's not exciting to be a buzzard and subsist on carcasses.

[scarface_74]

Microsoft is irrelevant as far as the platform and where most development energy is focused. Can you imagine trying to get funding for a Windows application?

[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.

[bee_rider]

Linux on the desktop is irrelevant in the same way that a carpenter’s home woodworking projects are irrelevant. I mean they are but that’s sort of beside the point, right?

People who want to beat Microsoft with Linux on the desktop should stop worrying and enjoy our nice ecosystem of little programs for what it is.

[TheRealDunkirk]

For years I've said that if you could take corporate purchases out of the Gartner numbers, you'd see that Apple was better than 50/50 when it came to personal use. I sure would like to see an updated version of that dataset.

[scarface_74]

That article is not the greatest citation and is factually wrong. Even the article admitted that It was dubious to think that Microsoft only had such a small share of the “compute” market in 2005.

> That Microsoft is dead, killed off by antitrust remedies and the web

The slap on the wrist that Microsoft got had nothing to do with them first losing the MP3 player market which led to Apple’s resurgence (remember the plays4Sure platform and then the Zune?) or their failed efforts in mobile.

> digital cameras that only shipped with Windows drivers

I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs

[ghc]

It's true that it's not the best article, but I'm not entirely sure the Goldman Sachs chart should be treated as factually wrong. The article misses that 2005 was the heyday of Blackberry and iPod (iPod sales did something like 10x that year), and it's conceivable that Goldman included those devices as "compute". At worst, it's just shifted for a couple of years.

The decoupling of IE from Explorer is what really killed Microsoft, nothing to do with with MP3s. Remember, Microsoft was producing a bunch of proprietary extensions to Javascript and HMTL to lock vendors into their ASPX nightmare. It took many years to undo the damage, but at least PC vendors were allowed to ship with a non-IE web browser.

> I don’t remember digital cameras ever needing drivers and most decent digital camcorders used FireWire which was on all Macs, most Sony’s and many Dell PCs

As an admitted hoarder of all my old tech, I can assure you I am still in possession of several floppy disks with Windows drivers from my first digital cameras. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact timing, but I think the last digital camera I had to install drivers for was circa 2007 (Vista!). I still miss the days of my Sony laptops coming with i.Link, but I don't remember being able to connect my Sony cameras to many non-Sony PCs. I do remember having to install drivers to get Sony's ridiculous memory stick readers to work with other PCs (and Linux) though.

[mixmastamyk]

Early webcams needed drivers before UVC, proper digital cameras used CF or SD, and often still do.