"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Saturday, April 07, 2007

Graham's Latest

Speaking of Paul Graham, his latest essay is as entertaining as any...

Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire...

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:

  1. 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.
  2. 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's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Yes another entertaining essay by PG. As I commented on /., there's one huge inaccuracy:

PG says "Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology" It should be, "Thanks to the iPod, Apple has come back from the dead." OSX, as wonderful and life altering as it may be, is a niche operating system. It's not OSX that has made Apple what it is today. It's the iPod. Even with the success of the iPod, OSX is still a niche OS. In fact, Vista may be blunting its growth, if the latest report [from some tracking company whose name I forget] is to be believed.

If I only had a $1 for every time someone declared "MS is dead". It's very much alive and will act like a zombie that won't leave you alone, for a long time.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.