Paul Graham is Braindead
Edit: After some thought, I was a little harsh on the title of the article. The play on his article’s headline was too much to resist. :) It obviously is not meant to be taken literally.
It’s very rare that I let something another blogger posts get under my skin, but Paul Graham’s article Microsoft is Dead made me bristle. A rant was necessary.
I’ve always thought of Paul as a smart guy, but his writings always drip of anti-Microsoft sentiment. Normally, that’s par for the course, and I let it slide — after all, if you don’t bash Microsoft at least three times a day you’re obviously a shill of the Man. Like I said, usually I let it slide, although I probably should expect slightly more from a respected blogger than I would of your average run-of-the-mill Slashdot troll. His latest article, though, is complete and total ivory tower bullshit.
Some of my favorite quotes from the article:
All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s.
What in the hell are you talking about? To be sure, lots of geeks use Macs and (particularly) Linux. That doesn’t mean that no one uses Windows anymore. Whether you particularly like the platform or not, if you’re a professional developer and you don’t know Windows, you’re definitely limiting your horizons. If you want to be ignorant of more than three-quarters of the business applications market, be my guest — it just makes it easier for me to find work.
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 way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.
Translation: “I don’t get out much. In my tunnel vision, I ignore 90% of the computing market. Microsoft who?”
And that was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard this since WEB 2.0 was coined, I could pay Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to fight to the death with rubber chickens in a no-holds-barred cage match. (And just try to come up with a better way to spend money than that!) This argument has been going on since Web 0.1alpha1. Whenever I hear anyone talk about this, I just laugh and recall fondly the NC and how Larry Ellison claimed it would be the FUTURE OF COMPUTING in the late 90’s. We still have applications running on mainframes, for God’s sake. What makes you think desktops are going anywhere? I’ll tell you what, Paul, you get one of your Y! Combinator startups to write the Quake engine using only HTML and Javascript, and we’ll talk — and remember, it’s 10 years old now.
Paul, what happened to you since your Great Hackers article? Are you that desperate for linkbait? Maybe it’s just that you’ve spent way too much time inside the Y! Combinator Anti-Reality Bubble. Your subsequent Cliffs Notes post trying to ease some of the backlash just served to make you look even more ridiculous — because you still stand by your insane claims.
I’m known to root for the underdogs too, but that doesn’t mean that I delude myself into thinking that when I speak, worlds are created before my feet.
You misunderstand him. He isn’t talking about the market in general, but about technology mavens - the hackers that he funds and works with daily. The case he is making is this: they are the trend setters. Certainly Microsoft has massive market share right now, but if all the trendsetters and people riding the cutting edge are running other software, they will have a serious problem in 10 years or so.
… and as for Quake, well, Doom will have to do for now.
http://www.databay.de/homepage/de/websolutions/tools_demos/281.html
Paul Graham is unethical and says outlandish things to get attention. I already wrote about how retarded his Y Combinator program is at:
http://livinginfirstlife.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/paul-graham-and-y-combinator-true-lies-and-damn-lies/
He insists on living in la-la land and that’s also why Y Combinator start-ups do almost nothing to impact normal people’s lives. They are almost completely geek-centric (I will give it to Loopt for doing something cool, but one out of 40 does not a pattern make).
They announced a web browser based Quake at the last QuakeCon.
get a life punk!
paul graham is my hero!
Your Quake example is more evidence the desktop is dieing. Every game engine released these days, including the latest from the makers of Quake, is being released on all gaming console platforms simultaneously. From Paul’s point of view, if Windows is becoming just another gaming platform, it is has “died” in some sense.
When you talk about 90% of the market, that is the long-established, conservative/skeptic end of the market. Paul is spending his time with the 10% at the front - the early adopters, and pragmatists who are creating what will be tomorrow’s conservative/established technology.
Wow, looks like I got picked up on the YCombinator feed. :) Good to have you all here, I’d like to get the other point of view. Sorry you guys missed the other 30 comments or so that were here when this article was originally posted… they got nuked when I moved back to Wordpress.
Let me clarify my position a little further. First, I have nothing personally against Paul Graham; in fact, I read his articles often and he has some very good insight. This time around though, I was accusing Paul of blatant sensationalism linkbait. The core of what I disagree with is in the quotes that I take from the article:
1. There are still a *lot* of so-called “computer people” that use Windows. The Bay area isn’t the only place in the world that software is being written.
2. Just because something is trendy (Ruby/RoR, RIAs) doesn’t make it better than what we have now. I believe that the concept behind the web as a platform is a good one, and may pan out in the long term, but the tools we have today (HTML and Javascript, I’m looking at you) aren’t adequate to unseat “thick” applications.
3. For better or worse, and whether we like it or not, Microsoft is still alive and kicking. Vista was a disappointment, sure, but that doesn’t mean that Redmond is going to break off and float out to see anytime soon.
4. As a leader of entrepreneurs, Paul would be better suited to be realistic about software development. I really hope he isn’t selling this tripe to the people he’s mentoring, because if he is, he’s doing them a disservice. He’s welcome to his opnions, but with the amount of attention his work commands, it’s dangerous for him to sell his opinions as fact.
Also, @Andrew: Windows is “another” gaming platform? Name another OS that is good for gaming, that doesn’t run on a console.
I think that Paul’s article was right on the money - sure a lot of “software people” use windows, mostly because they have to, but the point he was trying to make was not that Microsoft magically seized to exist, or that it ran out of money, but that they are currently a lot less of a factor (meaning hindrance) to the cutting edge guys. They no longer have to tremble with fear for their product because MS decides it will not correct some vital bug and leaves it as a “distinguished feature”. It’s not that MS is “dead”, it’s more that people are no longer afraid of them.
And speaking about “companies that are realistic about software development” - what are the new big kids on the block? Google? Yahoo?, what technologies do they use? Last time I checked, they were using “HTML and Javascript”, and not being shy about it.
Btw, most of the “thick” programs have been already ported to other platforms, or they can if need be. And windows “is” just another gaming platform - just look at the current game development practice for the “big sellers” - make for consoles, then port to PC - it’s just an afterthought to “make a few more bucks”…
@IvanK: I understand that that was Paul’s core argument — that the new wave of software developers don’t fear Microsoft — but he went way too far with it. If he would have just said that, then I would have agreed. No one should fear Microsoft… they have a lot of power, but they don’t have the same sort of vise grip on their industry as, say, Wal-Mart does on retail.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t believe that “web 2.0″ is the future of computing. Things like Google Docs & Spreadsheets are great, but I see them as a proof of concept. There’s a reason there’s a huge push for simplicity in web applications — because it’s much more difficult to develop and maintain a RIA than it is to develop and maintain a thick application. Within the next few years, we’ll start to see the total cost of ownership of RIAs. Google and Yahoo are using HTML and Javascript because there’s nothing else out there.
I’m all for moving to the future. Windows, as it is now, isn’t going to be around forever. I’m just saying that I’ve been hearing for years about the demise of the desktop, and how general-purpose PCs are going the way of the dodo “soon”. I have yet to see any *real* movement in that direction. And, you can take my general-purpose computer from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. :)
Regardless of all that, my point remains that Graham pushed his opinions off as fact, and made broad, outlandish generalizations about the state of software development. For someone of his stature, that’s just irresponsible.
[...] to Motivate Geeks” post that references similar articles, in particular one titled “Top 10 Ways to De-Motivate Geeks“. As with the first article, the points are all great, but #3 and #4 (on communication) are [...]
[...] called Microsoft is Dead, claiming that desktop applications are over, I remember to have seen this article challenging his Y Combinator guys to write the Quake engine using only HTML and [...]