Amusingly enough it links to an old pg essay (2007) of the same title. pg's essay was written just before I started following HN, so I found it interesting. pg mentions how IBM faded from dominance of an earlier generation. That struck a nostalgia cord with me. Back in the late 80's Gartner or somesuch presented a trial presentation to my company on how IBM was going to double in sales in the next 5 years. I thought, no they arent. And it turned out IBM had hit their sales peak and went into a decline. Sic transit gloria.
Author has obviously never heard the "Third Time's a Charm for Microsoft" idea, which contains some truth based on the historical record. This is a rebuilding a refocusing period for Microsoft, and the outcome on tablets is by no means a foregone conclusion.
If you start thinking of Microsoft as a consumer software firm that smartly migrated into more lucrative and long-term enterprise/service segments, they're doing just fine.
People will properly forget about them once their products are inevitably purged from most households.
Their Surface tablets don't appear to have sold very well, but to claim they are "dead" seems more than a little batty? Microsoft appears to be alive and well in the enterprise.
As an example, Microsoft (with Azure) is doing the same as Amazon in the cloud space. Now with Azure VMs and Azure websites, even more so. Websites on PHP or node.js? Hadoop? Go for it.
Want to run your own VM image.. fine, just upload it, Microsoft don't give a crap what OS you run. They offer pages and pages of VM flavors built by the community: http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index
I think that Microsoft are starting to get it. In my opinion they are entering the next phase of their lifecycle. Microsoft are starting to realise that they need to be open to survive. Google on the other hand, appear to be delving into their 'dark years' of wall-building and blocking, which Microsoft went through and (I believe) are starting to emerge out of the other side of (just sprouting seedlings, but still).
Several years ago people like Scott Hanselmann evangelized the open sourcing ASP.NET stack. It was hard to do and a huge fight in Microsoft, but it is now out there and this has started a conceptual change within Microsoft. http://www.msopentech.com is the next big step. The first job for the OpenTech team was officially supporting a port of Redis to Windows. I expect we will will see more of the same. Want to keep track? Want to make some pull requests (they will be accepted)? Pop on over to https://github.com/MSOpenTech
I bet that in ten or twenty years Microsoft will still be here (not dead) and going strong and still paying me good dividends. They may still have no great tablet offering, but then a jack of all trades is a master of none, so as long as they stay good at several things, who cares if others endeavors fail. In my opinion, I'm glad they tried to make a tablet. At they tried, even if the first try has failed.
<rant>
This forum is about embracing the making of things, about supporting the doing and not sitting back and procrastinating. To try and fail, is what this game is all about. I'm not going to knock anyone or any company that makes a damn good try at making something. People hate Microsoft because of the twenty years of protectionism and 'evil' monopolistic practices. I can understand that, but I am the kind of person that also is willing to give someone a second chance. If you think that you have been so wronged by a company that 'forced you to use Internet Explorer for such a long time', then really, first world problem. Grow up. That kind of hatred is just puerile. This kind of negativity should not be tolerated in such a forum, where the value of building things is such a core concern.
The same goes for sun-setting Google Reader. Oh Diddums! Bullshit, that's an opportunity! Go build another RSS reader if people are so vocal about losing this product. Make something better. Get off your fucking arse and stop whining. Google gave you something for free, now they took it away. Oh well, life goes on.
</rant>
It will also be interesting to see where Google sit in twenty years. My gut feeling is that Google are about to start their protectionist phase. In twenty years we may well be talking about them in the same way we do Microsoft. The reality is that all companies when they reach a certain scale become cumbersome. That hinders them, and to continue revenue they are forced to protect their market.
Um ... well obviously they're starting to get it but it's not like they had a choice. And maybe it's too late, I don't know.
Beside, you talked about how this forum is about embracing the making of things, Well I guess we all agree about that, BUT let's not forget that actually Paul Graham, the guy behind HN actually wrote the original "Microsoft is Dead" essay back in 2007 , so maybe you should tell him that he should grow up or whatever too !
