Microsoft is Dead
In 2007, Paul Graham declared Microsoft dead. He argued that Google's rise, Ajax making web apps viable, broadband Internet, and Apple's comeback (OS X, iPod) ended the desktop era. Microsoft's monopoly was inherited from IBM and lasted from the 1950s to around 2005. Graham suggests Microsoft could buy Web 2.0 startups to recover but doubts they will. A historical tech commentary, not an engineering piece.
April 2007A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?
Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them.
2007年4月。几天前我突然意识到微软已经死了。当时我正在和一位年轻的初创公司创始人谈论谷歌与雅虎的不同之处。我说雅虎从一开始就被对微软的恐惧扭曲了，这就是为什么他们把自己定位为“媒体公司”而非科技公司。然后我看了看他的脸，意识到他不理解。那感觉就像我告诉他80年代中期女孩们有多喜欢巴瑞·曼尼洛一样。巴瑞是谁？
微软？他什么也没说，但我能感觉到他不太相信有人会害怕他们。
Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.
But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.
从上世纪80年代末开始，微软在软件世界投下了近20年的阴影。我还记得之前的阴影来自IBM。我大部分时间都忽略了这片阴影。我从未使用过微软的软件，所以它只间接影响我——例如，通过僵尸网络发送的垃圾邮件。而由于我没有留意，我并未注意到阴影何时消失。
但现在它已经消失了。我能感觉到。再也没有人害怕微软了。他们依然赚很多钱——IBM也是如此。但他们不再构成威胁。
When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world.
What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.
微软是什么时候死的，又是怎么死的？我知道直到2001年他们看起来还很危险，因为当时我写了一篇文章，说他们实际上没有看起来那么危险。我猜测他们在2005年之前就死了。在我们创办Y Combinator时，我们从不担心微软会竞争我们资助的初创公司。事实上，我们甚至从未邀请他们参加我们为初创公司组织的向投资者演示的演示日。我们邀请雅虎、谷歌和其他一些互联网公司，但从未费心邀请微软。也没有任何微软的人给我们发过邮件。他们处于不同的世界。
是什么杀死了他们？我认为有四件事，都发生在2000年代中期。
The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward.
When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.
最明显的是谷歌。城里只能有一个大佬，而他们显然是。谷歌现在是迄今为止最危险的公司，无论从好的还是坏的意义上说都是如此。微软最多只能蹒跚前行。
谷歌何时领先？人们倾向于将其推回到2004年8月的IPO，但那时他们还没有设定讨论的基调。我认为他们在2005年领先。Gmail是让他们跨越边缘的因素之一。Gmail表明他们不仅能做搜索。
Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.
Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate 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 90s because they needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.
The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] 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.
[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, if you're a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is analogous to the writing of "literary theorists." Most don't try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.
Gmail也展示了基于Web的软件能做多少事情，如果你利用后来被称为“Ajax”的技术。这是微软死亡的第二个原因：所有人都能看到桌面时代已经结束。现在看来，应用程序将生活在Web上——不仅仅是电子邮件，而是所有东西，直到Photoshop。就连微软现在也看到了这一点。
具有讽刺意味的是，微软无意中帮助创造了Ajax。Ajax中的x来自XMLHttpRequest对象，它允许浏览器在显示页面的同时在后台与服务器通信。（最初与服务器通信的唯一方式是请求一个新页面。）XMLHttpRequest是微软在90年代末为Outlook而创建的。他们没有意识到的是，它也会对许多其他人有用——事实上，对任何想让Web应用像桌面应用一样工作的人都有用。
Ajax的另一个关键组件是Javascript，一种在浏览器中运行的编程语言。微软看到了Javascript的危险，并尽可能长时间地让它保持不兼容性。[1] 但最终开源世界赢了，他们生成了Javascript库，这些库在Explorer的缺陷上生长，就像树在铁丝网上生长一样。
[1] 使软件不兼容并不需要刻意的努力。你只需要不努力修复bug——如果你是一家大公司，你会产生大量bug。这种情况类似于“文学理论家”的写作。大多数人不试图晦涩；他们只是不努力做到清晰。那样不划算。
The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.
微软死亡的第三个原因是宽带互联网。现在，任何在乎的人都可以拥有快速的互联网接入。通向服务器的管道越大，你对桌面的需求就越少。
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. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way.
[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.
棺材上的最后一颗钉子来自苹果。得益于OS X，苹果以一种在科技界极为罕见的方式起死回生。[2] 他们的胜利如此彻底，以至于现在当我遇到一台运行Windows的电脑时，我会感到惊讶。我们在Y Combinator资助的几乎所有人都使用苹果笔记本。在创业学校的观众中也是如此。现在所有电脑人都用Mac或Linux。Windows是给祖母用的，就像90年代的Mac一样。所以不仅桌面不再重要，而且所有在乎电脑的人都不再使用微软的产品。
当然，苹果在音乐领域也让微软节节败退，电视和手机也紧随其后。
[2] 部分原因是史蒂夫·乔布斯被约翰·斯卡利赶出了公司，这在科技公司中很少见。如果苹果董事会没有犯那个错误，他们就不需要反弹了。
I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.
我很高兴微软死了。他们就像尼禄或康茂德——只有继承的权力才能让你变得如此邪恶。因为记住，微软的垄断并非始于微软。他们从IBM那里继承了垄断。软件业务从大约20世纪50年代中期到2005年左右一直笼罩在垄断之下。也就是说，几乎贯穿了整个历史。“Web 2.0”之所以充满兴奋感，部分原因是一种意识或潜意识的感觉：这个垄断时代可能终于结束了。
Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.
The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company 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 contender again, 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'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.
当然，作为一个黑客，我不禁思考如何修复破损的东西。有没有办法让微软卷土重来？原则上，是的。要看到如何做到，设想两件事：（a）微软现在手头的现金量，以及（b）十年前拉里和谢尔盖四处拜访搜索引擎公司，试图以一百万美元出售谷歌的想法，却被所有人拒绝。
令人惊讶的事实是，才华横溢的黑客——危险地才华横溢的黑客——以微软这样富有的公司的标准来看，可以非常便宜地得到。他们不能再雇佣聪明人了，但他们可以只花一个数量级的钱就买到他们想要的那么多。所以，如果他们想再次成为竞争者，这是他们可以做到的：
买下所有好的“Web 2.0”初创公司。他们可以用低于Facebook收购价的钱买到几乎全部。
把他们全部安置在硅谷的一栋大楼里，周围用铅屏蔽，防止他们与雷德蒙德有任何接触。
我提出这个建议感到很安全，因为他们永远不会这样做。微软最大的弱点是他们仍然没有意识到自己有多糟糕。他们仍然认为自己可以在内部编写软件。按照桌面世界的标准，也许他们可以。但那个世界几年前就结束了。
I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.
See also: Microsoft is Dead: the Cliffs Notes
我已经知道这篇博文会引发什么反应。一半读者会说微软仍然是一个利润丰厚的公司，我应该更谨慎，不要根据我们这个与世隔绝的“Web 2.0”小圈子里少数人的想法下结论。另一半更年轻的读者会抱怨这是老生常谈。
另见：微软已死：要点笔记