Microsoft Declared ‘Dead’; Mouthpieces Flap
Militant Geek doesn’t pull punches when its come to the Redmond behemoth which starts with M and ends in $. They’ve never been innovators. But with billions in the bank and thousands of Microserfs ready to take on any cause Microsoft is never a company to be counted out. Plodding and ponderous? Yes. But are they dead as Paul Gram so crassly suggested in his link-bait post this weekend? The blogsphere couldn’t wait to answer.
As the appropriately named raging mouthpiece Dave Winer was clever to point out:
Microsoft is not dead, because (come on get real) it’s a company, and companies aren’t living, and they don’t die.
The also appropriately named Don Dodge, current Microsoft employee, carefully shirks the issue:
Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company and Google does consumer web search. I have a lot of respect for Apple and Google, but Microsoft killers? I don’t think so.
Apparently he missed the Google Office announcement and its ascent on the S-Curve. And all those hated ‘Get a Mac’ Apple ads espouse the benefits of Apple’s software, not hardware - DOH!
The point is that this is the classic blogstorm in a teacup. One attention-deprived blogger purposely posts alarmist tripe and the echosphere chimes in shallow me-too-isms or counter claims.
What we really aught to be discussing is the legitimacy of this photo from the annuls of Microsoft history:
April 9th, 2007 at 7:23 am
The benchmark article for me about this is Joel Spolsky’s “How M$ Lost the API War“; my only question whether Joel has extra-galactic informants or /what/.
For my money I buried my “Bill Gates for Emperor” t-shirt the very first time I ran Win95 … and wanted to start a class-action suit charging them with psychological abuse.
Money only gets more money but in the end certain attitudes just have to result in __insert nugget of karmic wisdom here___. IMNSHO, of course.