Microsoft is Dead or so Paul Graham would have you believe.
Thoughts anyone? (especially Benben)
I just thought I would post something, since this place hasn't done much of anything for a while.

Also, it snowed in teh 'Nati today.

+5 bonus points for catching the Simpsons reference in the above post.

but that was a fun read.  I especially like his predictions about how people will react to the essay.  He reminds me of Dr. Page.

For ye in yonderville, it snowed in OKC this weekend, too.  40% chance of snow at Quartz mountain today.  That's pretty crazy, considering the Spring Fling (which usually ends the Quartz season, marking the beginning of unbearable heat) was last weekend.  There was much corn whiskey.

The CliffsNotes version: here with some explanation.

From http://www.snpp.com/episodes/CABF14 :
Homer: [gasps] Linguo -- dead?
Linguo: Linguo is dead.  [fades out]
-- "Trilogy of Error"

I guess there should have been emphasis marks around the is and -- for the pause, but then...

Anyway, no one seemed interested in this article enough to say anything - are they still there?

This is a really not-well-put-together response, but covers some things that stuck out to me.  Please also note that this is a personal opinion from a random dev at Microsoft and doesn't encompass the whole story by any means.  It's just BenBen's, 1/60,000 of Microsoft's, view on it.

I think Microsoft is turning into IBM - we're diversifying so much it will be really hard to kill us in all of the spaces we're in.  Is IBM dead?  No.  We're doing a lot of things that Google isn't anywhere near (except perhaps entertaining acquisitions in those areas), and we're very far ahead of them in a lot of that core development.

"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."

That's just a ridiculous statement.  We've got some catching up to do in search and services, but you also have to realize that in the services area, so much of it is about integrating with existing rich apps and we're decades ahead there.  Especially in the enterprise (I've played with Google's 'enterprise' package and I hereby call it adorable, at best).

"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."

Bandwidth is still the primary factor hindering services and that's not going to change anytime soon.  It costs too much.  The Internet is far from having enough bandwidth to do full web-based rich clients and we have quite a bit of time to get our story together before we actually need to worry about that.

I think Apple ("the last nail in the coffin") is a bigger threat to us than Google, because as I said above, the web isn't going to be the primary platform for many years.  OSX is a lot more dangerous to our market share (hell, I own an iMac now) and they're especially kicking the shit out of our hardware vendors.

Google's biggest two threats to Microsoft are search/media and pulling away our top talent.  I'm not impressed by MS's search efforts at all (I still use Google), but they're doing a good job of keeping top talent around.  No one at Google's getting sickly rich super fast anymore, and as soon as devs realize that, the playing field will be more even again.

Some good points, but too much of an ultimatum, especially when you look at the most important factor - our ever-increasing bottom line.  If we were dead, wouldn't our profits be stagnant?