{"id":1149,"date":"2007-04-07T14:13:10","date_gmt":"2007-04-07T19:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/04\/07\/mr-softee-dead-no-just-boring\/"},"modified":"2007-04-07T14:13:10","modified_gmt":"2007-04-07T19:13:10","slug":"mr-softee-dead-no-just-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/04\/07\/mr-softee-dead-no-just-boring\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr. Softee dead? No, just boring"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lots of chat going on<\/a> about Paul Graham’s post on Microsoft and how it is dead<\/a>. As my friend Tony Hung points out over at Deep Jive Interests, this is a wonderful piece of linkbait<\/a> from the noted programmer and angel investor behind Y Combinator and Startup Camp. But I still think that Paul has put his finger on something important.<\/p>\n

\"snipshot_d414lr9t4ghn.jpg\"It’s obvious that even Paul Graham doesn’t believe that Mr. Softee is actually dead — and he admits near the end that the company is clearly still alive as a business entity, since it has tens of billions of dollars pouring in every month. What he seems to be arguing<\/a> is that the software behemoth is no longer dangerous, no longer competitively interesting. In other words, it is boring — in the same way that IBM became boring in the 1980s, after Microsoft came along.<\/p>\n

Tony is right that Microsoft is stll extremely powerful, and rich, and therefore has the luxury of time<\/a>. And even for fans of Google and web-based apps like me, it’s obvious that MSFT will be a force for some time to come. But Paul is still making an important point, which is that Microsoft is no longer doing the things that appear to be the future — whether it’s the future of search, or mobile apps, or web apps. It is the IBM of the new century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lots of chat going on about Paul Graham’s post on Microsoft and how it is dead. As my friend Tony Hung points out over at Deep Jive Interests, this is a wonderful piece of linkbait from the noted programmer and angel investor behind Y Combinator and Startup Camp. But I still think that Paul has … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Mr. Softee dead? No, just boring”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}