There now exist parts of the computer industry that can ignore Microsoft, hence to them Microsoft (or the almost hysterical terror of Microsoft they had in 1999) is dead. But in a way that’s always been true. Perhaps Graham has just migrated to one of those areas.

If you were to say … write an article about how he’s attempting to be sensationalist. That’d be a different story.

Bob responds: So I can debate his tone but not his content? His argument’s form but not its substance? Sounds like over in the non-Microsoft world, you’re not supposed to question Certain Things! Sounds kind of restrictive; I lampoon Microsoft all the time in this space, so I don’t come at my opinion by way of being a True Believer in All Things Microsoft. On the other hand, I think Paul’s argument makes him look like a True Believer in All Things Not Microsoft. It doesn’t lend credibility to his arguments.

C’mon, Robert … I can’t possibly disagree with anyone without having “different definitions”. I do appreciate that you gave me the opportunity to clarify some details of why I disagree with Paul’s thesis. But I don’t think arriving at different conclusions means I can’t debate the merits of Paul’s conclusions.

Besides, a lot of Microsoft technology is elegant — C# and .NET, for example, are widely respected even by Java partisans.

I think that says it all.

MS has become irrelevant in developing areas, they are no longer growing, no longer changing. It’s just there, no longer living, a massive corpse that will take decades to fully decay.

Bob responds: I agree they don’t need to be wiped off the face of the earth to become “dead” in the sense of “irrelevant”. However, I don’t think they need to be either “feared” or “dominant” or, especially, “cool” to be quite a viable and important factor in the marketplace, either. Personally I think Microsoft is becoming irrelevant in stagnating areas, like its desktop OS, not in developing areas. IIS 7, CLR 3.5 / 4.0, and other pre-release products show terrific promise, IMO. I have a lot of company in thinking that SQL Server 2005 and VS 2005 kicks ass. They have a thriving developer community. Large parts of their ecosystem work just fine, as far as I can see. They make huge ongoing investments in R&D.

For those who truly want to define themselves in terms of what they are against, rather than what they are in favor of; if you really lay awake nights dreaming of the Paradise that will magically ensue when the Evil of Microsoft is wiped from the face of the earth — get a clue about what it will take for that to happen. It isn’t going to happen because you’re cooler. Millions of people like myself will have to decide that the pain of change is less than the pain of not changing. If you think that tipping point is past, or even within reach, then you are for the most part living in a dream world.

Bob responds: I’ll have to agree with you on that one! Those testosterone-crazed, take-no-prisoner types of managers don’t serve Microsoft or any other company well in the long run. Sometimes, not even in the short run.

Bob responds: I think you’re working off dated arguments. Maybe *you* should try VS 2005. It has refactoring tools built in. If those aren’t enough, there are plenty of plug-ins you can get. Instability? I have not experienced instability at all. I have always appreciated platforms in which virtually all the bugs are mine. I can do something about those! Bloat? In what sense is the CLR any more bloat than the JVM? Lock in? I ported one of my projects to Linux last summer — compiled it in VS 2003 and it Just Works running under Apache and Mono. If I want to, there are tools to run .NET code under any Java engine. Where is the lock-in? Also, I have sampled the competition’s products — slung a little PHP this past year even. Same book, different paragraph. After you’ve worked in a few dev platforms and languages, you realize that no one is inherently much better than the next. Different trade-offs, to be sure, but none of them represents Paradise.

I don’t know whether you understood that but it doesn’t seem that you’re refuting his definition but rather have your own undefined idea of what it means.

Bob responds: Okay, I’ll bite. A meaningful — as opposed to merely provocative — definition of “death” from my perspective is when the Microsoft dev stack is no longer viable because the marketplace as a whole has lost confidence in it. From the perspective of the total company, “death” means that enough areas of their business portfolio experience that same problem, such that the company ceases to be worthy even of Paul Graham declaring it dead. From where I sit, with work coming out my ears that is either specified to be Microsoft-centric or the customer doesn’t care and doesn’t object to Microsoft — I see neither even close to happening. I see it coming close only in terms of the Windows OS, and even that is far from “life-support” status.