Paul Graham has posted a clarification of his earlier statement about Microsoft demise:

Whatever it is that he is taking, that is good stuff.

We have to make a separation here from Microsoft as a platform builder and Microsoft as a service / application provider. In this case, I do believe that he is talking more about the service/application provider side of Microsoft. Assuming that I would decide to build a Web 2.0 for Social Bathroom Painting(TM), do I really need to fear Microsoft? Or to worry about Microsoft moving into my market and gobbling it all?

Probably not, but not for the reasons that Graham's paints. The issue with Microsoft is their size, what a startup sees as a viable market to cater to is not something that Microsoft is even seeing on their radar, unless you can present someone at Microsoft with a number with a lot of zeros in it, they aren't interested in trying. But, wait until the market is big enough to do appear on their radar, and you have another matter. Go ask Telligent (community server) what they think of Microsoft's moving in to their territory.

I read Paul Graham's article, and I couldn't quite believe the statements that he was making. I am not really sure where I can start talking about the flaws in the article. Just to take a couple of the most outragous ones.

He links to SnipShot, and calls it a Photoshop competitor. That is not apples to oranges comparisions, it is like comparing a candle flame to the sun. They are both fire, but that is where the parallels ends. Go ahead and reproduce this image using any web based tool. It took me about 30 minutes to do it in PowerPoint. I assume that it would take a compotent Photoshop wizard minutes or less to do it. If such a thing is possible to do in a web based tool, it is going to take so much longer.

The permise that Ajax is the new OS is flawed on many levels. I am writing this on a computer with fast CPU and quite a bit of memory, and I would really like those CPU cycles to do stuff that I want, not interpreted javascript in a browser window to give me something that is similar to what I want.

There is a limited class of applications where Ajax applications makes sense. Gmail has the luck to hit every point on the list. Other applications are simply not viable on the web. I can't imagine an IDE on the web offering even close to the bare-bones functionality of Visual Studio, for instnace, or the ease and power of Outlook.

Let us take something like Word vs. Writely, I want to add an image from the compnay portal to a document that I am writing. In Word, I just copy the image and paste it to word, you can't do that with a web based application. I could go on, but this has been covered quite enough elsewhere.

I should just mention that JavaScript is a really nice language, but the environment that it is running on is not very friendly, and to do things in Ajax takes significantly longer than doing them using WinForms or similar technology.

*cough* *cough* WHAT?!

I guess that being a professional software developer doesn't count as a computer person now, right?