unsystematic

The Day After

Normally at this time I’d be out pushing past people, lugging heavy tech toys around, maybe even a few Christmas gifts too. No, not this year. None of us felt like waking up at 4:30am to stand 200th place in line. This year we’re drinking coffee, watching terrorism unfold in India, and relaxing. We’ll go out a bit later.

Yesterday was fun though. After searching for some sort of open bookstore (I need a new book) I purchased a few packs of beer for myself and family and headed over to my aunts house for turkey dinner. A few beers later and two full plates I was ready to hit the sack and hibernate, at least for six hours. The dinner was great though so much thanks to my aunt for spending all day preparing it.

3000+ calories later…

So I got in bed last night and remembered that our food friend Rick Astley was supposed to be in the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade yesterday and since I missed it I was sure I could find it on Youtube. Sure enough. And lo and behold, the people at Macys actually did the unthinkable. They successfully Rick-Rolled us. After a little cartooney float with puppets and happy music, out came Rick singing “Never gonna give you up”. I’m sure Rick is thrilled to have all this attention.

I thought it was brilliant – and sad, and maybe even desperate. Like my friend Shaun said, “the rick-roll is dead. RIP”.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.

What a zoo

Last night I was driving to Atlanta to the home of some of my relatives. They live in a quiet neighborhood and both if their children – my cousins – are out of the house. Real quiet. After having a nice dinner and a few beers with my uncle and after watching House and Fringe, I went to bed and wrote a blog about big cities.

This morning I was 465 miles away in a peaceful suburb outside Atlanta. Tonight I am in Louisville, Kentucky staying with my aunt. Great hospitality, nice home, loud and abnoxious pets. Four dogs, one of which jumps on me constantly, two cockatoos both of whom squawk so loud my brain rattles around in my skull, and two cats who hide away in the master bedroom.

I enjoy animals. I have a cat of my own in fact, but I have no idea how she manages here. I don’t think I have the patience to deal with it all.

On another note, I finally got to meet my cousins little girl, Ashley. Adorable. And they have this little 8 week old kitten, Bonnie, that I wanted to hide in my pocket and bring home with me. I wonder what JC would think if another cat romping in his territory. Maybe he’d stop clawing my door frames…

The thing about big cities…

I’ve always loved big cities. I’m not talking cities like Sanford or even Raleigh, I’m talking about cities like New York, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Orlando. I’m talking about cities with countless skyscrapers, billions of neon lights, and great nightlife. And tonight as I was driving on I-85 through the heart of Atlanta I think I figured out a few reasons why.

Firstly, I love to people watch. And there’s not a better place to people watch than a big city; a city that’s got a huge gamut of individuals and personalities. Even though sometimes I like my peace and quiet there’s something serene about being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people. Everyone is so into their own thoughts that you get your own little piece of the world.

Secondly, the road networks are fascinating. There’s a junction here in Atlanta appropriately called ’spaghetti junction’ and it’s really an engineering marvel. The way the roads zip here and there and loop around each other and one minute you’re above cars then the next you’re below them…

Finally, the buildings. Every skyscraper is unique. Each one is someones attempt at individuality; a chance to reflect their persona by through architecture. Each person trying to be taller, bigger, more elaborate than the surrounding buildings in order to be that defining landmark like the Empire State Building or the John Hancock Building. Each building tells much about the owner and the company.

So I find myself drawn to big cities. The thrill, the excitement, the nightlife, the lights, sounds, people, and buildings all play roles to give a city a personality that speaks volumes. If I had to choose a city…

Repost: Microsoft is Dead

Originally posted by Paul Graham in April 2007. I felt it worthy enough to post, even if it’s nearly two years old. Enjoy :)

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they’d positioned themselves as a “media company” instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn’t understand. It was as if I’d told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he didn’t quite believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn’t paying attention, I didn’t notice when the shadow disappeared.

But it’s gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they’re not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. I’d guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started Y Combinator we didn’t worry about Microsoft as competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we’ve never even invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we’ve never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They’re in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

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.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren’t setting the terms of the debate then. I’d say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called “Ajax.” And that was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they needed it for Outlook. What they didn’t realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

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.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft’s anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way.

I’m glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn’t begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. One of the reasons “Web 2.0″ has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.

Of course, as a hacker I can’t help thinking about how something broken could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as Microsoft. They can’t hire smart people anymore, but they could buy as many as they wanted for only an order of magnitude more. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:

1. Buy all the good “Web 2.0″ startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they’d have to pay for Facebook.

2. Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they’d never do it. Microsoft’s biggest weakness is that they still don’t realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little “Web 2.0″ bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

So much for that (again) *sad face*

Well blah. Another nanowrimo attempt crashed and burned in a big heaping ball of fire. Okay, maybe not big and heaping since I only had a few pages, but you get the point.

Last year it was Thanksgiving break, this year it was a bunch of side work. And as I’m sure you know, nanowrimo does not help to pay the bills. It’s unfortunately because the main goal of nanowrimo is to see if you can actually do it. It’s about beating yourself, mind over matter (or maybe matter over mind?), and pushing through a really tough goal. I must admit I’m a little bummed, especially since I’m not one to give up easily. And I thought I had a pretty freaking cool plot too.

Ah well, maybe next year…

On another note, I did come across a good chunk of my novel from last year. I thought I had lost it when I reformatted my old laptop, but apparently I had 18,000 words of it on my backup drive. Exciting.