When a tyranny declines, there is almost nothing as satisfying. Microsoft held back the development of knowledge management for decades. Even now, most people have a hard time conceiving of distributed databases for information that interoperate (like WordPress) because the “document model” has been so firmly implanted in our minds. The “document model” creates information, but ties it up and privatizes it because it is first stored on the local drive. One has to make an effort to publish it. Now we are left with the Microsoft legacy of huge amounts of data tied up and unshared. This data will need to be migrated to blogging type distributed databases to become accessible. (The site http://www.symmetricalcontent.com does just this.) Applications like WordPress are the opposite of this, it starts off by sharing information, and you can make it private if you wish. As for Microsoft’s decline, here is the excerpt from a good article on the topic.
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.
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
