A few days ago I suddenly realized that Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo was influenced by fear of Microsoft from the beginning. That's why they 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 like I told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid-80s. Barry who? Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I understood that he didn't believe anyone would be afraid of them. Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for nearly 20 years starting in the late 1980s. I remember when there was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I've never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly, for example in the spam I received from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared. But now it's gone. I feel it. Nobody is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money, and so does IBM, for that matter. But they are not dangerous. When did Microsoft die and of what? I know they seemed dangerous back in 2001, because I wrote an essay back then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. I guess they were dead in 2005. I know when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about competition from Microsoft for the startups we funded. In fact, we have never even invited them to the demonstration days that we organize to present startups to investors. We invite Yahoo, Google and some other Internet companies, but we never bothered to invite Microsoft. And no one ever even emailed us. I'm in a different world. What killed them? Four things, I think, that all happened at the same time in the mid-2000s. The most obvious is Google. There can only be one great man in town, and they clearly are. Today, Google is by far the most dangerous company, in both the good and bad senses of the term. Microsoft, at best, may limp along afterward. When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to postpone it to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. I would say they took the initiative 2005.