For those who don’t have time to read Paul Graham’s latest essay

Microsoft is dead can be neatly summarized as …

To Google,
Please buy Snipshot – it’s going for a song.

Paul Graham funds a number of web2.0 startups…

So if they [microsoft] 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.

Graham does some Microsoft-bashing (hey – with all his money and status I thought this would have been beneath him but he’s got startups to be acquired), and makes some overtures towards 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.

Paul Graham is a smart guy but not smart enough to hide the whiff of desperation in his latest essay. If he’s not careful he could end up like this guy.