[fogpudding]

The first time this essay made the rounds, a bunch of people misunderstood his point the same way you're doing: https://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html

He was talking about cultural dominance among people developing new tech, not revenue.

There was a time when being a programmer essentially meant writing C++ on Windows. I still remember getting a Mac as late as ~2013 and having my normie (non-engineer) friends chastise me for it -- "how are you going to get any serious coding done?" -- because that was their genuine impression of Windows vs Macs. Meanwhile, imagine you're the founder of YC in 2007 in a city where all the new tech startups are happening. Everyone's using Macs. Surely it's at least a valid argument or hypothesis that this is a leading indicator of where the forefront of tech is going.

And now if you go to any modern fast-growing tech company, you look around, everyone uses Macs. Even lots of Microsoft employees use Macs. It seems the hypothesis wasn't completely wrong. Incidentally, it's only with hindsight that we're able to refute this somewhat: Microsoft made a nice comeback in the tech world after Nadella became CEO. But that was a big surprise when it happened.

Was it really necessary to turn this into a talking point about rich people and their sins?

[buran77]

> a bunch of people misunderstood his point the same way you're doing

Nobody implied he meant "dead dead" so that's a straw man, just that he completely missed the mark with his observation. Everything else is a backsplanation. PG even acknowledges he may look like a fool in retrospective.

> He was talking about cultural dominance among people developing new tech [...] Everyone's using Macs

So... a cultural thing you say, not connected to performance? Correlation not causation. The investor expects to see a Mac because that's part of the impression and everyone conformed. People showed up with a Mac to ask for money much like people show up in a suit to ask for a job. The interviewer expects the suit. It has no impact on the job performance or quality. It's just the "cultural" expectation. Wall Street people aren't more profitable due to the suits, and casual attire isn't dead.

> Was it really necessary to turn this into a talking point about rich people and their sins?

Was it really necessary to come to his defense? Was PG's opinion of MS really necessary? Would you have let it slide if I was praising instead?

[fogpudding]

They implied that he meant Microsoft's financials were in trouble, when he was more saying that Microsoft had become the new IBM.

I don't think Macs are popular in tech merely due to frivolous or circular fashion. Basically no one used Windows to do 2009-2016 era web dev. Not because founders were pushing employees to use Macs so investors would see when they came to visit; Microsoft genuinely lost a lot of reputation among programmers prior to the WSL stuff due to how bad their stuff was. Am I the only one who remembers this? People complaining and giving each other a look if they had to use "Winblows" and so on? (I still see this today.)

> Was it really necessary to come to his defense? ...

I mean, no, but why does every PG essay posted on here spawn a bunch of comments about basically how rich and pretentious he is? Why does this matter? If he's wrong, why not just say why?

[buran77]

> genuinely lost a lot of reputation

Billionaires also genuinely lost a lot of reputation. Present discussion and times stands proof. "Billionaires are dead", to mirror PG's sentiment. Surely you agree that having an opinion on rich people's predictive powers is at least as relevant and justified as having an opinion on MS's future.

PG called MS dead by observing a cultural/fashion trend among a sliver of the IT crowd and predicted a larger shift that never happened to any meaningful degree. He missed that what he was looking at wasn't truly of interest to MS. The 90% of regular users were and they had way more inertia than what PG though the few people in his line of sight could oppose.

> how rich and pretentious he is

Rich yes. "Pretentious" is your assessment. I made no moral judgement on the man. Just counterbalancing the common narrative seen even here that rich people have a superior intellects, they see things others don't even in the dark uncertainty of the future. In reality it's mostly bias, successes are praised, failures downplayed. It tricks people into believing rich people are oracles, or that not rich means not intelligent. You don't object to the praising and you'll fight to support that bias? That looks disingenuous.

> If he's wrong, why not just say why?

I did, repeatedly. You just cared more about responding than about understanding. No amount of "saying why" will change your mind because there's always some other place to shift the goal posts. "It's cultural but actually technical. It's dead but just dead for some coders. It's just a few coders but SV is all that matters. Time proved it wrong but it surprised everyone." You'll also put words in my mouth that I absolutely never suggested hoping it brings my argument low enough that you think you have a chance of fighting it. Not in a million throwaway accounts ;).