7 ms·
A prescient footnote
- presidentender 16y agoSuppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
- tlholaday 16y agoSell the stock of its competitors short.
- mattmillr 16y agoDon't you have to borrow stock to sell it short? Can you do that for 6 years?
- aidenn0 16y agoTaking a short position in the competitors is troublesome because you need to time it right. If you think apple can win, you can go long any time the stock is low and end up a winner.
- borism 16y agowho was apple competitors in 2000s anyway? I don't recall anyone noticeable
- gjm11 16y ago"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." -- John Maynard Keynes.
- francoisdevlin 16y agoWhat happens when the entire market segment balloons? APPL might beat out MSFT, but if everyone is more profitable, your short failed.
- zackattack 16y agoAre there publicly-available financial instruments that account for this?
- francoisdevlin 16y agoA put order would work well for this, IIRC.
- Timothee 16y agoSide-note: Apple's ticker symbol is AAPL, not APPL. It got me the first times too.
- rmc 16y agoYou have to know what their compeditors are. Pre iPhone, Apple's compeditors were Microsoft. The iPhone makes it look like Apple's compeditors now are Nokia/RIM (the makers of Blackberry). However a case could be made that Apple's current iPhone compeditor is or will be Google. So if you wanna bet on the iPhone, it's not clear who you should short.
- Tuna-Fish 16y agoLeverage and buy stock. The only thing that stops you from increasing the size of your bet is the risk of the downside. To some point, this is manageable, but after that point, it becomes pure insanity. YMMV. Shorting the competitors because you think a company is going to do very well is actually a bad idea -- it's entirely possible that Microsoft would have been able to open another very profitable market.
- barrkel 16y agoThere's a bigger problem. There's always going to be a spot-on prediction ex post. But you need to know which prediction is spot-on ex ante.
- vlad 16y agoIf you knew a technology was going to take off, learning their programming language/API and becoming a well-known expert on it could pay great dividends. Additionally, you could work there to make contacts and learn even more. Finally, you could try to join their developer programs while they are still in beta. Note that unlike suggestions to purchase stock in the company, this advice applies to technology at private companies, as well.
- zackattack 16y agoare humanized forms of indentured servitude legal anymore? for example, could you pay to send someone to the bignerdranch bootcamp to learn iphone dev, but then have some way of mitigating the risk that they don't then go ahead and auction their new skills, acquired at your expense, on the market?
- jimbokun 16y agoAren't these called non-competes?
- zackattack 16y agoNo, because I could train you to make iPhone apps for dentist appointments and then you could go sell your skills to make iPhone apps for farting. FartGenerator, Inc. is not in competition with iHaveAToothache LLC.
- nostrademons 16y agoThere are certain contracts you can make where you agree to work for X company for Y years if they pay for your education, or you have to pay them back for the cost. The U.S. Armed Forces does this with ROTC and the military academies. Several corporations will pay for an MBA if you come back to work for them afterwards, but you have to pony up the cash yourself if you choose not to work for them. In all these cases, the choice is always "Work for us or pay us back" - I don't think you can structure a contract so that they must work for you without running afoul of the 13th amendment.
- gxti 16y agoPrediction markets. They're like an elaborate, worldwide bet. Shame they're not government-sanctioned; a world with ubiquitous prediction markets would be interesting indeed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
- CUViper 16y agoPerhaps Apple reads pg, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy...
- stuff4ben 16y agoHeh, I made the same prediction one year before Apple released the iPhone. http://stuff4ben.blogspot.com/ http://stuff4ben.blogspot.com/ Oddly enough, it was the last post I made on my blog. Wish I could have capitalized on my foresight.
- isamuel 16y agoYour blog post reads more like a wish than a prediction. "I want my Apple iPod to make phone calls for me, play video's for me, play J2ME games for me, be WiFi enabled so it can login to my corporate network and check my email on Exchange, take 5MP pictures for me, allow me to IM people and surf the net, and play MP3's all in an iPod-like fit and finish. Why is this so hard?"
- stuff4ben 16y agoRead a little further: "Once Apple figures this out, their record iPod sales from 2005 will pale in comparison." and "I'd rather carry one sleek iPod-ish device that does everything for me." You see wishes do come true!
- dockd 16y agoThere had been talk of "convergence" for years, where the digital camera, digital music player, digital phone, PDA, etc. would be combined into one device. However, that's not exactly an earthshaking prediction. I mean, really, did anyone think that this wouldn't eventually happen? It's more of a question of when. In fact, when I read your quote, you're not predicting something, you're asking for it.
- motters 16y agoIn hindsight if you do enough searching you can always find people who predicted, or appeared to predict, future events.
- Alex3917 16y agoIt depends how specific the predictions are. Anyone can make some vague Nostradamus type prediction. Whereas I actually take pride in my spring '07 analysis of why cell phone software was broken: http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_soft.html http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_... (Which isn't phrased as a prediction, but is basically equivalent in that it can only be proven or disproven by future events.) The funny thing is that the post sounds completely banal today, but at the time there were several hundred comments about how wrong I was and all sorts of industry insiders calling me dumb.
- isamuel 16y agoA lot of your analysis applies with equal force today, and so has been falsified by intervening events. For example, you say: "Let's say that against all odds you get a few early adopters. To everyone else it will look like they are just sending text messages. Unlike the iPod, your software is invisible. Invisible software isn't viral." This is still true today (no one can tell what I'm doing while I fiddle with my phone). You also say that "the next generation of WiFi will make your product obsolete in two years anyway." Well, it's been three years, and the next generation of WiFi hasn't made anything obsolete. You also say this: "Cell phones don't fit into girl's pants. Remember how the women you asked said they would only use your software if it had a vibrate mode? Oops." I don't know if this is a prophecy that women won't use cell phones or what exactly it is.
- Alex3917 16y agoThe WiFi part I was clearly wrong about, it ended up being Apple and not a shift in communications standards that was the key disruptor for the industry. But I disagree on the other two points. If someone is playing a game on their iPhone today then it is pretty obvious, or at least much more obvious than the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes. And as for the thing about women, women used to store their cell phones in their purses and not in their pants until phones like the iPhone and the razor came along. Without this shift it would have been very, very difficult for services like twitter to have taken off.
- alain94040 16y agoVery impressive. In 1994 (I think, I can't be sure of the date anymore), I wrote an article in MacWorld France where I said the combination of Apple's GUI with the Unix kernel had a promising future. I didn't know it would take another 10 years...
- moxiemk1 16y agoSomething to that effect had been around for a while by then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX Apple has a wealth of fascinating abandoned projects.
- rbanffy 16y agoWhen they fail, they fail with style. I'd love to have an A/UX box. Edit: didn't think of it this way when writing the above, but a unix kernel with an actual, Apple designed, Mac GUI on top was actually a failure... Go figure.
- moxiemk1 16y agoOne of the old 68k Apple Workgroup Servers 95s would be awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Workgroup_Server http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Workgroup_Server
- alain94040 16y agoA/UX 3.0 on a Mac II is what I used to run my BBS on. Everyone else was using a PC with DOS or some QNX or BSD...
- chronomex 16y agoI've got an IIsi with A/UX on it. It's pretty neat, though a bit slow--9M of RAM isn't quite enough. I'd love to give you a hand setting up your own machine, let me know. :)
- rbanffy 16y ago
- austiniteye 16y agoHa, this made me search the web for things PG said recently. I didn't find anything that specific although I wonder what he thinks of Google/Facebook or Android/iPhone standoffs Come to think of it, I wonder what is going to happen to Microsoft? Something is obviously coming (they won't just fade into background), but what would it be? People say that oh, don't worry Microsoft will become just like IBM, but I don't buy it. IBM does a lot of different things, and it did even more in the past but stopped. Microsoft, on the other hand, really does just one thing well: Windows/Office and, assuming those are going to fade away, what does it leave them with? That's why I believe there's going to be a major shift/transition in Microsoft business model.
- gabrielroth 16y agoThe closest record of his current predictions would presumably be the YC roster.
- patrickryan 16y agoPG also made this statement in May 2009 (iPad released April 2010): What would be your dream setup? I'd like it if the Air was about half the size. I don't know why Apple won't make something in between the Air and an iPhone... Source: http://paul.graham.usesthis.com http://paul.graham.usesthis.com
- lenni 16y agoThat's what he looks like? I don't know why I imagined PG to look a lot more like a bearded Unix-type ...?
- ry0ohki 16y agoyes, he is in fact Sir Paul McCartney's evil programming twin.
- SwellJoe 16y agopg is not the UNIX-type. He avoids systems-level stuff like the plague, as far as I can tell. rtm and tlb did the UNIX work at Viaweb and, I believe, rtm does the UNIX stuff for HN. pg is a smug lisp weenie (and I mean that in the best possible way). He's also a serious Apple fanboy, which the right and proper UNIX beards tend not to be.
- grinich 16y agoWhen the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world. - Alan Kay
- bdr 16y agoThat's after pmarca let the cat out of the bag on Charlie Rose.
- kul 16y agoI'm pretty sure PG bought a lot of Apple stock in 2001-2003
- clemesha 16y agoWhat about the 2nd comment on the post, by "Sean O"? Javascript/Ajax has been fundamental to "new-age" tech giants. See Google's Gmail.
- seldo 16y agoA lot of JS on the web does still break all the time, to be fair. It's not like he predicted it would never improve.
- celticjames 16y agoBad reasoning: Remember the hits, forget the misses.
- todayiamme 16y agoThe hits are impressive nonetheless. I think that there is a lesson to take away over here; perhaps pg is good at this because he has the combination of common sense, practical knowledge and experience? It's quite easy to detract from/criticize something, but to learn something from it is everything.
- nollidge 16y agoA given prediction can only be considered impressive in relation to the predictor's track record. If pg's made a thousand similar public predictions and this is the only one to come true, then it's not impressive. There is insufficient evidence presented in TFA to judge whether or not this prediction was "particularly prescient" or not.
- lambda 16y agoThose footnotes have a mix of prescience and just plain wrong. For instance, there's one about how a good open source browser can fundamentally change the industry; and Firefox has in that time gained much ground and helped spur innovation in IE and across the web (as have WebKit and Chrome). However, Firefox was already underway by the time he wrote this, so that prediction isn't necessarily so forward looking. His opposition to client-side software, though, is less prescient. He says that JavaScript may not be available when you can browse the web on your phone; but JavaScript support is now one of the distinguishing features of new smartphones. He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong. Mostly, Java applets themselves were a bad technology, but client side code that integrates with the Web is a popular idea, in the form of Flash and JavaScript. So yeah, there's one prescient quote in there, but some more that are wrong. And many people were hoping for an Apple iPod/phone for quite a while; see, for example, http://technologizer.com/2009/12/28/iphone-rumors/ http://technologizer.com/2009/12/28/iphone-rumors/ (the first list of collected iPhone rumors I found in a google search).
- colinprince 16y agoAnd WebKit has certainly rejuvenated the mobile web industry.
- jseliger 16y agoAnd many people were hoping for an Apple iPod/phone for quite a while; see, for example, http://technologizer.com/2009/12/28/iphone-rumors/ http://technologizer.com/2009/12/28/iphone-rumors/ (the first list of collected iPhone rumors I found in a google search). This was published in 2009. Hackers and Painters came in 2004.
- lambda 16y agoEr, that was a collection of rumors about an Apple phone from before the iPhone was released. Yes, it was collected after the release of the iPhone, but it's reporting on rumors and speculation from before the iPhone, including one from 2002: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/19/technology/19APPL.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/19/technology/19APPL.html?pag... "And now come signs that Mr. Jobs means to take Apple back to the land of the handhelds, but this time with a device that would combine elements of a cellphone and a Palm -like personal digital assistant."
- code_duck 16y agoSo, the key to being seen as prescient is to make sure you get it in writing. John Doe of Hoboken could have said the same thing, but it wouldn't be possible to quote him on it since he only told his barber. Good reason to start blogging, I guess.
- coliveira 16y agoEverybody has opinions. Some of them become true, most don't.
- 5teev 16y agoYeah, no disrespect to Graham, but oatmeal-against-the-wall....
- bitwize 16y agoAlan Kay was heard to have said something along the lines of "Give this a 9-inch screen and you'll take over the world" when he first saw an iPhone. My favorite one of these was from my favorite music band, The KLF, who after the success of "Doctor in the TARDIS" decided to write a book called The Manual, Or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, which explains, as it says on the tin, how to go about producing a hit record without any money or musical talent. One of the most impressive things about this book is this bit, from the section on coming up with a good catchy chorus for your smash hit, something people will remember: Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7" single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over - the Number One position was guaranteed: "I'm never going to give you up" It says it all. It's what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with: "I'm never gonna let you down I'm never going to fool around or upset you" GENIUS. Amazing. By two decades these guys anticipated mashups and the Rickroll.
- gabrielroth 16y agoBy two decades these guys anticipated mashups and the Rickroll. No. The people who bought the single in 1987 were responding to the song very differently from the people who turned it into an internet meme 20 years later. The passage you quote describes the former; it doesn't predict the latter.
- stcredzero 16y agoA conversation several jobs ago, well before the iPhone: Engineering Manager: Well, mobile is obviously a next big thing. Me: You know what would be hot? If you could be listening to your MP3, then you get a call and the music fades out into your call. Then when the call ends, it fades back in. That would sell like hotcakes. Engineering Manager: [Looks at me like I'm an idiot]