4 ms·

So lots of people in this thread that realize vcs are supercilious talking heads. Why does Paul graham, the blogger who claimed Microsoft is dead and that lisp

So lots of people in this thread that realize vcs are supercilious talking heads. Why does Paul graham, the blogger who claimed Microsoft is dead and that lisp , which btw is untyped and slower than maybe even Go, is a competitive badvantage get admiration? Is it just by the wannabes?

tomhoward 7y ago
Lisp was a competitive advantage for the company that made him rich in the mid-90s. He wouldn't claim it is for a new company starting out now. He later wrote that Python and Ruby were a competitive advantage. They wouldn't be now. But other languages/platforms are. His claim wasn't that Lisp is and will always be a competitive advantage, but that at any time, there is a powerful platform available that few developers/companies have embraced yet, but that could be a competitive advantage to a company that does. As for Microsoft, it still is dead in the sense that he articulated in that essay; it doesn't offer any novel/powerful/ubiquitous platforms that new companies could or should build new products/companies on. It barely exists as a mobile platform, nobody has built significant new companies out of Windows desktop software in years, and its cloud platform is just one of several, and far from the biggest/best. He never said it would go out of business, just that it would become a generic BigCo, which is exactly what it is. He also built a new type of investment company that invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe and many other new startups, before any other VC would look at them, and at a tiny fraction of the valuation that other VCs would invest at. That investment model he pioneered has since been imitated countless times around the world - unsuccessfully, in most cases, because he did such a good job that others couldn't seriously compete. With all that said, I think there's plenty he's been wrong about, but he's been right about the most important stuff, and deserves admiration for that.
- paulgrahamisvc 7y ago
  You do realize that Microsoft is the company that holds the Guinness record for fastest selling electronic product and that was after the smuglord "essay". Ms cloud is 2nd after aws and fast catching up. You're an ignormaous clearly.
  - tomhoward 7y ago
    The Kinect sold many units quickly because so many people already had Xboxes or Windows gaming PCs, and it was relatively cheap. It's since been discontinued. Azure is popular due to all the corporates moving their application hosting and data storage off on-premise servers to the cloud. Neither of these products/platforms has led/is leading to whole new categories of products/companies being created, which is the specific context in which PG was suggesting MS was "dead". FWIW, arguably the biggest game-changing innovation in gaming in the past 10 years has been Twitch, which was a YC company. > smuglord > ignormaous You don't need insults if you have solid points.
pepper_sauce 7y ago
Source your quotes
- tomhoward 7y ago
  They're referring to these essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

tomhoward 7y ago

Lisp was a competitive advantage for the company that made him rich in the mid-90s. He wouldn't claim it is for a new company starting out now. He later wrote that Python and Ruby were a competitive advantage. They wouldn't be now. But other languages/platforms are. His claim wasn't that Lisp is and will always be a competitive advantage, but that at any time, there is a powerful platform available that few developers/companies have embraced yet, but that could be a competitive advantage to a company that does. As for Microsoft, it still is dead in the sense that he articulated in that essay; it doesn't offer any novel/powerful/ubiquitous platforms that new companies could or should build new products/companies on. It barely exists as a mobile platform, nobody has built significant new companies out of Windows desktop software in years, and its cloud platform is just one of several, and far from the biggest/best. He never said it would go out of business, just that it would become a generic BigCo, which is exactly what it is. He also built a new type of investment company that invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe and many other new startups, before any other VC would look at them, and at a tiny fraction of the valuation that other VCs would invest at. That investment model he pioneered has since been imitated countless times around the world - unsuccessfully, in most cases, because he did such a good job that others couldn't seriously compete. With all that said, I think there's plenty he's been wrong about, but he's been right about the most important stuff, and deserves admiration for that.

paulgrahamisvc 7y ago
You do realize that Microsoft is the company that holds the Guinness record for fastest selling electronic product and that was after the smuglord "essay". Ms cloud is 2nd after aws and fast catching up. You're an ignormaous clearly.
- tomhoward 7y ago
  The Kinect sold many units quickly because so many people already had Xboxes or Windows gaming PCs, and it was relatively cheap. It's since been discontinued. Azure is popular due to all the corporates moving their application hosting and data storage off on-premise servers to the cloud. Neither of these products/platforms has led/is leading to whole new categories of products/companies being created, which is the specific context in which PG was suggesting MS was "dead". FWIW, arguably the biggest game-changing innovation in gaming in the past 10 years has been Twitch, which was a YC company. > smuglord > ignormaous You don't need insults if you have solid points.

pepper_sauce 7y ago

Source your quotes

tomhoward 7y ago
They're referring to these essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html