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> There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have me

> There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck. I think Marc Andreessen addressed this when he asked whether team, product, or market was the secret to success. He concluded that product-market fit was key. Bill Gates found product-market fit several times; luck it was not. Perhaps "market meritocracy" is a better way of framing the question.

jonathankoren 6y ago
That still doesn’t explain it. There’s no obvious product reason why Netscape should have won compared to Spyglass. Bill Gates talking about product-market fit when Windows and Office’s success based on illegally leveraging the DOS monopoly, is particularly rich. There are multiple studies that have compared luck with skill, and luck is always the dominate factor. You can event simulate wealth concentration with fair coin flips. https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game Most damningly there (which sadly I can not find right now) where the university created a bandcamp like site, and has people listen to the bands, and recommend them to each other. The idea being that the most talented bands would be the most successful (plays, stars, whatever). The twist was that they A/B tested the community. (For example if there were 1000 listeners, they were split into two 500 person groups, with no interactions between them.) They found the most important factors determining success were random.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  Spyglass didn't. Microsoft may have started from the Spyglass codebase, but I don't imagine there was much left by the time IE 4 was released. The Netscape guys like to talk about how Microsoft's monopolistic practices killed Netscape, but by the time of Netscape 4.6 vs. IE 4, IE was a far superior browser in speed, stability, and CSS support. At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did. Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was released.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    I used Spyglass back in the Mosaic Communicator and Netscape 1.1N days. There was no real difference. The big draw of Mosaic Communicator over NCSA Mosaic was in-line jpegs. You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape’s fates would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical market.
    - cameldrv 6y ago
      Well things moved pretty fast back then, but in my recollection, Netscape had progressive rendering (i.e. you didn't have to wait for everything to load before the page was rendered) and Spyglass didn't. I believe IE 1.0 (derived from Spyglass) also lacked that feature. Spyglass might have worked OK on a university network, but over dialup, progressive rendering was a killer feature.

jonathankoren 6y ago

That still doesn’t explain it. There’s no obvious product reason why Netscape should have won compared to Spyglass. Bill Gates talking about product-market fit when Windows and Office’s success based on illegally leveraging the DOS monopoly, is particularly rich. There are multiple studies that have compared luck with skill, and luck is always the dominate factor. You can event simulate wealth concentration with fair coin flips. https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game Most damningly there (which sadly I can not find right now) where the university created a bandcamp like site, and has people listen to the bands, and recommend them to each other. The idea being that the most talented bands would be the most successful (plays, stars, whatever). The twist was that they A/B tested the community. (For example if there were 1000 listeners, they were split into two 500 person groups, with no interactions between them.) They found the most important factors determining success were random.

cameldrv 6y ago
Spyglass didn't. Microsoft may have started from the Spyglass codebase, but I don't imagine there was much left by the time IE 4 was released. The Netscape guys like to talk about how Microsoft's monopolistic practices killed Netscape, but by the time of Netscape 4.6 vs. IE 4, IE was a far superior browser in speed, stability, and CSS support. At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did. Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was released.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  I used Spyglass back in the Mosaic Communicator and Netscape 1.1N days. There was no real difference. The big draw of Mosaic Communicator over NCSA Mosaic was in-line jpegs. You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape’s fates would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical market.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    Well things moved pretty fast back then, but in my recollection, Netscape had progressive rendering (i.e. you didn't have to wait for everything to load before the page was rendered) and Spyglass didn't. I believe IE 1.0 (derived from Spyglass) also lacked that feature. Spyglass might have worked OK on a university network, but over dialup, progressive rendering was a killer feature.