What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?

by oskarth • 11 years ago

331 171 11 years ago

MichaelGG2• 11 years ago

Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair? Or if asked would they have said they were going to write software for computer users? The second phrasing doesn't sound so lame. And I imagine you can come up with a lame sounding subset for many companies.

Edit: I get the point that companies might have a larger scope and to look out for it but deliberately trying to come up with a lame tagline seems... Off? Did AirBNB really set out just to offer a single place with air mattresses? Like no plans?

chubot2• 11 years ago

I don't know for sure, but AirBNB had the weird domain name airbednbreakfast.com or something, and it still has pretty weird company name too. It's not really what you would choose for disrupting the hotel industry.

By decades of media coverage, "Microsoft" evokes images of a behemoth. But try to imagine what the name "Microsoft" must have sounded like -- it doesn't sound very ambitious. It sounds a little lame. If you planned to be the biggest company in the world, would you name your company "Microsoft"?

Microsoft was started when Gates was 20 or something. I think a lot of 20 year olds are just trying to make something interesting. Some are dreaming of taking over the world, but those are the types that probably don't actually do it.

I think you can see a similar thing with Linux. If you look at Linus's original mail announcing Linux, it doesn't sound like he has any goals to run on the majority of servers, mobile phones, many desktops, and tons of embedded devices.

He even insisted it would never be portable past i386!!!

I agree with pg that a lot of these people are living in the future and don't necessarily realize that they're going to be riding this hockey stick growth. Even if you're doing it, I'm sure it's hard to predict. There's hundreds of decisions and improvements you have to make along the way. There's no one idea or feature to implement to get that big.

kryptiskt• 11 years ago

But try to imagine what the name "Microsoft" must have sounded like -- it doesn't sound very ambitious. It sounds a little lame. If you planned to be the biggest company in the world, would you name your company "Microsoft"?

They certainly were no match for the ambitions of Intergalactic Digital Research.

trequartista• 11 years ago

I think it's about the MVP - minimum viable product of the company. The first product which is going to bring in revenue and keep the lights on. You will obviously consolidate further and build a business plan around the MVP. Basic for Altair was Microsoft's MVP. Offering air mattresses was AirBNB's MVP.

MichaelGG2• 11 years ago

Looking at Wikipedia, it appears they spent several months before launching their site, after getting a technical cofounder. So 3 people and 6 months, at least. I find it very hard to believe they did all that with the idea their MVP was renting out their flat.

enf• 11 years ago

What they said in 1976 was that they wanted to be "able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software." So more than BASIC, but without the notion that the computer software market would grow to encompass everyone.

kens• 11 years ago

The letter containing that statement is a key to understanding Microsoft's goals and their success (in particular the key innovation that people should pay for software). If you haven't read it, I recommend taking a look: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-...

bluedino• 11 years ago

> Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair?

Yes, in 1975. The DOS deal with IBM didn't come around until 1980, Excel showed up in 1982, Word in 1983, and Windows in 1984.

yatoomy• 11 years ago

This seems to me a clarification of the strategy PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 and an essay called "frighteningly ambitious startup ideas". It is a great way to think about and frame how to judge startup ideas.

Mainly centering around high potential technology, overlooked ideas and opportunities that these startups can take advantage of.

My question becomes, and it seems PGs, how can you do this without the value of hindsight. One one hand, you could sit and reason why startup x or your startup idea is the Microsoft in this scenario. But you can also easily delude yourself.

Pebble, IMO, is shaping up alot like early Apple did. They are entering a competitive industry with a new product, facing a goliath and have a huge emphasis on their design & focus on developer. Which makes me believe history will repeat itself. That if we have the Apple for wearables, there should be, or soon, a Microsoft for wearables.

Just a thought, would love any point for/against.

For reference:

http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI

seiji3• 11 years ago

PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012

That was a great talk. Everybody should re-watch it. Even if just for the one off question "why does HN violate the HTTP spec by sending invalid line endings?" (Answer: "because it works for me!")

ja27• 11 years ago

Starting a company to make a paid browser when Mosaic is already free.

kstenerud• 11 years ago

Free and pretty crappy & limited. When you can do better than the free crappy shit, people will pay. It was the same with Athena vs Motif.

zw1234566• 11 years ago

This reminds me of my experience with Microsoft very early in my career. Way back when MS was working on Windows 1.0, I was working for a start up company and we were developing network management software for SNA Networks and Mainframes. It was very advanced for the day and used a GUI but was done on Mainframe computers and terminals. The company sold out to IBM and I chose to take the money and run. A friend of mine referred me to MS because they needed people with graphics experience. So I met with one of the team leaders and went over and talked with them. At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me. They offered me a job but it was less money in terms of salary than another offer I had from a Fortune 500 company, but at the time MS had a great stock option plan, but I felt that was worthless based on my brilliant analysis of their prospects. So I took the safe bet. I tell this story occasionally to younger people who are trying to decide about what to do in terms of career choices. Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Just my view from the cheap seats.

AceJohnny22• 11 years ago

Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice.

It's really just dumb luck. One thinks one can extract a lesson from this hindsight, but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it?

Do what excites you and put your energy into that.

Absolutely.

TheAnimus• 11 years ago

but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it?

Sometimes I think people look at where a company is, rather than it's direction, it's velocity.

zw1234566• 11 years ago

True true. But if it is all dumb luck, then what the F, do want you want. I guess that was my point.

vram223• 11 years ago

This reminds of me of an image I used to have as my desktop computer background. Lost it later and the closest I found was this, so I added the same motto (that the image had) at the bottom of my post:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/11/alley-in-park-bucharest-ro...

veb3• 11 years ago

This is a variant of the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" if you didn't know! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taking_the_road_less_...

zw1234566• 11 years ago

In retrospect, the only difference between the fork in my road and the fork for others is that mine was so obvious in hind sight. Other people probably unwittingly passed over great opportunities but just did not ever find out what they missed.

npsimons• 11 years ago

Maybe I'm too conservative, but just looking at it from a "cool thing to work on perspective" I would have turned it down as well. I mean, seriously, you tell me a story about how a company offers you a job reinventing a wheel from a previous job, and that company later turns out to be the one in a million that made it on dumb luck and marketing, and you expect the takeaway to be "work for a technologically backwards company for low pay because, hey, they might be successful someday!"? It sounds like you did exactly what excites you: you passed up repeating work from a previous job.

zw1234566• 11 years ago

That was an aspect of it, one of the things that I had started at NSI and got cut short when they sold out to Big Blue (and PG would love this) was AI Expert System for Network diagnostics using a Symbolics computer using OPS5. I was convinced at the time that would be the next thing after the GUI. But if I had to be completely honest, a huge part of it (80%) is I just thought they had no chance of making it.

bch• 11 years ago

the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path...

@AceJohnny2 started to touch on this, but them seemed to retreat(?), but:

I can't find "wisdom" anywhere in that scenario -- some seem to think that making a mistake is -- making a mistake -- which is hilarious because people cheer for articles or philosophies of plowing through the business landscape making mistakes and pivoting until something "sticks".

With the information you had, you made the best decision you could. The lesson is "sometimes people are wrong", or "I had a near-miss w/ success/failure", or "there's no way anybody could have predicted X, and I witnessed part of it." Your experience (I don't mean to diminish anything) is an anecdote.

zw1234566• 11 years ago

I agree completely. I do not view it as a mistake (although it seems like everyone else does). It was just the path I took. And I went on and got to work on a lot of other very cool projects and did very well for myself as a result, just not "early MS money" well.

dsugarman• 11 years ago

I think what is really interesting in your story is that you directly had a lot of the knowledge and tools to fix the part that you felt was severely lacking in Microsoft's product. Was that the only reason you felt MS was doomed? I would definitely recommend to anyone who feels they can be the missing piece to be that missing piece.

marktangotango2• 11 years ago

My thoughts on this are: The op's perception could've been that they weren't very capable (since they didn't have solution to a fundamental problem (dirty rectangles?)) and, going in somewhere and being a savior is not something I'd want to do, that's large burden to bear.

PhasmaFelis2• 11 years ago

I think this sort of illustrates the flaw in the reasoning of the original post. No one could have looked at Altair BASIC and seen Microsoft, because Microsoft didn't grow out of Altair BASIC. They grew out of canny marketing and business decisions and dumb luck. Their shitty software had nothing to do with it.

If someone can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos, it's not because ice is great stuff.

maxxxxx• 11 years ago

I took the risky choice twice and it didn't work out. I think it's just a gamble especially if you are an employee. As a founder you have more influence.

wanderingstan• 11 years ago

Whenever I get to berating myself for missed opportunities (probably biggest was turning town a job at FB in 2007) I try to also think of the right gambles I've avoided: turned town early positions at 2 failed search engines, turned down job at Yahoo in 2005, etc...

I find those smart choices don't come to mind as easily as the missed big opportunity choices, so I have to work to keep them in mind too.

trhway• 11 years ago

At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me.

while it feels somewhat paradoxical, reinvention of the wheel has been an extremely efficient way to move the industry forward. Probably because it is an effective way to subterfuge the incumbents, and incumbents are the most significant obstacle on the way forward.

InclinedPlane3• 11 years ago

One thing that took me the longest to figure out was the value of half-assed work. It's actually possible to build things of value with enough half-assed work. I think that's one of the ideas behind the "worse is better" philosophy. Sure, it will take orders of magnitude more man-hours, and sure the end-result won't be nearly as elegant and perhaps not as robust as if something else created by a super talented team. But not everything needs to be created by "rockstars", sometimes you just need stuff that works well enough after a sufficient application of development effort.

holri• 11 years ago

Maybe, but that is not what makes a good engineer happy. And if happiness is the goal of live instead of richness in money "worse is better" is the wrong philosophy.

8ig8• 11 years ago

Great comment and awesome HN bio. Instantly made me feel good after a tough stretch. Thanks.

A 58 year old hacker. 5 failed start ups, now work for a really really big company. eh, oh well.

jonathanjaeger• 11 years ago

The Google and AirBnB references seem on point, but were people skeptical of Facebook being a good idea? Sure there were naysayers who thought Facebook couldn't beat MySpace or break out of the college campuses, but people did love Facebook pretty early on and weren't hating on the product (it was "cool").

seiji3• 11 years ago

The 0th version of facebook was literally "illegal stalking as a service." Outgrowth from that, and from ignoring the "we're accessing your systems illegally and you can't stop us" part, grew the horrible monster choking the Internet today.

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

Hah, the first time I met Bill Gates was at Percomp '78 in Long Beach California. This was a pretty small personal computer conference, but Microsoft was there pushing Altair BASIC. I had a Digital Group Z80 system (which I considered to be waaaaay superior to the Altair in the way that only a male high school student can project.) Bill was selling BASIC for $399, I had paid $900 for my entire system (as a kit). He offered to let me work for him and port it to the DG system, I declined. After all this guy was going nowhere, who in their right mind would pay more than half the price of their computer for BASIC right?

Looking back on that I cannot see any way in which I would have concluded differently, given the information I had available, but that experience has since given me insight to never dismiss an idea simply. I like to have solid reasoning behind my mistakes :-)

veb3• 11 years ago

Shows that he believed in what he was doing, and kept at it no matter what. Sounds like he got dismissed by a LOT of people seemingly (from reading posts like yours, and other articles over the years). Pretty good effort I'd say!

All I could think of after reading your post was: ouch!

r00fus• 11 years ago

Not to detract from his success, it also may have helped that he was financially independent (had a big safety net) having come from a wealthy family.

Things are different if you're worried about putting food on the table a couple of months from now.

marktangotango2• 11 years ago

The missing element here is: there were A LOT of small companies pushing microcomputer hardware and software products in the late 70's, Gates and Microsoft were pretty much indistinguishable from the field.

Anecdota: My Father used to subscribe to the Wall Street journal during this time, and him and I observed the whole thing play out. There no indication, none what so ever that Microsoft would win out the way they did. It was all really remarkable.

kabdib• 11 years ago

Fellow DG owner! Cool. I soldered my first computer together out of one of their kits, in 1977-78. I learned a hell of a lot building that thing.

I still have mine. Some day I'll get it running again (restoring the capacitive keyboard is pretty hairy, I understand).

Can you imagine what it was like to be the only kid in 11th grade (high school) who had a computer?

DG had a couple of pretty good BASIC implementations (MAXI-BASIC and Business-BASIC). They were not hurting there.

Fuzzwah• 11 years ago

Its a fun thought experiment, but I think it falls down when you start to consider how many "right bets" Microsoft, Apple and Google made. The other examples are no where near as mature and, to me, are still working on their initial idea.

The 3 I mentioned I think much of their success comes from implementing their first ideas very well and attracting the excellent talent which allowed them to pivot or broaden when other things came along.

Of course that then lands you back on another familiar YC idea of investing in teams rather than ideas.

zerop• 11 years ago

"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

xdjfjm• 11 years ago

in a way self-proved in context. Thank you.

nartz• 11 years ago

How does framing the question this way lead to deeper thinking or rather, yield different answers, than the typical questions of 'whats the bigger picture' or 'whats the company vision' ?

seiji3• 11 years ago

Reasoning based on concrete examples is easier to convey to other human meat brains for understanding and retention. If you start off with "big picture" or "vision" you're already into meaningless buzzword territory, and any discussion quickly derails practical advice/progress/suggestions.

Examples first, details later.

The Altair->Microsoft example also emphasizes the minimum condition necessary. What seems small but could be big (given the proper market growth and a mother who's also an IBM executive to get you free connections+business)?

Also see this great example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082844

hyperliner• 11 years ago

Because the question worded that way is more specific. I asked myself the same question you ask and my answer was that the question "what is the company's vision?" or anything that has the words "vision" or "mission" immediately gets eyes rolling.

segmondy• 11 years ago

I have to strongly disagree with this article. Altair BASIC was not lame for it's time. It was GREAT! There was no OS, there were barely any assemblers, you would have to toggle switches to binary representation to enter code in home brew computer.

Without BASIC, You do have to first of all learn assembly programming, learn to assemble it by hand and translate to hex/binary then flip it in. BASIC was amazing for the time, anyone could and can program in BASIC.

Google was not lame for the time, search engines sucked, no one saw/used google and said why? The first time we all used google we were hooked, we didn't have to AND OR NOT our results, it found meaningful results from the get go.

Now Facebook we could argue that about if it would take off, you might say, why? There's already myspace. But I don't know that the Microsoft BASIC or google search was lame in any way shape or form. If we all folks did was hear about the idea, then yes, they would easily be brushed off, but after implementation, it was a no brainer. Kinda like Tesla, all electric cars have really sucked until Tesla showed you could make electric cars stylish, fun to drive and with range.

nostrademons3• 11 years ago

PCs were lame for their time. They cost a couple thousand dollars, there was no software for them, and you really couldn't do much with them.

Search was lame for its time. You couldn't actually find anything, that's why we all had to use portals and directories instead.

Social networking online was lame for its time. What are you, some kind of nerd who doesn't have any friends?

I think the meta-lesson here is that you don't want your product to be lame. You want your product to be exceptional, given what's already out there. You want your market to be lame, but very fast-growing, such that in a couple years people won't think it's so lame anymore.

rwmj2• 11 years ago

PCs had a huge ecosystem of software, certainly after a year or two.

Google search was awesome. Even Altavista was awesome back at the beginning before they let their search results become polluted by spam.

S_A_P• 11 years ago

I was in college when google first launched. I remember distinctly at the time AltaVista was the best search engine, but I still rarely got relevant pages from searches. I dont think that in the early days I remembered getting much better results from Google, but eventually it was pretty clear cut for me. I do remember in around 2004-2005 some folks I worked with were thinking of starting a "new" search engine, and that it would far surpass Google. I can say I thought that was a pretty lame idea. Of course to a large degree I think that Uber and AirBnb are a bad idea, but you cant argue with valuations....

veb3• 11 years ago

For the group I ran around with it was how easy and uncluttered Google was back then that made us like and switch to it.

I wish it were still the case.

vram223• 11 years ago

I was in college when google first launched.

I was working in a company at the time. Happened to be one of the early people there to know about Google. Tried it out. A few days later told a friend, who was sitting at the desk next to me, about it. He tried it with a search; results came back in 0.x seconds (even in those days, 1997 or so), then muttered: "That's fast."

Tloewald2• 11 years ago

Setting aside Facebook -- Apple, Microsoft, and Google were all technically impressive early on -- it's as a business that they were kind of pathetic. It's easy to think of similarly technically impressive products that never turned into megacorporations -- e.g. UCSD Pascal did not create a software empire.

acqq3• 11 years ago

UCSD Pascal was very slow compared to the (later) Turbo Pascal. It was the "Java before Java" always interpreting the bytecode.

ganeumann2• 11 years ago

They weren't lame products, they were lame companies.

Yeah, Google had a better way to search. But it was obvious that Google, without any viable revenue model (they planned to lease their tech to other search engines) could never compete with the might Yahoo! or Excite.

Likewise the Altair. Sure it was a great personal computer, but who wanted a personal computer? What would you do with it? (Remember that some of the first Apple Computer commercials showed the Apple ][ being used to store recipes...What do you do at home? You cook. What would you do with a PC? Um, use it to help cook?)

I don't think PG is saying anything especially novel in this post. It's the obvious next step from the now-cliche "The best companies start out looking like toys" to "how do I distinguish between the companies that really are toys and the ones that can get big?" The answer is to imagine a way in which they could become big. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but at least you can weed out the ones that can't.

blazespin• 11 years ago

The answer is to look at the team, not to look at the idea.

ph0rque• 11 years ago

I gotta agree with you about Google; if anything, it was too good to be true. My boss and I discussed it, and he wrote it up in a blog post: https://medium.com/@snootymonkey/paul-graham-is-wrong-411fe0...

nostrademons3• 11 years ago

It's interesting for me to look at your boss's "Good ideas" circle, because for me, Amazon was an obviously bad idea, Uber is still a bad idea, and I thought DropBox was a good idea but when I look at their initial Show HN a good number of other people did not.

I think the problem we all suffer from is that we all have a very limited perspective. Things that we think are bad ideas - because we don't have an immediate need for them, or because we don't understand them - may be an obvious good idea for someone sitting somewhere else. And the trick to picking good startups is to get out of that personal bubble, and understand what is it about the users of that startup that differs from us, and whether that characteristic is going to be shared by more people in the future.

acqq3• 11 years ago

Yes, Altair BASIC was definitely great. If I understand correctly, Microsoft (at that time, BillG and Paul Allen) were the first that managed to pack the whole thing in 4 KB for the 8080 processor.

Google was also great: before them the best search engine was AltaVista where I often had to load a a few tens of pages in order to find the link relevant for me, the one that Google returned typically at the first page. Other engines were even worse, as in not even indexing most of the sites on the internet.

turbostyler• 11 years ago

How many times can he make this same blog post with different wording?

Alex3917• 11 years ago

My own side project sounds so comically bad that I don't even bother describing it to folks anymore. Usually when they ask why anyone would use it, I just pretend to be surprised and say, "Oh, I guess we never thought about that." Multiples times people have gotten so angry by how bad they think the idea is that they've actually started visibly shaking, which is a lot of fun in public at meetups or whatever.

The good thing though is that it keeps us totally focused on building our MVP.

I think part of the issue is that the most successful startups aren't successful because of new hardware or software, but because of the new social practices they enable. And while Apple releasing a new iPhone every year has gotten people really good at evaluating new hardware and software, most people don't have the same level of proficiency at evaluating novel forms of social interaction. (Even though it's totally learnable.)

bglazer• 11 years ago

Well you can't just dangle that out there and then not actually describe your idea!

mixmax• 11 years ago

I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in the statement that lame ideas turn out to be visionary.

Just because many successful companies are built on ideas that at first seemed ridiculous doesn't mean that ideas that seem ridiculous will be smash hits. Actually, most ideas that seem ridiculous are ridiculous.

If, however, a new market, technology or cultural bend turns up, an idea that exploits it might seem ridiculous because it breaks with social norm or accepted technological limitations but actually be viable. When Tesla started building electric cars they were ridiculed because few people understood that both the technology and the social acceptance was now at a point that made it possible. Had they started ten years prior the idea would probably have been ridiculous.

The trick is to be able to see the difference between the snakeoil salesmen, mad hatters and crazy inventors and the true visionaries. What makes this really difficult is that noone, including the founders, knows whether they're one or the other. There's a lot of luck and timing involved.

I'd also wager that the reason that mindblowingly successful companies often start out as seemingly ridiculous ideas is that if they don't have any competition in a niche that they can exploit. Microsoft, for example, were the first to sell software. IBM laughed them out of the room because software was just something that came with the hardware. The idea that you could sell software seemed as crazy as selling sand in Sahara. But because of a technological and cultural shift it was a good idea, and because it seemed ridiculous to "real" companies they had the market to themselves for the first vital years. Had they not been so lucky (or smart) with their timing noone would know who Bill Gates is.

I think you might be able to conclude the following:

"If you want merely to be well-off start a company that isn't based on a ridiculous idea. If you want a small chance of changing the world start a company based on a ridiculous idea"

untog• 11 years ago

Yep. Huge survivor bias both in the article and the comments here. Plenty of people talking about the time they turned down a job with early MS and came to regret it. We need some stories of the people that took a risk and failed miserably, because that's the far more common occurrence.

bjt• 11 years ago

I think the article more useful to VCs than to founders.

Good VCs worry about being pitched on the next Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Google and passing on it because of their own prejudices or lack of vision. I see the article as an effort to consciously counter those prejudices.

But VCs have the luxury of being able to invest in a lot of companies. When you have that luxury, you can afford to say "let's let a few lame ideas in because they could grow huge".

You're right that potential founders don't have that luxury. Sinking 5-10 years of your life into a lame idea is overwhelmingly likely to have little payoff for the founder.

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0

mgkimsal• 11 years ago

"let's let a few lame ideas in because they could grow huge"."

Which seems to be the strategy used by most VCs anyway. The primary difference is that may not (at the time) see some of those companies/ideas as 'lame' themselves. But "invest in a large number because X will fail and we need one homerun" seems to be the prevailing MO.

joncalhoun• 11 years ago

I don't think the takeaway here was meant to be "lame ideas turn out to be visionary."

If anything, I would say the takeaway is that many ideas that seem lame are dismissed without truly understanding their potential, and that PG has made it a point to spend more time exploring their potential before deciding they are indeed lame.

pi-squared• 11 years ago

Unusually short, and I feel very biased essay with examples from 3 big(est) companies out of hundreds of thousands (more?). #NotConvinced

moron4hire• 11 years ago

But how do we account for the perennial bad ideas? The 15th time we get pitched "stock market for small businesses" or "social network for coupons"?

Are these good ideas that are just too boring to have attracted a good team yet? I've heard these ideas going back and forth for 10 years now. After 10 years, nobody has gotten it right? Or are they lazy ideas that appeal to get-rich-quickers who think they can play the startup game? What is it?

I understand the value of "don't make fun", and it's something I really struggle with in my own life. I've (unfortunately) been on both sides of that exchange, and frequently feel bad about my involvement in it. It's a weird world we live in where you can't just keep your mouth shut sometimes. It's probably a sign of internet addiction. I digress.

But I also have to consider things from the standpoint of someone who is being pitched by non-technical founders on these ideas. "It might be a good idea" isn't enough.

VLM2• 11 years ago

Companies can fail because of bad idea, but also finance/capitalization, personal issues, bad execution...

Want a huge fight? Assign the dreaded smart watch to one of those reasons for past failure and likely near future. Or "the smart house". Or "voice control" or alternative UIs in general.

If you can convince a couple people the only reason the cuecat failed was their capitalization structure, then the world is doomed to a flood of plastic cat barcode readers and barcodes all over legacy media. Not all the different from QR codes (aren't they officially dead now?)

VLM2• 11 years ago

Youngsters are notorious for thinking history began when they got involved. See also, sex, drugs, music, dance...

Anyway I am sad to report that PDP8s and Decmates were widely available (if you had friends in the right places, surplus, repaired scrap, etc) but DEC insanely wanted to charge $3000 or whatever for the OS8 license. I think even Fortran and basic were separately licensed and billed products. It was nuts. You could get an old -8 for free, more or less, (back then, now they sell for thousands on ebay) but legal software was insanely priced. Microsoft disrupted the market at a mere $300. That's what made them interesting right from the start, the dinosaurs of the industry didn't understand the imploding ratios of hardware cost to software cost. Sure the hardware is dropping in price so something that cost a corporate buyer $10K in '63 might only cost $1K in '73 but its not like software was getting even on dollar cheaper so if legacy corp buyers will pay $3K per seat for OS-8 I guess we'll keep right on charging $3K till they go away or we go away. Well guess how that turned out?

The above is based on my Dad's experiences although I was a kid watching watching it all unfold at that time.

pekk2• 11 years ago

As long as that realization is tempered with this one:

"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

bztzt• 11 years ago

what, are you saying Bozo the Clown wasn't a success? :)

pekk2• 11 years ago

Sometimes something is laughed at not because it is out-of-the-box genius which will do well defying all expectations, but because it is actually ridiculous and will fail.