> Their [n.b Apple's] victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops So nearly all of the (relatively) very few people that are funded by YC have Apple and that's proof of Apple's complete victory over a dead MS. In a year when MS was still on an upward trend, growing by 20% market cap to become double that o…
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 ch…
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?