<story><title>Paul Graham on trends for the future</title><url>http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/08/paul-graham-on-trends-for-the-future.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hasenj</author><text>Linux may never be a factor on the desktop, but I think Ubuntu has a good chance.&lt;p&gt;Wait. Isn&apos;t Ubuntu just a Linux distro? Well, that depends on how you look at it.&lt;p&gt;Is FreeBSD a factor on the desktop? OS X is based on FreeBSD, but no one thinks of FreeBSD as &quot;a competitor to windows&quot;, or &quot;a user friendly OS&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Of course, Ubuntu to Linux is &lt;i&gt;not really&lt;/i&gt; like OS X is to FreeBSD. Ubuntu didn&apos;t invent a new desktop, it&apos;s based on Debian and it uses GNOME (or Xfce or KDE). But there&apos;s still a point to make here.&lt;p&gt;While the open source community as a whole might fail at designing a great desktop experience, this limitation doesn&apos;t necessarily apply to Ubuntu. The design efforts there are lead by Canonical, and it&apos;s not horribly fragmented. It has so far produced some pretty decent results. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD&lt;/a&gt; as examples.&lt;p&gt;The desktop as a whole is not quite there yet, but it does stand a good chance, and it&apos;s already making a lot of strides.</text></comment>
<story><title>Paul Graham on trends for the future</title><url>http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/08/paul-graham-on-trends-for-the-future.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>I took the liberty of taking notes.  Apologies in advance if my impressions did not capture what PG was trying to say -- I&apos;m summarizing, not stenographing.&lt;p&gt;1)  Innovation&lt;p&gt;We&apos;ve still got it, including making things that are not just ways to waste time on the Internet.  Evidence: sci-fi writers dramatically underestimate progress in our industry.&lt;p&gt;2)  Biotech&lt;p&gt;Sexy like cleantech, but doesn&apos;t require government subsidies to make money.  Also has competitive moat, because biotech is hard.  (Don&apos;t worry, software still worthwhile, too).&lt;p&gt;3)  Efficient markets&lt;p&gt;Free flow of information creates efficient markets where not possible before.  Many of our startups do this, such as AirBnB, an efficient market in lodging.  YC = &quot;mass production techniques, applied to VC&quot;&lt;p&gt;4)  Measurement&lt;p&gt;&quot;You make what you measure.&quot;  Put a paper graph on the wall plotting your favorite metric.  You&apos;ll optimize for it, celebrate improvements, and shoot yourself in the foot if you picked the wrong metric.  Metrics show social customs are obsolete (like, e.g., display ads).&lt;p&gt;5)  The United States&lt;p&gt;PG was born in England, is not &quot;wild, jingoistic patriot&quot;, but still thinks reports of US&apos;s impending obsolescence are greatly exaggerated.  The only thing that kills empires is when people can&apos;t make money by building stuff.  Three ways this can happen:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  a)  Bandits steal the money.  (NYC)

  b)  Your government steals the money.  (&quot;The England that I escaped from.&quot;)

  c)  Other countries steal the money.  (The Netherlands.)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Leading candidate for toppling US is China.  PG seems skeptical.&lt;p&gt;6)  Silicon Valley&lt;p&gt;Budget crisis in California is two sets of idiots playing chicken.  You don&apos;t have to start in Valley, but it really, really helps.&lt;p&gt;7)  Small companies&lt;p&gt;World is &quot;higher resolution&quot;: stuff gets done but it doesn&apos;t require industrial empires anymore.  Networked small organizations are more efficient.  Economies of scale paper over all the other sins of large corporations, but nimbleness of small companies means little guys win.&lt;p&gt;8)  Economic inequality&lt;p&gt;A network of small companies plus money not getting stolen will produce massive economic inequality.  (Patrick notes: PG&apos;s essay on wealth creation is my favorite of all he has ever written.  He has a convincing take on why massive economic inequality is a good thing, and it isn&apos;t based on trickle-down economics.)  If your business model bets on increasing economic inequality, good for you.&lt;p&gt;9)  Moore&apos;s Law&lt;p&gt;Computers getting better, but in uneven fashions (e.g. SSD, not &quot;all components improve 2 years&quot;).  Programmers are lazy.  Companies which enable programmers to be lazy (i.e. not change practices or working code to benefit from uneven improvements) and get automagic speed increases win.&lt;p&gt;10)  Things On Screens&lt;p&gt;We spend a lot of time staring at screens.  Wider population spending more time staring at screens.  PG has a suntan from his monitor.&lt;p&gt;11)  Server-based apps&lt;p&gt;(I missed this one.)&lt;p&gt;12)  Super good customer service&lt;p&gt;Customers can switch easily, people are talking together more, so have such good customer service like it seems like a mistake.  Customers can now participate in design of products in virtually real time.&lt;p&gt;13)  Apparently frivolous stuff&lt;p&gt;Our startup founders use Facebook to talk to each other about work, not email.  &quot;Facebook has not found its monetization model yet&quot;, haha.  This sort of adoption shows there is something really at work here.  &quot;It is surprisingly hard to do math that has no practical applications.&quot;&lt;p&gt;PG skipped Twitter.  Can&apos;t get a good name on it, but it turns out Twitter is really useful as a &quot;non-deterministic messaging protocol.&quot;&lt;p&gt;14)  Programming languages&lt;p&gt;There will be a succession of new, popular languages.  Use the next hot language.  You can be the guy who writes the library for such-and-such.  Server-based apps can now be cobbled together from multiple languages.  &quot;Super abstract languages, like the ones people successfully write applications in now, were once called &apos;scripting languages.&apos;&quot;&lt;p&gt;15)  OSS&lt;p&gt;I can&apos;t name a company which did too much OSS.  If no one has gone too far, we&apos;re probably not doing OSS enough yet.&lt;p&gt;16)  Linux will never be a factor on the desktop&lt;p&gt;Limiting edge of OSS is design.  Everyone thinks they are good at design.  Most people are not good at design: look at the contents of their houses.  What this means for the desktop: buy AAPL stock.&lt;p&gt;17)  iPhone&lt;p&gt;iPhone is a big deal, and I&apos;m bummed because Apple are jerks.  There are two problems startups have that aren&apos;t their own faults: immigration and AppStore approvals.  They&apos;re like something out of Kafka.&lt;p&gt;(Sidenote: We&apos;re not giving our startups too little money: they can all afford iPhones.)&lt;p&gt;Android will be crushed under Steve Jobs&apos; heels, because Apple cares about the iPhone like Google cares about search.&lt;p&gt;iPhone (or something similar) will do for laptops what laptops did to desktop.&lt;p&gt;18)  Design&lt;p&gt;Design is why the iPhone wins.  20 years ago, it would have been surprising to say American companies can beat Japanese companies in consumer electronics devices.  Core competency moved from manufacturing to design after people got microprocessors to shoot themselves in the foot with.  Plus, China commoditized manufacturing expertise.&lt;p&gt;19)  Real Time Stuff&lt;p&gt;Web 2.0 doesn&apos;t mean anything.  Real time does.  Google Wave will actually be important, not just somebody&apos;s 20% project.  It is like Google-branded Etherpad, and Etherpad is useful, so Wave will be a gamechanger.  See also Twitter, useful in a way different than Wave.  If you make the convex hull around Twitter/Wave, and see a space which is unoccupied, that is a worthwhile opportunity.&lt;p&gt;20)  VC&lt;p&gt;VC won&apos;t go away because VCs need to give you money.  They can make the terms arbitrarily better to put money in your pockets [Patrick notes: can&apos;t get 2 and 20 if you can&apos;t invest the money].  Great news for you, since [owners] will now have the market leverage.  Expect better valuations and board control.&lt;p&gt;21)  Founders&lt;p&gt;Founders will more and more have the upper hand.  Investors have learned firing the founders is a bad play.  More and more founders will be technical founders.  Programmers can learn to do business: make something people want, charge them money for it.&lt;p&gt;There should be an O&apos;Reilley book for business.  It would be really short.  &quot;Make something people want, charge them money for it.  Advanced: charge more money.&quot;&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Trends Not To Bet On&lt;p&gt;1)  Credentials granted by institutions&lt;p&gt;Admissions officers are terrible.  Look at our applicants: college graduated from (and by implication, admitted to) does not predict success.  Not surprising: colleges admissions are impersonal evaluation of 17 year olds based on criteria which can be successfully gamed for money.  Credentials are an example of an illiquid market.  (Pagerank for people would be nice -- our startup doing it didn&apos;t work out.)&lt;p&gt;2)  Business school&lt;p&gt;B-school is West Point for industrial capitalism.  It trains generals, not footsoldiers.  Market now rewards people who can do stuff.  The kind of people who would be good teachers own their own businesses, became rich, and now have no reason to teach B-school.  Instead, we get folks who cannot do and are forced to teach.&lt;p&gt;3)  Government&lt;p&gt;The people on the bridge changes, but the engine room is the same as always.  There is an increasing disconnect between public and private sector: government and 1960s PG (Proctor &amp;#38; Gamble, not the other PG) fit each other like gloves, and now government does not match startups/software/etc much.  Folks want to work in electronic medical records: they&apos;re going to think bureaucracy is terribly slow.&lt;p&gt;4)  Copyright&lt;p&gt;&quot;Don&apos;t start a music starup unless one of your co-founders is Johnny Cochran.&quot;  Expect a long, bloody fight that the content industry loses.&lt;p&gt;5)  Restricted flow of information&lt;p&gt;Getting more liquid, faster.</text></comment>