Apple is taking over the world. Microsoft has not realized how bad things are going to get for them. They think it’s bad now, just wait,” he said, adding that “It’s always frightening when one powerful group owns all of the clients. Maybe it won’t be as frightening under Tim Cook.
If the iPad had come first, we wouldn’t think of the iPhone as a phone; we’d think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.
- Paul Graham, Tablets
Graham makes the case that we should be calling this generation of devices — always on, touch screens, new notions of UX — tablets, not mobile devices, or palmtops, or whatever.
It seems like the type that matters most is imagination. It’s not so important to be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with surprising new ideas. In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already be doing them. So you need the kind of intelligence that produces ideas with just the right level of craziness.
The fact that super-angels invest other people’s money makes them doubly alarming to VCs. They don’t just compete for startups; they also compete for investors. What super-angels really are is a new form of fast-moving, lightweight VC fund. And those of us in the technology world know what usually happens when something comes along that can be described in terms like that. Usually it’s the replacement.
The Acceleration of Addictiveness, Paul Graham
Equates our growing fascination with technology — specifically the internet — to addictions like alcoholism, tobacco use, and cocaine abuse.
It’s a facile but overused metaphor, that fails when actually examined. This is just the war on flow again.
