Paul Graham on great hackers - Microsoft

Paul Graham on great hackers - Microsoft

I think he's probably right -- Microsoft's success is not reproducible.

Bill Gates saw the enormous potential for customer lock-in that proprietary software provides before anyone else did. Or at least he was the first one to exploit it successfully. I really don't think he just walked into it by luck, although he may have found it suprising how far he could take it.

Looking back it's very unlikely that anyone will be able to exploit that same opportunity again. There are no more big fortunes to be made in proprietary software.

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