Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…For me, the key thing here is to remember that the product-market fit and power questions are different questions. One doesn't necessarily answer the other, in fact, often doesn't. When you have a business model that gets you to product-market fit, there may be a power opportunity embedded in that and there may not be. Those are two very different problems. One is the problem of capitalizing on an inherent potential for power, and the other is trying to figure out what are you going to do that will get you power in something that currently doesn't have it. The second is a very hard problem. It's a second invent that's every bit as hard as the product-market fit invent. Think of Steve Jobs trying to figure out where to take Apple when the PC business turned out to not have any power. Here's the most brilliant innovator of our generation and yet he couldn't solve the problem and he ended up losing his job. It's actually worth drilling in on that, Steve Jobs came in for a minute. Of course, you tempt me with the Apple history catnip. I have to jump on it. It's interesting that he tried power computing—I don't know if the macOS running on other hardware devices was an initiative that started while Steve was still there. But it's interesting how obsessed Steve was with, we control the whole stack. We're the software and the hardware, our software only runs on our hardware, and our hardware can only run our software. With power computing and all these Mac clones that Apple authorized and said, we're going to enable our OS to run on these other PCs, I actually owned one. It was a cheaper Mac. It did not save the company because they had no ability to take the profit dollars that they earned from that and build something defensible with it. It's fascinating that, Hamilton, exactly to your point, they did try things. Also, there was no power opportunity that they or anyone really found to be a very profitable PC manufacturer. Yeah. I think if they hadn't completely flubbed the Mac3, I think they might have ended up in a very attractive power position because they did own the stack and they did own the operating system. They didn't yet own the processor, but they could eventually. If you think of the PC business, the two notes of power were the OS and the CPU. But you needed to have superior scale and get everybody signed up to have that work. The Mac3 was such a complete flub that it made it possible for the IBM PC to just take over the world, basically. Of course, the IBM PC didn't have power either. That ended up being a long-term not that attractive business…

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