Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

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What is your experience with predictions, exactly?

I feel confident that WordPress will be more widely used than Medium next year, in three years and in nine years (which is an eternity in tech). Would you bet against that? I don't mean money, but if you feel confident taking the other side, we can both set calendar alerts and check back in one, three and nine years to see who was over-confident and who was appropriately confident in their opinion.

AFIK, no open source ecosystem with WPs level of usage has ever died (and in a sense OSS is unkillable), but it would be fun if you want to take the other side of my prediction. This kind of dynamic is why I blogged every tech stock I bought (after AAPL in 2001). It keeps you honest in your own thinking.

It goes back to No One Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM. ;-)

When I came out of comp sci school in 1978, everyone thought that DEC and Data General had an insurmountable lead and that PCs were toys. Then they thought Macs were toys. Then they thought the web was a toy. I've been to countless tech conferences where the top guy from some "dominant" company told the tale of how dominant they were and two years later they were slinking around in the back of the room, no one wanting to talk to them. I could name names, but just read my blog. Hubris is a terrible thing and tech is filled with it. And your post was totally a product of hubris ;-)

You can call it hubris, but my goal is truth. I don't have any financial or even emotional stake in WP and am just trying to make the best predictions I can. In my experience, you don't hone those skills unless you actually have the nerve to make the predictions and then follow up on them.

Your reasoning on DEC and Data General make sense, but were either of them open source? In a sense, betting against WP is like betting against GCC 30 years ago when all the alternatives were proprietary. Either way, I'm happy to check back in a few years and see if the hubris was my prediction or your armchair psychologist reaction to it (・ω<)

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