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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think he said Microsoft "deserved" to win. He said he regretted that they didn't. But he was totally accountable for that loss.

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“That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.” Interpret as you see fit. It comes off to me as if it was stated that the natural order meant it was deserved due to inherit superiority.

You guys are reading way too much into this. Its just an objectively true observation - not a declaration of "superiority". An OS company should win in the OS space.

I read that as more like "We're Microsoft, they're "Google"[Small fry]." Given the stature of the company, and the combined brain power of the staff it was their battle to lose

Especially given that prior to Android, Google was pretty much just a web company whereas Microsoft had dominated the OS market pretty much the length of the entire personal computer industry. It WAS a natural thing for MS to win.

I think that's a very suspect use of "natural". Of course, many uses of "natural" are suspect, in that people smuggle all sorts of their personal prejudices into it. E.g., the way a number the Civil War declarations of secession mentioned how it was natural that whites should rule over blacks. Or the way today that religious conservatives think that the natural order is the dominance of men over women, and that gay people are unnatural.

Even in this case though, I don't think it means anything more than "we were so used to using our monopoly power to steamroll everybody that we expected to keep on doing that". Microsoft only ever dominated the personal desktop computer OS market. They were a minority player in server OSes their whole existence, losing first to big iron and later to Linux. The handheld market went from being owned by companies like Palm to Apple and Google dominating. I know less about the embedded market, but Microsoft has been trying to own that for 20 years, and I don't think they've ever had a dominant position. I think even their desktop OS dominance was less to do with Windows being an amazing operating system and more to do with it being the thing that ran Word, Excel, and other popular business software.

So I think tsunamifury is right. Gates got so comfortable winning he saw it as "natural", rather than a combination of luck and their willingness to be an aggressive monopolist in a newfangled industry and during a period where antitrust enforcement was falling out of vogue.

Or the way that modern progressives tend to skew everything towards race and class when a conversation is not even remotely about that, it seems like a natural thing for them.

It might be natural for the NY Yankees to win a world series. Some people complain about it when it happens. Some people don't like the Yankees. But they are pretty good at baseball. When Microsoft lost the mobile market, it was an unfortunate thing for them.

Bill Gates doing his postmortem relent on losing that market is not a big deal. It's just what you do when you take a loss.

You ever lost at anything you've strived for? It's hard not to think about "what if"? That's very human.

I picked those examples because they're very prominent uses of the naturalistic fallacy. The reason that obvious examples in America are about things like race and class is that America was founded by a bunch of rich white dudes who wrote their systemic advantages into law, enforced them violently, and then tried to pretend it was just the natural order. If you don't like that, take it up with them. Were we in England, I could have used similar examples from the aristocracy and royalty, who thought their dominance was just as natural, but everybody else (we colonists included) thought were inbred, chinless goofs.

I agree it's "natural" (by which I mean common) for people with systemic advantages to pretend that it is "natural" (by which they mean expected and correct) that they continue to receive those advantages whatever their actual merit. It's natural, but also revealing of the individual in question. Because not everybody does that. Just sticking with tech titans, we have Steve Jobs" and "stay hungry, stay foolish". And Andy Grove's, "only the paranoid survive".

I also think "not a big deal" is thoroughly wrong. Had Microsoft not gotten fat and arrogant on monopoly rents, they might have done a good enough job making OSes that they wouldn't now be struggling to stay relevant.

I think those who are defending Gates here naively believe they are of the same natural position, instead of realizing they are so far down they are more realistically his prey.

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