>In 1999, Krakoff was behind the first-ever gaming mouse: the Razer Boomslang.
He was 58 when founding a company for gaming peripherals, pretty cool IMO. Always make me feel better to see other accomplish successful and fun things later in life and maybe I am not over the hill in tech in my mid forties, never too late etc.
I sent in some (mostly positive) feedback then, and I got a very thoughtful reply in return including detailing some upcoming plans relating to my mail.
I miss that version of the company.
In contrast, Android is wildly fragmented which blows up the compatibility and testing matrix, and on top of that all device manufacturers have their own quirks in their implementations, and on top of that you have different versions of the OS, the drivers, kernel patches, ... - in short, Android has been, is and will always be a huge mess.
Meanwhile in embedded space, Broadcom can't even be arsed to implement PCI Express according to spec for a product of the scale and importance of the Raspberry Pi[1], and Android users have literally no say in updating their devices because they don't even have root access on them. Assuming someone discovers a bug in the GPU side, the bug has to go from the discoverer to the device manufacturer, from there to the SoC vendor, hope that the SoC vendor is willing and able to fix the bug, then that has to go back to the manufacturer, who has to prepare a firmware update, test and certify that with phone carriers and their bloatware, and then ship the updated firmware. As you can guess from the process, that rarely happens for anything except the flagship devices from Samsung and Google.
Anything outside of the x86, mainframe and Apple world can plainly be summarized as "it's a horrible horrible mess".
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-gpu-success
Games from when the only way to make money from games was to make good games are better games.
I recall reading this paper[0] which really bursted some of the myths/legends regarding age and entrepreneurship. The take is that a high-growth company happens more rarely to very young individuals compared to older ones. And this makes sense: to run a company you need to fail in order to gain the experience and insight into what means success. This is not to say "give up", but that one should expect ups and downs alongside the road (which let's be honest many of us 'youngsters' [<35] don't do this). [0] https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20180582
Its never too late.