I'm not sure what the author's intention was but to me this comes across as 'damning with faint praise'.

Another story worth reading (same blog/author):

A Google Interviewing Story

https://tyma.com/google-interviewing-story/

Paul Tyma - 3 posts in 20 years. A prolific blogger! :) Nice post. I read Cringely's blog for 20+ years. I think Paul hit the nail on the head. I think the problem with Cringely's ventures is he never seemed to have the discipline to hang on long enough to pivot and find product market fit.

I've only learned about them recently from a post about Mineserver. The article was posted to HN on Oct 4, they've passed on Oct 3 but I didn't know this until today.

I'm disturbed.

He messaged me a couple years ago and it matches with this post's description: "While the first half of the email was about the idea, invariably, the 2nd half was about how much money it was going to make."

  Point-to-point supersonic organ delivery

  Dear Derek,

  I'm Bob Cringely, an ancient Silicon Valley pundit. I also run a little
  CubeSat air-launch startup. Competition from SpaceX forced us to cut costs
  so we figured how to make an old French business jet fly Mach 1.6 on the
  fuel to fly Mach 0.8. Now we want to apply this tech to organ delivery.
  100 VTOL supersonic drones could serve the whole US operating from helipad
  to helipad at 1000 mph. Not autonomous, they'll have pilots on the ground.
  It's a $2 billion business with 75 percent margins but only we know how.
  Please pass it on.

The 2004 story made me laugh

Reading this piece, I feel a longing for a friend, but it also makes me think about what true talent really is. In the piece, he mourns his friend, but says that the friend's real talent was being an influencer rather than cooking. Reading some of the stories, it's sad, but sometimes I think that the talent a person has and the talent a person wants to have are different.

But I don't know much about the person named Bob, and yet Bob as he appears in this piece still seems cool to me. We like something because we're good at it, but sometimes we keep living because there's something we absolutely want to try even if we're not good at it. To me, programming seems to be that kind of thing.

I like the idea of slowly downloading content in the background over a dial-up connection, but using it to print out a full magazine seems kind of silly. You'd probably end up paying more for the digital copy plus ink than you would for a print subscription. I remember one of my old printers came with "apps" that would allow you to print out the top news stories from various wire services every day, meaning that the startup idea was similar to a feature cooked up by a printer company to try to get the user to buy more ink.

> I always thought he should start a Youtube channel interviewing Silicon Valley celebrities. I sent him a few emails along those lines, but Bob would mostly just ignore me. He was usually too excited about his new/current startup idea.

He did do a series of video interviews with tech people that got distributed online in the early 2000s. They're a good watch: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22nerdtv%22 . I agree that it's a shame that he didn't keep going with that idea during the rise of Youtube. He wrote a blog post where he basically says that the economics of Youtube didn't allow for the scale and spectacle of content he wanted to put out: https://www.cringely.com/2012/06/28/why-youtube-isnt-future-... . He did try to return to being a TV presenter by making a show about traveling around the US to interview various company founders, but for whatever reason PBS chose to pick up a similar show rather than his. The production company uploaded some clips from the project if anyone's interested: https://boondogglemedia.com/project/startup-america/