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In the Wrong Platform section he mentions how the new PayPal CEO wanted to switch the company to Windows and “Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.” That CEO they gave the boot? Elon Musk.

It was probably still a good decision and maybe we wouldn’t have spaceX or Tesla without that change, but still hilarious!

discuss

valuearb|5 years ago

It's probably a bad example. If Musk had won and they used Windows it probably doesn't kill PayPal. Likely either

a) They figure out how to get it to scale well enough to succeed. b) Musk learns he was wrong and they lose only a few cycles.

sethammons|5 years ago

If anyone knows, I’d be interested in more details around the windows thing.

andygcook|5 years ago

IIRC from reading the book PayPal Wars, Elon wanted to switch PayPal over to Windows because he saw it as the future. At the time, PayPal was on Unix. Max Levchin and the other main programmers didn’t want to switch. The disagreement on platform eventually came to a head and Elon was replaced by the board with Peter Thiel.

If you haven’t read PayPal Wars, it’s a great book.

tokipin|5 years ago

The Elon Musk biography has Musk's side of the story in the appendix. Paraphrasing, but basically he saw the tooling for Windows software development (Visual Studio etc) as being more coherent/batteries included/practical, in part because of Microsoft's investments in gaming and needing those tools to work on commercial games, which were stupidly complex even back then. Keep in mind Musk had some experience in the gaming industry. I'm not familiar with Linux, but it was likely rudimentary by comparison at the time.

Another good point he brings up is that you could find a lot of smart engineering talent, who is working on games, by using their tools/language of choice. SpaceX uses a similar tactic on a more subject matter level. People that can understand 3D game programming are probably a great pool of talent for writing rocket software.

QuadrupleA|5 years ago

Last I checked, StackExchange was performing fine on an all-Windows platform.

noneckbeard|5 years ago

Not saying Windows is dead, just that things seemed to work out alright for PayPal.