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Comment by philk | Hacker News Reader

This is a fine example of why I don't trust pundits. It's near impossible to tell those who are right from those who merely sound like they're right.

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With all due respect I think you miss the point of punditry.

The point of good punditry is not to convince someone you are right and have them follow you blindly. It’s to take an insight that you have and transfer that insight to other people by explaining the thought process that led you to that insight. In doing that a good pundit expects the people who receive their insight to then evaluate it on an on-going basis and those people need to use their own knowledge to judge the original insight’s accuracy.

So it isn’t about having the reader say “that guy is right” as much as it’s giving the reader something to think about.

To use this as an example I think this guy was right when he wrote the piece. He had no way of foreseeing the iPod/iPhone/iPad and their halo effect. But as a reader in 2001 people should have taken this piece with all the negatives it lists and weighed it against Apple’s strengthening product line. Then used all that knowledge to form a new opinion based on it.

Good punditry? Punditry is just listing all of the ways something can fail. That doesn't take much insight.

Insight would tell you how that crazy plan could succeed.

The challenge with punditry is that you don't (never?) know the complete picture, just parts of it. Good ones try and extrapolate from "what the hell are they doing" to "these guys are too smart to be doing this without some other less obvious purpose", but good ones are few and far between.

I think many pundits miss your point of punditry too.

In this case it isn't a matter of the pundit being wrong, it's a matter of everybody being wrong about one thing, and the pundit having a pretty decent insight relative to that error. Everybody thought the Apple Store would be a place to buy computers. The pundit thought that wouldn't work. He was basically right, but we were all wrong about the Apple Store being about selling personal computers. Probably Steve Jobs was wrong about it, too. The pundit doesn't deserve any more blame than anybody else.

The Apple Stores seem to have been doing well even before the October launch of the iPod. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/12/technology/to-cash-in-on-a... from July: "But Apple estimates that the stores will break even by the end of this year.") However, it would also have been difficult to predict that Apple would redesign the computer retail outlet so effectively.

Personally, I view pundit status as largely irrelevant. A valid argument is a valid argument whether it came from a pundit or not.

I tend not to trust anyone unless I've heard both sides of the issue. Of course, some people make evaluating their arguments easier by acknowledging the other side. It's the ones who present their side of the story as the only possible way of viewing things that you have to be careful of. A quick skim of this article convinces me that it falls into the latter category.

> "I tend not to trust anyone unless I've heard both sides of the issue. ... other side..."

Just two?

To me, this is more of an example of how difficult it is to value arguments that sound, or actually are, valid.

People who make really good arguments can certainly gain an advantage over people who can't formulate their thoughts into a convincing assertion, but it doesn't make one viewpoint better than the other. I don't know if there is an alternative to arguments, though.

Your latter point is a tautology. You win arguments by making really good ones and gaining an advantage over those you don't. By the measure of "able to win arguments" the former viewpoint is better than the latter. If you're using other measures to evaluate viewpoints, you shouldn't do so in the framework of arguments.

Regarding this particular argument and how difficult it is to value ones that sound valid: at the time, this argument was quite cogent and I would have agreed with it. The author made a well-researched, well-formulated, convincing argument. He (along with many others, I'm sure) was later proven wrong, but at the time of the argument, he had a convincing case. Nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

Often old articles with predictions that turned out to be horribly wrong come up on here. I think that whether the person turned out to be right or wrong is not very relevant. When you make an argument you are stating your opinion at that time, and so the quality of the argument should be measured in that context. That isn't to say that you can just make wild predictions without risk of losing credibility; again, your prediction can and should be measured at the time you make it, and I think that baseless ones should be critiqued appropriately.

"The author made a well-researched, well-formulated, convincing argument."

The author presented a number of fairly well known facts, but made the mistake made by many writers in treating Apple much like Gateway or another PC vendor. He threw out what sounded like facts when talking about PC Vendors having something like a 10% gross margin, but clearly was way off in assuming that figure could be used to predict Apple's sales requirements for profitability. Even most people vaguely familiar with Apple knew it as a premium brand (generally with higher prices and higher margins). When a writer doesn't know what he's talking about, he can make an argument that seems to have substance by throwing in facts that apply to something else.

Strangely, while the author was aware of problems with Macs sold as commodity items in places like Sears, and he opens quoting Steve Jobs talking about the bad experience of people shopping for computers, he seemed clueless to the notion of stores with good presentation in upscale locations reaching people besides the Mac faithful. So in addition to using PC-vendor margin numbers, he assumes the buyers are only those needing to upgrade from existing Macs.

Not taking into account the stores going after converts shows a serious lack of insight.

From the article:

"What's more, Apple's retail thrust could be one step forward, two steps back in terms of getting Macs in front of customers. Since most Mac fans already know where to buy, ..."

The funny thing is, most of his arguments against success do seem like they'd apply to the Microsoft stores.

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