He claims Bill Gates pushed office PCs to drive software demand.
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas basically saying the modern desk job was partly engineered by a software business model. Says Microsoft basically trained the modern office worker: sit at a desk, use a PC, open Word, open Excel, send files, repeat.
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New: Joe Rogan is shocked when Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas explains how Bill Gates tricked all of America into becoming office workers:
SRINIVAS: “Microsoft built this concept of the office worker because they wanted to sell office software.”
ROGAN: “Wow. This type of lifestyle is a very recent thing that we’ve just now accepted as normal.”
SRINIVAS: “It was the mission of Bill Gates to put a PC on every desk and get people glued to them.”
ROGAN: “What a freaking wizard. Boy did they nail that one.”
SRINIVAS: “It wasn’t about making computing beautiful like the vision Steve Jobs had.
All they cared about was selling computers so they could sell software. When you sell more software that’s when you become rich.”
ROGAN: “They’re so sneaky man.”
SRINIVAS: “That’s why we all got trained into using Microsoft Word and Excel.
Once you learned that then you could work for a company that has a PC on their desk who’s paying Microsoft money to use software.”
@_markfenner I use regularly. 🙂
@rohanpaul_ai Who is still using perplexity?
@rohanpaul_ai the software didn’t just support the work. it became the shape of the work.
@Goeun_6121 Yep
@rohanpaul_ai The weird part is Excel became both calculator and database for whole companies.
AI may break the desk job by killing the file handoff loop first.
@rohanpaul_ai You prefer it over Hermes, Claude, Devin, and codex 🤔
@rohanpaul_ai The next software shift may reverse that. Less “operate the tools” and more “direct the outcome.”
@rohanpaul_ai The file handoff loop is the real villain here. Word/Excel did not just digitize work; they made every process pretend to be a document.
Agents get useful when they break that loop without turning the audit trail into confetti. What replaces the file as the unit of work?
@paularambles wonder how joe feels being the most informed in the room