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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum

GLD 386.44

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Dec 5 4:00 PM EST

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To: Gib Bogle who wrote (4064)	2/7/2006 1:57:44 PM
From: Maurice Winn	of 218250

Gib, in 1976 [not long after battling Fortran IV], I met a programmer in Canada and I made a similar mistake to the IBM idea of there being only a certain number of computers needed in the world. I wondered whether it wouldn't be too many years before all the needed programmes were written and maybe he'd be out of a job. I didn't mean that the computers would take over the programming, I meant that all the needed programmes would be finished. He explained that that was not likely to happen. He was right, in a big way. In 1979 I was telling BP that everything that didn't need to be carried in a wheelbarrow should be on a computer and spent the next decade trying to get that to happen [as an adjunct to my actual jobs]. The boss of BP Belgium was being move to run the computer department of BP [worldwide] and wanted me to accept a transfer to his division [we were in Belgium which is how I knew him] to really kick it along [he must have agreed with my rants about computers, what they could do etc]. It was tempting, but we had 4 children who were getting older and it was time to head back to base [Auckland]. It would have been fun to be there for the cyberspace revolution. My 1979 theory was that the computer world was upside down. The hardware was hideously expensive, software quite expensive and user value was considered trivial. My argument was that it would switch over time and users would be most valuable, and hardware would be given away with a software purchase. In Japan, Yahoo! boxes were given out at train stations. Now, cyberphones are given away with agreement to purchase a service provider contract. Google is providing everything free, with the user so valuable that the advertizers bid to be put in front of the user. Computers vastly more powerful than 1979 versions are free with a service plan. So is the software, though there is still plenty to buy, via BREW for example. Mqurice

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