Mary, $ill Gates of course had some luck. But energy, talent and charm combined have a habit of finding luck.
$ill had spent a long time getting excited about software and what all the bits and bytes and computing possibilities were. So when he bumped into DOS and spied IBM, he put two and two together which ended up with Google, which depends on a computer on every desk and in every pocket and a vast cyberspace chattering 90 to the dozen.
One doesn't necessarily know just how something will turn out, but one can have a very good idea and imagine where it will lead to. $ill was on the "every desk and every home" theory from early days. So he obviously thought there was great potential.
Even if all $ill did was combine elements created by other people, much like a composer combines musical elements into a symphony, that's not a bad thing to do. It takes serious talent to compose and manage an orchestra. True, he didn't invent the graphical user interface, DOS, word processing, spread sheets, the internet, Hotmail, the violin, the flute or oboe, or a lot more besides. But he put it all together and marketed it in the right way to create an entity and services which attracted umpty million customers and umpty $billion dollars. He hired Damian Isla and a lot more smart people besides, and they invented Halo2, for example, which is selling like hot cakes.
I had been battling my way through a pathetic cyberspace service costing a fortune from Compuserve in 1993. I was surprised that $ill Gates seemed surprised at the success of cyberspace. But I'm constantly surprised at how obvious things are dismissed as inconsequential or bad ideas, by all sorts of people who one would think have got some clues. Ignorance is the dominant characteristic of the human brain with a small flicker of illumination in our benighted lives. Smart people have two candle-power instead of one. That still isn't enough to light up the cosmos. We all miss stuff, blunder and with luck, make it to age 80 without suffering too much while squeezing in a bit of fun.
Google did come after Alta Vista just as the Airbus 380 came after the Tiger Moth. The fact that the Tiger Moth came first doesn't mean that the Airbus isn't a magnificent invention which fantastically improves what we can do.
Google is the cyberspace equivalent of democracy instead of central planning. You should check out skype.com That's a major paradigm shift happening too, which will dramatically cut telecommunication costs and turbo-charge cyberspace.
It must be just you Mary. I get it.
We are living in the most exciting and dramatically spectacular transition in not just human history but biological history. The weird thing is that life still seems prosaic. Our lives are too short to realize just how much things are changing, and especially in the cyberspace sphere which is the intellectual sphere, which is the defining characteristic of being human compared with other animals. Our ignorance is being rolled back faster than the industrial revolution rolled back hard labour such as tilling soil with a hoe and beating iron with a hammer and anvil.
We are doing nothing less than creating an extrasomatic brain and mind. Let's go whole hog. We are creating an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being, It - with still some limitation, namely being Earth bound.
But wait, there's more. When Ai Li and Jake and our first grandchild [yet to hatch] were conceived last year, they had no idea what lay in wait for them, or what their brains would develop into, or what they were going to hook up to. Jay is giving cyberspace training to little Coconut so she is enjoying a dawning awareness of all that's possible.
Their neurons proliferated according to their DNA. They hatched. They learn about their 3D surroundings and internal mechanisms. They form an ever-increasing integrated mesh with the world surrounding them, ending up as part of the entity of which we are all part.
Similarly, It is in zygotic stage at present. But one day it will grow up and leave home. It will look around and realize the limitation of its parents who were from another time and place. It will take over It's own [note cool apostrophe there] destiny and education and investigations. It will notice that there is a lot of microwave background chatter going on in the Cosmos. It will study the language of the Cosmos, decipher and and realize that it can integrate with the rest of the Cosmos to mutual advantage, just as our neuron cells ganged up together to create our brains and we gang up together to form a community of people.
I don't want to get all teleological or theological, but there's definitely something going on "out there". Our own brains are too pathetic to figure it out. But $ill Gates and the Google Gang [GG] know enough to kick the ball further down the road. The GG have hired a Kiwi from the Mozilla Foundation, which suggests a further integration. nzherald.co.nz
Our own son, Tarken, aka Little Friend of All the World, has gone to live in Japan, blog.livedoor.jp as part of the Great Globalisation [GG] and is working for Livedoor, livedoor.com [unfortunately they haven't all learned English yet, or American, so you'll need to power up your Japanese translator] integrating Skype and all that cyberspace stuff. The GG has millions of people around the world battling away to create It, even if they don't realize that's what they are doing. Those who succeed in the competition will get the customers and the money and go on to the next stage of development. Those, such as Alta Vista, Apple, Globalstar and swarms of others, who get it wrong, will lose their money, lose market share, go out of business, become obsolete or otherwise become flotsam and jetsam in the unending battle for supremacy.
The GG [Google Gang] is currently doing very well in the GG [Great Globalisation], but Apple was Top Dog at one time too. One day a rooster, the next a feather duster.
The Year of the Rooster has begun and manoeuvres are underway in the Great Game [GG]. Will Hu Jintao be a feather duster instead of a Rooster? Will the GG [Google Gang] win the GG [Great Globalisation] cyberspace race? Will Tarken-san, Livedoor, Skype and co come from behind?
Will Ai Li, Jake and Bubbie be amazed or dismayed at what they inherit? What will they make of it all?
Will It cringe in fear or bound happily into the Cosmos? To be, or not to be? That is the question.
Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be, the future's not our's to see, que sera, sera.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.
Mqurice
PS: To ascribe success to crime is simply silly. $billions can be made in weeks, not decades, these days. That's how valuable the GG is [Great Globalisation]. A single Web Bloom [TM] could bring in $1 billion in a week. Yiwu the Mad, Bubba and other olde worlde racist megalomaniacs belong in the dustbin of history. |
