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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (2439)	3/31/1999 9:15:00 AM
From: The Street	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13062

Think for yourself-- all answers lay within. How was I being defensive? By not answering your crap?

To: Neocon who wrote (2439)	4/21/1999 10:20:00 PM
From: MeDroogies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13062

Actually, it IS a great idea to reinvent the wheel. If you can reinvent it in a more useful way... The problem with looking at the past is that you can often fall into the same traps that great thinkers fell into. On the other hand (my view) you are better prepared to avoid the pitfalls. I share Street's view on philosophy. I took 6 credits of it in college and found it boring and repetitive. I got A's, but it wasn't compelling. It never really answered questions about how/why people did what they did as they lived their lives. Economics does, however, which is why I was drawn to it. Back to the wheel...if you look at the history of ideas, they tend to progress incrementally, slowly. But it is with revolutionary concepts that great leaps are made - when we break with the past and forge a "new" future. The internet is a perfect example of that. It is a revolutionary new mode of education/media/entertainment/information all balled up into one. What has made many companies unsuccessful on the Web is due to their inability to view it as a somehow different thing, and trying to define it from the standpoint of their own industry. MSFT would easily have been buried by the internet (read Gates' comments leading up to its release of IE - he constantly ridiculed it), because MSFT believes the computer is king. Gates, luckily, was able to buy his way in, and due to the low cost of entry and his monopoly on the desktop, MSFT managed to leverage itself. MSFT will still fail, ultimately, to be an internet company because they still think the box is important. SUN, on the other hand, has always come from the view that "the network IS the computer" and that is why JAVA is blowing (and will continue to) out doors all over the place. They took a standpoint that was different and is now paying off for them. Had they taken the same view as MSFT, they'd be nowhere. ORCL is rapidly salvaging its position in the same way. NSCP failed because they thought software was king. It was, but it was THEIR OWN SOFTWARE that made them irrelevant. They defined themselves improperly. They were, indeed, a fine software company...but they were more a media company and they missed that connection. Still, it took a revolutionary idea (a reinvention of the wheel, essentially) on the part of Andreesen to allow us to do what we're doing now. Software-wise, now, everything is just window-dressing. I'm waiting for the "next big thing"...but this still has 5-10 years to play itself out.