Some realities
Some realities
- Subject: Some realities
- From: Steve Klingsporn <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 16:44:48 -0600
- It's going to take a while for the US economy in general to get
better. George Bush has severely messed it up.
- Now is a very treacherous time to be alive. The future remains very
uncertain. America is messing with people and forces that it cannot
adequately defend itself against, and our civil liberties are at stake.
A lot of prophecies are coming true. Chips in arms, new world orders,
mandatory vaccinations (smallpox), consolidation of government
agencies, detained indefinitely without rights, military tribunals...
- It's going to take a while for the tech industry to get better. In
excess of 400,000 unemployed tech workers in SF Bay Area alone, +
elsewhere. Some really great people with or without some really
advanced degrees are out of work right now.
- What we saw in the 1990's was a boom that didn't make any sense. It
was hype-based. The Internet has been here for several decades. The
web is only the first of many waves to come on the 'net. HTTP and HTML
(and XML, etc.) are not our saviors. They are backwards, primitive
technologies that will be replaced by parallel technologies in the
future.
- Apple needs to get into the x86 game, or Motorola and IBM need to
make this whole RISC gamble pay off, because the reality of the
situation no matter how you look at it (and Be proved this, as have
others (Linux, etc.)) is that x86 is the platform that is the
performance leader, and x86 is where *most* of the new PC technologies
appear first.
- Apple has stated that it realizes that software innovation is what
is going to bring it through the tough times. It's evident, as their
hardware product releases are fewer and further between (a good call),
and they are starting to do good things in software again. Don't
forget that very little actual software innovation came out of Apple
until recently. There is a lot of room for improvement, and it will be
a while before things are as cool as they can be again. Most of the
great ideas Apple was working on 10-15 years ago haven't materialized,
and some of the best stuff (like the Newton runtime/storage system)
have either died or are still under wraps.
It's going to be tough for a while. What we saw in the past 5 years
was the exception to the rule. It will take new innovations to move
things forward, not just hype, eye-candy, and thinking that our 2% of
the playing field is more important than the other 90%. Economics
prove it isn't.
I strayed from the Apple path after many years because I realized I was
lying to my friends. I could not justify telling them to buy Macs,
even though I liked using the Mac over Windows, because Macs were
prohibitively expensive, Innovation was lacking, the OS was a mess, and
all of Apple's attempts to make a good OS died on the vine. Meanwhile,
Be was there, things technically looked very nice, Linux was catching
on, Java was taking off, and the web was a place you could make insane
amounts of cash for no apparent justifiable reason. Those of us who
were not born in the HTML age realize that we have to get back to
basics, and that there are a lot of promises and problems that have
been well talked-about that are still not addressed 10-15 years later.
Things are really tough right now, but they will get better. I just
got my first stable job after 2 years "floating." Trust me, I've had
plenty of dire thoughts racing through my mind. What's working for me
is staying true to what I enjoy, realizing that things are going to be
tough before they are easier, getting used to living a lesser quality
of life, being willing to walk away and pare down my existence, getting
used to being bored much of the time, facing the realities of the
market, and realizing I may have to do other things to sustain myself.
It sucks, but things are not nearly as bad as they could be.
Steve
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