From: Sean Roach <roach_s@alph.swosu.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 11:41:24 +0800
To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: [LONG} Funding Cypherpunks Projects
Message-ID: <199709100321.XAA10545@www.video-collage.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 01:54 PM 9/7/97 -0400, Robert Hettinga wrote:

>At 3:35 pm -0400 on 9/3/97, Tim May wrote:
...
>Certainly a bass-ackward way to do it. Unfortunately, that's the way Disney
>did it, or L.B. Mayer did it,  or Gates, or Edison, or Parekh did it. They
>had a picture in their head of the way the world worked, or should work,
>they did things, as cheaply as possible, which should work in that picture,
>and they were right. They still invested something, is my point, whether it
>was their money or their time, or their inspiration.
...
Gates?  The closest he had to a grand vision is being able to predict the
financial gain behind programming computers.  That in my opinion was
marketing savvy, not a grand vision, for lack of a readily available substitute.
You know about traf-o-data.  This was a far cry from what he now has.
He rode the wave by changing with the times, hedging his bets, being in the
right place at the right time, etc.
That, however is about all I know as the book he wrote was a little too
basic alone the lines of my interests for my tastes and I had to put it down
for more enjoyable activities like staring at the wall.
When I can next stomache reading more kindergarten level computer analogies,
I'll finish reading his book.
...

>> Asking Jim Clarke or Bill Gates to opine on his strategies for success is
>> not quite as pointless, but is not real useful either. Ask also Manny
>> Fernandez about Gavilan Computer. Or ask the financiers of Ovation,
>> Processor Technology, Mad Computers, Symbolics, Thinking Machines, Trilogy,
>> or a hundred other examples of companies that burned through a billion
>> dollars of hard-earned investor money.
...
Interesting note.  I heard that the guy that started Thinking Machines is
now an imagineer at one of the evil empires.  Who would have thought that
one of the guys responsible for parallel computing development would now be
building theme park rides.

BTW.  I love this little game of artistic response.  It actually reads like
a conversation and makes it a whole lot easier to take the origional post
out of context.  Remind me to use line numbers when I respond to one of your
posts with a long message.  Or at least number the paragraphs.  Not that it
would matter.