In the '80s we had these dreadful things called dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS), with little 8-bit 1 MHz processors wheezing away at the end of a single 300 or 1200 (!!!) baud modem, so we could avoid the hard realities of f2f. One such, in the hills above Santa Cruz, was Stuart II (history notes here), frequented by myself and others who have gone on to better (or at least different) things around the Valley and blogosphere.

One of my self-appointed tasks in that past was to tap members for the Old Farts' Club of the BBS. The only requirement was to put up a post with a logical equivalent to 'well, I remember when...' and any current member could issue a beautiful ASCII certificate of induction. By self-reference, I am now member #1 of this reincarnation of the club.

The only excuse for this pointless regression is to explicitly point out that once you've survived three or more business cycles and over ten Moore's Law iterations, one does tend to come out with curmudgeonly pithy reminders of experience from time to time. My usual prelude to such an emission has usually been 'That trick never works'. (I'll have you know I'm a student of the Classics.) I also recall fondly a pungent comment by Alan Kay: 'The turkeys are making another run at the fence.'

The trick to this, assuming you're going to hang around long enough to be accountable, is to sort out the various ways things fail. Screwed up execution. People problems. Technology readiness. Market velocity. Path dependences that will never be reversed. Economic laws. Invariant human factors including cussedness. Some things change, some never will. Sort it out wrong and you're just an old fart, get it right and you're a grey hair, at least in your own mind.

Let this be fair warning that I feel a few such bloviations coming on.
10:41:46 PM