True, But I Am Old

I am an alumni of the first Internet Boom/Bust cycle, more specifically of Viant Corp which was originally founded with the name "Silicon Valley Internet Partners" or SVIP.    I joined SVIP from Merrill Lynch, and the shift was dramatic...   SVIP and eventually Viant was an organization of extremely bright, energetic, optimistic, creative and interesting people.  People who, to this day,  remain in touch.   There is a Viant Yahoo group where a few of us communicate and many of us lurk.   Recently there was a thread around the current events in the market and the general feeling that...

Things will get worse before they get better... The "spend more than you earn" party is over. It's going to be a massive hang-over.

A fellow former CXO responded in his characteristically upbeat , poetic and humorous style.  I enjoyed it so much that I've included it below....

True, but I am old.
In junior high school, Comet Kohoutek was predicted by some to wipe out the entire Earth. True, this was mostly predicted by people in California and,true again, most Americans were stoned out of their gourd during that time period...so that prediction doesn't really count.
But when I was in high school we all learned the metric system because "the rest of the world uses it and by 1980 America will too!". Well, that didn't happen.
A little later, Time magazine ran a cover story on "The Second Ice Age" which was fast approaching upon us and would have Americans moving to Mexico in droves so they wouldn't freeze to death! (Seriously, look it up, it was the late 70's.) Now we are warming globally, it seems, and Ohio will soon have beachfront property.
Let's see, what else? Communism was on the doorstep of taking over the world and we would all be calling each other comrade by the turn of the century. A wall came down instead.
Here's my favorite: Y2K. Remember that one, folks? People were preparing for the end of the world (again) and I think the only thing that happened was that one toaster in Australia malfunctioned or something.
I'm not saying that this isn't a real crisis or that there won't be real pain and suffering as a result of this. There probably will be.
I'm just skeptical.
Optimists vastly outperform pessimists.
I know that's true because a consulting company proved it to me with a 3X3 matrix and a very thick presentation binder that made a loud "thud" when they dropped it on my desk next to their Y2K report.
-Bill 

Thank for sharing Bill!

After Microsoft Stacks Vote - IBM Wants to Take its Ball and go Home

IBM May Quit Technology Standards Bodies - WSJ.com: 

"IBM and open-source groups that support collaborative software development said Microsoft had stacked the national committees that make up the ISO with employees and sympathetic voters. They also said Open XML is so complicated and obscure that only Microsoft could fully exploit it, cementing the software company's already-considerable lead in office-document software. IBM backed a rival format called Open Document that was already certified as an ISO standard."

Twitter Entering the Mainstream or "Jumping the Shark"

Ping - Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. - NYTimes.com:

"...why when people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are told about it, they are “uncomprehending or angry.” His response (The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey) was brief and unsatisfying: “People have to discover value for themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It’s what you make of it.”"

Adding Simplicity - An Engineering Mantra: Are Data Warehouses Dinosaurs?

Adding Simplicity - An Engineering Mantra: Are Data Warehouses Dinosaurs?:

"As anybody that follows my blog knows, I am not a fan of vertical scaling. I don't like solutions that can only be implemented in a single address and storage space. Unfortunately, there are analytical problems that need a holistic view of data. This is very typical of data warehousing applications. As a result, data warehouses are expensive, often out of the reach of smaller organizations. But there may be an alternative that is less expensive and horizontally scalable. What is this great revelation? Processing streams of events using an Event Stream Processor (ESP) solution."

Enterprise Architecture - A Perspective

Service Oriented Enterprise: Why Enterprise Architecture is a Joke:

 "Anyone who has been in our industry for any period of time has heard the jokes about EA... 'EA's are the guys who program in PowerPoint.' Despite valiant efforts to mature the discipline by groups like IASA, the OMB, The Open Group, The Zachman Institute as well as individuals like Ambler, the discipline remains fragmented and often unproductive."

As Text Messages Fly, Danger Lurks - NYTimes.com

"“The act of texting automatically removes 10 I.Q. points,” said Paul Saffo, a technology trend forecaster in Silicon Valley. “The truth of the matter is there are hobbies that are incompatible. You don’t want to do mushroom-hunting and bird-watching at the same time, and it is the same with texting and other activities. We have all seen people walk into parking meters or walk into traffic and seem startled by oncoming cars.”"

Polyglot Programmer Meme

"There is a 'polyglot programmer' meme going around which roughly says that future systems will be built on a statically typed library foundation (e.g. BCL in .Net) with a dynamically typed language used in a dual role to both script those static types as well as define a domain-specific language (DSL) which will be used to implement the high level app logic."