Bill Gates has a famous series of quotes where he says:
"Software is the best industry to be in" and "The best is yet to come."
Who would be so self-rightous to make the claim that they foresaw the Internet as it is today? Who would be so crude as to announce that they knew that technologies like SPAM filtering would be used to identify interesting genomes in DNA mapping. (Microsoft’s anti-SPAM technology is being used for just this purpose, in case you didn’t know.)
Robert Scoble, who I find myself not agreeing with a lot, has a great quote – and while I would rarely refer people to a quote of his because my personal opinions are generally different from his, I think this quote is something that everyone should remember, wherever they happen to be:
"All it takes to turn a company around is a very small team (Apple’s iPod teaches us that). You telling me that every single one of our 57,000 employees are dumb? ReallY? Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki is all of a sudden dumb? Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer has lost all his smarts?"
The bottom line is that while some people may think that we’re in a lull, technologically, I firmly believe that we’re just one breakthrough away from once again stunning the world.
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We have Gordon Bell working for us. The inventor of the VAX and the first original scalable computing environment.
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We have Jim Gray. The father of modern databases.
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We have Don Box. The master of component development.
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We have Gary Starkweather. The creator of the laser printer.
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We have Jim Allchin. The godfather of the modern directory service. (Banyan Vines)
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We have Ray Ozzie. The inventor of groupware.
…and we have Bill Gates.
And no matter what claim Larry Ellison might make about "the best software having already been created" and that "there are no new exciting things to be done in software"… it only proves to me that some others out there simply lack the vision necessary to take us to the next level of computing.
And if we continue to work at it, you can bet we’ll be there to make that happen.
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 