Goals vs. Visions

you need goals to bring ideas and practices from your cellar out to light. There are many ways to do this but these ways are governed by goals. It is good for a while to not translate desires into goals. Many things at PARC showed that. But it also led to the sad fact that these people and their stuff are all in niches now. They could have influenced personal computing in a even much better way than they have. They would have needed goals for that. Staying in niches is an okay proposition with me but then you should never bemoan what the rest of the world is doing. A PC World with more of the PARC spirit and less of weak PARC copycatting in it would please me a lot. Maybe this is how it runs and we get a chance now to study this spirit and bring some of it back. We should. There are others too who do it.

Noch was: Hast Du "Dealers of Lightning". Wenn nicht, magst Du's?

what i meant was: if goals are just driven by coins, copying, cloning but no vision, they don't mark a step further. maybe after a long time through experience. that could take as long as operating out of a niche, i would guess.

hiltzig? gerne! ;)

we have to be careful about that. In principle there are drivers a lot worse than money. relative money abundance is a large problem. most of the endeavours now are driven by the fantasy of better implementation (that has been MSs deal for a long time). in that world winning goes with money. so i conclude these people and their goals are driven by the desire to win. one of the paradox things in open source software is that many people are driven by the same goal. win. outright. and the metric for winning will be money and fame. if your model does not predict as much money as in proprietary software your desire for fame becomes ever greater. *fame here is by design a weak metonym for many related symbols

let me ask a naiv question here: what does fame bring? 15" seconds of satisfaction? i get more out of a got talk.

i surely do not comment what you and i feel here, i'm trying to understand what many people feel and desire and i think i recognize some desire for fame or rather acknowledgment. when a large audience gives acknowledgment you have got fame. this specific fame is a phenomenon in the age of media that reach large audiences. So fame might be a bad metaphor^* for acknowledgment, but this is the superficial phenomenon we see. take l. torwalds: i do not think he went for fame but for shure he went for acknowledgment by important peers and even role models. than he was famous and had to cope with it. and people cope very differently with it and some even think they need fame to be able to feel acknowledgment. *In this narrow context fame is rather a metaphor than a metonym

funny thing that also parc history tells is that not the originators got the fame; they had the knowledge, but less acknowledgment. and as herzfeld said (that's not a quote, though): the difference between then and now is the mass; there are much more of the same (chaps/knowledge) around. air got thin, so to say.

with people like Ken Thompson. And how many people now would know by heart who invented the chip or even which people where involved in creating microprocessors. Bob Noyce at least got really rich.