Things are not the way they seem. Tom Peters warns that anyone in a business who understands it completely is probably already failing.
Last summer at the BBSCON in Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2,000 intense individuals - not hackers and hobbyists, but serious economic players - pursued their futures with a zeal that would startle many people. One bulletin board system operator, whose BBS operates out of his basement, grossed more than US$5 million last year.
That BBS will probably be gone next year, but the operator had recovered his investment in the first two weeks of operation.
A lot of smug businesses, organizations, and implementations built around technology are going to be bypassed in the next few years - so fast it won't even be funny. I'll bet the Internet as we know it will be passe in five years - just as the largest number of people are waking up to it and making investment decisions about it. They will soon look foolish.
Wireless will yank the cords of an awful lot of companies who think they have it with LANS, TCP/IP, fiber, and cable. And who knows what is "beyond wireless?" Perhaps some incarnation of Tesla's crazy experiments in Colorado Springs in 1899, where he got electrical resonance using the earth as a transmitter, signals pulsating so strongly that they made a roar across the city and blew out the town's power station? Maybe that annoying "noise" around Santa Fe is a 14-year-old working on it.
Change is driving everything. Chaos is the form.
Maybe a fractal is more descriptive of a company than a spreadsheet.
