Old Guys
Wasn’t that a song by Chicago? Oh wait, that was Old DAYS. Right.
I love it when my two favorite cranks in the tech industry show up in the same column. From PC Mag’s John Dvorak:
One of the folks who complained about Fred’s posts is Dave Winer, inventor of the RSS feed, modern blogging, and all sorts of other things. He’s probably 90, maybe 100 years old. I can’t tell. He has plenty of good ideas and seems to be a genius.
It’s really like when the Green Hornet showed up on Batman (though I’m not saying who is the Green Hornet and who is Batman in this). I mean it. I loved it. And I’m way too old (late 40s) to be sarcastic here. To have Dvorak mention Winer is just great. Personally, I think they’re both geniuses. Though from time to time, I stray from reading them daily, going back is always like returning home.
And they’re both right in this attack on those who would attack anyone over 30 as not being innovative. Ridiculous. Facebook? Please. Anybody who turns down a billion dollars because they want to do it themselves is just simply naive. The greatest folly of youth is thinking what they’re doing has never been done before. In some cases, that’s true, but it’s pretty rare. A few months before stocks started declining in 2000, I dumped out of my mutual funds. Because I knew it was coming? No. I dropped out of the market because when I got my annual report, I saw that most of the fund managers had been going to proms and homecoming games during the crash of 1987, so such an event wasn’t in their personal history. It WAS in mine, however, and I knew it could happen again (and did). I didn’t want to fund their education.
The first (and best) piece of blogging software I ever bought was Radio from Dave Winer, and the first computer columnist I ever read on a regular basis was John Dvorak in the old broadsheet Infoworld, which I used to buy at the ASU bookstore when I was in college in about 1981. I still remember him reviewing Pagemaker and (my favorite) Ventura Publisher. Not forgotten is an email exchange I had with John about the customer service practices of Peachtree Software.
And you know what? I still listen to what both of those guys have to say, whether they’re 30+, 40+ or 90+.
Okay, I’ll stop now. Even to myself, I’m starting to sound like a fogie.
