Geodog

Great One-Liners from Supernova 2002 Day One

I was planning on writing up all my notes and thoughts and posting them, but I'm not sure that it would be worth the time and effort. Supernova 2002 must be the most blogged conference to date. Instead, at least for now, I thought I'd post my favorite one liners from the conference.

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

-- William Gibson

This must have been the most oft repeated quote at the conference, and with good reason. It is a profound statement about the nature of change, especially technological change. We tend to assume, for no good reason, and against experience, that the rate of change and its spread are both linear. But they aren't. The rate of change tends to be logarithmic, and the spread of change discontinuous. This has a lot of implications for looking at technology trends. Change tends to come faster than we assume it will, but doesn't become as widespread nearly as fast as we assume it will.

Only geeks change their preferences

-- Howard Rheingold

Geeks are good at inventing the future. They aren't so good at making it available to ordinary people. They have a much higher tolerance for complexity and the need to tinker than ordinary people. What I like doing in product management is bring technology invented by geeks to the rest of the world.

Technology trends start with technologists, not customers.

-- Doc Searls

There were multiple examples of this over the 2 days of the conference. Geeks invent things that nobody else has thought of before. Often times, they don't get used for what the geeks expect they will be used for, the classic example being Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, but focus groups or customers don't invent new things. They may tell you how to package or modify them.

Macromedia can upgrade 97% of the internet in one year.

-- Jeremy Allaire

Very interesting statistic from Jeremy. Macromedia Flash has reached such a level of ubiquity that they can upgrade 97% the Flash players in one year. This is fantastic distribution, and a fantastic level of upgrading that very few players have. Just that fact that it is possible is amazing, and is a sign of the rate of change that is coming. Just compare it with all the people you know who are running Windows '95, a seven year old technology.

After you have a nerve center taken out by crashing a Boeing 757 into it, you start to appreciate the P2P virtues of resilience, self healing, and no "key" nodes.



-- Mike Helfrich

In this age of terrorism that we live in, the value of strong P2P clients is strongly enhanced. Centralization makes fat targets.