The Ten-Year Cycle

Had the honor of sitting dead center, second row, right behind Ross Perot, in a jammed packed Davies Symphony Hall, when Steve Jobs introduced the NeXT computer back in 1988.  (Thanks, Dan’l !)

 

In his stunning presentation (when he’s good, he’s great), Steve discussed the ten-year development cycle… that is, the next "big thing" usually happens in ten-year cycles.

 

Of course, since he didn’t cite any sources, I thought he was just making it all up ’cause it sounded good (when he’s bad, his infamous reality distortion effect is really bad).

 

Turns out, the tech world does cycle about every ten years!

 

Here are some important public milestones in tech:

 

     1962:      IBM goes public.

 

     1977:      Motorola goes public.

 

     1984/6:   Apple, Microsoft, Intel go public.

 

     1995:      Netscape and Nokia go public.

 

     2004/5:  Google and Baidu go public.

 

 

Interesting… stepping back and looking at the list, I can now understand why all the dot-com’s blew up… most had the misfortune of going public at the wrong part of the cycle! <grin><groan> 

 

To Get Paid?

Filled out an online expense report… it asked me the question: 

 

     "Expense Report Purpose?"

 

I know there must be a right answer but all I could write was: 

 

     "To get paid?"

Those Crazy Google Math Guys

Those crazy Google guys are at their math pranks again.

 

Brad Feld, VC and blogger extraordinaire, observes that Google’s recently announced 14,159,265 share stock offering is really a play on pi…

 

…the eight digits after the decimal point to be precise.

 

Amazing cosmic coincidence?  I think not.

 

And who said public companies can’t have good clean fun with numbers?

Opening the Floodgates… Again!

John reminded me that Netscape turned ten years old on Aug 9th.

 

Time flies, eh?

 

Netscape, of course, should be remembered as the little company that opened the floodgates to the entire online world.

 

Almost exactly ten years later, Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) — a little company many are calling the Chinese Google — is opening the floodgates to all of China.

 

True, both were not the first or the only. 

 

But, history will look at both upstarts — with small revenues on torrid growth paces with seemingly outrageous market values — as the companies that popularized the major commerce movement of their time.