Rossini, an Italian composer, understood the benefits of procrastination. In discussing the best time to compose an overature:
Wait until the evening before opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair.
Bruce Sterling has an excellent piece in the Austin Chronicle about traditional business and the internet. Some excerpts:
But look what happened. When was the last time that you saw commerce, global capitalism, competition, the profit motive, the real deal ... choking on advanced technology as if they'd swallowed a jalape?o? What a spectacle! It ranks with the beached gasping of Marxism-Leninism in 1989.
...
Houston is supposed to be a solid, non-nonsense, oil-bidness town. Houston doesn't have any SXSW. Poor Houston is the snakebitten home of Enron, while Austin's feckless cyberslackers are still grinning and hitting the Return key. Yeah, Dell fired some people here, so maybe local rents will drop and all the potters and tapestry weavers will return from Wimberley. Man, anything's possible these days.
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If Napster and its P2P clones ever get loose, nobody in the music business will make any money ever again. And if 802.11b ever works, nobody will sell Internet access and AOL will go broke. And if Linux had a decent graphic user interface, Bill Gates would have no business model. Bill would have to spend all his time giving vaccinations to little kids. You tell me what we're supposed to do about this menace.
If... If... If...
But I think that business (or, at least VCs) running scared from the 'Net is proof that it is possible.
Reflections on Sterling's comments:
Linux isn't going away and it is not constrained by the requirement that it make money. The only constraint for its continued growth that it has to be interesting to a sizeable number of people. Those who take an interest in it want it to be more useful and will often work to make it so. As it becomes more useful, it becomes more interesting to more people. Growth continues.
Apple has latched onto this cycle by open-sourcing the core of its OS X. Perhaps it will be enough. Perhaps not.
The main barrier that Linux faces is not Microsoft. It isn't even the prevelance of closed file formats (where people can't open Word documents in anything but Word). The main barrier that Linux faces is that your mother doesn't know about it.
Windows is so ubiquitous that everyone is familiar with it. It brings a comfort level. Yes, mere mortals can use it, but, the fact is, mere mortals can use most anything if they set their mind to it. Once Linux has generated enough interest, people will produce the needed applications, and Linux use will skyrocket.