I really enjoyed re-reading that. It captures the very essence of "instant in time" incorrectness, it is why I stopped believing anything I thought was "definitely true" in the tech business actually was what I thought it was.<p>I felt the same way that Paul did, Microsoft had calcified into this Office/Enterprise crust, living off their contracts with big businesses, while the real world was cruising to a new, agile, and open source beat. I had also been at Sun when it was still small, and cringed when bad news from IBM put a big negative impact on Sun's nascent stock price, even though, at the time, IBM's pain was coming from Sun not that we'd share in it.<p>But the trap that I had fallen into, and this essay expresses, is that "Today is every day" or more precisely, now that the world is to my liking, it will cease changing in ways that I disapprove. :-) I felt like the puzzle is figured out, I "get it" now, I can see the strings going from the puppets to the puppeteers and now I can see how the world is working.<p>But the cruel trick is that in systems, the puppets are recursive, or in mathematical terms, the forces influencing the future direction of technology are nonlinear at best, and likely chaotic. Everyone is changing in response to the changes they perceive around them, and in response some of their changes change those around them. Like the traffic analyst who figured out you could stomp your brakes going West on Interstate 10, and have the 'wave' of your braking effect roll south on the Harbor, get picked up going north on the 405, only to have it come back and hit you from the front as its echo headed east back along the 10. Sun made <i>Workstations</i> and Microsoft only cared about <i>PCs</i> except the echo of what a workstation was suddenly came back and hit Sun in the face as a big PC. Or Sun's prophetic, if ill fated slogan that "The Network is the Computer", which turned out to be literally true as clusters of Linux machines took out big iron symmetric multiprocessing systems. And then again, as Paul points out, when the Web browser ran its "programs" on the "network." Where did the computer start and the network end? It was no longer possible to tell.<p>Take away from this the certain knowledge that Google, Facebook, and Apple will all "die" (Apple for the second time :-)) at some point in the next 5 to 20 years. What we care about today will seem silly in the future, and the there will be technologies that enable completely different things to consume our time and resources than the things that do so today.<p>People create startups and dream new dreams for the same reason a surfer starts paddling their board toward shore, waves come up, and you have to be in position to get a good ride.