Big computers are silly
Seth Godin’s post on the economies of small is great. I particularly loved this bit:
I’m writing this on a laptop at a skateboard park… that added wifi for parents. Because they wanted to. It took them a few minutes and $50. No big meetings, corporate policies or feasibility studies. They just did it.
But there’s a paradox here (you’ll have to read his full post to get the context). The economy of small relies on the economy of scale. I absolutely love grass-roots efforts, whether installing a $50 wi-fi router at a skateboard park, or contributing to the evolution of Linux. But so many of these things rely on a groundwork that must be laid by the economies of big — we wouldn’t have wi-fi routers without all the groundwork that has led up to their adoption and manufacture. We wouldn’t have Linux, at least not as a commercially viable Enterprise-grade solution, if not for the thousands of people (and some big companies) that have made it real.
I love small — but we can’t lose sight of the big companies and efforts that have made a lot of these small things possible.
