RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing -> The Next Long Move
"Too often, someone publishes a list of the five or ten technologies that represent "the next big thing." Then, entrepreneurs and investors pile on, creating a situation in which companies are drowned in more money than they need to build one or two widgets that, taken as a whole, are just enough to support a project team for a few months but not a company for years of growth. It's looking for a "thing," as though history were reducible to a single artifact that represents the apotheosis of human endeavor, that leads industries and societies into dead ends.
While I can appreciate the focus that a "big thing" lends to folks with a business degree, the broader and more flexible approach to decisions about resources afforded by a historical perspective tell me that it is the Next Long Move, a trend that pulls people and organizations along new paths, that provides the richest opportunities. Trends are based on collections of things, not any one thing.
A long move would be a collection of events that transformed a wide range of human organization and activity. Think protestantism, industrial consolidation made possible by a wide range of machines, electricity distribution networks, Marxism, Islam, Clausewitzian military strategy, Romanticism, personal computing (which gave rise to myriad widgets of functionality that have paid for, among other things, Bill Gates' house and Mitch Kapor's early and critical support of the EFF), and data networking. Thinking in terms of a long move forces one to consider tangential opportunities and challenges. A focal point-like "big thing" makes you subtract everything from the picture that doesn't fit.
But it all fits, history is the story of how everything about humanity and its artifacts has been woven into a rich fabric.
Nothing against threadmakers, but if you want to invest or take a job that will lead to long-term involvement in a particular and evolving field of endeavor, you should be looking at a wider range of opportunity than blue threads or Wi-Fi. A long move around cheap wireless access (which will not be provided solely by Wi-Fi) will include millions of products and services changing in response to the availability of data and human connections anywhere and at any time."
4:35:23 PM 
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