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Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did
securitas writes: "If you think that dotcommers are the first people to live on Internet time, then take a trip to the 19th century (NYT Story, here's a Yahoo link). Thomas Edison had 10,000 researchers and scientists working at his Menlo Park labs, who slept on their desks, and had the same problems pleasing the investment community as today's tech companies. The result? Over 1000 patents and many inventions that we take for granted today."
Consider a story also about the corporate workplace, "Working with Einstiens."
Heres a quote from a news segment I've seen:
Reporter: "Mr. Edison, how do you feel about Einstiens theory of relativity?"
Edison: "Well, I don't quite understand it."
Edison inspired his staff by working EXTREMELY hard all of the time. Also, because of this, he was certianly qualified to be the boss: he was the one who made it happen, and he didn't play golf to do it. Can the same be said of the local IT industry? Is the management a group of people who got there because their career path in life was to work harder than their peers? Or did they choose a path that they thought would net them the most money with the least amount of work?
My guess is on the latter for most management.
I like Edison's management technique a lot better:
"What a man's mind can create, a man's character can control."
His character gave him the respect and admiration of his assistants, who helped him with the mundane task of trying out thousands of different materials to find just the right one for the light bulb, among other things. Do you think we find the same in the IT industry? Will I do something "stupid" for someone else because I have faith in them? I think not. I'd only do it for a high rate of pay.
There is a place akin to this one: MIT media lab, as well as a lot of other Universities throughout the world, where the professors work like dogs for a lot less pay than they would get if they would sell some of their inventions on their own. But don't be so haughty as to compare this lab to IT.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Of course we can only speculate, but I think people will look back at Gates the way they look back at Henry Ford. Gates never claimed to invent the GUIs or OSs. He simply produced an OS that was popular and you could have your applications in any color you liked, as long as they were Windows applications. Likewise, Ford never claimed to invent the automobile. Daimler and Benz had the first practical car, but it was Ford that put them in the hands of millions of Americans and sparked the real revolution. Much like Gates' OS, Ford's cars were "good enough" and offered little choice in style. That was the right tactic for the first few years of the auto, and it was the right tactic for the first few years of computing.
Of course Daimler and Benz did just fine and became a premium brand--like Apple. There were certainly automobiles prior to Daimler-Benz. These would be analogous to the prototypes turned out by Xerox PARC or the DoD. They failed to reach the market either because the inventors were hogtied by short-sighted backers (Xerox) or because the projects were not suitable for the mass market (ENIAC).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
His patent predates Marconi's.
He didnt make the commercial system before marconi because tesla was trying to use the investor's money to secretly develop another invention.
Not in the way Edison was trying to claim.
Telsa thought AC was the way to go for long distance power transmission; he'd fallen out with Edison after Edison had already ripped him off, and took the idea to Westinghouse.
Edison, meanwhile, had invested a lot in using DC for long distance transmission, even though it's quite inferior. Since he couldn't compete on the merits of the technology he was pushing, he ran a campaign to try and scare people away from AC by pointing to its use in the electric chair, and by slaughtering animals with AC driven apparatus.
Of course, at the kind of volatages and currents used for transmission, DC is just as dangerous as AC (grab the poisitive 550V DC terminal on a Wellington trolley bus while grounded if you don't believe me), but Edison wasn't about to allow the pesky facts to get in the way.
Tesla's experiments into wireless energy transmission would have spelled the end of the energy industry as we know it, as well as the end of conventional radio and television transmission as a limited resource doled out by the FCC, as we have seen all of this become. His Autobiography is very interesting albiet very quirky. It is also interesting to note that over half of his patents and papers remain classified by the U.S. government to this day. Try getting them through the FOIA act, I dare you. It would actually be an interesting experiment. You can read about alleged uses and abuses of Tesla's wireless technology in the book about Project HAARP, entitled Angels Don't Play This haarp: Advances in Tesla Technology which puts forth evidence that Project HAARP's goals aren't as benign as they would like you to think, and that the weather modification aspect of the techology has been tried extensively for less than good purposes. Food for thought and grounds for further research. (http://www.haarp.net/ HAARP book home page.)