<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.6000.16441" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>You are confusing the creation of the infrastructure with
the creation of the companies that USE the infrastructure. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Yes - the Internet depended on government funding to get
bigger than tiny. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>That is like the government building highways or airports.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>My Business was the product of me busting my butt to use
THAT infrastructure to create a new enterprise that used the
infrastructure. That is like Ford developing a mass market automobile or
Rockefeller developing fuel refineries and gas stations to run on highways.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Google is not a government funded start up project. It
came from guys in a garage working until they had something to show venture
capitalists who funded the next stage of development until that stage was
worthy of more development and more capital infusion. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>If they had messed up - their project would have died and
they'd have been pushing brooms. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Jobs and Woz - there were a hundred guys in the Palo Alto
Garages dreaming up early personal computers ( I was one of them) and most of us
did not invent a workable machine, let alone one that could be sold, or did
anything useful or gathered support. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>You look at Apple and Google and HP now and think they are
BIG companies. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>I was there when Apple was tiny. And when the BCE was
tiny. When Google was not yet a thought form. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>If you do not understand that entrepreneurs do a LOT of
work and take a LOT of risk, then please go get a job with a punch card and a
regular check. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The garage start up is not a myth - it is the hard reality
of almost all of America's big companies.. and the reality of most of the ones
that do NOT get big as well. The vast majority of businesses (all
businesses) began on dining room tables and in garages. The hard part of the
story is how many of these garage ideas never get out of the garage, never got
big, don't work and don't make anyone any money at all. It takes hundreds of
folks trying new ideas in their garages for one new enterprise to start up.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>I began six businesses on my dining room table. One
got big enough to sell for serious money - even so it still missed the
mark. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Had the new owners pursued our core business idea - we'd
have built eBay a decade earlier - alas we were too early and not enough of the
other pieces were in place. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT><BR>Even the early commercial computer companies
were only started because of the possibility of large government contracts.
Above all much of the development of computing as we now know it was driven by
US military needs in relation to the Cold War and Vietnam and continues to be
sustained by military adventurism in Iraq and elsewhere. To a large extent this,
rather than some fantasy of garage creativity, is and always has been the 'heart
of the economic engine'.<BR></DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Your ignorance of history is staggering. ENIAC was
a big government contract - not for the Cold War - it was for WW2.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The second successful commercial comptuer was for
private industry. And funded by entrepreneurs who worked by the seat of their
pants (without a BIG contract) and ran out of capital and had to sell
their nascent business to a larger company that could fund the development
costs. See <A
href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0645.html?printable=1">http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0645.html?printable=1</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT><BR>Jobs and Woz and Hewlett and Packard may have
worked in garages, but those garages were sited conveniently close to the
location of an already huge industry only made possible and sustained by large
scale government funding, spending and infrastructure. </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Those garages were in communities where there was a
critical mass of supply and demand but Jobs and Woz were not selling to BIG
government contracts and sold the first machines by the hard work of one guy
peddling the Apple ONE to school teachers. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>The garages themselves probably only existed because of that industry's
need to house its workers. </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>PROBABLY!!!??! </FONT><FONT face=Arial>What is this word
doing in this sentence? Are you guessing? It sure seems like you are guessing.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>You make it sound like Steve Jobs was living in a garage
because there were not enough workers housing projects for them... DO you
think Palo Alto is Moscow? </FONT><FONT face=Arial>The vision is
laughable. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>You call this image a "</FONT><FONT
face="Times New Roman"> libertarian fantasy that denies the real history of
the industry" </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Having been present for much of this history, what you
don't know shows. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The PC industry has a long proud history if inventing
stuff in garages and dining rooms tables. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>See VisiCalc story for example. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Some of us who worked in those garages resent the image
that BIG government and BIG companies invent this stuff. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The very first e-commerce business was started on a
dining room table and used a data host that was in a garage. LITERALLY.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>before there was any of this Internet infrastructure we
ere shuffling data around at 300 BPS and doing business and inventing core
concepts that are in use today. </FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>We built it up bit by bit and some parts of it got to be
huge. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Inventing business processes is not ONE invention
- it was a thousand of small inventions, problems solved, ideas hatched, dead
ends in which we got lost and walls we hit that bloodied our noses.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>In the beginning it is creative entrepreneurs who risk
everything they have, borrow from family and friends, scrape together
assets and build dreams into working products. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>And it is a dog-eat-dog world into which they throw
their invention and it either thrives or dies.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>I had my share of garage ideas die in the marketplace.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The risks are enormous. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The costs overwhelming. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The work unending. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>The opportunity for success is dim and hard to
reach</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>But when it hits. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>It's huge. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>And all YOU see is the "huge" at the end and ignore all
the rest... </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Alex Randall - Proud Garage Entrepreneur </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>