History Repeats Itself: This Telecosm Giant Holds the Keys to the Next Phase of Broadband Tech Dear Daily Prophecy Reader, Below you'll find an excerpt from the March issue of The George Gilder Report. If you're already a subscriber I'm sure you've seen this month's portfolio pick. But if you're not, click here to find out what you can do to make sure you don't miss out on this opportunity… In the decades that I have spent discerning the vectors that guide technological progress, I have undertaken an arduous education in many sectors. Including mathematics, physics, engineering, the properties of the electromagnetic spectrum, information theory, and even the genetic code as the supreme expression of that theory. The most important thing anyone ever taught me, however, the key to every correct call I've ever made in technology, I learned one day in Newark Airport during a discursive chat with my great friend and mentor Carver Mead of CalTech legend. We were not talking not about physics or electromagnetism, or the quantum properties of micro-circuits, or the dead-end of wave particle duality, or even making horribly ingenious puns, all Carver conversational favorites. We were talking about entrepreneurship. Carver argued that the secret to successful entrepreneurship was waste. Waste the cheapest and most abundant relevant resource so as to conserve or create what is scarce. Academia portrays economics as the study of scarcity. Carver summed up for me a truth I had been grasping at for years: Economics consists in identifying the abundances that, wasted prodigiously, overwhelm scarcity. I had heard echoes of this before. One of my favorite quotes from another hero, Peter Drucker, was "don't solve problems, pursue opportunities." A problem is a scarcity, whether of talent, time, money, or information. It is in the abundances we find opportunity. With Carver's axiom, I found myself able to perceive the paradigms that would dominate both the Microcosm of computing machines, as well as Telecosm of infinite bandwidth. |
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