Oh Kara Please Don’t Be the Ken Olson of the Social Network Generation October 12, 2007
Posted by John in Technology.trackback
Kara your post is a replica of all the written articles in Computerworld in the 1980s… Substitute PC for Facebook and there you have it. I was in Massachusetts at that time a freshman in college and I remember clearly the mini and mainframe guys saying the same line…PCs are for kids. Kara says “I am a big grumpy adult and Facebook apps are like an army of tiny little Rugrats. “
Kara be careful that you don’t come off like Ken Olson. We all know the Ken Olson famous line about the PC..”There is no reason for a person to have a computer in his home”
Stop the needless Ken Olson bashing! (I already did that in my last book related to that exact quote.)
I think I am more in the genre of Bill Gates, who once said: 640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
Kara,
Ken Olson was great leader for DEC but was hardheaded about the PC. Gates said whatever he needed to say to sell his wares. All of these quotes are urban legends because they were all in a different context.
I think that you need to be careful and objective about Facebook. It is a real platform. 100 billion it is not – but it has critical mass at many levels.