With all the things you can do today, you can say one thing… life is never boring! Between the almost unlimited music and videos you can find in the internet, to the countless video games you can play, and the hundreds or thousands of friends you make in the social networks, you constantly try to pinch yourself that the person who can invent a way for us to have more than 24 hours a day is really the one that will get my hug.
One thing I was afraid would suffer was that my children, as a result,would read less books! TV or video is a great way to learn a lot of things, but nothing stimulates thinking and learning still more than reading. That is why I was so elated about the report that worldwide,3.13 billion books were sold in 2007, still an improvement over the 3.1 billion books sold in 2006. Although that represents only a 1 percent growth, hopefully that illustrates that reading is still a must and should not be substituted.
I try to continue to read as much, and although I don’t watch as many movies, I was still flabbergasted to learn about the big fire that gutted Universal Studios. One of the things that immediately caught my attention was the report that over 50,000 movie films were burned.
Because if you ask me, all the others can be rebuilt, but the films cannot! The big loss nowadays, is not really the physical asset but the intellectual asset. Even if the buildings cost millions, the films are priceless! I think it was a relief to hear that all the films have backups! Which incidentally reminds me to remind everybody – backup your data. Store it somewhere a little bit far, so that when something happens, you will not lose it! Hard disks are much better nowadays, but it still is no guarantee that it will not go anytime.
I was a little bit nostalgic when I read about Bill Gates delivering his last public speech in TechEd Conference as a full time employee.
Bill will officially retire from Microsoft in a few weeks to devote most of his time to philanthropic work. His work now will focus on how to give away over 60 billion dollars of money – an amount which could singlehandedly pay the foreign debt of the PHilippines– a task he finds as challenging.
Gates started as a developer 33 years ago when he co-founded Microsoft, and irregardless of some of the things that you might have read about Microsoft, he left a lasting legacy in the industry. Although users will be more fickle, many developers remain the most loyal followers of Microsoft.
By becoming the richest man in the world for sometime, and making Microsoft one of the most visible companies of the tech generation, Gates showed an army of developers that it was not only cool to be a nerd and a techie, but you could make a lot of money too.
Gates himself was a little bit nostalgic – reflecting that for over thirty years since he was 17, he had only one passion and immersion – software. Gates in his last speech, also highlighted Internet Explorer browser, which has been somewhat of a curse to the company.
Although it helped Microsoft secure a dominant position in the Internet, it has remained free all these years, and in fact was the primary technology that triggered Microsoft’s antitrust problems – something that upto this day haunts Microsoft.Anyhow, beta 2 of Internet Explorer Version 8 will be available by August, he said.
Wilson Ng creates a weblog of his articles in www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife