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How a Grocery Shopping Website Can Save America
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Les Pinter
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Foreword
"This is Bill Gates. Do you know who I am?"
It was Thursday, September 23rd, 1980. I was sitting on a frayed sofa in my
Fannin Street office in Houston, meeting with Mike Griffin and Bill Radding, my
two partners in Small Business Applications, Inc. I was COO, Mike was VP of
Technology, and Bill was VP of Marketing. Mike had written a word processor that
he called the Magic Wand, largely financed by two investors who were friends of
mine. We were eight months into our first year of business, and doing pretty
well. In a fledgling microcomputer market hungry for software, word processing
was the "killer app" that sold computers, and we had, according to at least one
well-known reviewer, the best one in the world. That was what the 23-year-old
Bill Gates was calling about.
Bill Gates had left Harvard after one semester to develop a BASIC interpreter
for MITS, manufacturers of the Altair 8800 kit computer. The BASIC interpreter
was a rewrite of software developed by faculty and students at Dartmouth
University under a government contract, and was therefore in the public domain.
Bill managed to wrest ownership of it back from MITS (Bill's father was a lawyer
for Digital Equipment) and signed a deal with Intel that paid Microsoft a
royalty for every CPU that they shipped. That royalty, an estimated $5 per CPU,
was ultimately paid for some 200 million units. If you can multiply, you're
impressed. That was how young Bill got his start. So yes, I had heard of him.
"Yes," I said, "I do. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I'll try to say this in as few words as possible, and I need an answer as
quickly as possible," he said. "I've made a commitment to deliver a word
processor to a Japanese company that wants to compete with companies like Lanier
and Vydec
[1].
I just found out that I'm not going to make my deadline, and I
don't want to lose face. I want to buy your source code. I'll give you a
two-year non-compete agreement. What will it cost me?"
I remember being relieved that he didn't want to simply buy the software and
compete with us. I didn't understand how Bill Gates thought. I do now. Microsoft
plans for the long term. He had no intention of competing with us during the
next two years; he intended to compete with us for the next twenty.
I covered the receiver with my hand, turned to Mike and Bill, and repeated the
question and its generous non-competition offer. "Tell him $35,000," Mike said.
I repeated Mike's number to him.
"You're not going to change your mind, are you?" the voice said. Uh-oh, I
thought; I probably should have asked for a little more. "No," I assured him.
"I'll be there tomorrow," the voice said. And after a few pleasantries, the
conversation ended.
A few minutes later, Steve Ballmer, President of Microsoft
[2].
called and
introduced himself. "I want to make sure that there are no slip-ups at the
airport. Mr. Gates looks very young," he told me.
"No problem," I assured him. "I'll pick him up. What does he look like?"
"He looks very young," Ballmer reiterated. "Look for a 15-year-old in a
thousand-dollar suit reading the Wall Street Journal."
The next day I drove to Houston's Intercontinental Airport, parked my car, and
walked down to the terminal. In those days, you could wait for an arriving
flight just outside the jet way. Sure enough, there was a kid who looked about
15 in a really, really nice suit, reading the Wall Street Journal. I introduced
myself again, drove him to my house, made him a grilled cheese sandwich, and
handed him the source code to our program, printed on 14-7/8" X 11" green bar
paper and a couple of huge 8-inch floppies. He pulled out his personal checkbook
and wrote me a check for $35,000.
And that's how Microsoft got the source code for the program known today as
Microsoft Word. It was my first incursion into the world of microcomputer
software.
How I became an Internet developer Top
I studied to be an economics professor, my goal since an early age. I finished a
Master's degree in economics at Rice University, the "Harvard of the South." I
felt that finance offered more concrete career opportunities, because frankly,
with two degrees in economics, I didn't actually know how to do anything. So I
switched colleges and finished the coursework for an MBA and a Ph.D.,
specializing in Finance.
Ten years before, my two-year-old son had been crippled by spinal cord cancer.
Some parents of children with cancer are able to bear up under the strain; I
wasn't. The rigors of graduate school, supporting a family, caring for a
handicapped child and trying unsuccessfully to save my marriage were more than I
was able to deal with. I left the university without finishing the Ph.D.; I lost
my house; and my wife informed me that my place in her new apartment was already
occupied.
[3].
Suddenly I had no wife, no family, no house, no career and no
prospects.
A professor friend of mine suggested that I learn COBOL and work as a contract
software developer. "But I don't know COBOL," I protested. "Heck, it's easy," my
friend said. "I'll teach you in a week." And he did.
Shortly thereafter, I interviewed at a chemical company on the Houston Ship
Channel. My friend had told me all the correct buzzwords to say, so I breezed
through the job interview. Finally, it came down the big question. "What do you
charge?" the IT manager asked. I was about to say "ten dollars an hour", when a
little voice in my head (which I am happy to report has not spoken to me since)
said "double it." "Twenty an hour," I said, hoping that I was displaying outer
calm. "That's fine," he said; "We'll see you on Monday."
I walked out of that office and down the hall, hoping that my knees wouldn't
buckle before I got to the men's room. I had just replaced a failed career that
I had pursued for eleven years with a new one that I had learned in a week, and
it paid three times what I was earning as an instructor at the University. I was hooked.
I built a career as a COBOL contractor, writing programs for the main companies
in Houston - Exxon, Shell Oil, Mitchell Energy, and many others. I developed a
reputation as a hot-shot programmer. And I continued teaching at the University.
I taught Finance in the MBA program for several years. That was why I was tapped
for the job of COO of Small Business Applications. I knew about both programming
and business.
Hah.
Just to set the record straight, Mike Griffin was five times the programmer that
I was even on a good day. And my complete ignorance of the microcomputer
business on the day that I took Bill's call became clear once I learned about
his BASIC royalty agreement with Intel.
Bill Gates knew how many microcomputers were going to be built during the next
six months because he received Intel's manufacturing statistics monthly,
together with a royalty check for millions and millions of dollars. He knew that
within a couple of years, he could sell thirty-five thousand dollars worth of
word processing software an hour. Eventually, he would sell thirty-five thousand
dollars worth of word processing software a minute. That might have surprised
even Bill Gates.
Sadly, selling the source code for the Magic Wand to Bill Gates didn't help
things at Small Business Applications, Inc. Mike and Bill now realized what they
had, and their resentment toward the investors snowballed. Within a month, they
informed the investors that unless they were given the opportunity to buy back
the company, they were history. Without their support, the Magic Wand had a
guarded prognosis. The investors sold the company to Peach Tree Software of
Atlanta, and the Magic Wand was re-christened PeachText. It died a slow death
under that name.
Microsoft Word surfaced two years later, its skeleton still recognizable as the
Magic Wand, but with many, many improvements, due largely to the brilliance of
Charles Simonyi (pronounced shee-mon-yi, with the accent on the first syllable).
Charles was the first programmer hired by Microsoft, and one of his first jobs
had been the development of a word processor. When their delivery schedule with
Ricoh fell behind, Bill called me.
Charles continued with Microsoft for many years. He introduced the practice of
prefixing variable names in programs with two letters to indicate the variable's
scope and data type (e.g. li for local integer). Since he was born in Budapest,
this naming convention was called Hungarian notation. My father was also
Hungarian, a fact that I pointed out to Charles when I saw him at a party at his
girlfriend's house in Palo Alto some 20 years ago.
[4].
He told me that he knew
that the moment Bill told him my name. Pintér (pronounced pin-tayer, with the
accent on the first syllable; the accent changes the pronunciation of the letter
e; it's not accented as if it were in Spanish) is the Hungarian mispronunciation
of Binder, the German word for a maker of barrels or wagon wheels; Pinter means
cooper or cartwright. Any Hungarian would know that.
In 2007, Charles Simonyi became the world's fifth space tourist when he spent a
week in the International Space Station.
[5].
The stock he owned when he left Microsoft had
a value at that time of around five billion dollars. That's what he was paid to
modify our program. I've imagined for years what the payoff should have been to
develop it. I owed it to Mike to intercept his number and add some zeroes, and
for that, Mike, I apologize.
Now jobless, I bought a Radio Shack "Trash-80" (TRS-80) Model II and began
looking for programming clients. Shortly thereafter, Lotus 1-2-3 appeared, and I
attached myself to it like a life preserver. I soon had developed a very
respectable clientele of financial planners who needed spreadsheets to explain
the benefits of their tax shelters to prospective clients.
[6].
But increasingly, my clients wanted database applications. In the name 1-2-3,
the 1 represents spreadsheets; 2 is for graphics; and 3 is for databases. In my
opinion, it should have been called "Lotus two and a half," because its database
capabilities were truly miniscule. I began to look around for a better tool, and
stumbled across dBase II.
The story of dBase II (née Vulcan), created by Wayne Ratliff (based on a
database created by Jeb Long) at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California is well-documented. I learned it and developed software for many
Houston businesses, including Exxon. I wrote their Drill Sheet system for
reporting on daily progress drilling offshore wells. In fact, Exxon was my
biggest client. I moved to Kingwood, a joint venture of Exxon and the King Ranch
30 miles north of Houston, where many Exxon employees lived. The oil business
was booming, and oil companies were my only clients. In fact, in Houston, Texas,
they were everyone's only clients. Then the OPEC oil cartel broke ranks, and the
price of oil dropped from $48 a barrel to $9 a barrel. Houston died.
Texas has unitization. That means that if your grandmother's ranch covers 4% of
an underground oil deposit that produces a hundred thousand dollars a month in
royalties, when you inherit grandma's ranch, you inherit a monthly income of
four thousand dollars. About one in five Texans was the beneficiary of
unitization in those days, which explained why your neighbor bought a new car
every year and your dad didn't. No one wanted to admit that their success was
based on inheritance, so they didn't talk about it. They just let you assume
that they were smarter than you.
But when the price of West Texas sour crude dropped to less than its lifting and
refining cost, producers shut in their wells - poured cement down the rathole,
the surface-level hole about 30 feet deep into which the topmost components of
the drilling mechanism are inserted - and went home. The royalties stopped, and
the extra disposable income of a fifth of the Texas population disappeared.
Texas experienced in 1986 what the entire country experienced in 2011; we just
did it twenty-five years earlier.
At Exxon, they laid off twenty percent of their staff, and all of their
contractors. I was one of those contractors. I struggled for nearly a year, but
my income dropped by 85%. My house, my rent house, and my little farm near
Huntsville, Texas all went back to the bank. My neighborhood in Kingwood, where
many Exxon employees lived, looked like a ghost town. People were ashamed to be
seen leaving; they would pack up and drive away in the middle of the night. They
didn't even take their furniture, which was also about to be repossessed.
Eventually I figured out that things weren't going to get better any time soon.
So, I got in my little Honda station wagon with eight hundred and fifty dollars
and headed west, wondering how a guy with eleven years of college could screw up
so badly. My children were in Palo Alto with their mother, so that was where I
headed.
In San Francisco, I listed my name with a software contracting shop. As soon as
I signed the contract, they gave me a name and an address in Nicasio, about 30
miles north of the City. The client was George Lucas, the director of Star Wars,
and the work was to be done at the Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio, located in the
west end of Marin County.
George had bought the MGM library of books about the movie industry, and had
asked his programmers to write a program to permit him to do a keyword search of
his titles. They had tried to write a program in C on the VAX located at ILM
(Industrial Light and Magic) in San Rafael, a dozen miles to the east of the
ranch and connected with hundreds of miles of cables. But the program's
performance was dismal.
"Let's try one of these new microcomputers," someone suggested. They had heard -
vaguely - of something called dBase III (the second release of dBase II). So,
they put out a request for contractors among the local headhunter community, and
I apparently walked in the door the next day with a resumé chock full o' dBase.
I interviewed at the Skywalker Ranch and got the gig. I got to work and wrote
the software, but they thought that it was too slow. So thanks, but we'll just
go back to the program we wrote in C for the VAX and try to optimize the code.
I had come to California with only about eight hundred dollars. In Houston that
would get you an apartment for four months, although if you promised to keep it
clean and chase away vandals, you could probably stay for free. But apparently
the oil crisis hadn't come to San Francisco. An apartment would cost you first
and last month's rent and a month's rent as a deposit, and a month's rent in San
Francisco and environs was a grand. I didn't have three thousand dollars. So
when George Lucas told me that my software was too slow, I was sleeping in my
car. I really, really needed that job.
I had read about a new language called FoxBase, a clone of dBase III but "quick
like a Fox". I called up and had it overnighted to me. I walked back into the
Carriage House with the install disks in my hand. "Didn't we fire you?" the IT
manager said. "You gotta see this," I protested. I installed FoxBASE and ran my
program. It ran seven times faster. "Oh, that's much better," she said. And she
gave me another pile of programming requirements. So I moved out of my car and
into a houseboat at Pier 4-1/2 in Sausalito, and my new life was off and running.
FoxBASE became FoxPro, and Microsoft bought FoxPro. I began publishing a monthly
FoxPro newsletter, which continued for ten years. I even started a Russian
edition, which was published for four years in Moscow by a brilliant young man
named Dmitry Artemov. I talked with Bill Gates about him at dinner at Gates'
house in Seattle one evening, and two months later, Dmitry was hired as the
third employee of Microsoft in Russia. He's still there, a major player in their
SQL consulting operation.
I became the most published author in the world on the subject of FoxPro - not
the smartest, not the best, but the most prolific. I wrote six books about the
FoxPro language. Through my monthly newsletter, I solved the most common
problems that readers called or wrote about. Eventually, I collected probably
two thousand thank-you notes from programmers: "you saved my job", "you saved
my marriage", and a few that said "you saved my life."
I loved helping other programmers avoid the agony that I had gone through
learning how to make things work. I felt that this was the way that I would give
my life meaning beyond simply making a living. I had made a difference in these
peoples' lives. The day came when I realized that I could die happy - not rich,
but happy. I hadn't dared to have a long-term plan, but if I had, that would
have been it.
But Microsoft had a long-term plan regarding FoxPro, too: To kill it. I think it
was because people who bought FoxPro didn't buy SQL Server. They didn't need to;
it solved data storage and data access in such a simple, straightforward way
that the need for something as complex as SQL didn't even register with FoxPro
developers. Data access was like breathing; you didn't even have to think about
it. Why would they pay a couple of thousand dollars for something that was both
more difficult to use and a lot slower? FoxPro made SQL look bad.
I was outraged. I wrote so many angry editorials for one industry publication
that I was eventually fired for being too negative. How could they get away with
this? Isn't monopoly (restraint of trade, like buying a competitor in order to
kill it, for instance) illegal? My son got a little embarrassed at his father's
public outrage. "Gaga says 'it's better to light a candle than to curse the
darkness'," he told me. Gaga was what he called his grandmother. "Why don't you
write a book to help all your gray-haired FoxPro buddies learn what's next,
which is obviously .NET?" He even offered to help. So we got started.
The .NET (pronounced "dot-net") initiative was unveiled by Bill Gates on June
22, 2000. He proposed to use the Internet to link all computing devices,
including devices then still on the drawing boards, using the Internet. At the
time, his decision to turn a huge company on a dime and head off into uncharted
territory was considered bold, even rash. Time, of course, has proven the wisdom
of that decision. The new programming technology that I would write about was
the .NET framework, which would underlie all of Microsoft's programming
languages. It had been underway for a year at the time, and we decided to hitch
our wagon to this new technology.
A week later we went down to a hilltop in a park east of San Jose to watch the
Leonids meteor shower. It was a once-in-a-century show. But around one in the
morning, my son told me that his back hurt. John had chronic ghost pains which
he never complained about, so I knew it must be pretty severe pain. By five am
he couldn't bear it any longer, and I drove him to a hospital in the City. It
was cancer - this time, leiomyosarcoma, caused by the radiotherapy he had
received 29 years earlier. A few weeks later he checked into the hospital. He
stayed there four and a half months. On April 23rd at 2:40 am, I watched the
line on his heart monitor go flat. He was 34 years old. His suffering was over; mine had just begun.
I sequestered myself in my house for months. There was no work; the
"dot-bomb" implosion of Internet startups had wiped out the contract software industry.
Finally, my wife talked me into finishing
the book that John and I had started, so that it could be published as a way of
paying homage to him. Writing a book about how to rewrite FoxPro programs into
Microsoft's new .NET technology was the best career move I ever made. And it
introduced me to the Internet from a developer's point of view, and ultimately
led to this book, because it forced me to learn Internet programming.
Up until my entry into the .NET world, I wrote executables - programs that you
install and run on your computer. Websites are a completely different approach to
software. A browser, like Internet Explorer, FireFox and a few others, formats
and displays strings of text consisting of HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
usually from files with the extension ".html" or ".htm". HTML consists mainly of
tags and text. Tags are enclosed in the symbols "<" and ">", called carets by
the cognoscenti. <p>Paragraph;</p>. <i>italics</i> and <b>bold</b> are some of
the tags used to present and format text. <img> tags contain a reference to an
image file - a picture or graphic - that's loaded and displayed in place of the
img tag. Hyperlink <a> tags contain an "href=" parameter that points to the
name of the HTML file to load when the hyperlink is clicked. There are a few
dozen more tags, and of course the magic of cascading style sheets; but it's
basically pretty simple. If you build a bunch of HTML files that link to each
other, you've got a web site.
However, you can also write programs that run on the web server, and which read
data of various types and use the data to build and serve HTML on the fly. Such
programs don't send back files from the server; they construct and send back
strings of text containing the HTML that will be used to render a web page. When
one of these strings gets to your browser, it has no idea that the web page that
it's rendering didn't exist a millisecond before. This is often called dynamic
content, because, unlike static file content, it's assembled dynamically when
requested.
Generated web pages of this type were once called active server pages (hence the
acronym ASP), although these days there are many, many competing technologies
with many, many acronyms.
[7].
Dynamic web pages, pages created based on what you
did on the previous page just before you clicked a link or a submit button, are
like the difference between walking and flying in a jet. The difference is
breathtaking. You can build pages that respond to the user's selections on the
previous page, or values retrieved from a database, or cookies retrieved from
the user's computer, or any of a nearly endless list of data sources.
Dynamic web pages turn the Internet into practical magic.
Thanks to dynamic web page creation, the Internet can display any amount of
information, with any degree of complexity, presented any way you can imagine,
to anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, day or night, for free. How can
that not change the world?
I knew about dynamic websites, but the type of applications that my clients asked for would
have performed miserably if written as web pages. So, I considered them
irrelevant. However, new Internet technologies came along that let us access
data from executables across the Internet just as if we were connecting to a
database on our local area network.
Suddenly the Internet was relevant to the technology that I sold.
Writing a book about rewriting FoxPro applications to .NET languages had taught
how to do it. My gray-haired FoxPro buddies wouldn't have to retire after all.
They could build dynamic web sites, or they could write executables that used
the Internet as the cable connecting the app to the database. I could give them
new careers. I had a piece of the new frontier!
[8].
My Epiphany Top
After my book about migrating FoxPro programs to .NET came out, I started
looking around for an idea for a website that would do something important. I
didn't know if I wanted it to make me a ton of money, or to do a ton of good, or
what; I just wanted an idea.
One day I was at the grocery store with my wife. I picked up a jar of Keiller's
Dundee Orange Marmalade, which I'm particularly fond of, and started to put it
in the shopping cart. "Don't buy that here," she said; "it's a dollar cheaper at
Trader Joe's."
"A dollar?" I thought. "How can a store get away with selling something that you
can get for a dollar less six blocks away?" Turns out, grocery stores have done
a lot of thinking about things like this. Turns out, charging a dollar more than
the expected price is only one of perhaps twenty strategies to separate you from
more of your money than you thought you were going to spend. The fact that there
are thirty-five-thousand prices to remember for each store is what they're
counting on.
Stores have a weapon that consumers don't: Information asymmetry - their ability
to remember everything instantly (not them - their computers), and knowing that
you can't. Merchants count on information asymmetry to overcharge. They know
that you can't possibly know the prices of all thirty-five thousand items that
they and the other grocery stores in town charge. They know them, of course;
they use databases to remember things. You use your brain. Databases remember
better than your brain does. You need countervailing power. You need a database.
And my years as a database developer, plus the power of the Internet, meant that
I could offer a solution.
This was an epiphany for me. Those eleven years of studying economics had
persuaded me that, based on the theory of perfect competition, prices should be
about the same everywhere. The perfectly competitive model is the basis of the
free market - its very justification. But if the consumer doesn't have a
photographic memory, the free market fails, and the consumer loses. It's the
perfect blame-the-victim scenario.
JustPrices.org Top
Imagine if you could go to a website and tell it what you wanted to buy, and get
a shopping list for each store with only the items that are cheaper there than
at any other store in your neighborhood. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?
Surely there's an app for that.
Try it. Go to Google, or Yahoo, or Bing, and try to find out the lowest price in
your city for a package of 24 newborn Pampers - or anything else. You can't. The
stores own the data, and they're not about to let you have it in a way that
permits comparison. There are no store-to-store price comparison websites.
So I stole their data and built a website to let people shop for groceries. Part
of the reason I did it was simply to teach myself the technology. In the process
of learning how to do something like this, I would have to master dozens of new
tricks and techniques. Doing this website would be good for me. So I began my
journey. I never imagined where it would take me.
I named the website JustPrices.org. People assume that it means "only prices".
It doesn't. It means fair prices.
In my demonstration website, you enter your zip code (although currently, there's only data for one),
and you see the stores in your neighborhood.
You can exclude any of the stores that you just don't like. You then proceed down the virtual aisles,
picking one of this, two of that. When you click the CheckOut icon, you get one shopping list for
each store in your area, containing only the items that are
cheaper at that store than at any other in your neighborhood. Stores that
don't have the lowest price for anything on your list don't even appear. They're
invisible. Ultimately, either they lower their prices, or they die.
Loading the data was of course the hard part; I was able to screen-scrape a few
stores, and manually entered prices from another. So if there was no website to
raid, I had to walk up and down the aisles with a pre-printed list of product
names and write their prices down, then go back home and type them in - a
ridiculously labor-intensive process. (There's an alternative, but it would take
a teeny tiny change to our laws. More about that later.)
One day, when I was in a grocery store gathering prices, an employee came up and
asked me what I was doing, and I told him. A minute later, his manager came up,
called me a communist, and told me to leave.
The economic model that my website is based on is the basis of capitalism.
What could cause a merchant to accuse me of being a communist for trying to precisely
follow the capitalist economic model? I soon found out. Based on my test data, which I loaded from some stores in San
Mateo, California, I discovered that I could save a typical grocery shopper 24%
of their grocery bill - twenty-four out of every hundred dollars, two-hundred
and forty out of every thousand dollars. In the case of the average American,
it's a mortgage payment a year; in the case of a nation, it's a big step toward
surviving this economic crisis and regaining our greatness.
In the case of a grocery store, however, it means losing 24% of their gross,
and probably 90% of their profits. That's why he called me a communist: Because to
people like him, free market means the freedom to lie to us and cheat us.
This might seem radical to you, but if someone knows that they're charging more than their
competitors and they don't tell you, they're lying. My mother taught me when I was six
years old that not telling the whole truth is called lying by omission - not "just doing business",
not "protecting the bottom line"; it's called lying.
It's the first word in the phrase "lying by omission."
There's no other word for it.
Lying, it seems, is the biggest money-maker in our economic system. And if you
don't catch the lie, it's your fault. Caveat emptor - buyer beware. Don't beware
of lying and cheating and getting caught. Beware of being the fool who was lied
to and didn't catch on. We're been taught for years that this is perfectly fine.
And if we don't agree with it, we're communists? I don't think so. We'll look
further into the basis of our economic system in chapter one, but I'm pretty
sure that the economic system that capitalism is based on doesn't demand that we
lie. We're better than that.
When I realized what my little website could do to help people who are feeling the pain
of the economic crisis, I felt like the Leon Lederman, the Nobel-prize-winning
scientist in the television ad, who found proof of the existence of bottom
quarks one day in the early hours of the morning, and then realized that for the
next few hours, he was the only person in the world who knew of their existence.
As an economist, I understood the problem. As an Internet database programmer, I
had built a solution. I was giddy with excitement. If I was looking for
something important to do, I had found it.
It turned out to be the tip of the iceberg.
The ability to deliver any amount of information to anyone anywhere in the world
in any degree of complexity at any time for free implies greater possibilities
than saving you a buck on a box of diapers. It promises ways to fix what's wrong
with our civilization, which is poised on the brink of self-destruction. And the
problems go far, far beyond the cost of food. But there are solutions, and the
Internet is the key.
What this book is about Top
"If you're not outraged," the bumper sticker says, "you're not paying
attention." The essence of the cover story of The Economist, a business-oriented
British magazine that many consider the best in the world, early in 2011 was
this: "The free market has failed us, and monopolists are sucking the life out
of us." It's not a secret. Television, magazines, books, the Internet itself -
every information source we have tells us so. And we're overwhelmed with other
problems that seem to admit of no solution other than violence. We know who the
bad guys are, and where they live. What do we do next? The obvious answer - the
R word - immediately comes to mind. But it would be a terrible step to take.
However, doing nothing is no longer an option.
This book is about how we can use the free market model, with the lies stripped out, to fix
what's wrong in just about every aspect of our society. Education, medical care, government
ineptitude, corporate greed, overcharging - every single one has a solution involving
the basic elements of my little web site: Using only the truth (not someone's version of it,
but the actual, verifiable truth) to make decisions, with the option to make
decisions based on anything else removed. Politics is the power to lie and to be treated as if you were
telling the truth. Politics is what needs to be fixed. But the Internet can help...
with a few teeny-tiny changes in our laws.
Our country is falling behind the rest of the world because our children are not
learning anything. The Internet offers the perfect framework for both lowering the cost of
education and improving its quality. The infinite patience of a web server to repeat and
reinforce is just what the doctor ordered,
with a few teeny-tiny changes in our laws.
No one can afford medical care any more, and the reason isn't that we don't have enough
insurance; the reason is that they charge too much. Not only can the Internet help
to solve this problem; it's about the only thing that can -
with a few teeny-tiny changes in our laws.
Our political system is broken, and only the Internet offers a means to fix it -
with a few teeny-tiny changes in our laws.
As a result, dialog between Democrats and Republicans is impossible. The parties don't seem to care
about the facts or the truth; they only care about using the farce of our current electoral process
to steal the 2012 elections. They don't want to argue the facts; they just want to win.
And because they're lying, they think that the other side is also lying, so why bother to listen to them?
The Internet can fix that, too. Just as my website manages to achieve justice by banishing lying from
the grocery business, so can we fix our political process by eliminating lies. Once Democrats can't lie,
they'll be more careful about what they promise, but know that they can't deliver without Republican cooperation.
And once Republicans can't lie, they can go back to arguing that nothing needs to change because they personally are doing very well,
which is their traditional and natural role. Later, once Republican voters realize that they personally are in the
same ditch as the rest of us, they'll vote for change too, and we can get our country back.
Blueprints for a peaceful revolution
I hope that this book will contribute to a movement that can spare us the ultimate tragedy.
With Internet technology, and with and a renewed determination to solve our problems justly and
rationally, we can fix this broken world. The purpose of this book is to show how to use the Internet
to avoid a violent, bloody revolution. Without it, our downward spiral will continue.
If the amazing power of the Internet can save us from a conflagration, then that will be its
greatest legacy.
In the pages that follow, I'll talk about some of the problems that our country
faces, and propose solutions that the Internet could provide, using the same
approach that I used in my website. Most of these technical solutions would
require what I like to refer to as teeny tiny changes in our legal framework. In
fact, the changes to our legal and political framework that would be needed are enormous. We
have the technology; what we lack is the political will.
Footnotes:
[1] Lanier, Vydec and a few others produced dedicated word processors that were
selling at that time for around $25,000. Gates said he was developing one for
the Japanese printer manufacturer Ricoh.
Back
[2] Bill Gates had by then been promoted to Chairman of the Board, his management
talents having been evaluated and recognized, presumably, by both himself and
Steve Ballmer. It was a really, really smart move.
Back
[3] I don't blame her; about 98% of marriages of parents of children with cancer
end in divorce.
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[4] I didn't tell him that I never liked Hungarian notation. Microsoft didn't
either; shortly after he retired, they dropped it as a corporate standard.
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[5] He went back up to the ISS two years later, making him the only space tourist to go into space twice.
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[6] I'm writing a novel that describes some of the sleazy practices I witnessed
back then, and occasionally helped to perpetrate on their trusting victims. Of
course, any resemblance between the characters in that novel and any persons,
living or dead, will be purely coincidental...
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[7] One of those is ASP.NET, Microsoft's solution for building dynamic web pages.
This is the technology that Microsoft ("dot-NET") developers use.
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[8] They didn't appreciate it. One of the greatest disappointments in my life
was the dawning realization that most FoxPro programmers considered me a traitor
for suggesting that they learn a different technology. I once saw a call for
papers that specifically excluded me, saying that "no presenters on migrating
FoxPro applications to .NET need apply." My newsletter had two thousand
subscribers, and my books sold tens of thousands of copies. When my son died, I
received perhaps a dozen condolence letters from the FoxPro community that I had
been such a large part of.
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Email me when the book is published
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