Throughout the stratosphereic run of Apple, few have truly believed. With the Apple stores, nobody believed. iTunes was mocked. The iPod was old technology. The Powerbooks too expensive. There was options backdating scandals and liver cancer.
NOW there are Tablet revenue predictiuons for 2020.
3. Killed the Kindle . I thought the Kindle had killed the Kindle when the Kindle was launched?
4. Was passed down from God. In fact, I think it would be cool if Steve Jobs had Ben-Hur playing before he takes the stage and throws the first Tablet into the crowd after breaking it on his knee.
I own Apple, but not with the size or passion that will make or break my year.
It is fun to see how our community thinks about trading and investing. We are attracting larger groups of futures and currency traders from looking at the charts and data. Looking at it today, I am getting some new ideas on how to display the information next week. Any ideas are welcome in the comments:
Other than Steve Jobs and option backdating, Apple has steered well clear of the government. Not so for Google.
The biggest news of 2010 is Google and it’s run in with government…not even ours.
Nothing scares me more than the government.
Let’s face it, when you get a letter from the IRS…you shiver…and even that is 99 percent junk mail.
Cornered cats do scary things. Our government is broke, but getting larger. That’s the opposite of what happens in the real world.
You and I can’t print money to pay our creditors. If we could print money, we would not work either.
When you are ‘Too Small to Fail’ you are left alone. When you get big, the competition notices and things get harder. If you get really big, your competition lobbies the government and you are toast.
2010 is going to be a tough one for big web companies.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times is calling this economic decade ‘The Big Zero ‘.
It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.
Paul and I smoke insanely different tobacco. As an entrepreneur that has managed a hedge fund now for 11 plus years through bubbles and crashes, I almost take offense.
When 2000 started I was living pretty high on the hog. Stocks only went up and they did so 50 points at a time. By March of 2000, that party ended. In March of 2009, if the same stocks moved $50, they would have been -$49 and change. BUT, by December 2009, the S&P is only 28 percent below all-time highs.
That’s definitely SOMETHING.
This decade was all about two things, creative and greedy destruction. Both hit all-time highs in 2009. In ten years we will see dizzying new highs again.
Here is a list of great creative destruction and economic wonderous things we did not have a decade ago (thanks @gregory for the fast list, great post and super cool Listorious ):
Skype
Wikipedia
Gmail
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
adWords
Amazon AWS
iPod
Wordpress
iPhone
Google Docs
Flickr
etc……………………
If anything, this decade did not see enough creative destruction…see AT&T.
As for creative greed , count me as a wounded, frustrated casualty. In 2000, I was way green and soft. When bad stuff happened to me I was a victim godammit! In 2009, when bad stuff happens to me, I blame myself. That’s a little growth .
In 2001, I was caught up in ‘collateral damage’ and I learned about diversification and humility. My lawyer was my best friend and saved/guided my ass (I love you Sara). I have written a few posts about it over the years . In 2009, I know that if my lawyer is my best friend, I am in trouble. That’s something.
Since my personal economic bottom in 2002, I have had many big victories . There was an insane amount of hard work, a lot of good fortune and a little luck. In 2005 I discovered blogging when I typed ‘term sheet’ into Google’s search box. I was directed to Brad Feld’s blog. I was inspired by Brad and his wicked blogroll of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. That term sheet was one I was writing for an angel investment in GolfNow.com .
As you know though, blogging is a waste of time and of no economic value.
In 2006, I started Wallstrip. In 2007, Wallstrip was purchased by CBS. Booyah!
In 2008, after writing the obligatory book (a bestseller…in Haiti!), I co-founded Stocktwits. In 2009, True Ventures and Foundry (yep Brad Feld) invested. In 2010, someone from Russia will invest bonker dineros. That’s just how shit will go down in the next decade of the web.
It’s not just economic progress….it’s global, thermonuclear economic progress – with a side of money laundering.
Ponzi schemes, named for infamous swindler Charles Ponzi, are extremely simple: Investors attracted by promises of high profits are paid with money from an ever-increasing pool of new investors, with the scammer skimming off the top. Sometimes the investments are at least partially legitimate but more often are completely fictional. There’s no reserve fund for lean times, or for when droves of investors start demanding their money.
Not sure about you but that sounds a LOT like our FED!
America is awesome. If you have the right attitude, you win. If you measure everything by money, things get instantly more clouded. We have definitely become a money society, but that does not mean you, the individual must fall in line.
You have to laugh. You have to recognize greatness and appreciate it for what it is.
Jon Stewart delivering media knock out punch after knock out punch; Amazon, Apple, IBM and thousands of other American companies executing flawlessly even as they scale to enormous sizes, Tiger Woods striking a golf ball (and getting struck)…
With greatness (and large, fat, dumb populations) comes slickness.
It is hard to block out the atrocities around us, but if you don’t someone else will.
America is an opportunity machine and while I cannot predict the future, and few can for any great length of time, you should surround yourself with people that see it that way.
If you have a ‘Too Small to Fail’ attitude, you will start reading these stories in a different light and you may even get some shit done.
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