Here are some responses to balance his opinion:

• Scoble's vision of the future
• My future is so bright that I'll need to wear sunglasses
• Microsoft's omnipotence is overstated
• Focus on business needs
• Microsoft is paranoid and histrionic
• The Bad News From Boeing

(Thanks to Scoble for the collection of links (of course he does have an interest in maintaing that Microsoft is not the enemy)).

I'd urge all you fellow soon-to-be Comp Sci grads to read through some of that stuff. The past and future of the IT market is not often discussed in school. Somehow they think with enough calculus and formal language theory that we'll be able to land on our feet and build a future for ourselves and make the school and world proud.

I know that back pre-bubble burst, Waterloo was really just a breeding ground for Nortel and Microsoft so they really didn't care about you doing the entrepreneur thing. Today maybe we're just a breeding ground for Microsoft and Amazon but unless you're in the top 1% you can't really be counting on an offer from either of those companies to secure your short term future. It's time for the school to recognize this (and they are a bit, i.e. the MBET program, ECON 220, MTHEL 400). What we need is a CS49x course that examines the past, present, and future of the IT market.

I'll add my own anedocte to the list above.. Back in 93? a group of us were sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting to board a plane back to Canada. We had just spent a week at Comdex. While we had seen some interesting things (and got a lot of t-shirts) John wouldn't stop lamenting that we were born to late. That all the cool stuff happened in the 70s and 80s. Ten years later its safe to say that the landscape today is just as exciting as it was back then. We were around to see the advent of email, the web, wireless communications, GUIs, P2P, digital media,... Somehow we slept through the dot com boom and jumped on that a year too late but whatever. Things may look bleak again going forward but I'm sure the next 10, 20, 30 years will be even more exciting than the years gone by.
3:52:45 PM   []

Lavigne was patently unready to handle a show in a venue as vast as the Dome, if she has any chops at all in live situations. Her wildly mispitched singing was like bad karaoke, blown up to stadium proportions. Her fans didn't mind; their connection with her songs is evidently deep enough to withstand any abuse.

And I agree.. The show should have been outside.
10:48:28 AM   []

• Fall 2003
• Winter 2004
• Summer 2004
• ...
• Never

10:37:17 AM   []