Geniuses and Ordinary People

There have always been geniuses - and it has always been easy to spot them. Mozart was a musical genius - probably the greatest genius of classical music, of all time. As classical music evolved however, other geniuses appeared, such as Beethoven. Ordinary people then appeared, to play, or sing, their music.

The line between geniuses and ordinary people cannot be sharply drawn. Many people exist somewhere in between them - and have their moments of inspired genius also.

The Computer, with its Software - has confused things even more. There are software geniuses, and I have worked with a few. And I have seen geniuses come and go - as the Computer industry has evolved. Geniuses at one kind of software, stop being geniuses as new kinds are invented.

Most of us, only use the software they have invented. And some of us, do not do that very well. The  amount of substandard software being produced is prodigious.

The software world is like the world of the Red Queen - you have to run at top speed, to stay in one place. And developments in the next square go around you anyway.

For example, I worked for Adaptec for awhile. It made adapters for the desktop computer - huge things, three feet tall the two feet deep. They couldn't do much, out of the box - and you had to plug in adapter boards for anything exetra - such as accessing the Internet.

When the laptop computer appeared, adapters were no longer necessary - and Adaptec went out of business. The same thing happened for the Computer Graphics companies I worked for - they went out of business also. Everyone who worked for these companies was out of a job.

But no one panicked - they just learned another skill, and headed for the next job fair, if they were in a boom period. If they were in a bust period, they were shit out of luck.

The Business Cycle was as powerful at ever,