The New Pirates of Silicon Valley - Older isn't wiser
(Page 2 of 4 )
When you think of those who are typically smarter, you tend to think of older people. Just take a look at the president's job. By law a U.S. president has to be 35 years old at least. The government has almost a step-up program based on age and the position to which you can be elected.
So why does this age requirement exist? It's because as you get older, you typically get wiser. This logic makes it seem like the great ideas and inventions are typically going to be originated by older people that have had a great education and have been working in development for decades.
The one thing that technology should teach us all is that technology is anything but predictable.
Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were in college when they ventured out and began their own companies, and both have been semi-successful. Okay, who am I kidding? They have been dominating and revolutionary. Granted, at that time computers weren't mainstream, and there weren't many companies that were comparable to Microsoft and Apple. Are they just flukes of history, or is the younger, hipper generation the place to look for the next big thing?
One of the few companies I would ever consider up there with Microsoft as far as computing is concerned is Google. I have been a Google fan for a long time. This web site, and now major company, was founded by two Stanford students. The biggest search engine in the world was created by two college students, and yet it came to dominate the field, even though search engines like Yahoo and Microsoft boast nice-sized teams being paid well with benefits -- and even though both Yahoo and Microsoft have been around for years longer.
The two students started the project as a mathematical look at the Internet. They believed the most relevant pages were the ones that were linked to the most. This was the idea behind Google's PageRank algorithm.
With the success Google has had so far, I'm going to jump to the conclusion that the algorithm works pretty well. Google was launched in 1998, and ten years later Larry Page, one of the founders, now has over $18 billion dollars. That's not bad, taking a research project from dinky website to monster corporation in ten years. To compare with Apple, just as no one wanted the first Apple computer (who would ever need such a device?), no one knew what to do with Google at first either.
Next: Older Still >>
More Opinions Articles
More By jkabaseball
