Shorter Robert X. Cringely

I told someone about a website, so I'm basically a hero.

In which I keep talking about IBM because it's all I know and determine that software defined networking is a magic wand that eliminates all the hard parts of networking.

I have no idea what IT does, so I assume they're unnecessary, which is a bit surprising for a technology blogger.

Turns out the key to being a venture capitalist is to invest in successful companies and not invest in unsuccessful companies.

“Nobody dies of cholera at masked balls because people shit themselves to death over several days.”

“No, I’m not a doctor or an epidemiologist...” but I guess you don't need to be to make the brave prediction that a global pandemic is bad.

I'm not a doctor, but I read a medical paper once, so I've figured out how to save 400,000 lives per year. In the best practices of oracles, I predict that this will definitely not happen, unless it does.

Bonus review of my 2020 predictions!

My first three predictions:

In case you forgot, a decade ago the world learned that I mail my friends and family nude pictures of our entire family as Christmas Cards because I am loon. Oh, and Y2K happened a decade before that.

I'm deep in debt, so I've decided to invest in a new company in a crowded space. because I thought it would be fun. You know, like the MineServers and living in the middle of a highly flammable forest.

Fax machines, which relatively few people had, caused demand for new area codes. Cell phones, which damn near everyone has, causes lack of demand for area codes. Also, I've completely forgotten how expensive long distance calls were, which allows me to believe that faxes were cheaper than the US Postal Service.

I have no idea how loud drones are, how fast they are, how long their batteries last, how much they can lift, or how much pizza a neighborhood can eat in an evening. So, yeah, drones delivering pizzas to cars, seems reasonable!

Elon Musk is such a blowhard that even I realize it.

A company with $200 billion in cash might try to invest it.

The dominant company in a market will continue to use their dominance to dominate that market. In this particular case, we're renaming the market to “Virtual Private Cloud”, but nothing has actually changed.

A computer crashing several times a day is close enough to “just like a new one.”