But when most people think of the fairy-tale dream start-up story, they think of YouTube. Founded in February of 2005, sold to Google in November of 2006 for $1.65 billion USD. Start your site, and twenty-one months later, you’re a millionaire. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The difference is, it takes an innovative, forward-thinking company to recognize and acquire an innovative start-up. Google itself was an overnight success story, pushed through to greatness mostly by the sheer stubbornness of its founders. Having run that gauntlet themselves, they know how to recognize a good idea headed by a tough entrepreneur. This is a skill that Old Guard companies like Microsoft fail to grasp – so much so that bloggers all over the web are asking whether Microsoft is doomed, and has prompted Paul Graham himself to pronounce Microsoft dead.

Microsoft… dead. Imagine what a huge gap that would leave. Like the huge multinational banks in the United States which are getting bailed out during their economic turmoil, Microsoft seems almost too big to fail. If they did, there would not be another Microsoft. Their niche instead would rapidly be filled with the New Guard: smart, innovative, small companies that think fast and take risks… and know how to cooperate with the competition!

Peter Brittain

Anyway, so The Ellison has this fun little rant on YouTube, where he whinges in true Ellison style about how some agent called him expecting to do an interview for free on a DVD commentary. And he told them, as only Ellison can, to get stuffed. And a web designer posts this in support of the view that web designers are not assertive enough with their pricing policies, too.

Fair enough. Except that the world market for web work is competitive. In any business, you have competition in the form of price, and no matter how much you complain about it, if somebody’s out-pricing you, you lose some business. The other point to compete on is quality. We can all do that, too.

We can also examine our overhead; I’ve known a lot of web designers who swore they couldn’t stay in business doing what others charge, and then it turns out that they have the pro version of DreamWeaver for development, the full Adobe CS3 suite for graphics, all running on Vista on a machine that’s ten times as powerful as they need, and running five monitors so they can look cool in their $750 Aeron chair while they design. Oh, and they need the top-dollar graphics card to play World of Warcraft on while they “wait for inspiration”.

Just a hint: It’s called “code”. A text editor can do it. But anyway…

You have to wonder about how far the writing profession has come since Ellison’s prime, and what he would have to say about the blog world were he to behold it. There’s millions of blogs out there just sending out reams of work every day for free. OK, granted, it’s ad-supported. And then there’s Wikipedia: what a mind-boggling amount of work is out there now, for no charge! But they collect donations.

The thing is, the web of the 21st century is becoming a new business model where if it isn’t free, it’s so close to being free that it’s hard to tell. Now, could you imagine explaining open source software to Uncle Harlan?

Peter Brittain