Fun_People Archive
15 Nov
Ten Ways to Rule the World Through Cyberspace

Date: Tue, 15 Nov 94 17:39:38 PST
To: Fun_People
Subject: Ten Ways to Rule the World Through Cyberspace

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: Dan Wallach <dwallach@CS.Princeton.EDU>

1. Killer Client

	Create an amazing monolithic web client.  Get everyone hooked
	and then augment the standard until you've locked out your
	competition.

2. Killer Standards

	The HTTP standards are way too simple now!  Any creative little
	company can get in on the action.  Start making those standards
	FANTASTICALLY complex so just a few big companies can play.  An
	MIT consortium could accomplish this without even meaning to.

3. Killer Fonts

	Start a trendy magazine with hard-to-read fonts.  Take smart
	drugs.  Plan an on-line service of your own while labeling all
	potential competitors "obsolete" or "tired".

4. Killer Shopping Mall

	Start an on-line service for people to buy things.  Keep an eye
	on people's email to make sure everyone is shopping and NOT
	complaining to each other about crumby products.

5. Killer Content

	If you happen to own the rights to serious amounts of popular
	Mass Culture (violent action movies, cute cartoon icons, etc),
	try to leverage that into deals with technology companies.

6. Killer Set-Top Box

	If you happen to own a telephone or TV cable company, just
	design a set-top box so you can pump mindless drivel into
	people's homes.  Home Shopping and Top-10 Movies On Demand
	would make you LOTS of money.  Give the consumer enough
	upstream bandwidth so they can press the "buy" button on their
	remote, but not enough to actually get on-line and (god
	forbid!) communicate with each other.

7. Killer Language

	Invent a little language and call it a "scripting" language or
	a "mark-up" language, so people will overlook the fact that its
	syntax sucks or it has dynamic scoping.  Try to insinuate it
	into the HTTP or MIME standards.

8. Killer Buzzword

	Pick some industrial graphics standard and rename it as something
	sexy like "Cyber Space Modeling Language".  Hope no one notices that
	CAD graphics modeling languages have little or nothing to do with
	interactive presence.

9. Killer Magna Carta

	If you happen to be a collection of powerful communications
	corporations who are afraid the national net will be opened up
	as a common carrier, issue a manifesto in Wired Magazine
	ranting about how the government should stay out of Cyberspace.
	Talk about freedom and progress and hope no one notices that you
	just want to pump Home Shopping and Video Games into the home.

10. Killer Government

	If you happen to be the US government, then you ALREADY rule
	the world!  Just make sure you can eavesdrop on cyberspace and
	crush anything that looks like it's getting too big.

© 1994 Peter Langston