Skip to main content

Scott Adams on Dilbert at EclipseCon 2007

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="160" caption="tricia@cheekyattitude"][/caption]

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, did a great job with the EclipseCon 2007 Keynote talk on Tuesday.

While the talk was certainly entertaining, the thing I liked most about his talk was the focus on things like "failure", "timing","luck", and "persistence".

Scott pointed out that his "list of failures" got to 29 items before he stopped counting. Of those 29 failures, most would have been successes had they been shifted forward or backward in time by as little as 5 years. As I've said before, timing is everything. Startups are often too early to market. Lots of VC-backed startups do not have the patience to wait for the market to catch up to them. Patience.

In addition to his 29 failures, Scott did recognize 3 successes. And, certainly, a bit of luck played a part in the successes.

However, Scott's spin on "lucky" and "unlucky" people was interesting. Lucky people are those that expect success to happen to them and, as a result, they have a broader perspective of the world around them. Unlucky people do not expect success and often miss the signs that would otherwise drive them toward the right opportunity. Interesting. Don't forget to look around.

Finally, don't ever give up. Be persistent. Create a "product". Create lots of products. Something will eventually stick, perhaps with that component of "luck" playing its part when you least expect it.

Nothing in here about Eclipse or EclipseCon 2007. Still, very well done, informative and entertaining.

Be sure to take a look at the Dilbert Blog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bill Coleman Joins 3tera Advisory Board

I think this move surprised a number of people, since Bill recently wrapped up Cassatt Corproation, getting the technology and people  acquired by Computer Associates . However, I was not surprised at all. The announcement, via  3tera Welcomes Bill Coleman : You may or may not have seen the recent press realease.  Bill Coleman, IT/Silicon Valley luminary, Founder and CEO of BEA Systems, has joined 3Tera’s Advisory Board. Yes, this alone is a great testimonial to what we have accomplished in our field.  Getting dignitaries such as Bill does not come easy.  But here’s the best part - this has a lot more than just marquee value and I doubt that Bill would have joined us if that was the case.  Bill, especially since his most recent stint as Founder and CEO of Cassatt Systems, is an extremely knowledgeable visionary in the area of utility and Cloud Computing; and, data center automation. So, Bill will be extremely valuable, reviewing and tweaking both our business plans and techno

Big In Japan Open Sources Their Ruby On Rails Tools

The kind folks over at Big In Japan have graciously decided to Open Source the code they used to build their demo web sites . It's all Ruby on Rails code, and it's being released with a GPL license. The code trees being made available include: elfURL ~ URL Shortner FeedVault ~ OPML file storage FrankenFeed ~ RSS feed merger InstantFeed ~ RSS feeds via email QwikPing ~ Ping Server SocialMail ~ RSS via email Very cool. I just love the Open Source community . I have actually been writing some code of late, and it's great to have some reference code to check out. Not sure if I'm going to go with Ruby on Rails yet, however. And, for the record. I have no idea if this is big in Japan. Tags: Open Source , GPL , Ruby On Rails , Big In Japan , Brian Berliner , brianberliner

CA Acquires 3Tera – It’s About Time!

I started tracking 3Tera in August 2005. They made some amazing progress with their AppLogic release in the next 12 months and things were really starting to look good, so I wrote my first article about them in September 2006 . A couple weeks later, ReadWriteWeb called them out as well . Time passed. 3Tera was early. The market was maturing. Keep pounding away at it… Meanwhile, Cassatt Corporation, the company I co-founded in April 2003 with Bill Coleman and Dave McAlister, sold its technology assets and people to Computer Associates in June 2009 . The Cassatt team was all over scalable “cloud” computing architectures and the management thereof. CA’s acquisition, combined with some of their other aggressive moves in this space (the similar acquisitions of NetQoS, Oblicore, Orchestria, Platinum Technology, and Netreon) made it clear that CA saw some white-space for them to expand into cloud management in a big way. Next, I reported how Bill Coleman joined up with 3Tera as