Everything I know about Stephen Hawking I learned one evening a couple years ago at the old Claremont Hotel on the border between Oakland and Berkeley, California. I was there to give a speech and was late for the gig, so instead of waiting for an elevator I took the stairs down a couple floors in the old wooden hotel. Bursting through the doors at the bottom of the stairs and into the lobby I almost crashed into Stephen Hawking! Killing a world-famous physicist in a wheelchair is not what I wanted to be remembered for so it was lucky I was able to roll a bit to one side and avoid — just barely […]
It is rare when my two primary gigs — technology and finance — intersect in some philosophically satisfying way but it happened recently when Goldman Sachs was being charged with civil fraud by the SEC and I was speaking the same day at the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON) in Columbia, South Carolina. Just minutes before my time to speak I realized that what I had to talk about was trust — the T-word — a word which has very different meanings in each of these realms.
What are the odds that this week’s story about the next-gen iPhone “found” in a Bay Area bar came about by accident? A quick survey of former and current Apple employees (okay, it was only four of them) came out 100 percent on the side of this being no accident but a deliberate plant on Apple’s part.
This column was finished before I realized that this week is Twitter’s Chirp developer conference in San Francisco where Twitter will supposedly (and finally) explain how it intends to make money. As you can see below I have my own ideas on this. Let’s compare my ideas with Twitter’s later in the week and see whose are more fun.
Look at the photo with this column. It’s of an audio microcassette I found in my desk drawer yesterday while madly looking for something else in my overgrown office. As you may be able to read on the picture, it is an interview with Bill Gates from June, 1998. That’s the interview I did for my ill-fated Vanity Fair piece on the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It is almost sixty minutes entirely devoted to Bill talking about Steve. Quite a historical document, especially since its contents have never been published. And they won’t be here, either, except for one short quote that stood out when I listened to the tape today after […]
We’re halfway through the selection process for the 
Thinking about Ed Roberts, who died last week, reminded me of the best story he ever told me about Bill Gates and Paul Allen, explaining why Gates was always richer than Allen and why that differential may not have been fair. Here’s the short version:
