On May 12, 10:55 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > I find this pretty typical in discussions involving Apple. Whenever the > exchanges start discussing numbers, Apple enthusiasts tend to quickly dig in > with a "I don't care, Apple makes tons of money which means they're great".
Tim O'Reilly, from "Rules Of Thumb" <http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/ oreilly/tim/articles/thumb_pref.html?page=2>: If I were to boil my company vision down to one sentence, it would be this: "To make money doing interesting and worthwhile things." Why "to make money"? Well, money is the fuel for the whole system. It makes the rest possible. What's more, there is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics. When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it cleans out an awful lot of wooly thinking. I think often of Alexander Pope's comment about writing poetry in rhymed couplets. He said that funnelling his creativity through such a narrow aperture made it shoot out like water from a fountain. Why "interesting and worthwhile"? Oddly enough, while dull people find very little to be of interest, intelligent people find almost anything interesting. (Curiosity is the wellspring of intelligence.) And so there are many things that can be interesting that do not add a great deal of value to the world. Adding the proviso that what we do be worthwhile in some larger sense limits our selections a bit, but like the need to make money, actually improves the chances of happiness at what we do. -- end quote -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
