How The Game Is Played

Eulogy for a Blackbird

There is an old saying that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Sometimes though studying history is helpful in order to repeat things, particularly successes.

With that in mind, I want to tell you a story. It's a story with a happy ending, at least for someone.

Once upon a time, when the net was shiney and so new that the first porn sites hadn't even come up, a King named Bill happened to notice it.

"Hmm," said Bill, "this new form of communication is a threat to me. For currently there is one press in the kingdom and I own it. Should the net become important however it might upset my control."

So he thought about it and thought about it, and finally decided that he needed to control this new "net-thing" as well. He sent for his wisest advisors. They looked at the net and said, "You know, this HTML thing isn't so different from what we do now in our Help Engine. Lets redesign the Help Engine so it runs on the net and we can replace this pesky HTML thing with something we already control."

The king was pleased with this plan, and so was born a project known as Blackbird. The advisors gathered their best craftsmen and they labored long and hard. But while they were pounding out the old shape of the Help Engine and trying to pound it into a new one, a funny thing happened. The people were bored waiting for the King's new thing, so in the meantime they started playing with HTML.

And they decided they liked him. This encouragement made HTML swell with pride and almost spontaneously he started growing. In fact, he started learning new tricks at such a rate that the King's laborer couldn't keep up.

And so, the King, who after all was a king because he was wise as well as powerful, said, "Clearly, my advisors had their heads up their posteriors." So the King killed the Blackbird and sent the advisors to the dungeons and the laborers off to work on a way to control HTML directly.

And thus the Blackbird was given a eulogy, and that eulogy was called Internet Explorer.

The Blackbird died, but the King lived happily for a long time after because he understood exactly what he wanted from the beginning and, when he couldn't get it from Blackbird, he got it from IE.

And in that, there is a moral.

Posted at 07:29PM May 06, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]