Commentary

Here's To The Onliners

by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, September 30, 2011

You do realize our industry is completely insane, right?

Our developers have to ensure consistency and compatibility across infinite platforms, operating systems, and interfaces of all kinds. Mac and PC. iOS and Android and Windows 7. Mouse-based and touch-based and gesture-based. They deliver technological miracles every day to a population whose expectations sit far above miracle level.

Our marketers have to dynamically transform strategy and tactics to a landscape that changes faster than a politician's core values, and to client demands that change even faster: Groupon! Foursquare! Facebook! Google+! Bling! Shiny things! Squirrel!

Our entrepreneurs repeatedly bet everything they have on their ability to manage circumstances beyond their control, for the remote and improbable possibility of changing the world. Then they succeed often enough to keep the hope alive in thousands of other would-be revolutionaries.

Our investors back us and support us and give us opportunities to play in a space that will never be defined, predictable, static, or certain. They lose far more often than they win, and still they front up.

We are insane -- and yet, we are alive. We are dancing on a roiling sea, battered continuously from above and below, drenched with saltspray and pivoting madly to escape the sharks nibbling at our toes. We are surfing on the waves of innovation and disruption, twisting and leaping in response to our inconstant environment. Google buys Motorola! Amazon has a new tablet! Facebook is changing everything they do and the entire way you interface with the platform -- again!

So here's to you, onliners. Here's to you surfers, you dancers, you pivoters, you changemakers. For your bravery. For your intrepidness. For your insanity and for your unshakable optimism. For your innovation and your early adoption and for your evangelism. For your belief that every company and every industry, no matter how big, can be disrupted.

I am grateful to you. It's a fun world we live in. Thanks for making it possible.

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3 comments about "Here's To The Onliners".

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Douglas Cleek from Magnitude 9.6, September 30, 2011 at 8:35 p.m.
Made me lol. Lead-up to squirrel says it all.
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Jason Klein from Selligent, September 30, 2011 at 8:49 p.m.

Insane *and* fun. I think you captured it all and a very entertaining post. Keep 'em coming!

Mike Mcgrath from RealXstream PTY LTD, October 14, 2011 at 1:47 a.m.

Surfing is fun! And so what if we fall off every now and again, or if we get smashed and never surface again. 20 years from now we can still look back and say that "we were there" when some of the biggest wave's of change were breaking along the coast of society and we were riding those waves and not just standing on the beaches watching....