Is Facebook the next Microsoft?
Posted on July 20th, 2007 by Jackie Danicki
I have no idea, but this made me choke:
If you’re a member of Generation X, you’ll know the history; if you are younger you may not.
It seems like only yesterday that all the people who weren’t fellow Gen Xers were, well, infants.
Today is the last day of my 20s. Not that I’m obsessing about it or anything.
Filed under: Life
Two things. Firstly, “Generation X” is a term that has been much stretched. The term was originally popularised by Douglas Coupland when he wrote the novel with the title “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” in 1991. He was referring to people born in the final years of the Baby Boom. That is, people born between about 1961 and 1966. By that definition I am too young to be an X-er, and you are eight and a half years younger than I am. I think the media picked up the term as meaning “People in their mid to late 20s”, and kept it as meaning that for ten years or so, even as the people in that age group moved out and new people moved in. In about 2001 things changed because the children of the baby boomers started reaching adulthood in large numbers (births shot up starting in 1981), and this new generation was both larger and clearly something different. (Culturally they had had computers and the internet in their childhood and teen years, and I think this matters). At that point a post-X generation was with us, but I don’t think we have a name for it yet. “Generation Y” seems to have died, which is good as it made me bletch. “Echo boomers” is too obviously made up by demographers. “The Millennial Generation” is perhaps the best I have heard so far, but I doubt it will stick. “New Victorians” is sort of cute (and fits in very well with your Neal Stephenson readings) but I think that may only be a subset.
Probably I think the best definition of Generation X is anyone born between the end of the baby boom, and the beginning of the demographic bulge from their children - ie everyone born between about 1967 and 1980. However, the trouble with this is that it entirely excludes everyone the term was originally coined to describe.
As for the next Microsoft, I don’t believe there will be one. Microsoft came into being due to Bill Gates having a strange combination of good connections, a certain amount of forsight, a truly astonishing personality, and being in the right place at the right time. (The fact that there was a previous quasi-monopoly from IBM in certain parts of the computer industry that he could take over was great luck, too). Before the internet was dominated by PCs, it provided a framework in which software from lots of people could interact. The software environment of the internet consisted of lots of little pieces from lots of sources all stitched together. To me, that is how today looks, too. I think that is much more the natural state of things. The Microsoft model was the aberration.
When I think that I made it to 26 or 27 without an email address or a mobile phone… but it’s too easy to exaggerate the difference these things make to life in general on the one hand, if not easy to exaggerate their individual impact (blogging changed my life, very much for the better, and after two weeks I can already see what Facebook might do).
Clive James got it right: the internet means that a life spent exploring culture writ large is now open to almost anyone, anywhere, at any time - and, unlike TV in its heyday, it isn’t cheapening (I think Veoh, for instance, to be a supremely elegant piece of work).
It would make me want to be 21 again, if not for the fact that I can remember what 21 was like, and feel well shot of it.
Yeah, when I actually stopped to think back on what I was doing and who I was at age 20, I broke out in a cold sweat. ROLL ON 40.