Re: Talking to Jim

[anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com]

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On Sat 2 Dec 1995 05:24 one of the Alices wrote on the subject 
of Jim's comments about "bubbles" and such, and ended up automatically filtered to my Deleted folder (THAT will teach me to be curious about what ends up there!):

> The market seems to "think" that it's a better present judge 
> of what Netscape has than he does.  It's almost as though 
> the "market" has developed a "mind" of its own.  

Well, of course! Markets are the most efficient integration of the minds of the participants, hands down.

> It's own particular neural network.  

Exactly. Literally. And huge, too.

> It's almost as though there is automated software at work. 

There is: Wetware. Massive concurrent processing, heavy parallelism, inefficient I/O. Distributed, redundant memory. Inefficient but infinitely adaptable interprocessor routing. Capable of handling any degree of outage. All elements individually expendable. Self-replicating processors that have significant lead time but integrate smoothly into the net. Designs and builds its own outboard peripherals and interconnects. Best damned planetary computing system in this star system. But I diverge...

It's not always right (though self-fulfilling prophecy is often a big part of the equation), and it often misses the anolamies, but because it IS an integration is precisely why it may mean something different than you suggest.

It may in fact be the best barometer we have of the true depth of the exploding Internet phenomenon.  Completely aside from the question of whether or not the seeming Netscape overvaluation bubble bursts, etc., Netscape's share price more directly reflects the personal involvement and upward view of real people with respect to the Internet/WWW than anything else we have.

Remember, there are still naysayers out there, declaiming in places from books to columns to TV, while the reality is that computers are now outselling televisions, and a key new form of synergistic human communication is exploding in exponential growth.  Humans deal on a personal level only moderately well with linear processes, and poorly with geometric processes -- it's understandable that the growth of the Internet/WWW and the implications of thereof would be late in being recognized and be incorrectly understood until sometime AFTER the changes have rocked the society.

Markets, though, more accurately reflect what people are actually doing, what they are willing to do, and what they think "in their gut" will happen.  While they also reflect what people might LIKE to happen, they reflect, too, that what people WANT to happen, their desires often MAKE happen.  Capitalize ME to the tune of $5 billion, for instance, and I may be influential not only during the course of your life but the lives of your great-grandchildren.

Selling Netscape short may or may not be a wise move -- selling market processes short is usually a fool's exercise in self-delusion.

We Jurgar Din
(that will have to suffice: I do not yet live in a free country)

+"The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone. It is to the+
+vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no +
+election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now  +
+too late to retire from the contest." -Patrick Henry 1775 +


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