Tong Family

Random Thanksgiving Thoughts

We all have much to be thankful for. My biggest this year is that I can sit and think with guys like Ludwig about what the next big thing is. Here are a couple of observations, just an outline, I’ll fill in later, but wanted to get thoughts down.

1. The miracle of Sourceforge. Open Source drives modular code. You have to think about it from day one. The code is very small (gallery.sourceforge.net) is a 1MB program in total, but the desktop loader is 2.5MB. What do you make of that. Folks should have an internal sourceforge.
2. Building great consumer products. It’s about hardware and software integration in consumer products. In personal productivity, it’s about applications and operating system.
3. The great pillars of consumer products. For desktop productivity, it was spreadsheets, a narrow, but great need and word processing, a broader more diffuse one. For today’s consumer, I think it is about gaming (like spreadsheets, same deep but narrow at 30% penetration) and photography of all sorts. The ether of the last revolution was email, in this world it is blogging.