I have two friends. I’ll call them Bert and Ernie.
Bert is 72, a Baby Boomer, and lives on the East Coast. He is mostly retired after a successful career in consumer marketing, including running his own successful business. Bert is technically savvy and aware, and usually has the latest i-Gizmo.
Ernie is in his early 40s, a Gen Xer, and lives on the West Coast. He teaches at a private boys’ school. He’s a runner, and a good one, not to mention being an enthusiastic and fearless early-adopter of technology.
In February, I wrote a post comparing tech giants of the twenty-first century to those of the nineteenth century (see here). I wondered in the post if maybe historian Richard Hofstadter had been correct when he wrote, "Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men."
That’s when Ernie dropped me a note from Oakland. It was clear I wasn’t seeing the modern digital landscape clearly. Here’s what he wrote: