Reply #55: okay

[Lexingtonian]

The part about corporate elites setting obstacles makes no sense at all, especially in light of what has happened in the last ten years. Get educated? Where have you been? There are literally millions of highly educated, technically adept, highly skilled workers that are now working the counter at your local Starbucks. Be creative? We are the creative force that has brought all these toys to you, the problem is that corporations are vehemently anti-innovation. Innovation disturbs their profit models, and therefore, must be stifled at any cost. Has Microshit ever brought one single innovation to the software industry? No, they kill innovation and convince you that is how it should be.

You see the individual trees clumped together, I'm calling the situation a forest. We're not actually in disagreement.

The corporate elites of the present do stifle the evolution of the economy and Microsoft is a perfect example. (It's been called 'the Ford of software' for a reason.) Microsoft started off as typical postindustrial business, then started doing things in an ever more industrial age (and now colonial, i.e. "outsourced") fashion.

I haven't thought much about how it's done, but the Microsofts of the world endure because of protectionisms of certain kinds. Someone is going to have to end these protectionisms eventually. Which takes political action against excessive corporate privilege, excessive copyright and intellectual property and patent rights. It also takes an economy with more stabilized and serious demand for these gizmos than we have now, the present is a market of continuously fueled fads and "upgrades".

The question is who is going to do this, and when, and how. How we all know, and who is obviously going to be the slowly building postindustrial workforce (which is not purely identical to tech workers, btw) once it creates its own leaders. The when is the tricky part.