Unsought Input

I had to post this video: Mr T. busts through a wall, alarmed by the jibber-jabber of a fat-headed consultant. He proceeds to show the consultant that Mr. T puts the “T” in IT.

Best lines:

“You know you got a lot of mouth, and I’ve got a lot of fist for your mouth!”

“Intelligence in the network? That’s for suckas. That’s for routing stuff, not data, fool!”

This is a video for Hitachi, but that last quote could also be seen as an argument for net neutrality. Somebody call up Mr. T. and get him in front of Congress.

And in all seriousness, Mr. T. is a really interesting guy - check out his profile on IMDB.

“I think about my father being called ‘boy’, my uncle being called ‘boy’, my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called ‘boy’. So I questioned myself: ‘What does a black man have to do before he’s given the respect as a man?’ So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody’s mouth is ‘Mr.’ That’s a sign of respect that my father didn’t get, that my brother didn’t get, that my mother didn’t get.”

As I write this, Google has a market cap of about $148 billion, compared to Verizon at $124 billion and AOL parent Time Warner at $82 billion. Google might rule the Web search market, but Verizon’s $88 billion and Time Warner’s $44 billion in revenue last year dwarf Google’s $10 billion.

Why would a smaller company that makes less money be worth more to investors than larger competitors? Are they just being irrational? Maybe so, but I think there is at least one good reason why Google has been so successful: it has focused on providing services, rather than content or infrastructure.

Why is this important? Think about it this way: whenever you do anything on the Internet, chances are you can break it down into three layers:

1) Infrastructure - your connection to the Internet, whether it’s Cable, DSL, dial-up, FIOS, etc.
2) Service - the application you use to get what you want done, for example the search engine you use to find things or the mail client you use to read you email.
3) Content - the stuff you read, watch, listen to, or create yourself for others to see.

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