Let me give another perspective here.

Some people are VERY SMART. Some people are so smart they're scary.

I believe most people "could" be smart, but it's not cool to be smart. Being some dumb guy with a perfectly toned body is much more important in society than being smart.

Smart people do GREAT R&D, but they don't build good mass-market products. Here's why.

Let's take computer networking. First generation networks were very difficult, almost impossible to run. It took incredibly smart people to build and maintain them, and they were VERY EXPENSIVE. You had to decide different things within the card (like how many times to retry a connect UDP packet before giving up on a connection). Each vendor had different standards. The guy who could make a NETBIOS, Token Ring or Ethernet network work in these years was scary-smart. The programming was assembler, with lots of difficult timing loops. The work to get something like X.25 working was simply incredible.

But networks didn't REALLY TAKE OFF until the Ethernet vendors all agreed to build to a very strict common specification. For most people, networks were completely out of reach until they were already built into the motherboard, or you could at least add a card and have it "automagically" work.

Same was true 100 years ago for electric motors. They were only for "smart" people who understood electricity because there were no standards, and getting your wires crossed could mean death. There were no AC or DC standards for wiring the factory, much less the home. Following the example of the "steam engine", the first builders of electric motors were trying to build them HUGE, so they could run the main drive belt of a 4-5 story factory, with a belt to each floor and then belts to each machine. Finally, some guy figured out that you could put a small motor on each machine and run wires everywhere. But that was dangerous, until standard voltages/amperages and even outlet plugs were invented.

The revolution in world manufacturing occurred as inventors finally made electricity simple, and now 98% of the people in the modern world don't have a clue as to how electricity works. They just put the plug in the socket and it works.

You want to be a billionaire? Take something that is really difficult today to do/use/create and make it simple. People want simple, people need simple. Examples I have thought of:

1. How about a car dealership where you pay about $100 over a normal car payment ($400-500 a month?) and the dealership takes care of you forever. When you take your car in for service, they have a rental waiting. When things (tires, brakes, etc.) wear out, they just take care of it. If the car breaks down, they send a tow and a cab. They just take care of you. How many people would kill for that? Just make transportation simple.

2. In one prior organization I worked for, there were a few financial "geniuses" who built the spreadsheet models. These guys were simply brilliant in their smarts in building these models. Then, they would give them to managers who would put the numbers in the right places, and then answers would come out. The managers could play with the numbers and see what would happen if they spent more or less on people/hardware/software, etc. The smarter managers would question the "assumptions" that the models were based on, but most just accepted the model as fact. Simple.

3. For years, the products one org I worked for were difficult to use and configure. We and our customers spent tons of money on programmers, consultants, installers, etc. Then TCP/IP game along, and we rewrote our product where all the customer needed to install our product was one 10-12 character field (kind of like an IP address). That's it. The product did the rest. Now, the company is phasing out all the "old" stuff because the new product is soooo SIMPLE!

It's not that complexity isn't good or valuable. It's just that 50% of the people in the world can't even handle the complexity of rows and columsn. The next 25% can handle 2D data, but are lost on 3D data. Then the real geniuses manage data in their heads in 5 dimensions. We should have people in the world who truly understand and value complexity, but then we need to hide a bunch of that complexity (like we do in Ethernet and TCP/IP), so that only a few thousand people in the world understand how it works.

However, I do become afraid from time to time that we'll end up like the Star Trek episode where the women lived underground and the men above ground. The women had this "magical" cap that simulated the brain of the leader of the women to have them instantly "learn" how to fix things, solve crises, etc. The cap stimulated the short term memory to the point where someone could do brain surgery for a matter of hours. Was it "Spock's Brain? or Pain and Delight?" I do think they stole Spock's brain in the episode because they needed a "controller". What happens when you the "controller" dies? What happens when there's no one left who knows how TCP/IP works anymore? Will we even be able to read the 20th Century English RFP defining the specification?

Bottom line, for mass market success, you need simple. But you still need the super geniuses who understand how things really work. You just want someone else to pay their salaries.

Glen Austin