Thursday, December 08, 2005
Paul:
Recognize that between Mark 1 & 2 our technology has already had 50+ tests in projects of national importance. So the need for a 51st demonstration is about as interesting to us as spitting into the wind.
My responsibility to the business team is to guarantee the 2006 readiness of a Mark 3 beta -- independent of further investment success. Their responsibility is to raise funds. As of now I have all the top-secret magic stuff executing, so after January the thrust is on to the conventional Windows based GUI Browser stuff. They know that the earlier they find money for one GUI and one COM programmer + an Artist, then the earlier the beta licenses generate profits. Earlier or later, the beta gets done in 2006 and this is historically the 8-10th time I have done this on or near schedule. The trigger has already been pulled and the future now is ballistic.
In the meantime every installment of our university course turns out a dozen new want-to-be licensees. Most are senior program manager engineers of independent wealth that own or run their own businesses. The next installments will be focused on training their production staffs using the Mark 2. I will have the revised Mark 3 grammar parsing by the end of this month. So our sample problems and exercises are in Mark 3. We are producing and hitting targets while not asking for money and that, of course, is what sells investors on investing. At least 2 in the course have been doing that and plan to do more.
This is my 3d or 4th industry start-up (50-60th corporate start-up) and this is the way it happens -- check my vita -- they are all named there. It would be nice to have academic leadership, but teachers are often the last to know or believe things that come upon them unexpected -- particularly because the idea of sacrificing logic and language seems so unthinkable. We are not thinking about it -- we did it 10 years ago.
The Mark X series has been focused on becoming a commercial standard platform (a la Microsoft) not an experimental platform. So the funding cycles are already planned: (Omitted information). Independent tool platform acquisition candidate until gross sales make it possible to stay independent. Future depends critically on capacity to remain industry technology leader beyond that sales volume. Also pricing modeled to never force any potential customer to have to seek out another tool supplier. TARGET: Commercial acceptance of de facto single source monopoly within international fair practice rules. (Microsoft-like again).
The science base is real -- that is the thing that motivated me for the past 20-30 years, but if we are trying to gain an enduring livelihood as knowledge scientists we need a thriving business base to take the lead for the next 10+ years.
This is engineering on the scale of civilization itself, not the big ahaaa while standing at the blackboard. Who wouldn't like to play endlessly with a big grant and grad students -- but my ambition here was about changing the scope and timescale for civilized planning and sense of future responsibility. For that confidence and foresight we need predictive micro-modeling on a global scale, exhaustive futures exploration before passing laws and making policy, and the assurance that all knowledge will persist and grow even with inconsistent human attention and care taking.
My teachers convinced me early I had my whole life to spend as I wanted, so it too has been ballistic for all these years -- it remains so gladly.
Thank you.
Dick
[PC1]Prof Paul to add /subtract content appropriately to the document to make it complete and relevant to the tasks at hand