"...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."Using the Blue Ocean metaphor it's impossible to not imagine a certain chief executive of a business in Redmond in the role of Captain Ahab, chasing down legendary Moby Dick in a dangerous effort to bloody the blue ocean. Ahab says he's given up the hunt, but everybody knows Ahab can't quit as long as Moby is alive.
- Captain Ahab, Moby Dick. Herman Melville, 1851.
Skipper Steve, his ship unable to navigate the stormy waters of the web, wants nothing more than to harpoon one of the whales that caused this mess; that battered both him personally and the vessel that served him well all these years. As long as Moby's cousins Google and Yahoo! -- the latter admittedly one lame beast after a harpoon took out half its brain -- swim the wild blue ocean our modern Ahab will be called to hunt them.
With more money than most countries Ahab is certain to eventually harpoon our modern-day Moby, but at what cost to himself, his ship, and his crew only history will tell. In any event, I'm symbolically composing this post on my Dell Ubuntu machine. It's not a dual-boot. The only thing worse than having a competitor build a blue-ocean in your sector is polluting your formerly Blue Ocean to the point that its new red hue is unmistakable.
"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness." - Moby Dick.
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