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grouchy and a little unfair but brilliant in its own way

``` Many forwarding headers removed.

Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 11:12:03 -0500 From: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic) Subject: Ten Ways to Rule the World Through Cyberspace

Forwarded-by: Dan Wallach

1. Killer Client

Create an amazing monolithic web client. Get everyone hooked and then augment the standard until you've locked out your competition.

2. Killer Standards

The HTTP standards are way too simple now! Any creative little company can get in on the action. Start making those standards FANTASTICALLY complex so just a few big companies can play. An MIT consortium could accomplish this without even meaning to.

3. Killer Fonts

Start a trendy magazine with hard-to-read fonts. Take smart drugs. Plan an on-line service of your own while labeling all potential competitors "obsolete" or "tired".

4. Killer Shopping Mall

Start an on-line service for people to buy things. Keep an eye on people's email to make sure everyone is shopping and NOT complaining to each other about crumby products.

5. Killer Content

If you happen to own the rights to serious amounts of popular Mass Culture (violent action movies, cute cartoon icons, etc), try to leverage that into deals with technology companies.

6. Killer Set-Top Box

If you happen to own a telephone or TV cable company, just design a set-top box so you can pump mindless drivel into people's homes. Home Shopping and Top-10 Movies On Demand would make you LOTS of money. Give the consumer enough upstream bandwidth so they can press the "buy" button on their remote, but not enough to actually get on-line and (god forbid!) communicate with each other.

7. Killer Language

Invent a little language and call it a "scripting" language or a "mark-up" language, so people will overlook the fact that its syntax sucks or it has dynamic scoping. Try to insinuate it into the HTTP or MIME standards.

8. Killer Buzzword

Pick some industrial graphics standard and rename it as something sexy like "Cyber Space Modeling Language". Hope no one notices that CAD graphics modeling languages have little or nothing to do with interactive presence.

9. Killer Magna Carta

If you happen to be a collection of powerful communications corporations who are afraid the national net will be opened up as a common carrier, issue a manifesto in Wired Magazine ranting about how the government should stay out of Cyberspace. Talk about freedom and progress and hope no one notices that you just want to pump Home Shopping and Video Games into the home.

10. Killer Government

If you happen to be the US government, then you ALREADY rule the world! Just make sure you can eavesdrop on cyberspace and crush anything that looks like it's getting too big.

---- End of forwarded text ---- ```

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