>>>>> "K" == Ken O Burtch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
K> Mark Lane wrote:
>> Seriously, you actually tried to run an open source business
>> in a bedroom community like St. Catharines?
K> That's where I was.
>> I have had fleeting thoughts of opening a business in the
>> Niagara Peninsula but alas finding qualified employees locally
>> might be tough.
K> Exactly. So I moved to Mississauga.
There is expertise in the Bruce like you wouldn't believe. I have
Linux license plates, so people stop me in the hardward store to talk
about device drivers. Up here, people are very much accustomed to
"rolling their own". I have local expertise on every facet of web
production, including very modern things like a world-expert on
Manilla. I even have a neighbour who does all the canvas work on the
Space Shuttle! All of us have one thing in common: We don't even try
to sell our wares locally.
So maybe down in the Banana Belt is just a bad place; don't judge all
of rural Canada by your local experience. When I first moved to
Stratford in the late 80's, I found I could not pay Toronto companies
to talk anything more modern than SAS assembler, a few were
experimenting with C, and none could see any earthly use for WAN style
networking. In those early days I was peddling FidoNets and other
free softwares (and sharewares), but no one was even willing to talk
except the Toronto Zoo (who only wanted it to do communications
between buildings, and then had to re-assign their budget).
In Stratford, I hooked up with the Chatham Agricultural Exchange and
discovered their BBS systems had been going gangbusters for years. I
also discovered that the closing of some giant life insurance company
had littered the streets of Stratford with top-notch programmers.
>From rural Canada, my costs are low and I'm so equally far from
/everyone/, clients don't seem to care if they are in Toronto or
Montreal or Ohio; true, 90% of the jobs I bid on bolt as soon as they
learn where I am, but I live quite comfortably on the 10% that
remains. It's also true that as the first-generation Internet people
age, which is people my age, they get positions of power where they
already know that Internet collaboration really works, and they are
less frightened by recluses like me.
<rant class="superfluous, cathartic">
Personally, I've found the major businesses in the Golden Horseshoe to
be very technologically backward. While the LUGs and other grassroots
orgs (mostly centered around the university communities) were bubbling
with ideas and new technologies, in 1985 very few of the major
businesses had desktop computers, in 1995 they still hadn't discovered
Internet or the web, in 1998 precious few had Intranets, in 2001 most
still did not have extranets, and today when I mention webservices, I
have to explain myself. In 1986, Brewer's Retail was still using
assembler on a mainframe and the Royal Bank was only just
investigating Structured Programming in C. CBC /still/ doesn't have a
decent search engine and is increasingly obsessed with Flash. Compare
Sympatico to AOL and you get the idea, and Sympatico is now half
American.
I fully realize I can't paint 3 million people with the same brush and
I'm probably just having bad luck, or paying off bad karma, but I'm
getting real tired of hearing of my collegues to the distant south
doing all sorts of new, wonderful, innovative and /useful/ things with
these new tools we are developing while I can only find offers to do
Visual Basic, which I don't do anyway, or pretty brochure sites that
only exist to feed advertising to potatoes.
It's not that I didn't try. I joined SmartToronto and SmartOntario
and spoke at their functions, I joined the Toronto Chamber of Commerce
and was basically asked to come back later, much later. I joined up
with Telepresence Ontario only to see it's fearless leader now selling
animation software and it's other prime movers coding websites for
AT&T.
There was a time when Bucky Fuller called Toronto, "The city of the
future" and when it seemed it had everything. It was the time of
McLuhan and Innis, of Ring Music, the Riverboat and all sorts of
things. Then came, who was it, Art Eggleton? and from then on Toronto
became Convention City and a stodgy Bankerville where the only locally
deployed profitable innovations come from Jarvis Street hookers. Ok,
that's a low blow. I retract that.
</rant>
There. I feel better now. Don't mind me. I'm just in a bitchy mood
these past 20 or so years.
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - TeleDynamics Communications
- blog: http://www.auracom.com/~teledyn - biz: http://teledyn.com/ -
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)
