Chapter 2: A Knock On The Head
What Really Happened On The Way To The Forum
The following is a fable about find the Dragon Kings, and continues from the last post I made.
Clara shows up in a couple of day. A lovely young lady that runs notes for the old man. He says he is free and you can visit him today, but he wants you to first do research on personal sundials.
There were many questions that you wanted to ask him about the Dragon Kings and Dragon Hunters. So you spend the day studying it, and you write your notes on some papers. You travel to his house. His wife greets you at the door, and takes you into his study. You pull out your notes out to show them to the old man.
“Young man,” he says. “It looks like you gathered your thoughts together. Can you tell me a bit about personal sundials?”
You tell him that sundials were created by a group of Dragon King hunters to hunt the King Dragon of Time. By utilizing sundials, it was possible to time when the King Dragon would be in and out of his layer. By having the right time that you could read off of a sundial, you could slip into the Dragon's horde and become extremely wealthy. So there was a lot of activity around the creation of different types of sundials. At first the Sundials were extremely large, but over time the Sundials had become very small and fit on your wrist. Matter of fact, the sundials dominated almost all of the current society. You had big sundials and little sundials.
You are very familiar with the history of sundials. The story behind sundials is at one time only large organizations had sundials, and each sundial would take care of an entire town or an entire band of hunters. However the problem is Big Sundials were really inefficient. A new type of Sundials came up that were made much smaller and could fit on a wrist. These were called personal sundials. Some reason however, personal sundials were shortened to just PC's which stood for Plate Calibrator. It turned out that the PC market was one of the biggest changes that came to the kingdom over the last 30 years.
The hunter group that started the PC industry was named after the three main things your needed to build a sundial. These were:
I - Indicator (the part of the sundial that casts a shadow, used to indicate time)
B - Base (the flat surface of the sundial that supports the other components)
M - Meridian (an imaginary line on the sundial that marks the direction of true south, used to align the sundial with the sun)
So the hunter group simply called themselves: IBM. You pull out the IBM logo and proudly show it to the old man.
“Oh, I’ve very familiar with this story,” you say. “IBM was very stupid, and they allowed a small company called Microsoftus to own the inner logic for putting the gears the sundial. Everybody knows that they were stupid because you never give away the gear logic.” You then proudly show him the Microsoftus logo that was featured on a note your took.
Suddenly, before you can move, the old man whips out a cane in his hand and beats you over the head. It hurts so much, your pretty sure that you are bleeding.
“Owwww,” you say marveling at the speed of the Old Man. “Why did you do that?”
“Because you need skin in the game,” said the old man. “When you give stupid answers that are completely wrong because you are arrogant and lacking knowledge, I’m going to make sure you remember it. I learned this trick from my friend Nassim. He found that without pain, people simply don’t learn. The worse problem of today is making people feel that a wrong answer has no downside.”
You are absolutely in shock, and wondering if you should leave now. What person beats on another person, especially a student. However, you feel the top of your head, and realize that the old man actually did not draw blood. He just knew how to make you hurt. On reflection, you did give an answer without knowledge. And you decided that you were arrogant.
“Okay, I don’t think I agree with your methods, but I’ll play your game,” you say. “What actually happened?”
The old man then sits down and starts to tell you a story. The story revolves around IBM coming to market with a brand new personal sundial or PC. The issue is that IBM had an extremely profitable sundial business making large sundials for towns. This new PC segment was a very very small part of the overall market. It really didn't matter to anybody. And these new personal sundials were so small that they really were not sophisticated. It actually turned out that IBM knew very well how to write extremely sophisticated sundial internal gear operating instructions. However this sundial was so small, that it didn't require a super sophisicated sundial instruction level, these instruction were common called the operating system or OS. The issue was they actually needed somebody who wasn't really good at writing complicated OS that required a gigantic sundial to go run because it was overkill. There was very little value add in the initial work that Microsoftus did on these minor and smaller personal sundials. The OS was not sophisticated.
It turns out if you know the history of Microsoftus, you will find out that Microsoftus didn't even write the first operating system. What they did was go to a friend in the city that they had set up shop, and they bought a set of instructions from them. They polished it and presented it to IBM.
Nobody cared about the OS. It was the least valued part, and done by many people.
The personal sundial actually had three different pieces to it, you had the OS for the internals of the personal sundial, you had the manufacturing of the personal sundial that fit on your wrist, but the big issue is you couldn't actually read the sundial unless you had a sundial face. There were many different people starting to make sundial faces. Different faces that you could read at night and different faces that you could read during the day. To make money you either had to create the wrist sun dial, or you had to produce a face. The big issue is Microsoftus only put together the minor instructions that had the gears meshed together.
Lotus made the daytime face, and made a lot of money.
Wordperfect made the night time face and made a lot of money.
IBM made the main body and made a lot of money.
“So which one did you invest in at the time?” you ask the old man. “The sundial face or the body (or IBM)?”
“Neither,” he explains.
While the small sundials were growing quickly, this segment was only a small part of the overall sundial business that IBM dominated. You couldn't invest in IBM and see a good return, because the size of their Large sundial business basically made it so the small PC sundial business really did not impact their bottom line. On the other hand the sundial face makers did have two favorites, in Lotus and Wordperfect, but the market was just crazy.
Everybody was threatening to come out with a sundial face, and multiple people actually had put together sundial faces that were very much like the ones that Lotus and Wordperfect made. But they were extremely cheap and were threatening to ruin the business that Lotus and Wordperfect dominated. So at face value it seemed like there was no good option. You either had to invest in sundial faces which look like it could be quickly disrupted. Or if you invested in IBM, but there was not a good return because the other business made the personal sundial business inconsequential to their overall results.
“So what did you do?” you ask.
“ There was another set of hunters called Compaqius, these hunters had made a sundial which looked almost exactly like the sundial that was made by IBM. It took them a lot of effort, and they were the only ones that were backwardly compatible with the faces that were being made by Lotus and WordPerfect. Because they had this clever way of being backward compatible, they were the only other personal sundial anybody would consider buying if they were serious about personal sundials. The issue is they had a much better sundial than IBM, this means that anybody that was savvy, first bought the Compactious sundial, even they they had coped IBM. They were extremely successful and for five years they became the dominant dragon hunting pack of hunters.”
Now you are really confused, you’re hearing this person talking about investing in a group of hunters even heard about. Who is the Compaqius hunting group?
“Do these people even have a group today?” you ask.
“No, the are long gone, but for five years, they were the best people to invest in,” he answers.
He then goes on to explain that people have a tendency of thinking of investing in hunting groups. However you really should not invest in a hunting group, the issue is investing the hunting of a Dragon King. Hunters evolve as they start to understand the King Dragon, and often times a Hunting group that starts off well, don’t have the ability to change and pursue the Dragon King as the environment changes.
As a matter of fact, it turns out that it is extremely rare that somebody who initially experiences great success with hunting a king dragon, has the ability to continue to go after the King Dragon through the life of the King Dragon. So it is very important to make sure that you are always thinking about the King Dragon, and not thinking about the Dragon hunters that are hunting the King Dragon.
“Okay, but how did Microsoftus end up doing well?” you ask.
“It turns out that because Microsoftus made the inner instructions for the gears, they figured out how to make sundial faces that really only worked well with their own internal gear instructions. Many say this was a plan by Microsoftus. We have people that worked at Microsoftus saying that the instructions weren't known as being done until Lotus and Wordperfect couldn't run. However we don't know this for sure, as Microsoftus simply claims that they were very smart and was able to create a better group of sundial faces than anybody else. However we know from history, that many operating instructions for the gears, do not result in sundial faces that are better. So I'll leave it up to you to figure out what actually happened, to me it really doesn't matter because I could see the effect at the time.”
“Why did you invest in Compaqus at all?” you ask. “Why not just wait for Microsoftus?”
“You can’t be on the outside looking in,” he answered. “If you want to pursue a Dragon King, you need to give it your full attention. Again, the fault is when you start looking at a Hunter group and not the Dragon King. You’ll never truly understand a Dragon King unless you invest in a hunter group. Besides, for five years, I made so much money on Compactus that I actually bought my vacation home. The key was to always be looking at the changes in the Dragon King and figure out who has the best chance of taking the Dragon King’s gold. You don’t need to be smart, you need to be diligent.”
You look at him, and wonder if he is really telling the truth. He sees a look on your face.
“I see that you are simply thinking that I am pretending to be smarter than I am,” he states. “I would be doubtful to believe myself without proof. However, I have something to show you.”
So, he goes over to a bookself that is labeled “Usenet Letters.” This was a historical group where different people wrote letters to talk about things like Microsoftus and IBM. Everybody would get a copy of the letter.
It had everybody arguing about the state of the sundials at the time. Evidently IBM had tried to do their own internal instructions called OS/2, but it turns out that Microsoftus had done sundial faces that only worked on their own internal instructions or OS. The old man had been pointing out that the sundial faces were really critical for success, and the fact that Microsoftus did not support the IBM OS/2 was very bad news.
“I guess you did see it coming,” you said. “However, I don’t understand why you don’t own the town. I’m sure you bought lots of Microsoftus.”
The old man laughed.
“Yes, it’s funny, but even though it is obvious, we all get scared to act on the obvious or other things prevent us from acting on the obvious,” he said. “Would you believe at the time, I was actually a hunter. Although I lived in the same town as Microsoftus, IBM asked me to join their team. They were so big at the time, I couldn’t turn them down. I wanted to wear the IBM logo on my Armour. However, I dealt many years with Microsoftus. I have been successful, but it is hard to invest when I felt they were attacking us. I made a lot of good salary working for IBM, but in retrospect, I should have found a role at Microsoftus so I could have invested my money more easily. This should be a lesson to you also if you ever decided to go hunting.”
“Okay, I understand that you need to be careful about how you pick and stay with different Dragon Hunters,” you say. “Can we talk some more about the Dragon Kings? Like which Dragon Kings should we be looking at today?”
He sighs and says he has paper work.
“Look, I’ll call for you in a few days,” he answers. “I’ll send you some questions in between so you can prep. I know you don’t want another smack on the head.”
You smile, and thank him. Your head is filled with understand that most of what you’ve been told is probably wrong, and written by people that didn’t think through what was happening. You look forward to your next chat.