Steve and Bill and Tim

Steve built the first personal computers.
Bill made software, which no one,
not even Steve, yet knew the use of.
People tend to think the two of them
have been competing, but things are
pretty plain: office workers use Bill's
gear; professionals use Steve's, pro
film makers, pro music makers,
pro world changers. Last I checked,
you couldn't change the world with
a spreadsheet. But the most world
changing phenomenon of them all
didn't come from Steve and it didn't
come from Bill; it came from Tim
in Switzerland. This phenomenon
took us all by storm. Before any
of us knew it, we started using
the WWW to research the globe,
which up 'til now, had been
shrouded in far too much mystery;
we started using email and blogs
to stretch out the human conversation
going for millennia now. Voices
began to crop up that had been
caught in silence for far too long.
Ignorance simply started
to disappear. None of us can
imagine how pathetic our lives
would be now if we couldn't
reach Dz Chiang in China to
find out what's really going on
there, if we couldn't openly
agree with Alfred in
San Francisco about the mystical
aspects of ambergris, if we couldn't
check the weather, and the traffic,
and the implications of magic
realism with just a few keystrokes.
Where would we be? True, Bill
has some money, but something
tells me Steve and Tim ache for
more credit than anyone's giving
them. So let the dickering begin:
how much exactly is changing
the world for the better worth?

(2007)