Smart commentary from the always-relevant Clay Shirky:Resist the Lure of Simplified History.
Favorite parts:
"A five-year business plan covers 20 quarters--20 consecutive 90-day periods. Ninety days before this column was written, the Nasdaq was at 5000. Ninety days before that, the word "Napster" had not appeared in The New York Times . Ninety days before that, no one knew how 1999's ecommerce Christmas would turn out. Ninety days before that, no one was shipping WAP phones. That's only the past four quarters; what is the next quarter going to tell us about online music, wireless access, Microsoft's future, international adoption?
"


and:


"Our past was chaos, our present is disarray, our future is flux."