10-Year Plans

Communist leaders used to have their five-year plans, where their planned economies would make Great Leaps Forward(tm). Except that the economies didn't. The problem with perfect plans, of course, is that humans are involved, as noted in the movie, "The Minority Report."

One of today's headlines is, "Gates: Beating Asia Piracy to Take 10 Yrs." (It was wrong for Reuters reporter Ben Hirschler to use the word "beat" in his headline, which implies that piracy would be eliminated in Asia.)

In more detail, Gates claims that it will take a decade to bring rates of priacy in India and China down to North American rates. It reminds me of Autodesk ceo Carol Bartz's claim that converting most 2D users to 3D will take ten years.

Leaders and their 10-year plans.

The real reason behind reducing piracy and 2D use is to make more money, naturally. Wanting to make more money 's human nature, just as it is to spend less money. Everybody loves a bigger paycheque and everyone loves a sale. Hence piracy and 2D use will continue. It's because humans are involved.

And the reason for declaring 10-year time horizons is to create deadlines so far in the future that by 2016 no one will remember (hopefully). And remember this 10-year prediction follows other failed predictions by Gates, who should stop making prophecies: one month to fix all security problems in Windows; all spam eliminated by this year; tablet PCs to be the most popular PC this year; and 640KB RAM sufficient for PCs.