Did Bill Gates bring down the Berlin Wall?

“There are those who think that they were dealt a losing hand,

the cards were stacked against them, they weren't born in Lotus-Land.

All preordained, a prisoner in chains a victim of venomous fate.

Kicked in the face, you can't pray for a place in heaven's unearthly estate.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill.

I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose freewill.”

Choice, freewill, self-determination, freedom, information…Microsoft? Did Bill Gates bring down the Berlin Wall? Before you all choke over your latte’s – especially my brother – just think a little.

I’m reading a book at the moment titled “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century” by Thomas Friedman. The book postulates how the world is becoming ‘flatter’ and therefore matches every supposed reported threat with an opportunity with implications cultural, social, economical and political. Thomas Friedman presents a number of innovations or events that has driven this change to make his case.

During the part regarding the Berlin Wall, Mr Friedman discussed the information technology innovations that he states assisted the collapse of the communist block as symbolised by the Berlin Wall coming down.

And I quote: “A critical mass of IBM PC’s, and the Windows operating system that brought them to life, came together in roughly this same time period that the wall fell, and their diffusion put the nail in the coffin of communism, because they vastly improved horizontal communication – to the detriment of the exclusively top-down form that communism was based upon.”

Ok, it may be quite a leap to then suggest that Bill Gates brought the Berlin Wall down, however, what cannot be argued with is the revolution that his Windows operating system and other innovations such as the launch of Netscape in August 1995 has brought us.

I find it difficult to believe that Windows was only launched in 1990, with the first really usable version 3.0 coming also in 1995. How the world has changed since then. Thanks to Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee and numerous others since; a laptop and Google gives a user in a Baghdad café more information and knowledge at his finger tips than a Harvard professor had in 1990. This is liberating.

I am excited to be alive in the 21st century. For every disaster and horror we have greater achievement and hope. If you look for fault, then don’t be surprised if you find it.

I wish you all a wonderful and successful New Year and if I can ask you to do one thing, it is to look at 2006 with hope, expectation and a sense of self-determination. The alternative is despair and ‘victimism’.

Quote: Rush "Freewill"