The recent news about Warren Buffet’s longbet about hedges funds reminded me that when I was working at Boston.com, New York Time Digital’s Martin Nisenholtz made a longbet with Dave Winer about the blogs vs. the New York Times.
I figured at this point the bet must be close to being over, so I figured I’d check it out. Winer won. I lost, but in a different way than Nisenholtz did. The terms of the bet itself were so steeped in the the state of the market at the time, I figured the bet itself would be irrelevant in the five years. I looked back at how the Internet looked in the five years previous. I had probably just switched to using Netscape Navigator. Google itself had just started. From back in 2002, I thought it was rather presumptuous to assume that the internet would look roughly the same.
I guess where I went wrong was the assumption that the rate of change would keep at the same pace, but looking back I’m starting to think that I was wrong.