That little insight just came up in the conversation Dave and I had on the phone a few minutes ago. I was the one who said it, but it was a mutual idea. For both of us, the basic user interface is just a rental car. Hey, think of what you want from a rental car. For Dave and me, it starts with hunting around the bottom of the radio dial for the local NPR station. Then there's the ignition, the shift lever, the seat adjustments, the lights, the wipers. There may be a lot more that some cars can offer, but we usually don't care. Hey, it's just a rental car. Same goes for Windows, Mac, KDE and Gnome.

There's another one that Dave came up with.... Shoot, I thought it was great, but I can't remember it right now. "It'll come to you," he said.

It just did!

I think that's it. The idea: it destroys money-making opportunities by dropping the cost of production down to nothing. The threshold of communication is approximately zip. Want to publish a magazine? Start a radio station? Set up a wireless network? Just do it. "Who needs production?" Dave said. "It just gets easier and easier. You think it's going to suddenly turn around and get harder?" (Dave, if that's off, write and correct me.) Same goes for lots of familiar retail businesses where people want face-to-face contact. Such as pet stores (his example). I think Dave also said "It looks like there isn't going to be a pet store on the Internet." Or that sells only on the Net.

The end of the trough

The tragedy of the dot-com craze was that so many entrepreneurs and VCs thought the Net was a way to solve distribution problems, when what it really solves are relationship problems. They were coming from Supply, not talking to Demand. In the long run both win when they talk to each other.

The Industrial Age was the Age of Supply. In its golden age, which only ended when the Net showed up, Supply was used to having so much power that Demand looked like a stockyard at the end of a slop trough. You "control" a market herding a majority of "consumers" into your pens, where they would eat whatever you poured down the trough.

Want to be "Net-savvy?" Make the trough shorter. Put 2s between your Bs and Cs. Take advantage of the Net's "efficiencies."

One problem. Real markets are places where supply and demand have equal power and get their juice from human contact. Pet stores are real world places where people like to see the goods, talk to and learn from others who care about the same things. The real pet (and pet supply) market is a conversation that happens first in stores, but also on the Net and anywhere two or more people who care about pets are gathered and talking. It's not just a bunch of consumers downloading chow and uploading cash.

It wasn't just a dream

On Saturday evening Joyce and I went to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at UC-Irvine, which is one of theUniversities of California where drama not only survives but thrives.

Colette Searls

Theater and performing have always been big with Joyce. She grew up in Hollywood, majored in theater at UCLA, and has seen pretty much all your familiar plays, any number of times — in L.A., New York, London and elsewhere. Here in San Francisco we've had subscription tickets to ACT for years now. So by now both of us have seen quite a few outstanding performances.

The last time we saw A Midsummer Night's Dream was in London a few years ago. It was by the Royal Shakespeare Company. That was my first Midsummer. Joyce guesses it was her sixth. It was wonderful, of course.

This one at UCI was better. Yeah, you could say this is a biased opinion. The director was Colette Searls, and I just happen to be her father.

But I'm really not slanting this review. Joyce, who knows her stuff and is veryhard to impress, was amazed at how good it was. Both of us were blown away. The direction of the play was just outstanding. So were some of the performances, especially Jenn Colella as Puck. The thing was over three hours long, but it moved, and it was truly funny. Colette has always had a knack for directing physical comedy, and she really proved it here.

So consider this a scouting report. You're going to hear more about this young woman, and it won't just be from me.

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