I remember those days, with Computer Currents' "Year of the LAN" parody predictions repeated year after year. Macs with PhoneNET definitely made it easier and cheaper in the beginning.
Even with patents, copyrights, etc as mentioned in a sibling comment, it would be interesting what he could do if he had a fresh start. There might have been ideas that challenged the existing business that he could be free to pursue.
He'd have no shortage of talent and funding to embark on such a venture.
The big question is once the dust settles (including a possible divorce), he'll still have billions of dollars and need a reason to get out of bed. Being that he's a famous workaholic, I imagine he will try something new after he's done licking his wounds.
There is often so much bureaucracy in government aid programs that I sometimes wonder if universal basic income might be more efficient. It's something I don't see brought up at all in ubi discussions. You'd still need some bureaucracy for expanded aid etc but I'd find it very interesting to see someone do the math on whether it would save money for various countries. And I don't mean this to be an argument for ubi it's just a point of many related to ubi that I'd love to see brought up more.
Middle management should be nervous. Plenty of people whose job it is to ask "is it done yet? when can I have it?!" -- they could be replaced today with better tooling and processes.
Or a pigeon pecking at a checkerboard with randomly scattered bird feed.
On a serious note: all the heat and light is about AI for automating coding tasks, but a significant amount of management is just theater about deliverables. So much of that could be replaced by better product delivery pipelines that can accurately generate the "when can I expect this release?" without a layer of management that considers sitting in zoom calls all day work.
Ironically, they kind of tried with New Math. Not SQL specific but the foundations of what it represents. I caught the tail end of it but it's been so long I have no memories of what I was actually taught at the time.
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