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Welcome To Vilcabamba
"The Sacred Valley of Longevity"


This Is A Privately Circulated Blog, scribbled exclusively for Friends & Familiars, that peers into and pontificates about Expat life in the hinterlands of South America. If your eyesight is less than optimal (like mine), then just click the type size up a notch on your browser..


Here you will find a series of curmudgeonly commentaries that I've posted from atop my rickety old soapbox for the past few years. And yes, there are indeed political rantings, so place your seats in the upright position and fasten your seat belts .... it may be a bumpy ride.






3/4/16

Who Is Walter O'Brien?

While listening to a Podcast that often offers interesting interviews (Tim Ferris of “The 4 Hour Workweek fame”) I came across a conversation with Walter O’Brien during which O’Brien mentions that to his mind Bill Gates was one of the most successful people he knew ..... and why.

Now, dear reader, let me state my own personal bias about this matter of the PC versus Apple. My first introduction to any computer was a Kaypro II back in 1984. It was also the machine upon which I learned to code. A year later I purchased my first Mac, the Apple IIe. Since then I have never owned any other computer than a Mac.

In fact for many years, and even now to some degree, I have always bought into the whole marketing rivalry of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates. Of the two machines I always found Apple to be more elegant and intuitive to use than Microsoft’s. Bill Gates was simply, to my mind, the ‘nerd computer freak’ versus Steve Jobs as a master salesman/inventor/artist.

But damned if Walter O’Brien wasn’t right about Gates being the most successful of the two men .... and the richest.

In the last 12 years of his life, Jobs did reinvent himself and his business not once but several times, and finished far ahead of his rival. He built the most valuable business in the world--creating more than half again as much wealth for his shareholders as Microsoft.

As Walter Isaacson writes in his highly readable biography, Jobs "revolutionized six industries"--personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing--and he "reimagined a seventh"--in creating the stores that became shrines to his memory in the days and weeks following his death from pancreatic cancer.

But in the end, much like the old fable of the “Tortoise and the Hare”, it was Bill Gates who crept into first place on the totem pole of success, with not only the financial benefits but with his wife Melinda Gates philanthropy as well.

Oh, and just who is Walter O’Brien? He is the Irish born, 197 IQ president and founder of Scorpion Computer Services ..... which you really ought to Google and get acquainted with him.