On Independence Day weekend I attended an excellent performance of patriotic and country music at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vince Gill, the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West, and a dazzling fireworks display at the end. It was a great opportunity to commemorate the birth and history of the United States in a venue that, throughout its history, featured so many legendary performers of the many types of music that enrich our lives and express our diversity.
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| The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, August 23rd, 1964 |
The Hollywood Bowl website presents a pictorial history of the venue and lists some of the legendary performers who graced its stage. Probably the most famous rock concerts there were The Beatles in 1964 and 1965. Here is a video clip from one of the performances. This weekend, the Hollywood Bowl commemorates The Beatles with “A Beatles Celebration,” while Ringo Starr celebrates his 70th birthday this week. The Independence Day and Beatles concerts on successive weekends illustrate the interdependencies of strong cultural, political, and commercial ties between the United Kingdom and the United States.
The Hollywood Bowl and The Beatles changed over time. The Hollywood Bowl was modified several times with various acoustic shells above the stage; The Beatles began their career sounding similar to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, and ended within a decade incorporating many styles, traditions, and innovations, including Indian and Western classical music, jazz, hard rock, and progressive rock.
As this timeline shows, the history of computing is also very rich, diverse, and complex. There’s a big gap at the beginning of the timeline between 500 B.C. and 1614 A.D., but I’m sure we all would have no problem filling in all that occurred in computing during that time. The timeline ends on December 31, 2003, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee was knighted for creating the World Wide Web. That event provides a segue to the main development of the following years that I’m sure we all could fill in with details: cloud computing.
The Beatles exemplify the cultural transformation of the 1960s, which included an unprecedented popular interest in diversity, individuality, and freedom of expression, all pillars that inspired the foundation of the United States. While music was and still is an important vehicle for diversity, individuality, and freedom of expression, cloud computing is now carrying us to a new level and era of exploration and understanding like those that occurred in the 1960s; the Age of Enlightenment when the United States was born; the Renaissance; and the ancient civilizations worldwide that launched our traditions of inquiry and exploration that remain today.
The consumer and business application stores at Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and VMWare illustrate the new renaissance and enlightenment that we now have available on small devices almost everywhere. They provide the stages, or platforms, that display and run the innovations of today. The hundreds of thousands of applications available through these stores also illustrate how much easier it is to create software applications today than ever before, because the platforms that developers and users need are inexpensive and always available in the cloud.
Since the 1960s many rock bands have come and gone, but few actually made it big. We now have a similar situation with so many excellent applications available online. How will your application get the exposure and visibility it needs to succeed and become a rock star of innovation? If you build it and upload it, users won’t necessarily find it. Just like The Beatles, you may need an agent to help you see the limelight.
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