I’ve mentioned Craig Burton before. (He’s the “Lord Craig Burton” to those of us who know him well.) In addition to being someone with a “sixth-sense” ability to see the potential of technology right down to its core, he is a personal friend and a professional mentor. He was also the founder and SVP of Novell who was responsible along with SVP and co-founder Judith Clarke Burton (who passed away in January of last year) for giving me my professional start in the Communications department of Novell some 27 years ago. Look what they started. On a global scale, Burton was responsible for the strategy of hardware independence in the early days of PCs. His role in creating the network computing industry’s foundation via Novell made it possible for the equipment from disparate providers to combine and connect. It’s a concept we take for granted today, but the technology world we know would be a much different place without that foundation. Without hardware independence, the Internet we take for granted as a ubiquitous resource, available to all, would have been constrained for a far longer time (and potentially even forever) to private silos with much more limited power. So he’s a revolutionary, of sorts. He’s also a “brilliant mind” kind of guy who doesn’t see the world as it is, but seems to be equipped with a perpetual lens into the technology future that becomes progressively more honed over time. “Prescience” is the word I use to describe his innate gift. “Clairvoyence, insight, prophesy, prediction,” the thesaurus says about my definition of choice. Yes, it fits. This weekend I had the chance to share several hours with Burton, reminiscing, laughing, sharing Novell stories, and getting his thoughts on the ways to turn a prescient idea into a strategy and business that can change the course of the world. But first I wanted to hear exactly how he came upon the idea of hardware independence that rocked the network technology world. “It was the beginning of PC networking,” he recalls. “We had this Novell operating system and there were some 200 internet adapter choices. Ray Noorda [Novell CEO] even owned stock in one of them. There was ArcNet, GNet, Ethernet, ‘Ad Infinitim’ Net. He asked me which one we should choose.” This, in a day when the most popular network adapter cost $900. “Do you know how much they cost now?” he asked me. I did. They are free. “Every product has an 802.x interface build into it these days,” he tells me. “Without it, they’d never be able to sell.” Back to the Novell decision: “I remembered the words of my dad,” Burton said. “I guess he was ‘prescient’ as well. He told me the story of a guy with a little shoe store in Manhattan. There he was, next to Macys, Bloomingdale, all these high-end stores. How would he ever compete? Then he had a brilliant idea. He put a sign above his door that said simply ‘Main Entrance’.” …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
