Hey Mark,
Congratulations on the cover picture of you and Priscilla on Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People Issue and to have Bill and Melinda write it up.
Something that your picture with Priscilla demonstrated is how much you adore her.
I'm writing because like it or not, you and I are often viewed as leaders in the tech world... Facebook and you representing how people connect on the Internet and Apple and me representing hardware and iPhones that they connect with.
And that gave me a disruptive idea that I'd like your input about and to even partner with you.
Between Facebook and Apple, we have done a lot to help people in the world connect. What is lagging is helping people relate to each other. In fact, the more operative Moore's Law is, the less empathic the world becomes. The less empathic, the less people relate to each other as people and more operational and transactional their interactions become. It's almost as if we have turbocharged a toddler's tricycle.
The presidential candidates appear to be pre-occupied with each other and winning. They talk about relating to their supporters, but it appears as if few supportors are feeling related to. So it may behoove us to step up to address this chasm of non-relatedness.
Steve was able to see into the future by realizing that if he made technology simple, reliable and beautiful, he would capture the B2C market in ways the B2B serving technology hadn't. At Harvard you had the vision of turning a university "facebook" that every university had as a way to connect students into Facebook to connect the world.
Both you and I are private individuals, but as news of our personal lives has made its way into the public arena, there appears to be a hunger to know more about that part of us. I am by nature an optimist and I see the public's motives to know more about us personally as not merely being voyeuristic. I think there is a hunger in them to see us relating to other people. That's also because like it or not, we're also serving as role models.
I've never claimed to have the visionary chops of Steve or you, so at this point I'll defer to yours in how to have technology not just connect people, but help them relate to each other.
If we pull that off and find a way to bring empathy and caring between people back into the world - which the millennials would love -- animosity would go down, terrorism would go down, war would go down.
How disruptive would that be!
Are you in?
I am!
Tim