Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the wheels fell off that particular cart shortly after 9/11, along with a lot of optimistic visions of the future.
It's also not real clear that the outcome of the primer is a positive for the Mouse Army.
Cryptonomicon was awesome but too long. I wish it was cut down.
I loved Diamond Age. I still think about it.
...Spoilers....
the specific near-future tech product that Stephenson suggested in it never happened – he didn’t in 1999 predict ubiquitous smartphones even though they were less than a decade away. In contrast, Reamde still seems ‘right’ but that’s because it doesn’t contain technology predictions.
I downloaded the article to see if see if it also contained predictions, and if so, whether they were accurate. In classic Stephenson style, the article is a long (60 page) discursive essay, so my check might take a while….
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cryptonomicon wasn't quite supposed to be predictive, though it did "predict" crypto currency. It was and always has been science Fiction, evidence being - ask yourself, how did Enoch Root die in Switzerland and then appear later in a jail cell in the Philippines?
The question was surprisingly answered in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" in a way I really wasn't expecting but did make it clear that this was an entirely made up universe.
Think of Stephenson's answer to the question, "why call what is obvious Linux, 'Finux?'" He wrote, "for the same reason it's metropolis and not new York." He wanted to be allowed to do whatever he wanted to without horde of Linux users filling up his (now non-existent) inbox. Same for his universe - like ours, but dissimilar enough to allow him to get away with pretty much anything.
less than 2% of all desktops are linux. There is no horde of Linux users, much to my personal dismay. This is a myth.
In 1999 I worked for a company in Canada that replaced servers that supported their products and internal servers that ran SCO UNIX with Red Hat boxes. Saved them a lot and we managed to keep everything working as it had on the old servers.
I didn't think of myself has part of a horde at the time but I sure was opinionated about Linux and could see myself being one of those "know-it-all-kids" that hassled Steve had I read his stuff at the time.