1966, The Beatles final concert..

..was this evening 48 years ago.

Although they made an unannounced live appearance in January 1969 on the rooftop of the Apple building in London, The Beatles' final live concert took place on 29th August 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California.

The Park's capacity was 42,500, but only 25,000 tickets were sold, leaving large sections of unsold seats. Fans paid between $4.50 and $6.50 for tickets, and The Beatles' fee was around $90,000.

The compère was 'Emperor' Gene Nelson of KYA 1260 AM, and the support acts were, in order of appearance, The Remains, Bobby Hebb, The Cyrkle and The Ronettes.

The show began at 8pm. The Beatles took to the stage at 9.27pm, and performed 11 songs: Rock And Roll Music, She's A Woman, If I Needed Someone, Day Tripper, Baby's In Black, I Feel Fine, Yesterday, I Wanna Be Your Man, Nowhere Man, Paperback Writer and Long Tall Sally.

Of which my favourite today would be Nowhere Man (Here from Munich in 1966).

Steve's Birthday

Happy Birthday! Imagine a time when songs about angst, misunderstanding and broken relationships become obsolete in a world where people said the right things, kept their promises and happiness became so common that it would hardly be worth a song! (There would be one less thing to discuss however.)





And the hard part isn't merely thinking of ideas. Yes, it's hard to sit with a bunch of amateurs and discuss the script that took months to finish, and hard to get it made and hard to get the first one distributed.


But the truly hard part is, 15 years later, sticking with it long enough for it to actually work.

Field of Dreams

Fairy tales and hero stories follow similar patterns: the good win, the bad lose, and people who do the right thing get prizes. These rules are pleasant, easy to remember, and have been with us as long as we’ve had stories to tell.

Applied to business, the myth that goodness wins is best captured in the famous saying, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” It’s sometimes paraphrased as “If you build it, they will come,” the iconic phrase from the baseball film Field of Dreams. Unfortunately, the quote is a misattribution to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading 19th-century american intellectual.

What he actually said was probably, “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, you will find a broad, hard beaten road to his house.” I’m not sure when you last sold pigs or grew corn, but Emerson had something other in mind than rallying would-be entrepreneurs to get in the innovation game. The phrase was meant to be poetic, not instructional, and he’d be disappointed at how many people have taken his words literally. The phrase has been used as the entrepreneur’s motto, misguiding millions into entertaining the notion that a sufficiently good idea will sell itself.

It’s not going to happen. These days, the best equivalent to the metaphoric mousetrap is “to build a better web site,” proven by the 30,000 software patents and 1 million web sites created annually. Certainly not all of these efforts are motivated by wealth or wishful thinking, but many programmers still hope that the “If you build it, they will come” sentiment is alive and strong.

And HTML5 and JavaScript are far from the best software development languages, yet they’re perhaps the most successful in history. Even today, right now, ideas of all kinds that experts criticize are gaining adoption.

Reminder to myself

What's it for and How will we know if it works?

Answer these two questions first, please. If it's worth doing, it's worth knowing the answers before you do it.

A hammer is for getting nails into wood, and it's pretty easy to tell if it does the job well. That's one reason why we have so many good hammers in the shops -real clarity about what it's for, and whether it works or not. Too often, we wait until we see what something does before we decide what we built it for.

(Examples: what's a receptionist for? Cat food? Life insurance?)