As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

One of my favorite quotes (pretty aptly describes the world of a software engineer/architect, where true things rapidly become “Ain’t So”)

But it wasn’t Twain, it was Joshua Banks “It ain’t what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, it’s what he do know that ain’t so” (from memory, not exact).

As far as applying digital thought to anything but software, I’d quote myself as a software guy upon joining a hardware/software startup: “Hardware’s pretty weird: sell a product and it’s gone.”.

That ability to re-sell a piece of software is a major force multiplier. There are some things that work the same way (e.g. movies, recorded music) but mostly they don’t. On the other hand, Carlos Slim got to be the richest guy in Mexico by buying air time in bulk from carriers and reselling it at retail (google ‘MVNO’ for how that works). Personally, I think that was a function of how extravagantly carriers were (and are!) overcharging for air time. So taking advantage of wholesale/retail in the office space world might plausibly have worked — but there’s no force multiplier, so no potential exponential growth as there would be with a digital product.

Having worked directly with Steve Jobs (and having dealt with the fallout from his ‘reality distortion field’), I’d expect that this is an example of the same thing.