I was working with a Salesforce account hosted on their new NA3 instance (NA=North America) when it suddenly stopped working. No.... I'm not blogging to complain about the brief outage, but it did give me a moment to reflect on various technology inflection points over the past several years and their likely quarks that were dutifully suffered, knowing that things could only improve.

Inflection Points and their related detracting comments:

1) "Use the public utilities for electricity? No way. What happens when they go down or the power is not clean?" (OK. Maybe a little before my time)
2) "Personal computers? Those are just toys."
3) "Graphical User Interfaces? I can type faster than I mouse. Real programmers don't use GUIs."
4) "Windows in business? Rebooting from the 'blue screen of death' 10 times a day will actually make you less productive."
5) "The Internet is too slow and limited to just web forms. Client-server business apps are much better."
6) "Don't the frequent Salesforce.com outages bring your business to a halt? I wouldn't run a business on hosted software."

Of course, the detractor making the final comment is viewing their latest pay stub online from a Windows business laptop that is plugged into the public power grid.