Billus is Periphera's trickster
brother. He was always jealous of the attention Perhiphera got
for her grand creative inventions of new technology. Billus decided
to manipulate those inventions for his own pranks. He is the God
of software bugs, deadlines, short-sighted corporate profits and
the triumph of inferior technology. His tricks are often brilliantly
devious and costly to those who suffer.
Those who pay homage to Billus will be able to meet
deadlines or get close enough to the deadline that the result
is still profitable. But this efficiency comes with a price for
software bugs are favored creatures of Billus. He will even help
track down a bug which is preventing product sales or delaying
a release, but the fix will introduce at least two new minor bugs.
Computer programmers who fail to pay homage to Billus are likely
to see their work take many times longer than expected and their
grand designs may be trumped by inferior technology from Billus'
minions which was released sooner with better marketing.
Billus has many grand triumphs throughout the history
of technology. When the engineers at Sony paid too much attention
to Perhiphera while building the Betamax, Billus tricked the managers
of Sony into focusing on short term profits by keeping the technology
private. Meanwhile the inferior VHS, a project by engineers who
paid homage to Billus, triumphed in the marketplace.Billus also
makes sure that the qwerty keyboard remains the industry standard
despite the fact it was designed to slow typing, and despite the
fact the dworak keyboard is many times more efficient.
For a long time, IBM was the favored company of
Billus, always overbilling customers for second-rate technology.
But when the developers of OS/2 paid too much homage to Perhiphera,
Billus punished IBM by switching his favor to Microsoft and promoting
their inferior Windows operating system.
Billus likes power outages which happen just before
you save a large paper, and gleefully manipulated California legislators
to lift only half of the price controls on electricity so power
generating companies would have no incentive to build new plants
when needed. He promotes inferior polluting fossil fuels over
renewable clean energy sources like wind and geothermal power.
Billus makes sure that the most inexpensive computers
come primarily with his favored software. He keeps Windows quirky,
buggy and crash-prone and makes sure Linux will never get a decent
user interface. Billus promotes bloatware ever larger and slower
software full of largely useless features. But Periphera's disk
drive designers have triumphed for the short term by making hard
disk space grow faster than Billus' bloatware.
Billus loves monopolys, because once a product has
the lions share of the market an no competitors can stay profitable,
the product then has no motive to innovate beyond the baby-steps
necessary to encourage upgrades. The major new features in his
favored monopoly products always have a profit or advertising
based tie-in to make more money. Windows, Microsoft Office and
Quicken are his most prominent monopolistic software successes
but his minions are in charge of many small niche products with
monopolys as well.
Billus used the grand designs of Periphera's Internet
to trick investors into supporting technology companies with unworkable
business plans and when major investors realized they had been
duped, technology stocks plummeted in value regardless of the
merit of the company. Thus he caused economic problems for the
entire country.
So take care as you travel the realm of new technology.
Periphera provides innovation and creativity, the grand designs
that bless humanity. But Billus can not be ignored. Pay homage
to him occasionally, so the bugs you encounter will be merely
annoying rather than devastating. But beware paying too much attention
to Billus for those who choose to worship him full time will never
escape profitable mediocrity.
Note: Periphera is the Goddess
of Technology. Unfortunately, her creatress has reconsidered her
permission for usage and has requested that we remove Her article.
