The Google students and the Mullah pupils
Jameel Theyabi Al-Hayat - 15/10/07//
So many are the conflicts in the Arab world, sometimes for the most frivolous purposes! The world around us is innovating, thinking, progressing. The world surrounds us on all sides with achievements, innovations, and inventions. The Arab world has not forgotten the vast past and insists on crying over its ruins. The Arab world does not come out of the circle of conflicts as it ends one feud to start another, and exits one war to enter others. The Arab people are preoccupied rushing to the letters of Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri and whatever there is beyond Al-Qaeda's terrorism.
We are falling behind without rejecting progress, but then we accuse others of plotting our failures. We are experts at formulating conspiracies, plotting assassinations against one another. We are people who read without comprehending because we have gotten too used to memorizing and lecturing. We are used to being controlled without choices even when we are given the right to choose. We are in love with everything and yet achieve nothing. We are people who for the slightest disagreement hate all others. We are simply people who talk so much and yet do so little.
While the information revolution sweeps land and space, we float on the surface until our minds and hearts went afloat. The rest of the world innovates in creating and applying knowledge to the best needs of times while we are busy applying it in excommunicating and attacking one another, as well as in condemning each other from behind the comfort of devilish aliases.
Weren't most of the heroes behind the revolution of new corporations in the 1990s college and university youth? Weren't some adolescents? Is there no good example for those creative successes such as Google which has become an uncrowned world leader? Hasn't Google become the world's most used search engine on the World Wide Web?
Almost two weeks ago, Al-Hayat depicted a remarkable report on Google in its issue 16247 (September 28, 2007) that is worth reading by every ambitious Arab mind. It is worth considering, and to consider the scope of actual value that Google has provided to the human mind and intellect in speeding up the process of research and in cutting down data retrieval time down to seconds.
According to the report, on September 15, 1997 -- the same month in which Al-Qaeda's leader launched his attacks on New York and Washington four years later - two students at Stanford University in California, purchased the domain name google.com. At the time, neither of them was over 24. Their company was announced from a garage in a middle-income American home in California.
The two students were inspired to use the name Google from the works of mathematician Edward Caster, and on September 17, 1998, Google was officially launched as its makers graduated from university.
Today, Google is considered to be the leading search engine on the World Wide Web, offering services in 35 languages including Arabic. Its data search capabilities have evolved enormously over the past ten years, making it partly important significant because of its mutual data archives and its ability to search for detailed maps, not to mention its Earth tool which offers satellite images of countries, cities, and villages, or Sky tool which allows the retrieval of images of earth, the solar system and outer space.
Google got enlisted on the exchange market in August 2004 with shares worth $85 each. Today, the market share price is $525 with a market capitalization of $164 billion. Each of the owners, on the other hand, is worth about $16 billion while the corporation's capital is estimated to be worth $13 billion. This is not to mention that the founders have purchased the garage from which they started for an undisclosed sum.
So stark is the contrast between the success story of the Google students and what they have offered to humanity in the service of science, knowledge, and intellect on the one hand, and the contributions of Mullah Omar's students, the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden in terms of murder, destruction, terrorism, and defamation of Islam.
We really need to start innovating by offering incentives and awards to encourage creativity in the hope of having Newton's apple in the new millennium, and to offer the world minds and brains that think, innovate and offer knowledge and human and scientific services that contribute to global progress.
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