In the beginning there was Microsoft Window. For some one coming from the dark ages of character based DOS, this was new age stuff. Freedom from the uni-dimensional blinking cursor. A portable thumb sized MP3 player with digital quality sound in the age of the gramophone. But like most new age stuff introduced across human history, it wasn’t perfect. There were kinks, bizarre black holes, obtuse blue screens that announced your system had become unstable. With a technology that was less than a decade old, on a platform that was even younger, using a just released operating system, the blue screen caused sheer panic. What should I do? Douse my computer with water for it may burst into flames any minute. Call the techno geek’s equivalent of 911 - the three finger salute – press CTRL-ALT-DELETE and voila; an instant reboot. And when that didn’t work, you did what you did with every thing else; pull the plug out and plug it in again.

Within the first few editions of Windows, the blue screens were as common as Windows was rare. At times all it took was a single key stroke on an already stretched computer to invoke the wrath of the blue screen. Like bad food, untested software and at times low quality pirated copies would produce blue screens with the severity of anaphylactic shock.

As the personal computer, subcomponents, software and Windows itself improved, blue screens started becoming rare and rarer. My IBM Thinkpad and Windows XP combo today throws up a blue screen once in a year. And that too when I do something at the hardware level that I am not supposed to. It took a decade and a half since Windows original launch for this universal icon of electronic instability to be hunted down into extinction.

What is the relevance to entrepreneurship? You may ask. One word – Reboot. The concept that you can flex three fingers (or one, as I have done at times) at a specific instance of your life and restart with what is left and salvageable a few seconds (or years) later. Just like the initial version of Windows, for first time entrepreneurs, blue screens are expected. With every iteration they become rarer. Till you get to a stage where you are endowed with the “touch”. You become the entrepreneurial Sufi – turning every thing you bless, with your presence, into gold.