1 Million Geek March

By Nick Hodge | July 2, 2007

What is an Geek? Is Geek a pejorative term?

In the UK, being a trainspotter or anorak is definitely pejorative for those outside the craze. Duncan Riley uses the marketing term Prosumer (professional consumer).

If anyone comes up to me and calls me a Geek, I am proud. Having spent the last year breaking off the shackles of "sales and marketing droid", being a geek is refreshing. And having successfully passed on my geek genes to Liam - I am even prouder.

Self-proclaiming myself as a geek with the title Professional Geek still gets sideways glances - even at Microsoft - which has spent the last many years successfully becoming the enterprise software company. Thankfully, Microsoft's heart still beats with a geek tune.

So what is the size of the geek virtual nation? This is a nation not divided by 19thC limits of Empire; nor separated by age, gender, language. A geek has a understanding over the last 250 years, technology has propelled humans at a rapid rate. The information age we live in may be seen as a different time to the industrial age - who can predict future historian's categorizations?

There are two recent measurements of the size of the geek virtual nation as it exists today:

Apple PR: Downloads of Apple's Safari 3 beta for Windows 2000, XP and Vista: 1,000,000
Who else apart from geeks, independent of platform religion, would download a beta of yet another browser?
Piper Jaffray estimates 500,000 iPhones sold on the weekend.
Most estimates put the US at 50% of the world's IT economy. 2 x 500,000 = 1,000,000

Whilst both numbers are Apple-centric, it is still an interesting number to ponder. How many borderless, hyper-online geeks are there in the world?

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