I don’t know where I came across this one, but since a significant and growing portion of emails and other material received these days seems to consists of longer and longer CYA notices, why not settle this once and for all:
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Academica nervosa
Beware the academic with "gravitas", writes Philip Davis; all it means is that he can make a ten-second banality last ten minutes. A gravitas has "all the inner life of a bicycle pump."
I love it. As for comments on why – no comments. Aside from the fact that anyone connected to academia has met Professor Gravitas. Sometimes on self-reflection.
I am still formulating my thoughts here.
Delightfully Absurdistan
Absurdistan bears the same relationship to Russia that John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces bears to New Orleans: It paints a wildly satiric picture that somehow comes up more true than the original. The Ignatius O’Reilly of this book is Misha Vainberg, the grossly overweight, rich and rubbed son of a Jewish oligarch who eventually finds himself stranded in the rapidly disintegrating Republic of Absurdistan (known for its TV remote control factory), an oil-rich enclave by the Kaspian Sea. Misha wants to return to New York where went to Accidental college and learned to appreciate rap, junk food and assorted versions of psychoanalysis:
At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those smposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.
It really is no point trying to explain the plot here, to the extent that there is one. The language and the casual kicks in many directions (the role of the Golly Burton company in instigating civil war to get various military contracts, for instance) is howlingly funny and yet oddly irritating. Misha Vainberg is a despicable character, but with enough money and borrowed cachet that nobody seems to care. he blunders through a disintegrating republic where people are shot in the streets and bombed for the benefit of television, returing to his hotel room to read today’s menu and seeking to escape on the American Express VIP train:
"Wow", I said in English. I turned around to look at my manservant. "Did you see that, Timofey? We did it. We saved a life. What does it say in the Tamud? ‘he who has saved a life has saved and entire world.’ I am not religious, but my God! What an accomplishment. how do you feel, Sakha?
But Sakha could not supply the words of gratitude I deserved. He merely breathed and drove. I decided to give him some time. I was already componsing an electronic message to Rouenna about the day’s exploits. What had she told me in that dream about the eight-dollar apple? Be a man. Make me proud. Done and done. […]
Respectful of the Hyatt sign, the soldiers waved us through, the locals banging on the sides of our vehicle, hoping we could enable their safe passage to the hotel. "Unfortunately we have to save our own hides first," I said to Sakha.
Unfortunately, Sakha, a local democracy advocate with uncertain background and appalling dress sense, gets shot about two minutes later. This eventually earns him a statue and Misha the post of Minister of Multicultural Affairs, with the job of trying to get Israel to finance a Holocaust center and the USA to invade.
And there you are – a novel impossible to classify, howlingly funny, and highly recommended.
Carr on computers as current
Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.
In his excellent book Holidays in Hell, P. J. O’Rourke visits Future World (an attraction at Disney World) and says that it is "like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, ‘Soon you’ll be finished with dinner.’"
I get the same feeling reading Carr’s book (an advance copy) – it is well written, stylish and easily recognizeable like Disney World – and understandable to the masses. The main message of the book is that because of faster networks, computing will be centralized and made accessible like electric power. Carr even draws a line back to the history of electric power provisioning. All very well, we already see this happening with Google applications and Gmail. But I first heard this prediction in 1990, spoken not as a wild speculation of the future but as a likely and not particularly exciting outcome by my thesis advisor, professor Jim McKenney at the Harvard Business School.
The centralized and ubiquitous computing future Carr eloquently predicts is, in principle, a return to shared mainframes accessed over telephone lines, only cheaper and faster by orders of magnitude. The mainframe lost dominance to the PC because people wanted control of their own computing and their own data, so they chose a cheap, weak and unreliable computing platform over one that offered stability, performance (at least in the aggregate) and reliable backups. Otherwise known as a disruptive technology.
Many hard disk crashes and viruses later, a significant portion of the populace have not yet moved their files to Google Docs and are unlikely to do so. For that matter, I would venture that more information and computing is still done on mainframes than on Internet-accessible servers. That is not where the innovation is, true, but new computing platforms come in addition to other platforms, not as replacements.
So we will move into the Cloud, but for social computing, collaboration, and information lookup. People will still want their local storage and (at least perceived) local control. And will end up with a three-tiered personal computer architecture: Traditional centralized computers for transactional systems that demand global recalculation (like airline reservation systems), personal storage and processing for the very personal (where are you going to store those photos, you said?) and cloud-based computing for stuff we want to find and share.
Oh well. This is not news. I know Carr’s book is written for the great unwashed, and I admire his language and clarity of examples, but it is like Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat: If you have been reasonably awake and facing in the right direction the last 10 years or so, you will not find any surprises here.
And that’s a pity, for I read books for ideas, not for summaries. And this one, for all its elegance, had me dozing off more than switching on.
Atlantic wall tumbling down
The Atlantic is following the New York Times lead (or, rather, example) and tearing down its paywall so that even non-subscribers can access its articles and archives. This is yet another indication that in the media world, the choice is now between not-quite-penniless relevance and no-longer-so-profitable obscurity, and that the scale is tipping further and further over from the latter to the former.
The point, of course, is that The Atlantic now is linkable, debatable and taggable in this Next Generation Enterprise of ours. I will celebrate by linking to two classic Atlantic articles by Tracy Kidder: Flying Upside Down and The Ultimate Toy, both of them from The Soul of a New Machine (1981), still the best case study (and, come to think of it, introductory text book) on leading techies I have ever read.
Enjoy. And link.
(Via The New York Times and Undercurrent.)
Building a market for digital movie rental
Seth Godin has a brief yet thoughtful take on the digital movie rental market.
Just about the first thing you learn in microeconomics is that over time, given competition, the price of a product will come close to its marginal cost. Understood by economists for hundreds of years, but not yet understood by the movie industry. Over time, their machinations will make as much sense as the British red flag laws (mandating a person walking in front of motorcars with a red flag) at the beginning of the 20th century. Until then, it seems the content industries will make the same mistakes – first the music industry, then movies and TV, then book publishing.
Frustrating, yet seemingly inevitable.
One of the things I used to wonder about was what would happen when the theory of disruptive innovation (see various articles by Clayton Christensen) became known. Would the effect disappear, like a Heisenbergian attempt at measurement, because managers now knew how it worked? After all, if you understand and recognize a pattern of development you can anticipate it and create a new business model. That is, if you are smart enough to read theory and willing to apply it to your industry rather than find excuses.
I think we see the answer in what is happening in the media industries – a truly disruptive innovation will ruin your business even if you know about it, because (as Weick phrases it) companies select and enact their environment. In other words, they choose what they want to see and discard anything that indicates a deviation of their prejudices. The death-spiral of the RIAA is but one example, with its desperate attempts to turn back time and preserve an anachronistic business model.
At least we now know that disruption is real, hard to prevent, and, for companies with no current stake in the business, a great opportunity, exploitable less for the novelty of the innovation than for the blinkers of the incumbents. Fun.
In and above the flow wikis
Andy McAfee has a good post on how to make people use wikis – use it as a tool to do their work (in-the-flow) rather than document it (above-the-flow).
I have used wikis in classrooms situation for a few years now, this is a call to move more of the activity over to the wiki and away from traditional papers and email.
MacWorld keynote in Twitter time
You can "listen" in via Twitter at http://twitter.com/macrumors, which now has 10000 subscribers. Talk about creating an fan following.
I am hoping for a Tablet version of the MacBook Pro, preferably a 15-inch twist screen. That would make me a Mac customer.
Update post keynote: Well, Twitter had som hiccups, but macrumorslive.com has a good summary. As rumored, a very thin subnotebook, but not tablet, tough it does seem to have some of the iPhone screen controls. We’ll see, I just might go for it. The thinness and lightness seems a big plus.
Proximity rules!
Google prediction trading and proximity. This graphic sure is interesting – read the article for explanations:
Wait a minute….I live in Norway, waaaaay out in the boonies – this explains a lot!
Desktop virtualization
Good, short primer on desktop virtualization over at Enterprise Systems.
Negroponte II
Ann Zelenka has a reflective review of Nick Carr’s new book The Big Switch over at GigaOM.
(The reference to Nick Negroponte is because of the term "switch" – back in the late 80s, Negroponte predicted that what was going through the air (TV) would go through cable, and what went through cable (telephone) would go through air, known as the "Negroponte switch".)
I, too, remain unconvinced that the move to net-centric computing will result in job losses overall. More people produce more content to be consumed by markets that previously did not consume at all or could only afford a little.
Have you sat down with your friends for a Youtube-based rock video night yet? I have. Would have cost a fortune just five years ago, now you can do with an old TV, a laptop with an S-video cable, and some $80 speakers.
The real car of the future
Tata shows a $2,500 car, the Nano. John Seely Brown once said that the most important effect for Western countries from globalization will be the innovation necessary to compete in markets of many individuals with little money – and how those markeds would spawn products that would then be exported to the West.
This will be a $10,000 car in Norway once you have added the 200% car import tax and transportation. Still, I would love one for driving myself and my lunch packet to work every day…..
Financials tools and innovation
Clayton Christensen and friends have an article out in HBR that I have been waiting for: Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things (behind paywall, unfortunately).
Vaughan on IT maturity
My esteemed colleague Vaughan Merlyn runs a BSG Concours Institute project called RLT (Reaching Level Three), based on a three-tiered model of IT-business demand-supply relations. Here is a well-written posting on IT demand and supply in capital markets.
I like this way of doing "open" research, with some of the debate taking place over the public Internet. Makes me feel less lonely here up in the chilly North… Plus, it might, over time, make the research more visible and thereby bring others into the debate.
Henry James taking a bow
David Lodge: Author, Author
I have seen this book described as "tepid", apparently because it does not contain scandals or a hard-hitting plot or whatever, but it is a study in indecisiveness – an author wanting to find money and fame as a playwright, but lacking the will both to shape his work to fit the format and a willingness to commit his best work to it. Many a scientist seeking money as a consultant will recognize the feeling, at least I do….
And it works – the "not quite documentary, not quite biograhy, not quite novel" format gives a great impression of the era moving from Dickens to Wilde, with Henry James wanting the latter’s fame using the tools of the former. Another fascination is the time scale of things, and the easy living – while worried about money and deadlines, James had money for servants, a secretary, and leisurely trips to Paris and Venice for weeks and months to write and contemplate. His meticulousness with language was such that a large expense was telegraph fees for last-minute corrections. One suspects he would have been a great blogger, with infrequent but meticulously crafted, long entries.
Recommended, as is anything by David Lodge.
Commentocracy in business class
‘Great idea from Jeff Jarvis – I would certainly contribute, given a half-decent interface and plenty of ff points. But I think his main point is: “What do my customers know and how do I help them share that?”, which, incidentally, is rather deep.
Hitchens/Sharpton on God (but not religion)
Fun discussion at the New York Public Library in May 2007: Christopher Hitchens vs. Al Sharpton on Atheism and God – The Full Debate. Great fun, though Sharpton – who actually is rather sharp – sidesteppes the issue a little. Most fun (and there are many to choose from) comment was Hitchens saying that the best defence for religion is that it "domesticates our need for ritual".
Anyway, 89 minutes of intelligent repartee for when what is on regular TV just is too hard to bear.
System from the mess
David Weinberger: Everything is miscellaneous.
(Somehow it seems fitting to link to the blog rather than the Amazon page here.)
Weinberger argues (and here, for once, I can say that I have been there as well) that with the Web and digital, searchable information, we can rely on categorization less. We can move everything into the category "miscellaneous" and establish order by search, metadata extraction, etc.
The book lays out a detailed and very well written argument. I my summary seems overly short, it is because many of the ideas were familiar to me – but Weinberger writes beautifully, yet tersely, and this will, no doubt, be a standard reference for years to come.
Highly recommended!
Applied Abstractions 