Jon Rahoi has an excellent article on buying and watching Chinese pirate DVDs at Hollywood Elsewhere. My experience exactly. I went to a Chinese market and bought a handful of DVDs just to see – and Jon’s observation that the film studios don’t have much to fear, at least not at the current level of sophistication, is entirely correct. Out of 8 DVDs, two are unusable, either because of technical problems or because the copy is shot in a cinema with a handicam. For the rest, both quality and quantity suffers – I got the three Lord of the Rings movies for $2 apiece, but rest assured, I will buy the three-disk extended edition when it eventually comes out. The quality is so bad that in the scene where the hobbits are cheered by the inhabitants of Gondor, you can barely see their faces.
Didn’t get any pirated music CDs, though – I assume the quality would have been better there. Seems you get what you pay for, up to a point.
Author Archives: Espen
Shanghai memories
I have just finished teaching a graduate course in strategy at the Fudan University in Shanghai. The students were executives – all Chinese – from Chinese and Western companies. I haven’t been to China for ten years (and then I was in Beijing, not Shanghai), and the difference was dramatic – Shanghai is a modern city, with skyscrapers, a central shopping district with pedestrian streets, and any kind of hotel you want (if you can pay). Beijing ten years ago had ratty taxis and impressive, though dusty, tourist attractions, but not much else. Here is a random collection of some of my impressions:
- Lenovo, a Chinese company formerly known as Legend, and listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, had just agreed to buy IBM’s PC division – the second time a Chinese company had made a large acquisition of a Western company (the first was the takeover of Thompson, according to my students). Hugely significant to the students, as Lenovo took over a company about four times their size, and moving their headquarters to the USA. I detected quite a bit of pride – and a nagging wonder if not the company had sold itself too cheaply, that this really was IBM taking over Lenovo.
- The perplexed look on the faces of most foreigners – by that, I mean Caucasians – trying to take in all the Chinese signs and the incredible din of life in Shanghai. Reminded me of Chinese communist delegations to Oslo in Mao suits in the mid-80s.
- The many business opportunities and vibrant atmosphere. Shanghai is shock full of students and businesspeople with guts and smarts, primarily held back by a lack of fluent English. This will change – and this is currently the land of opportunity if there ever was one.
- The quality of the food. Shanghai knows seafood, and the hotel restaurant had a dish with small shrimp fried whole in Maggie sauce that was just incredible. Normally I an slightly squeamish about eating the whole shrimp, shell and all, but in these the shell had the consistency of sugar coating rather than plastic, and were a delight.
- The customer service in the restaurants – I finally understood why waiters are called waiters. They waited in the background, and as soon as you were finished eathing, they instantly brought the next dish.
- How wonderfully the skyscrapers add to the cityscape of Shanghai, and how bad they would look in Oslo. The difference lies in topography – Shanghai is flat, with many people, Oslo is surrounded by green hills, and has a small population. In a featureless landscape, skyscrapers provide definition. In a hilly city, they disturb the view, which is why skyscrapers don’t really look good in Hong Kong (but where the population density makes them unavoidable).
- How being a pedestrian single white male makes you an instant target for every prostitute in Shanghai, even in the good shopping streets
- I don’t know to what extent the European fashion brands do business in Shanghai, but their brands certainly are there. At ridiculously low prices, especially if you bargain a bit.
- How the Chinese have not been infested by the irony bug – an epidemic that, I think, started in California and moved eastwards with Starbucks. Makes you really careful about what you say, if you only shut up long enough to hear how they speak.
- How incredibly much more complicated life becomes when you have to express thoughts in pictograms rather than text. On a similar note, I was rather surprised that my Tablet PC attracted attention – would have thought that with the Chinese character handwriting recognition it has it would be very common – but I only saw one person with a Tablet, and that was a German businessman in the check-in line at the airport. A few of the students had Graffiti-style devices, combining keystrokes into characters, but that can’t be the be-all and end-all in Chinese character entry.
- The instant cognitive dissonance produced by seeing angels, Santa Clauses and snowflakes in shop windows in a country that is patently non-Christian (though it is very spiritual – several of my students bore witness to their Buddhist convictions when presenting themselves at a student dinner.)
- The ambivalent relationship I suspect people have to the Mao period. The Shanghai Bund museum, for instance, has detailed explanations about the situation during the settlement period, the early resistance against the European colonizers, and the resistance against the Japanese. But for the Mao period there are only large, captionless photos of parades and dignitaries. I wonder if not the rather sophisticated population of Shanghai pegged the Communists – including the people from Beijing – as powerful but rather annoying country hicks. Shanghai is brash, vulgar and modern, Beijing is cultured and political, and slightly out of touch with the business community. The relationship between Shanghai and Beijing is rather like that between New York and Washington D.C.
- The fact that China has many languages and many provinces. I was hitching a ride with three of the students. The two in the front seat were talking to each other, and the person I shared the back seat with turned to me and said “they are talking in Shanghai dialect, which I don’t understand.” Or the faculty member who described to me the problem of the Western provinces, who are “not open-minded”, like Shanghai and other areas on the Eastern seaboard. China is not one country, but many provinces – and sometimes it can be as hard, if not harder, to move goods or people between provinces as between countries.
- The incredible manual dexterity necessary to be Chinese – for writing, eating or making art. Everything is done in exquisite detail, at sometimes heartbreakingly low prices.
- That it really takes 5 days to get over the jet lag (from Europe)
- How human personality shines through cultural and physiognomic variations “like x-rays through a wall,” to quote Neal Stephenson. The students had every archetypical student personality – the kidder, the sincere woman with a social conscience, the experienced senior manager who thought through every slide and asked pointed questions, and the social facilitator who was mostly interested in having fun, volunteering to run the karaoke competition
- Speaking of which, karaoke and gift-giving is what middle-manager Chinese do for fun (at least in my limited experience), and they have a good time doing it
- That Chinese drive like crazy – apparently, they have 1.5% of all the world’s vehicles and 15% of all the world’s road accidents. More than 100,000 killed on the road every year…. People routinely weave, drive through groups of pedestrians, run lights, and speed. I never saw anyone letting another car into a line, unless the driver of that car pushed his way in.
Google Desktop to the rescue
Turns out Google desktop can save lost files because it keeps some copies tucked away somewhere on your hard drive (losing formatting, but still…)
Google Desktop has become a very useful tool – I am constantly surprised at the number of times I have forgotten that I wrote or downloaded something earlier – and GD will find if for me. Excellent.
An example to emulate (if only I knew how)
Richard Posner, who popped to the blogosphere surface because he has started a blog with Gary Becker – a blog that has the distinction of being heavily subscribed while only the test message was up – is a very interesting individual. Not only is his written production astounding – 4 books, 30 academic papers, 27 shorter papers, and 171 legal opinions in 2 years – but he does all the writing himself, and has even found time to write a week’s diary for Slate (albeit in 2002). Off the scale.
An interesting aspect of the new blog was that Kieran at Crooked Timber thought it an elaborate hoax – though I am beginning to suspect some tongue in cheek here, especially since Lawrence Lessig has endorsed the new blog. Anyway, blogging is getting serious.
Now THAT would be ironic….
The Register speculates that IBM might get into some relationship with Apple following IBM’s sale of its PC unit to Lenovo (fomerly Legend). Makes sense, though, with IBM promoting Open Source platforms and wanting access to the lifestyle market – given IBM’s image transitioning from Big Brother to Cool Dude the since the mid-90s, Apple’s image might actually be enhanced by this. IBM lent corporate legitimacy to the PC when it entered the business – it might do the same to Apple.
Simplicity is hard
Excellent little article in The Economist on a new sliding block puzzle, which you can play here. And a lot more puzzles here.
Enough of this. Back to work!
A cafe latte’s worth of numbers….
stefangeens.com steangeens.com (which, incidentally, has a very elegant blog design – I really like his “sideblog” comments) – has a great entry on the most efficient way to crack The de Bruijn Code – that is, how to spin through all possible combinations of a four-digit number with as few keystrokes as possible (allowing for continuous recombination).
Now, if only the da Vinci Code had had just a little dusting of a bit of a shade of this way of thinking and writing…..
A non-outsourced review to die for ….
Jack J. Woehr’s BYTE review of Ed Yourdon’s new book “Outsource This!” (pay site, unfortunately) is a gem as absolute slaughters go. I will just quote the final paragraph here, but the whole thing is a classic:
It would be wrong to acquit the author on grounds of ignorance. Despite being marginally informed, Ed Yourdon knows exactly what he is doing for his readership, especially when he makes their spines tingle by invoking denizens of their anxiety closet: turbaned job-stealing foreigners, underpaying jobs at Wal-Mart, etc. The truth is that Yourdon is heir to the itinerate mages who brandished lunar eclipses to cow neolithic hunter-gatherers.
Wal-Mart as Wimax Telco
Bob Cringely has an interesting idea: That Wal-Mart could become a WiMax operator. This makes sense – and leads me to wonder who the aggregator could be in Europe. Someone with continental presence, a strong network, many locations and the coffers necessary to outcompete the regular telcos. Some of the oil companies, possibly, using gas stations? There is no Wal-Mart in Europe, the retailers are market segmented, though some chain collaboration might work. McDonalds? Lack the network and the regulatory moxie. Hmmmm…..
Ricardo explained by O’Rourke
I am writing on a document that mentions outsourcing at the moment, which made me remember the best explanation of Ricardo and the theory of comparative advantage I have found so far: Eat the Rich, P. J. O’Rourke’s brilliant a-bit-too-well-informed-to-be-real-gonzo “treatise on economics” (pp. 116-118):
There are, however, a few things about economics that don’t seem to make sense at all. Todd G. Buchholz, in his book New Ideas from Dead Economists, says “An insolent natural scientist once asked a famous economist to name one economic rule that isn’t either obvious or unimportant.” The reply was “Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage.”
The English economist David Ricardo (1772-1823) postulated this: If you can do X better than you can do Z, and there’s a second person who can do Z better than he can do X, but can also do both X and Z better than you can, then an economy should not encourage that second person to do both things. You and he (and society as a whole) will profit more if you each do what you do best.
Let us decide, for the sake of an example, that one legal thriller is equal to one pop song as Benefits to Society. (One thriller or one song = 1 unit of BS.) John Grisham is a better writer than Courtney Love. John Grisham is also (assuming he plays the comb and wax paper or something) a better musician than Courtney Love. Say John Grisham is 100 times the writer Courtney Love is, and say he’s 10 times the musician. Then say that John Grisham can either write 100 legal thrillers in a year (I’ll bet he can) or compose 50 songs. This would mean that Courtney Love could write either 1 thriller or compose 5 songs in the same period.
If John Grisham spends 50 percent of his time scribbling predictable plots and 50 percent of his time blowing into a kazoo, the result will be 50 thrillers and 25 songs for a total of 75 BS units. If Courtney Love spends 50 percent of her time annoying a word processor and 50 percent of her time making noise in a recording studio, the result will be one half-complete thriller and 2.5 songs for a total of 3 BS. The grand total Benefit to Society will be 78 units.
If John Grisham spends 100 percent of his time inventing dumb adventures for two-dimensional characters and Courtney Love spends 100 percent of her time calling cats, the result will be 100 thrillers and 5 songs for a total Benefit to Society of 105 BS.
(Just to make things more confusing, note that Courtney Love loses 40 percent of her productivity by splitting her time between art and music, while John Grisham loses only 25 percent of his productivity. She has the “comparative advantage” of making music because her opportunity costs will be higher if she doesn’t stick to what she does best.)
David Ricardo applied the Law of Comparative Advantage to questions of foreign trade. The Japanese make better CD players than we do, and they may be able to make better pop music, but we both profit by buying our CDs from Sony and letting Courtney Love tour Japan. And if she stays there, America has a definite advantage.
Highly recommended!
They really said that?
Feeling geeky today, so here is a great list of Computer Stupidities to waste time on. My goodness, what people can get themselves into.
Shameless self-promotion….
ACM Ubiquity just published an interview with me, somewhat misleadingly titled The Economics of Technology Evolution (not that there is anything wrong with that as a topic – but the interview was a little bit of everything).
Anyway – if anyone has any feedback on my two “laws” of the Internet, or anything else, I will be happy to hear about it!
The inadvertently interconnected puppy
We have an Irish Softcoated Wheaten Terrier, named Midi, much loved, playful and lively and cute. The other day, my wife searched Google Images for “wheaten terrier“. Imagine her surprise when a picture of our very young wheaten terrier puppy showed up as the top image.
With hindsight, it was clear why: I had posted a link to the picture in the manuscript of a speech I had given in Ireland, where I referred to our Irish-ancestored dog in the opening statement. And given the interlinked nature of blogs – or, perhaps, the lack of blogging wheaten terrier breeders – the picture has escalated the list, courtesy of Google’s Page Rank algorithm, which places high emphasis on incoming links.
Dogs grow, of course, and so has our Midi. To set matters straight, I have decided to post a few more pictures – “Wheaten Terrier resting“, “Wheaten Terrier on a walk” – just to see how fast they will move into the search engines. As well as provide some more typical pictures of what a Wheaten Terrier actually looks like…..
PS: Given the introduction of Google Scholar, as well as a recent paper (via Marginal Revolution) on an auction- and citation-driven market for academic publications, the interlinkedness of information attains career-enhancing importance. Now, which mutual-admiration club should I become a member of?
PSPS: Sometimes Midi will show up as number two. Wonder why….
PSPSPS: Aside from their cute looks, playful nature and sunny disposition, Wheaten Terriers don’t molt. Now, there’s a great feature in a dog.
Short-term technology trends
On December 17th, I am participating in a teleconference discussion about new technologies for The Concours Group. The idea is to ask “Which technologies do CIOs need to pay attention to – the next year, two years, five years or ten years out?
I won’t go into the timing details here – but here is a list of technology evolutions that I think will happen in the near future. Anyone with other solutions?
Wireless make cables obsolete, at least for the personal connection. New standards such as WIMAX, 802.11n (gigabit wireless Ethernet) and perhaps Zigbee or (finally) Bluetooth will make a serious dent in the demand for cables.
Telephones will run on the Internet rather than the other way around. VoIP will marginalize the incumbent telecommunications providers, as a classic disruptive technology.
DRM will have modest success in the corporate market but not in consumer space: DRM – which only will work for identifiable and small customer sets – will be used by companies who want to limit access to their corporate information, especially in an era when employees can blog and extranets are the norm. In the consumer space, however, copy protection schemes will be broken and confirmation-based algorithms – the digital equivalent of calling the CD manufacturer and ask permission everytime you play a song – will not work this time either. In fact, never.
Multimedia content delivery over the net will take off. With broadband connections, cheaper digitizing technology, and content companies gradually beginning to understand that going to war on your customers is marketing myopia, delivery of content over the Internet will move from fringe to mainstream. TV stations (especially the public ones in Europe) have already started to delivering more and more of their content over the Internet. iTunes will get new competitors, and podcasting will become a serious alternative to truck-based music delivery.
Webservices will disappear as buzzword and appear as common practice. Enough said.
RFID will be implemented anywhere the privacy advocates can’t see it. After the outburst against RFID. it will be relegated to implementation at the case and pallet level, improving logistics further for the big retail chains. The in-store theft problem – which, incidentally, is mainly perpetrated by employees – will be solved by off-line solutions such as the Vensafe dispensing machines for small, expensive items, activated via plastic cards at the cash register.
The Ipod will move from music platform to information tool. With a 60 Gb hard disk and a small screen, the iPod will be able to store not only music, but also pictures and video snippets – and will become the basic item in a portable personal architecture – connected to cellphone, camera, PDA or combinations thereof.
China just might have the year of Penguin – in two years. Linux on the desktop is, I am sorry to say, a non-starter. Except, perhaps, in vertical markets (grade schools) or in China. Linux will continue to attack Microsoft from above (in servers) and below (as “device frosting” and operating system for the emerging OEM cellphone industry), but will not make much headway against the desktop for at least 3 more years.
Blogs and wikis will go mainstream and corporate. Blogs and wikis and other forms of loosely coupled collaborative software will be integrated into web browsers and email clients (using RSS) and will become the new, relatively spam-free way to distribute medium-intensity information streams.
An IT market for older people will open up, where companies compete on componentization and usability. Marketers will finally realize where the money is, and develop technology for the grey masses – as well as for their grandchildren, and the financial and informational interaction between the two.
Countries will invest in countering digital amnesia. Fueled by continued rapid growth in search engine technology speed and functionality, microfilm- and paper-based libraries will increasingly be put online. We will have the paperless library (and perhaps the paperless toilet) long before the paperless office.
The home office will become the new standard for office technology. Actually, this has already happened. Computers, printers and screens will increasingly be designed for the home office environment – and the corporate office will be designed as a bigger version of the home. This means more plug and play, more miniaturization, maintencance-free wireless and really quiet, inexpensive printers.
and, finally…..
10 years from now, IBM will issue a press release saying that voice recognition is the technology of the future, that the next release of ViaVoice is showing real promise, and that the time to ditch the keyboard is Real Soon Now…..
Well, so far, so good – I am sure I missed a lot, any suggestions?
Scholarly Googling
Google Scholar is an excellent new service from Google, which combines Googles search engine and page-ranking algorithms with academic citation protocols. I especially like the refreshingly simple and straightforward FAQ that accompanies it.
Now, will we see academically oriented page rank inflation consultancies springing up? Academic Googlewhacking?
A webcast not to be missed
IT Conversations has a “fair use” version of Clayton Christensen‘s presentation “Capturing the Upside”, which essentially is a run through his book The Innovator’s Solution. Brilliant style and deep content. Any entrepreneur – open source or not – should download this presentation, get the slides, find a quiet corner and spend the hour and three quarters it takes to listen through it and understand the implications. Then get the book – and the chances that your company will succeed just increased considerably.
I am definitely making this presentation part of my courses – will have the students listen through this while in class, with breaks to make sure they understand the various technologies and terms he uses (which are familiar to technically orented native English speakers, but perhaps less so for Norwegian students.) Come to think of it, it might not be that easy to understand – he uses references to technology and business terms that are relevant and incredibly precise, but hard to understand for folks that are intellectually lazy. Clay’s material is so rich and contains so much useful theory – practical, real theory – that it demands time to study and understand. Time and effort well spent, I assure you.
Everything on sale
Interesting idea from Jeremy Wagstaff: What if everything you owned always was for sale? I have a garage full of stuff that would be cheaply available, but the transaction cost of listing it is too high – and I don’t have the conscience to throw it away. On the other hand, if the metadata was taken care of, why not?
Paper on corporate wikis
I have recently written a short paper on using wikis in a corporate context (PDF, 500K) – and would like to solicit comments and ideas for how to make it better. It is very unfinished at this point – but any pointers will be appreciated and dutifully acknowledged!
Update, 10nov2004: Second edition added, much cleaned up, including suggestions from Hĺkon Styri. Added three more pages, took away footnotes, made structure more logical and discussion on technology architecture more coherent. The old version is still here.
A System after the mess
Neal Stephenson: The System of the World (Volume Three of The Baroque Cycle)
The last of the three volumes in the Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, is both a detective story set in London in 1714 and a phantasy on the very early beginnings of the industrial age, where the natural philosophers leave their roots in alchemy and become real scientists. Isaac Newton and Gottfried von Leibnitz figure prominently here, with much rivalry but also some interesting philosophickal discussions, as do the personages from the earlier volumes, The Confusion and Quicksilver: Jack and Bob Shaftoe and various of their relatives, Eliza, Dappa, Van Hoek, Daniel Waterhouse, and the enigmatic Enoch Root.
The System seemed to me the most worked through of the three volumes – there are fewer digressions and meandering descriptions, the intrigue is tighter though perhaps more predictable. The language is less modern, the backdrop of old London interesting, and the research into the outline of the Tower of London or the details of justice metered and rendered is deep and more relevant than in the other volumes. I enjoyed The System the most of the three and found it the easiest to read.
Overall, there has been progression through the three volumes – somewhat unusual, though I wonder whether not sales have suffered because the Quicksilver was comparatively hard to get through, with more historic personages and less progression in the story. I like long books, philosophy of science, and enough magical realism (we never get an explanation for the denseness of the Solomonic Gold, for instance, as well as Enoch Root’s longevity – he shows up in Cryptonomicon, too) that you get a sense of the playfulness of the author.
Recommended – though some perseverance is necessary with the first volume. Have fun.
Finally – a reason to get a tablet PC
GE’s Imagination Cubed is just what you need to justify getting that cool tablet computer – after all, you are at an advantage when you need to outdraw your colleagues, wherever they may be.
Nifty tool, though, would be excellent to have running while having a phone conversation. Let me draw this for you…..
(via Kimberly Hatch, The Concours Group)
Applied Abstractions 