Karl Rove: He’s Back, Big Time
*Great*
Money for Nothing – NYKrugman
Now, those with a vested interest in the fiscal crisis story have made various attempts to explain away the failure of that crisis to materialize. One favorite is the claim that the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates artificially low by buying government bonds. But that theory was put to the test last summer when the Fed temporarily suspended bond purchases. Many people — including Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco — predicted a rate spike. Nothing happened.
Obligatory caveat: yes, we have a long-run budget problem, and we should be taking steps to address that problem, mainly by reining in health care costs. But it’s simply crazy to be laying off schoolteachers and canceling infrastructure projects at a time when investors are offering zero- or negative-interest financing.
You don’t even have to make a Keynesian argument about jobs to see that. All you have to do is note that when money is cheap, that’s a good time to invest. And both education and infrastructure are investments in America’s future; we’ll eventually pay a large and completely gratuitous price for the way they’re being savaged.
So it’s time to stop paying attention to the alleged wise men who hijacked our policy discussion and made the deficit the center of conversation. They’ve been wrong about everything — and these days even the financial markets are telling us that we should be focused on jobs and growth.
Your one stop shop for Krugman: http://www.longvie.ws/category/nykrugman/
Rolling Stone Mobile – Politics – Politics: Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math (Is anyone else reminded of that scene from “The Day After Tomorrow” with Dick Cheney?)
NPR.org » A Nerd Is Not A Geek: Two Spins On Spider-Man (The Toby McGuire version was better, and more real.)
What would you tell your younger self? — GigaOm (Best one: “Tell her how you feel.”)
End Game: Inside the Destruction of Curt Schillings’ 38 Studios
Nickel and Dimed – Barbara Ehrenreich (Oldie)
George Stuart Robertson: An Englishman at the first modern Olympic games
I.B.M. Is No Longer a Tech Bellwether – NYTimes.com (Also see this week…)
Are Indian high schoolers manning the help desk (Too bad to be true)
The debt battle last year lost us a lot of money (Can’t wait for the next round…sigh)
Austerity’s Big Winners Prove To Be Wall Street And The Wealthy (Austerity is about getting what the rich want, as usual – it’s stupid and short-sighted)
They’ve got no better ideas (Let’s buy back our stock!)
Dreaming of a world with no intellectuals – The Chronicle
How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline
The Vanity Fair article on microsoft finally makes it online:
Amid a dynamic and ever changing marketplace, Microsoft—which declined to comment for this article—became a high-tech equivalent of a Detroit car-maker, bringing flashier models of the same old thing off of the assembly line even as its competitors upended the world. Most of its innovations have been financial debacles or of little consequence to the bottom line. And the performance showed on Wall Street; despite booming sales and profits from its flagship products, in the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion.
Sixteen days later, Bill Gates handed off the C.E.O. reins to Ballmer. “I was stunned when Bill announced that he was stepping aside to become ‘chief software architect’ in January 2000, with Steve Ballmer succeeding him as C.E.O.,” recalled Paul Allen. “While Steve had long served as Bill’s top lieutenant, you got the sense through the nineties that he wasn’t necessarily being groomed for Microsoft’s top spot. I’d say that Bill viewed him as a very smart executive with less affinity for technology than for the business side—that Steve just wasn’t a ‘product guy.’ ”
Balmer is smart. But smart isn’t enough in a technology company. You need to have a technical vision as well. That Microsoft did nothing with PocketPC for ten years is inexcusable.
“If you don’t play the politics, it’s management by character assassination,” said Turkel.
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
Supposing Microsoft had managed to hire technology’s top players into a single unit before they made their names elsewhere—Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon—regardless of performance, under one of the iterations of stack ranking, two of them would have to be rated as below average, with one deemed disastrous.
This stack ranking thing sounds bad, but it sounds too bad to be all true. There are quite a lot of superstars at Microsoft; it can do great things.
Bell Labs is gone; we must understand what made it great.
I thought I was retarded…until I stopped using Windows 3.0
For more experienced users, cloud storage solutions like Dropbox provide a much more familiar experience. But for novice users, history has shown that direct interaction with the file system is where usability goes to die. iCloud blunts the worst of these sharp edges, but in the process it also sacrifices some extremely desirable traits that users cling to.
Jobs had this philosophy as well – apparently a lot of user interaction testing shows that file system confuses the hell out of some people. But, does anyone remember Windows 3.0? The file system – if I remember correctly – worked the same way. Files were saved intra-application. It royally sucked. It just wasn’t useful. And you see that in iOS as well. One of the best parts of System 7 was the file-oriented nature of the OS, the solid-ness of the system with respect to files. I miss that.
So I’m against this iOS trend. I think it is limiting for the tool – and tools should be as empowering as possible right?
Me want
The early bird robot price is $199. To interact with the bot, you simply call it via Skype after downloading the proper software. Motion controls allow you to move Botiful around the office, room, or under and around obstacles. Delaunay recommends using it to play remotely with pets and/or kids and to visit hard to reach places like a crawlspace or dungeon.
I wish I had seen the interview on CNBC – the looks on the hosts faces. This is big:
On Wednesday morning, the 79-year-old Weill, one of the 20th century’s most acquisitive bankers, stepped up to the mic to endorse … breaking up the banks. “What we should probably do is go split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit-takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail,” he remarked on CNBC.
Obviously, Wall Street is shocked. How could it be bad for them to be completely free to do whatever they want? People are talking about Weills as wanting to repent, fix his legacy, etc.
Here’s a different take:
Weills is on the out. He will never be made CEO again of one of these huge consolidated, too-big-to-fail, WMD banks, or probably of any bank given how much he helped cause this mess. But if there is massive financial structure upheval due to regulatory reform — led by him — he may just find himself in charge of one of these split-off divisions. Chaos makes opportunity for people on the outside. I’m all for it.
The biggest mistake of Obama’s presidency was not restructuring Wall Street immediately, when they were vulnerable.
Longvie.ws is meant to be informal and unobsessive. in that vein, once a week or so we hope to post something fun.
This week’s joy to the people came about when I was reminded of Chris Farley. I miss him.
In It to Win It: Asana Raises $28M Series B, Peter Thiel Joins the Board
I have tried many collaboration websites and apps. Asana is really good (except for the iPhone app); I would invest.
Business Model Dances – Jean-Louis Gassée
Microsoft announces its Surface tablets…pardon…Tablet PCs, and quickly finds itself between two business models: Are they offering a vertically integrated device, a la Xbox; or are they licensing a software platform, as in Windows/Office? As remarked upon by Horace Dediu and others, one day Ballmer says:
“We are working real hard on the Surface. That’s the focus. That’s our core.”
and the next, with equal strength of conviction:
“Surface is just a design point.”
Interesting take on business model changes in the google-apple-amazon-microsoft wars.
What’s Next for Superhero Movies?
The Dark Knight Rises was fantastic – a must see.
But.
Enough already. There have been many, many bad superhero movies. I thought the idea was to keep rebooting until you got it right. (Right: Toby McGuire, Sam Raimi in Spiderman; Chris Nolan, Christian Bale in Batman; Norton in The Hulk; see also Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings). When you get it right: STOP! That’s it. The special effects technology is good enough now to find a good director/writer/actor combo and get it done properly. When you’ve done this, come up with new ideas.
The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
Yet Isaacson understands how genius worship has led to multiple interpretations. “It’s like arguing the gospels with a fundamentalist,” he says about the futility of trying to rebut what he sees as misreadings of Jobs’ life. He tells me what he’s told lots of people who have sought him out to catechize about the book—that his biographies aren’t how-to manuals for the good life. He isn’t arguing that readers not look for guidance in the story of Jobs; he knows it is the nature of biography-reading to do so. But Isaacson stresses that Jobs’ life was complex, the lessons to be found myriad.
The legacy of the Walter Isaacson book continues with derivatives. I think Steve Jobs chose wrong, he should have chosen David McCollough. Isaacson missed something; he doesn’t have the love (of technology in this case).
Jobs was a unique character: he didn’t have to be the way he was to be successful, he just was that way.
But I hadn’t known about this addendum from Isaacson (not bad).
Barack Obama: Taking the Cyberattack Threat Seriously
Pretty bland, but the threat is real – the economic IP theft is already thought to be huge.
The President’s op-ed reminds me of that scene from the West Wing when President Bartlett is deciding on an “equivalent” response to a terrorist bombing. Cyber War makes that kind of tit-for-tat war acceptable for even nuclear powers.
See also this much more interesting read in Wired on Kaspersky:
What is mentioned is Kaspersky’s vision for the future of Internet security—which by Western standards can seem extreme. It includes requiring strictly monitored digital passports for some online activities and enabling government regulation of social networks to thwart protest movements. “It’s too much freedom there,” Kaspersky says, referring to sites like Facebook. “Freedom is good. But the bad guys—they can abuse this freedom to manipulate public opinion.
A New Technology
He has compared university administrators to subprime-mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world.
At least Thiel’s fantasies are aimed at improving the world. “It seems like we’ve not been thinking about the right issues for a long time,” he said. “I actually think it is a big step just to ask the question ‘What does one need to do to make the U.S. a better place?’
What’s interesting about Thiel is his drive to make the world better (basically solely through technology) combined with his harsh Libertarian views. An unusual connection occurred to me while listening to NPR’s Fresh Air this morning: Jill Tartar, former director of SETI, kept describing civilizations (ours and alien ones) as technologies. E.g., “an old technology” might describe an ancient civilization who managed to get to us from across space. Describing our civilization by our technology alone…is certainly one way to describe us, but it assumes a equivalence of our fundamental nature, or our societal moral nature, while compared to another species.
