Archive for January, 2004

Resistance to Licensing6.0 Hits the Bottom Line for Microsoft

by eleanor on 30 Jan 2004 @ 10:55 am in Open Source   ++

Marcelo Prince in The Wall Street Journal reports on the increasing signs that Microsoft may have overplayed its hand in introducing its new licensing scheme, Upgrade Advantage. This plan is one of the first implementations of the ’software as a service’ model in a situation outside of the ASP (application service provider) space. The concept is that you pay Microsoft annually for the use of the software, moving away from the notion of buying rights to use a particular version as a one-time charge. Microsoft finance chief John Connors discusses the slow going:

“We have a $1.1 billion hole from Upgrade Advantage that we’ve got to fill going into” the fiscal year that starts July 1, Mr. Connors told investors at meetings Tuesday and Wednesday that were Webcast. As for how many customers will choose to renew, Mr. Connors said, “If it were 10%, we would be disappointed. If it were higher than 30%, we would be very surprised.”
Many customers will opt to simply buy one-time software licenses rather than pay extra for subscription plans that give them the right to product upgrades because new versions of Office and Windows are several years away, some analysts say.

This comes in robust contrast to the situation back in 2002, when Microsoft results doubled quarter-over-quarter (July to September $2.7bn) when the first incarnation of the program was first announced. The program offered two flavors - annuity model Software Assurance and supposedly limited-time offer of the transitional Upgrade Advantage. The scheme proved so confusing to customers that IT consulting firm Gartner put up a mini-site devoted to explaining the intricacies and advising the proper course of action.
As a historical note, the Upgrade Advantage mentioned above as performing poorly was originally slated to close September 30, 2002 and is still continuing…

Sources: WSJ.com -
Microsoft Says Revenue Growth Will Be Harder, Guardian article Software lock-in helps double Microsoft profits 10-18-2002, and Gartner’s mini-site for Microsoft Licensing issues and a good blog on the topic

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Encryption for the masses

by eleanor on 29 Jan 2004 @ 12:03 pm in Emergent   ++

Users don’t use encryption. It’s just a fact - Gnu PGP and other freeware encryption tools remain in the domain of power users comfortable with command line interfaces and scripting.

Here’s an excellent case in point - last spring, I helped out the EFF in their project to put together guides to introduce ‘normal’ people to encryption with FAQs and tutorials on using common freeware tools. In searching for a link, it’s apparent this project was never completed and published, an anecdote which itself captures well the state of user-grade crypto. It’s perceived as so cumbersome and unusable that even the EFF, crusader for privacy rights, can’t come up with a credible way to push for day-to-day encryption. Good thing I got a t-shirt out of it in exchange for my time and feedback. (This is also a case that proves how difficult it can be to manage interns and other volunteer efforts).

So what can change this? Today Alex Salkever, in the mass-market, mainstream Business Week Online, puts forth an all-too-likely scenario (riffing off an earlier Clay Shirky blog entry) that RIAA will do it. Alex writes:

The culture of fear and loathing that the RIAA has created is starting to put encryption on the must-have list of every Joe and Jane Internet user. The results will be wide-ranging and will pose a threat to the movie industry, the software industry, and just about any other industry involved with the creation and sale of intellectual property.

As Clay’s much more academic piece puts it: “The RIAA’s successful extraction of user identity from internet service providers makes it vividly clear that the veil of privacy enjoyed by the average internet user is diaphanous at best, and that the obstacles to piercing that veil are much much lower than for, say, allowing the police to search your home or read your (physical) mail. ” Thus we see the consumers beginning to take a real interest in guarding their privacy online.

In pushing this activity underground, RIAA and its backers shift the technological curve out further. RIAA has proved itself slow in responding to change, but that may not continue forever. Still, this brinkmanship - motivated by the search for profits on RIAA’s part - will be countered at every step by the more nuanced consumer drivers. These range along a spectrum of motivation, often changing per use as consumers interact with the system. It’s worth going through a few of the modalities here.

• Pure fair use in ‘device shifting’. I’m at work and want to listen to a song I own already, but don’t have encoded with me, or I don’t have the know-how or equipment to encode mp3s (simple IDE cd players often don’t support ripping).
• Market failures exist, when the songs or albums are rare or out of print. This is a clear case of unmet demand and loss of public good, where an alternative distribution system is needed. The record companies control the artists’ work and their economic structure makes it infeasible for them to reissue tracks and albums.
• Try-before-buy to determine if the purchase is worth it. This is probably among the strongest motivators in that many record shops still don’t have facility to allow listening of every cd prior to purchase.
• Pricing resistance, where consumers reject the steadily increasing prices placed on music products.
• Rebellion cannot be discounted, especially give the highly aggressive and inimical way that RIAA has attacked their consumers.
• Piracy, or, getting something for nothing.

It’s critical to remember that piracy is but one of several valid motivators. Since they are not all illegal or even morally questionable, it’s impossible for RIAA’s legal battle to deter them all. cannot. This dynamism is completely lost when RIAA labels all file sharing activity as piracy.

Sources: BW Online | 1/27/2004 | Big Music’s Worst Move Yet and The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

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Population, trade, and growth

by eleanor on 27 Jan 2004 @ 11:44 am in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Jeremy Siegel, a professor of finance at Wharton, writes in The Wall Street Journal to acknowledge the worries about trade deficits and job outflows, but entreats:

But look at the big picture. The trade deficit is a consequence of larger demographic and economic forces at work in the world. The rapid aging of the developed countries combined with the striking economic growth in China and India are the major cause of these trade flows. Europe and Japan will eventually run trade deficits, too, and the result will not be as dire as many think.

The most critical problem facing the U.S. — and all developed countries — is the aging of the population, which impacts not only our trade balance but also the viability of Social Security and Medicare. Aging will also influence the value of all our assets, including stocks, bonds and real estate.

This is important from a capital markets perspective because of the numerous retirement-triggered security sales that are in some cases mandated by law, and in others merely promoted as portfolio rebalancing to serve greater needs for liquidity and shorter time horizon. Those securities will need takers from somewhere, otherwise we risk a large fall in value as supply far exceeds demand.
Prof. Siegel continues:

A self-sufficient economy needs enough workers to produce goods that will be consumed not only by the workers and their families, but also by all the elderly. Historically this has never been a problem, since the young have always greatly outnumbered the old. But the demographic picture is now different. In 1950 there were seven workers per retiree in the U.S., a number now down to five. Starting in 2010, when baby boomers begin to retire, this ratio will plummet. By 2030, it will fall below three.

This demands a huge increase in productivity, as more work will need to be performed by fewer bodies. And that’s precisely where the rest of the world fits in.
But right now, it’s our very productivity that’s causing short-term equilibration problems.
In the last few years, we’ve wrung huge productivity gains out of the economy and it’s precisely because of this fact that our ‘jobless recovery’ has hurt so much. All of the promising technology evolved in the last 10 years - from better run networks, to less buggy software, to horizontal productivity applications like sales force automation, supply chain management, and customer relationship management - has resulted in more efficient operations. Perhaps not as much as touted in the glossy brochures, but these tools have enabled people to do more with less. And that has definitely enabled organizations to merge once-discrete job functions into compounded positions. Layer on top of that the value destruction from the cratered dot-coms and you have an economic vacuum - especially in places like Silicon Valley. So, even in the US - before we talk about trends such as offshoring - we already have fewer chairs that demand higher performance and offer lower pay. And those demands and conditions are unpopular, but what gets still more outcry is when those jobs go offshore.
These are difficult issues and make for tough times, but the merciless logic of demographics dictates that we’re going to need help. [Unless we find some sort of Moore’s Law of productivity (looking for stats on rolled-up productivity gains over the last 10 years, would love to project them onto our estimated needs 15 years out to see what it would take to fill the baby boomer gap)] Absent another boom, drawing on the developing world to fill our population gap (Europe and Japan have the same issues) will involve great complexity as we learn how to effectively offshore both production and knowledge based functions. It will help to have this head-start.

Source: WSJ.com - The Way We Live Now

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Harvard Business Review Back Issues Now Available Electronically

by eleanor on 26 Jan 2004 @ 11:38 am in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

For subscribers of the esteemed Harvard Business Review, there’s good news. Maybe things move slower on the East coast, but it seems they’re finally getting with it. Last year, they finally started making their current issues available online for subscribers - but only for the current month.

I take notes from these articles, and it was a pain to have to scan, or, worse, re-key choice text into my knowledge management system. I was pretty happy that they were available at all, but it was sometimes hard to remember to download and save all the worthy articles during a given month.

Now, they’ve made their subscription more valuable by making the last year’s worth of issues available for reading online. This finally puts their service on par with the venerable McKinsey Quarterly and Booze-Allen Hamilton’s Strategy+Business.
See Harvard Business Online | HBR for more information.

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European smartphone & handheld trends

by eleanor on @ 8:34 am in Emergent   ++

Perhaps the research industry as a whole has taken some credibility hits. I have heard of several instances of VC dismissing market growth projections from GartnerGroup with, at times, extreme prejudice.
Today, in a somewhat odd piece of news, we’re told that a firm I’ve never heard of before, Canalys, has confirmed research giant IDC’s data on handheld and smartphone sales. I’m sure it’s meant to be reassuring.
On to the data: 1M handhelds were sold in the EMEA market (Europe, Middle East, Africa) with HP now the resounding leader at 33%, leaving Palm and Sony behind - with Palm’s share eroding a further 19% to stand at 25%. 2M smartphones were sold, with Nokia claiming 78% marketshare of new sales.

“Handhelds have found a new lease of life with the arrival of competitively priced GPS navigation bundles,” said Canalys senior analyst and director Chris Jones. “In some countries, Germany being a prime example, major retailers are now insisting on navigation solutions in preference to standalone handhelds, and the leading vendors are taking advantage of this. Vendors without navigation bundles will find it harder to get shelf space - Palm and Sony are pointed out by Canalys as having some catching up to do in this area.

Also, Canalys predicts it will become more and more difficult to sell such devices purely on the basis of personal information management. Low end handhelds are competing with smartphones offering a similar level of functionality; high end models must offer other benefits to justify their higher price points.”

Jones points out that navigation benefits from the larger screens of handhelds, though he expects that smartphone vendors will eventually wake up to the opportunity. Providing audio feedback can offset the disadvantage of a smaller screen, and as regulation forces drivers to mount mobile phones on their dashboards smartphone vendors will turn this to their advantage.

Source: infoSync World : Canalys confirms IDC numbers for 2003

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Bain & Co. presentation at Davos WEF Conference

by eleanor on 25 Jan 2004 @ 10:47 am in Strategy-Marketing   ++

This past week, leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss key economic and policy issues. Bain & Co., a consulting firm, presented a paper reviewing the economic costs of the inequitable split between the US and the EU in terms to pharma development.
Pharma is not generally within my core focus, however, this piece gives an excellent analysis of the unintended consequences and second-level effects that arise from execution of a flawed strategy.

In the paper, Jim Gilbert & Paul Rosenberg explore the consequences arising from the different policies of the US and the EU towards pharma. It’s well known that US consumers bear a disproportionate share of the cost of drug discovery in the form of higher drug costs, while consumers in other countries benefit from the bargaining power of their national healthcare systems, which often gain huge price concessions. Over the last decade, pharmas have made these concessions, planning to recoup their R&D investment from their unregulated prices in the US. This is a hot political issue now in the US, with medical costs rising.

The analysts at Bain take this issue a step further, shifting the focus not on the impact on consumers, but the impact on the larger economies. Their work draws attention to the second-level impact on EU countries of their ostensible ‘win’ for consumers, painting a picture of longer waits for new medicines, limited availability of both new medicines and local trials of new formulations, and a shift of pharma research to the US.

This is an instance where the strategy employed by EU nations to secure the lowest price for pharmaceuticals resulted in a higher-than-anticipated cost. A parallel, yet-unreasearched situation is that of Walmart - where their obsessive pursuit of the lowest price is wreaking havoc both in their home markets, as US factories and competitors cannot match their prices, and abroad, where the constant drive for lower costs is cutting even Chinese labor markets to the bone. A focus on the simple price of any good is simplistic at best and highly destructive of economic value at worst.

Source:
Addressing the Innovation Divide: Imbalanced innovation

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Snapshot of RFID from Walmart suppliers’ perspective

by eleanor on 23 Jan 2004 @ 11:06 pm in Emergent   ++

Crayton Harrison of The Dallas Morning News has a piece discussing the inexorable march of RFID as it’s pushed forward by Walmart. The snippet below captures a picture of the current costs of the solution. It’s interesting to note when I discuss RFID with industry types around here, it’s very hard indeed to get accurate current-state cost estimates. They all prefer to focus out, when the chips are sub-5-cents.
This is a good reality check of the long road to get there.

The chief complaint, of course, is about money. An RFID chip costs 20 cents or more, and the antenna and packaging for the tag add to the price. Suppliers must also pay for the infrastructure needed to add the tags to their shipments.
And if they want to take advantage internally of RFID’s capabilities, they have to pay for readers, software, employee training and more.
Not only is Wal-Mart asking suppliers to make an expensive investment, it’s setting a deadline. Some suppliers would rather wait until the cost of chips comes down, but they can’t if they’re supposed to be ready in 2005.
Wal-Mart’s 2005 deadline may reduce the price of RFID chips more quickly than they would have fallen otherwise. The U.S. Defense Department announced a similar deadline for suppliers soon after Wal-Mart’s plans became public, which should also help prices fall.
If other companies put RFID plans into motion, as expected, tag prices could come within the 5-cent range - the point Dillman and many suppliers believe is appropriate for supply-chain tagging.

Source: Wal-Mart see future in RFID technology

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A bet that paid off

by eleanor on 22 Jan 2004 @ 6:49 pm in   ++

Here’s a game theory application right out of the press. Today’s issue of The Wall Street Journal discusses the continuing scuffle between the big telecom players over payments for using each others’ lines.

AT&T, to press its case, unilaterally stopped paying long-distance access fees to SBC and other local phone companies at least 15 months ago, opting instead to pay a lower rate applicable to local phone calls…. Even as it rejects AT&T’s argument, the FCC isn’t likely to force the company to pay retroactively because of the difficulty in determining what calls weren’t paid for correctly, government and industry officials say.

Sometimes unilateral intransigence can pay off - this time to the tune of millions.
Source: WSJ.com - FCC Is Poised to Clarify Future of Internet Phone Calls - subscribers only….

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Watching Venture Funds

by eleanor on 17 Jan 2004 @ 11:53 am in Venture & Startup   ++

Economics is supply and demand. One of the key ways to keep a handle on the climate for startup funding is to watch how successful the venture firms themselves are at raising money.
Once these funds are raised, it’s often a point of pride that the GP’s invest all the money - returning funds to the LP’s typically amounts to a failure. And once those funds are committed, it’s money that should be put to work earning returns as soon as is possible.

So we watch funds and fundraising. Private Equity Week has a piece by Dan Primack that gives a view into the current state. Contrary to all the doom and gloom, firms are seeing great success in opening new funds.

When New Enterprise Associates launched its 11th fund-raising drive last summer, many prospective investors snickered at the $1 billion target. Some remarked that the proposed size reeked of bubble-era hubris, and that NEA had vastly overestimated its own reputation.
The firm held a $994.6 million first close in early December, and is expecting to bust its target by securing a few additional commitments this month. It is the largest VC fund-raising coup of 2003, and ultimately should be the first $1 billion fund raised by a VC-only shop since a handful of firms did the deed in 2001.
More important than the numbers, however, are what they mean to the VC fund-raising market as a whole. This is an arena that has been stagnant for years, and only occasionally brightened by the promise of a massive influx of new offering memorandums from veteran firms….
“It was interesting because even though LPs were very receptive to the fund, there was still more due diligence than ever before,” says Klausner, who adds that many of the questions revolved partnership stability. “There were a reasonable number of questions about the team and making sure that all of us were fully on board.”

Hopefully, activity like this will renew confidence among the venture community and increase liquidity available to promising startups.

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WordPress ‘BlogThis’ Magick

by eleanor on 14 Jan 2004 @ 12:46 pm in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

This is a shameless admission of not reading documentation, but I discovered today that if you have text on a page selected when you hit ‘blog this’, that text gets copied into the window. Just like magic.
Ah, the clueless enthusiasm of the newbie!

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Speaking of free Microsoft stuff……

by eleanor on @ 12:40 pm in Open Source   ++

TechSoup, an online resource for non-profits just announced an “IMPORTANT CHANGE TO MICROSOFT SOFTWARE DONATION PROGRAM” whereby

all qualified nonprofits may now request a donation of Microsoft products one time per one-year period. This is a change from the previous “two year rule” (one order of MS products per two year period) that was established when the enhanced Microsoft Product Donation Program was introduced on March 1, 2003.

This development further example of exactly the sort of thing that Charlie Demerjian wrote about in his 12/29/2003 article in The Inquirer. You can read my entry about this here .

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Evaluating ‘the package’

by eleanor on 13 Jan 2004 @ 10:05 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

While at Xerox, a number of retirement packages made the rounds. A boisterous colleague across the hall dilly-dallied with retirement, constantly pushing for more sweetner. ‘The package’ can often be rich, the result of careful calculations that get employees to bite at the least cost to the firm.

In some ways, it’s a more humane way to Employers rid themselves of often higher paid employees, with more seniority and who are more thoroughly imbued with the firm’s culture. That’s good and bad, depending on how you look at it. Companies reduce salary costs, free up positions for succession (in a state of zero growth, succession depends on retirement), and can open up the gates to renew culture from the bottom up. On the negative, when greybeards get the axe, the company loses a huge repository of organizational and functional knowledge.
When such packages are used to cull the herd, they play on employee fears. It’s tacitly understood that if enough people don’t opt for the package, layoffs follow close behind. So in a sense, these packages take on aspects of a 3×3 matrix under game theory, where employees must make a calculated bet, comparing the current offer on the table to probabilities and expected values around continued employment or being laid off.
The New York Times details some of what’s been going on in the larger companies that have offered retirement packages. From this data we see that bolsters the view that the work world is changing for employees of all levels of experience.

At FedEx, 3,600 workers took an incentive package to leave in October, out of 14,000 who were eligible. Even more striking were the numbers at Verizon Communications a month later: 21,600 workers left their jobs, or 10 percent of the company’s work force.

Both companies said the responses easily achieved the goals that had been set.

Similar packages have been heavily subscribed recently at, among others, the State Street Corporation, a financial services company in Boston, and the Entergy Corporation, a network of utility operations with headquarters in New Orleans.

“We cannot underestimate the changing mind-set,” Ms. Hart [HR] said. “People are not viewing retirement incentives as an end to work.”

Employers are mindful that shrinking their head counts with early retirement packages is more palatable, both inside and outside the company, than wielding the ax of layoffs. And they know that years of job insecurity have conditioned workers to fear the worst, thus raising the odds that workers will leave if the incentive is rich enough - typically 40 to 50 percent of annual preretirement wages.

The workers taking early retirement often are in their early 50’s and say that they neither can afford to stop working nor want to. They embrace packages that give them full pensions years ahead of schedule, or severance equal to a year or more of full pay, or both. Although the current economic recovery is notable for an absence of robust hiring, these people are gambling that they can get just enough work to make up the lost income. Above all, they are lured by the promise of continued health insurance, fully or partly paid by the company.

It’ll be a test of the ‘free agent worker’ philosophy that some people advocate to see where these experienced folks, many who have just come off a ladder of rising wages and responsibilities, land for the next act of their career. Let’s hope we see more of them advising young companies… :-)

Source: New Incentives Persuade Many to Leave Jobs

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Web Server Wars

by eleanor on @ 2:49 pm in Open Source   ++

Check out this beautiful graph from Netcraft counting webservers.
Come to think of it, it has been perhaps a year since I’ve heard about web server statistics, and this quiet expansion of Apache’s market share would be a good explanation.

Source: Slashdot | 2003: Year of Apache

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Searching for productivity

by eleanor on 12 Jan 2004 @ 5:54 pm in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

Like so many this time of year, I’ve found myself searching for a better way to keep track of my activities. The closest thing to an actual resolution I’ve made for the year is to keep up my blog (and finally for anyone sipping RSS, post all my back entries and unpublished drafts).
So to aid this daily chore, I feel the need to schedule some discipline, to delimit my news reading and force me to generate some lasting archive of what I find out in the world.
A daily schedule, or a habit, is something many people find comforting. Not me though, perhaps it’s a desire to spice things up, but I rarely cycle through tasks repeatedly. It’s time to cut down on that deviation from the mean.
I’ve used PalmOS and PIM software successfully for about 5 years. However, I find the configuration of the default tools are best for one-off’s, whether they be appointments or tasks. What I feel the need for now is a gentle guide to structure a day, reminding me to move along to the next task. My logic here is that I should be able to apply myself with true focus if I can provide my massively-multi-tasking side assurances that I will have variety.
I’ve evolving the requirements for this system while mulling over calendar and PIM offerings I’ve used, seen, and heard about.
Outlook: I’ve used MSOutlook in the past, but abandoned that because of the virus overhead. As you can see in my OS credo, using Windows is something I can do, but I have no love for Microsoft’s implementation of application software (MSExcel excepted).
Mozilla: I’ve used Mozilla’s mail client for over a year now, and found it satisfactory. There is a calendar application for Mozilla, but it is not fully featured. One reason to watch this project is that they implement under the ical standard.
iCal: iCal is the IETF standard, most well-integrated with Apple’s Macintosh platform that allows you to layer on calendars. This hyper-logical approach is sure to win, and this is one area that actually tempts me to buy Apple’s products. Being able to group events into discrete clusters, toggle into view, and delete with one click are powerful attributes.
Act: Back in the summer, I ran across a great deal for Act, the contact management software. I’ve always wanted to test the power of one of the big commercial contact management and sales force automation tools. It’s mostly gone unused, until today. I’ve set up Act to serve as my daily taskmaster, reminding me when to shift tasks, cajoling me to keep plugging at the current task for 22 more minutes. Act is not synchronized to my Clié, indeed I’d have to shell out another $70 for the privilege.
So after a bit of thought, experimentation, and research to see that what I need has not been created yet (at least for the platform and sw set I currently use), I’ve adopted the following: Act to manage daily tasks, PalmDesktop to manage appointments, and PalmCalendar synchronized with the PalmDesktop.
Here are other blips on the radar screen, none of which seem useful to me at this time:
PHPicalendar, a view-only app running on PHPnuke, Kronolith, running on Horde (they also say they have timetracking apps, but development doesn’t seem to be there).
This coverage gap has been oft commented upon - reading Infoworld columnist, Jon Udell’s comments on it saves me the typing.
This is an area ripe for a strong application, and the prices are fair too - Brown Bear Software supplies two of the more promising commercial entrants, an iCal server for Windows and Calcium, perl-based calendaring system. Both are priced at $95 for one calendar, and $395 for 10 calendars (and it seems this application is most useful with multiple calendars). This same company, Brown Bear Software, also has a synchronization module you can add on for an additional $100 for one copy. These license fees are not insignificant.
Will Chandler save us?
Oh, and iCalshare is cool and these scripts might be useful.

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Vanishing Jobs?

by eleanor on 11 Jan 2004 @ 10:42 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Leslie Haggin Geary CNN/Money staff writer gives a good summary of recent gloomy statistics and projections concerning the job market.

An August Federal Reserve study estimates that as many as 79 percent of jobs are in industries where jobs have been lost forever, a phenomenon Fed economists call “structural change.”

Another estimate by Forester Research goes into more specifics. Forrester estimates that by 2015, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology. Forester analyst John McCarthy says jobs that are most at risk require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable.
Those include computer programming and software engineer jobs, that have long been leaving the country. By 2015, 26 percent of those jobs will be gone, says McCarthy.
Clerical jobs, like accounts receivable and payable, financial research, data-entry and various administrative services also are vulnerable since their tasks are either becoming automated or can be performed by less-expensive workers somewhere else.

Profession	Employment today	Employment in 2015 (projected)	Percentage change*
Financial underwriters	23.560	19,319	-18%
Computer programmers and SW engineers	905,370	669,974	-26%
Paralegals and legal assistants	179,330	147,051	-18%
Telemarketers	461,890	378,750	-18%
Travel agents and reservation clerks	199,700	163,754	-18%
Data-entry keyers	458,720	339,453	-26%
Typists	257,020	210,756	-18%
Source:  Forrester Research as cited in CNN-Money. *Calculated based on published data.

I’d like to note that, when generating percentages from the data that appears in the CNN/Money article, we can gain insight into Forrester’s likely methodology - the simple projection of estimated percentage losses. It appears pretty arbitrary, but at least is a starting point.

Source: CNN-Money - Vanishing Jobs

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RFID Casino Chips

by eleanor on 10 Jan 2004 @ 10:57 am in Emergent   ++

Slashdot has a few good links about RFID. Most interesting is an article by Jeff Hecht discussing emerging RFID applications within casinos.

I was working with a stealth startup that was exploring this space, and my research indicated that it’s very promising. We’ll continue to watch this one. In the article, he recounts a few application areas - RFID tags within chips and banknotes that have great possibility.

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Read your contracts

by eleanor on @ 8:46 am in Open Source   ++

Today we’re brought a reminder to always carefully read contracts to be sure of what you’re getting. Did SCO actually buy what it thought it bought? from Aussie journal, The Age.

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Product Development is Hard - Nuclear Weapons as Case Study

by eleanor on 9 Jan 2004 @ 7:23 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Even with the plans widely disseminated, money just flung at the projects, and national prestige on the line, countries find it exceeding difficult to create their own nuclear weapons programs. This is a classic product development problem - tuning your organization to engineer a product successfully, overcoming obstacles, and managing effectively.
I don’t want to belittle the challenges involved in obtaining or creating the specialized raw materials, but as detailed below in an article by Gregg Easterbrook of the New York Times, the numbers are compelling and speak of deeper problems.
All the resources available to North Korea have been applied to weapons programs, with little results. It takes great leadership and a powerfully motivating goal to marshall the resources, intellect, brute force, and creativity necessary to overcome these challenges.
This is a clear case where it is the implementation that is the problem, not technological ambiguity.

This points to an important reality about nuclear weapons: they are extremely difficult to make. Claims that bomb plans can be downloaded from the Internet, or that fissile material is easily obtained on the black market and slapped together into an ultimate weapon, seem little more than talk-radio jabber. Nations like Libya that have made determined attempts to obtain atomic munitions have not even come close.
Atomic bombs have proved difficult for countries like Libya to make for several reasons. The “enrichment” of uranium or plutonium to weapons-grade concentrations is a fantastically complex undertaking, involving reactors that cost billions of dollars or centrifuge facilities that are also costly and complicated. Atomic bomb engineering and fabrication involve extremely precise calculations, exotic materials and unusual specialized components that even enormous cost-is-no-object government programs in the United States and the old Soviet Union found hard to manufacture.
Attempts by developing nations to make an ultimate weapon have gone slowly even though they have concentrated on atomic bombs - the kind dropped on Japan in 1945 - rather than the far more powerful thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, which have never been used, except in tests. (Making a hydrogen bomb involves even more complex calculations, precision manufacturing and rare substances, like the hydrogen isotope tritium. )

Sources: The Atomic Club: If the Bomb Is So Easy to Make, Why Don’t More Nations Have It? by Gregg Easterbrook, who typically writes for the conservative journal The New Republic. Slashdot also provides links with a good view of the history of this issue.

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Ipod battery scuffle links & history

by eleanor on 8 Jan 2004 @ 3:18 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

After having been at the happy land of Mac users yesterday, I went back and looked at the course of the ipod scuffle.
For posterity, the story goes like this. As originally reported in the Washington Post, a guy had trouble with his ipod battery, heard from Apple that there was no repair system in place and that the official party line was to go purchase a new ipod. Pretty cavalier response, which, in my opinion, remains the primary point of the story.
If you’re Apple, whose sole existence is predicated on selling pricey, cool stuff to loyal, proselytizing customers, you shouldn’t be cavalier, ever in customer service. But, then again, that’s me - who might never embrace the Apple cachet.
Back to the story, the guy fought back, putting together some great propaganda/guerilla resistance media, including a video and a website.
Amid all the publicity, legal got involved, with the law firm of Girard Gibbs & De Bartolomeo LLP
preparing a class action.
Of course, this whole incident takes on a cast of a collective schadenfreude, especially when you see the glee with which the Slashdot crowd greeted this bad press.
The real skinny can be found in on ipodbatteryfaq.com, the sole purpose of which is to dispel this furor.
An Apple PR hack moonlighting, or just another example of the immense loyalty of Macheads? Possibly. I choose to take it as another sign that the homesteading mentality of the web is over - it is now possible and easy to casually register a domain (and host it) on a single-use, throwaway basis. I think that fluidity is a positive thing, and this demonstrates again the frictionless start-up attributes of the web.

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Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas

by eleanor on @ 8:20 am in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Yahoo! News - Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas
Intel’s Craig Barrett, always opinionated on topic, had this to say:

… the United States “now has to compete for every job going forward. That has not been on the table before. It had been assumed we had a lock on white-collar jobs and high-tech jobs. That is no longer the case.”
Barrett complained about federal agriculture subsidies he said were worth tens of billions of dollars while government investment in physical sciences was a relatively low $5 billion. “I can’t understand why we continue to pour resources into the industries of the 19th century,” Barrett said.

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