ellementK: (ĕll'ǝ-mǝnt-kā)
noun - A fundamental, essential, or irreducible constituent of a composite entity. Middle English, from Old French, from Latin About Eleanor Kruszewski: I'm known variously as Eleanor or Elle. My last name is like that coach from Duke - kru-shef-ski. Based in Menlo Park, CA, I work for Yahoo! in their Developer Network. The easiest description of what I do is the MBA shin kicker, handling community, marketing, commercial programs and sundry backend stuff. Disclaimer: I've done big corps, midcorps, and startups, so I overstate and oversimplify as much as anyone else. These opinions are my own, not my employer's. |
Archive for January, 2004Resistance to Licensing6.0 Hits the Bottom Line for MicrosoftMarcelo 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:
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. Sources: WSJ.com - Encryption for the massesUsers 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:
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.
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 Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackPopulation, trade, and growthJeremy 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:
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.
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. Source: WSJ.com - The Way We Live Now Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackHarvard Business Review Back Issues Now Available ElectronicallyFor 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. European smartphone & handheld trendsPerhaps 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.
Source: infoSync World : Canalys confirms IDC numbers for 2003 Participate: 1 Comment | TrackbackBain & Co. presentation at Davos WEF ConferenceThis 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. 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: Snapshot of RFID from Walmart suppliers’ perspectiveCrayton 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.
Source: Wal-Mart see future in RFID technology Participate: 1 Comment | TrackbackA bet that paid offHere’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.
Sometimes unilateral intransigence can pay off - this time to the tune of millions. Watching Venture FundsEconomics 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. 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.
Hopefully, activity like this will renew confidence among the venture community and increase liquidity available to promising startups. Participate: 4 Comments | TrackbackWordPress ‘BlogThis’ MagickThis 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. Speaking of free Microsoft stuff……TechSoup, an online resource for non-profits just announced an “IMPORTANT CHANGE TO MICROSOFT SOFTWARE DONATION PROGRAM” whereby
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 . Participate: 4 Comments | TrackbackEvaluating ‘the package’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.
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 Participate: 3 Comments | TrackbackWeb Server WarsCheck out this beautiful graph from Netcraft counting webservers. Source: Slashdot | 2003: Year of Apache Searching for productivityLike 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). Vanishing Jobs?Leslie Haggin Geary CNN/Money staff writer gives a good summary of recent gloomy statistics and projections concerning the job market.
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 Participate: 7 Comments | TrackbackRFID Casino ChipsSlashdot 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. Participate: 4 Comments | TrackbackRead your contractsToday 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. Participate: 5 Comments | TrackbackProduct Development is Hard - Nuclear Weapons as Case StudyEven 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.
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. Participate: 4 Comments | TrackbackIpod battery scuffle links & historyAfter having been at the happy land of Mac users yesterday, I went back and looked at the course of the ipod scuffle. Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs OverseasYahoo! News - Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas Participate: 5 Comments | Trackback |
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