Although it feels hastily pulled together, this NYT article in interesting -- the notion that the corporate lab model is in crisis has made it into popular press.
Unboxed - Corporate R.& D. as the Ringmaster of Innovation - NYTimes.com
Things That Never Existed To Begin With
A bank with 140,000 tech works -- can that sort of thing exist in reality, or can it only be a giant illusion?
From a
Bloomberg report on Citibank:
"Pandit’s initial plan was to complete the integration that Weill and Prince left undone.
‘Massively Inefficient’
“Each business has been operating with its own back office,” Pandit told investors and analysts gathered in New York on May 9. “We have 140,000 people in IT and operations. We have 16 database standards. We have 25,000 developers. This results not only in waste but doesn’t give us any opportunity to leverage our organization. That’s massively inefficient. We’re finally going to merge it all.”"
The game theory of hurting others at a cost to oneself
Interesting paper from the world bank that looks at how people try to bring others down, even at some cost to themselves. Perhaps human behavior implicitly recognizes that life is not a one-shot game after all, and "status" is just a codification of some advantage carried over to future rounds of competition...
IngentaConnect Spite and Development: "In a wide variety of settings, spiteful preferences would constitute an obstacle to cooperation, trade, and thus economic development. This paper shows that spiteful preferences - the desire to reduce another's material payoff for the mere purpose of increasing one's relative payoff - are surprisingly widespread in experiments conducted in one of the least developed regions in India (Uttar Pradesh). In a one-shot trust game, the authors find that a large majority of subjects punish cooperative behavior although such punishment clearly increases inequality and decreases the payoffs of both subjects. In experiments to study coordination and to measure social preferences, the findings reveal empirical patterns suggesting that the willingness to reduce another's material payoff - either for the sake of achieving more equality or for the sake of being ahead - is stronger among individuals belonging to high castes than among those belonging to low castes. Because extreme social hierarchies are typically accompanied by a culture that stresses status-seeking, it is plausible that the observed social preference patterns are at least partly shaped by this culture. Thus, an exciting question for future research is the extent to which different institutions and cultures produce preferences that are conducive or detrimental to economic development."
In
The Big Picture | Google Destroyed Feedburner, a popular blog complains: "Feedburner has become utterly worthless as an advertising platform. October ads threw off under $500, down 75% from the pre-Google days, despite RSS feeds more than doubling over the past 3 months."
A court rules against "business method" patents:
Court limits 'business method' patents (AP) by AP: Yahoo! TechBusiness method patents have been prolific source of patent production in recent years. Companies and business models are built around them. The early reporting does of the judgement not quite clarify the magnitude of the implications, but this is going to be interesting.
Who's who in Asia
After about three days of the
2006 Asian Games, China has 53 gold medals. Japan has 15, South Korea 12, and Kazakhstan 7.
Next comes India with two gold medals (athletic supremacy in chess and billiards), at par with North Korea, Mongolia, Thailand and Kuwait. Several others have one gold each.
A glimpse, perhaps, of the "big picture" of Asia?
How big does a server farm have to be?
FAST FORWARD: Microsoft's cash versus Google - May. 5, 2006: "In such a world, the data centers will be vast, many in number, and loaded with servers, storage and switches. Such facilities will be so energy-intensive that the primary cost of operating them will probably be electricity. They thus will be, as Ozzie explained, located as close as possible to inexpensive power sources like dams.
In the wake of the FORTUNE story, people starting putting two and two together. The Seattle Times's Brier Dudley wrote, 'A few weeks ago, Microsoft paid $1.08 million for 75 acres, where it's building three structures totaling 1.4 million square feet. That's about the size of 10 Costcos.'
The site of those structures is not far from the Grand Coulee Dam, the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world. The Quincy Valley Post-Register reported last year that Microsoft said it could need 48 megawatts of power for the facility, and will build its own electrical substation and transformer on site."
Wow.
