When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
John Brockman.
Daily Archives: January 3, 2008
Marc Andreessen…
… is a genius. First he has the idea for Mosaic, the first real graphical browser and the main reason the Web reached a tipping point in 1993 — and co-authors the code with Eric Bina. Then in 1994 he co-founds Netscape with Jim Clark, and sparks off the first Internet boom when they took the company public in August 1995. He then founded Loudcloud and morphed it eventually into Opsware, an outfit with 550 employees and $100m in annual revenues. Now, he’s sold Opsware to HP for more than $1.6 billion in cash.
Today we have announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share.
For Opsware, this means that our vision will now get delivered at much higher scale — being part of HP’s software business will ensure that our software will be used by a much larger number of organizations and have an even more dramatic impact on the industry than we would possibly have been able to reach by ourselves over the next several years.
And he maintains a terrific, witty, thoughtful, civilised blog. Oh — and he founded Ning, the DIY social networking service.
Pure genius.
Farewell, my lovely
Paul Steiger, the retiring Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has written an interesting valedictory piece — a retrospective view of what’s happened to print journalism during his distinguished career.
On Thursday I’ll pack my last box and take leave of a place where I’ve spent 26 of my 41 years in journalism, including 16 as managing editor of the Journal. (The other 15 years, 1968 to 1983, I was a reporter and then business editor at the Los Angeles Times.) Today, all around me is an industry in upheaval, with slumping revenues and stocks, layoffs, and takeovers of publishers that a decade ago seemed impregnable. Just this month, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. completed its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s publisher, and real-estate magnate Sam Zell gained effective control of Tribune Co…
Google statistics
Interesting list compiled by Jeff Jarvis…
• Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
• Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.
• Google’s sites had 112 million U.S. visitors in November, 2007, says Nielsen.
• Google’s traffic was up 22.4% in 2007 over 2006, according to Comscore.
• Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion.
• Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.
• Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before.
• Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100.Not that we didn’t know this already. But the stats still amaze me.
Me too.
The Personal MBA
A few years ago, marooned in the departure lounge of a big international airport, I fell to perusing the books in the (huge) ‘business and management’ section of the airport bookshop and wondered whether it would be possible to mimic an MBA ‘education’ from a combination of booklists and air-miles. It turns out that Josh Kaufman had a similar idea, but has done something useful and interesting with it — the Personal MBA Manifesto.
Business schools don’t have a monopoly on worldly wisdom. If you’re serious about learning advanced business principles, the Personal MBA can help. The Personal MBA recommended reading list is the tangible result of hundreds of hours of reading and research, and features only the very best books the business press has to offer. So skip the fancy diploma and $150,000 loan – you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.
I’ve scanned the complete list of the 69-volume ‘canon’ he proposes and am ashamed to say that I’ve only read two and hadn’t heard of most. He’s done an interesting deal with Amazon.com who will sell you the ‘PMBA Motherlode’ for $1267 — or “about 1.26% of the cost of a $100,000 business school education”. Neat, eh?
BusinessWeek ran a feature on the PMBA a while back.
Later: The basic flaw in this approach is in its implicit assumption that ‘content is king’. Just reading the same stuff as students at HBS or the Wharton School or the Judge Business School doesn’t provide the same educational experience as being at these institutions. Why? Because it’s always been the case that students learn at least as much from one another as they do from their professors.
The five ‘coolest hacks’ of 2007
Just in case you thought that the Dark Side had gone away. From Dark Reading
Hackers are creative folk, for sure. But some researchers are more imaginative and crafty than others. We’re talking the kind of guys who aren’t content with finding the next bug in Windows or a Cisco router. Instead, they go after the everyday things we take for granted even more than our PCs — our cars, our wireless connections, and (gulp) the electronic financial trading systems that record our stock purchases and other online transactions…
Mapping Professional Networks
I’ve often reflected on the discrepancy between the structures of companies shown in official organisation charts and the informal networks that orchestrate the real work that’s done. An obvious way of charting the ‘real’ networks would be to map the email and other communications of workers — though of course it would raise privacy and other issues. (Not that corporate employees should assume that their email is ever private.) Now comes an interesting post about how IBM has developed tools (one code-named Atlas) for doing just this:
Atlas’s most powerful features rely on the data available through Connections… It collects information about professional relationships based not only on job descriptions and information readily available through the corporate directory, but also through blog tags, bookmarks, and group membership. Atlas can be configured to look at e-mail and instant-message patterns, and to weigh different types of information more or less heavily. The result, Lamb says, is a set of tools that go beyond the simple networks that are clear from a corporation’s structure…