Missing columns
For the last two Sundays some unexplained glitch has prevented the publication of my column on the Web edition of the Observer. While an explanation is being sought (and the Editor looks for The Guilty Man) I’ve decided to go in for a spot of self-publication.
The column for May 28 is here. It’s about corporate hubris and the risks thereof. Sample:
Nothing succeeds like success, especially in the wishful thinking of technology companies and their Wall Street shareholders. The moment a company shows signs of dominating a particular market, then its executives — and their stockholders — begin to dream about dominating other markets in which they had hitherto no expertise. They are encouraged in this delusion by the mainstream media, which are irresistibly fascinated by the hubris implicit in corporate megalomania.
The best-known case study is, of course Microsoft…
But the column is actually as much about Google as about the Gates empire.
The column for today (4 June) is here. Sample:
If, like me, you while away the time while waiting for a Tube train by browsing the display ads on the wall opposite the platform, you will have been struck by some recent Microsoft advertisements. They show office workers wearing dinosaur-head masks engaging in laboured banter, in which one worker berates the other for his or her obsolete work practices.
My first reaction was to conclude that Microsoft had picked a turkey of an advertising agency, because the ads and the dialogue are so entirely devoid of the creativity that large advertising budgets are supposed to command. But this rapidly gave way to puzzlement. You see, it’s clear that the people in the ads are users of Microsoft software: they have to be because most office workers are. So why is Microsoft insulting its users by portraying them as dinosaurs? After all, treating your customers as idiots is not generally a sustainable business strategy — though the record and movie industries haven’t quite twigged that yet. But Microsoft isn’t a brain-dead organisation like Sony BMG or Warner Brothers. Au contraire. So what’s going on with these daft ads?
Al Gore’s Keynote address
There’s been a lot of careless talk in the mainstream media about Al Gore’s “PowerPoint presentation” on global climate change. In fact he uses Keynote, an Apple program. But I suppose it’s unrealistic to expect the average hack to appreciate the difference.
Dave’s new friend
From today’s Guardian…
One of Conservative leader David Cameron’s new breed of business backers is a millionaire landlord who has been accused of using ruthless tactics against tenants. Trevor Pears, 42, whose family owns 15,000 properties, is alleged to be driving out small shops in favour of supermarkets and forcing out tenants through legal loopholes.Mr Cameron is trying to boost his party by adopting green themes and criticising big business. He has accused supermarkets of using their financial muscle to drive small shops out of business. Mr Pears is among the property tycoons and hedge fund traders who put up almost £500,000 for his leadership campaign. The tycoon has been heavily criticised by small shopkeepers in north London, where his firm owns rows of premises in Fortess Road, Kentish Town…
Such a nice friend, too. For example:
The Pears empire is estimated to be worth more than £1bn. In one year the family paid themselves a £42m dividend. But there have been repeated complaints about their methods. In 2000, they used what a court called a “repugnant” device to try to force out housing benefit tenants along the Brighton seafront. The company used the terms of obscure agreements to raise rents to an impossible £25,000 a year. It then sought evictions for arrears. The appeal court said this was “very serious”, and could have bankrupted tenants.
A Pears company bought housing blocks the same year from Greenwich Hospital, originally an elderly seafarers’ charity. Nick Raynsford, Labour MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, says the firm exploited its position once the property passed out of control of the crown. Rents were raised from £50 a week to £190 and many were forced out. Mr Raynsford said: “The Pears Group acted in a reprehensible way in their dealings with the elderly residents.”
A case of “Vote Dave, get Rachman” perhaps?
The wisdom of cr… er, lynch mobs
Here’s an interesting echo of Jason Lanier’s rant about the stupidity of crowds — an intriguing NYT story about online vigilantism in China.
SHANGHAI, June 2 — It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country’s most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack.
“Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons,” one person wrote, “to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband.”
Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home. It was just the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.
How to hold your drink
Er, you just stick it in the ground. Ideal for picnicking drinkers. $7.95 from Crate & Barrel.
Problems of the “hive mind”
Interesting essay by Jason Lanier challenging the “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis.
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It’s been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it’s a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that’s actually interesting information.
No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…
The $130 laptop
From ZDNet.com…
Nicholas Negroponte showed off the latest prototypes of the fabled $100 PC. It’s not longer a $100 PC, however. The ruggedized, two pound Linux desktop (Fedora) system, with mesh networking will sell for about $130 to $140 (san shipping) to governments starting in April 2007. Negroponte expects to reach the $100 price point by the end of 2008. The colorful system can turn into a tablet, and Negroponte said that it “will run like a bat out of hell.” Pricing depends on how much RAM, but key is the display, he added. “It has to be sunlight readable.
That won’t be done until August/September.” Then there will be a beauty contest among three systems and go into manufacturing for shipping, he said. Current seven countries are evaluating the system. The most enthusiastic are Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand and Argentina. In addition, China, India and Egypt have shown interest, as well as Russia, Mexico and Indonesia. Negroponte said that manufacturing has to reach 5 to 6 million to get scale pricing…
It gets worse
From GMSV…
Now comes word that the Justice Department has told Google, Microsoft and other major Net companies that it wants them to keep records of every Web page their users visit for two years, a polite request now, maybe a law later. Search sites, portals and ISPs are sweating, not wanting to side with the pedophiles and terrorists but not wanting to appear to bend over so readily that their customers scream. “Child pornography is disgusting and illegal,” said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google. But he said any proposals related to users’ data “require careful review and must balance the legitimate interests of individual users, law enforcement agencies and Internet companies.”
Current regulations require companies to preserve data that is the subject of specific criminal investigations for up to 180 days while law enforcement collects evidence that could support a warrant or subpoena. “This is a radical departure from current practices,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Mercury News. “We’ve opposed it because we think it creates an unnecessary risk to privacy and security of Internet users.” And that risk is only one of the problems. Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said requiring companies to keep such data could end up costing billions of dollars, raising the price of Net access. “The Department of Justice has yet to tell us what they want us to store.”‘ McClure said. “If they decide they want us to store everything, there isn’t a storage facility in the U.S. large enough to store that.”
Dorneywood: a correction
Just realised that I was wrong to claim that Dorneywood was intended as a country residence for the Foreign Secretary. It has in fact generally been regarded as a perk for either the Chancellor or the Home Secretary — as Simon Jenkins points out this morning. Chevening is the Foreign Secretary’s country residence.
Jenkins is also good on what motivated rich people to donate these grand houses to the government.
Dorneywood is one of a set of houses round London donated in the last century as a snare for naive Labour ministers. They were supposedly for the relaxation of those without “places” of their own. Both Chequers (1917) and Dorneywood (1942) were given during the tribulations of war and with socialism looming. Lord Stanhope gave the spectacular Chevening in 1967, obscurely for use by the Prince of Wales, the prime minister or another cabinet minister. Since 1980 this has tended to mean the foreign secretary.
The gifts had a mixed reception. Lord Haldane considered Chequers “a dangerous distraction” for those “unaccustomed to the charms of a country house”. Ministers would lose touch with government business and go native. Arthur Lee, Tory donor of Chequers, regarded this as precisely the point. A fine old house was architectural psychotherapy, to subvert whatever revolutionary instincts its occupant might harbour. The trust deed stated: “It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power will be drawn … To the revolutionary statesman, the antique and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history.” Maurice Hankey put it more succinctly: “Chequers should have a marvellous effect on these Labour people.”