HP loses CEO to testosterone poisoning

So Hewlett Packard, or HP as it prefers to be known these days, finally dumped its abrasive CEO, Carly Fiorina. (She got $21 million in severance: would that I should be so dumped.) But the company is apparently still on the crazed trajectory on which she had launched it. HP used to be a company which had a great printer business and an indifferent PC business. Fiorina’s Big Idea was straight MBA-rookie stuff — go for a big merger/takeover. The unlucky bride was Compaq, a PC maker in terminal decline. It didn’t work. HP is now a company with (still) a vibrant printer business and a duff PC business. Seven wasted years. What I hadn’t quite realised was how hated she was in the company. HP was famous for its civilised, unaggressive collegial atmosphere. Carly was primadonnish and abrasive (and female). A measure of the antagonism she aroused is Invert Parody.com, a satirical website devoted to the affairs of the PH company and its abrasive female CEO Karla Fidora. Here’s a flavour:

“She came to PH from the Great American Wire and Cable Company, where she led the divesture of the firm’s wire and cable businesses.  She later admitted ‘that left us with just the Great American Company and no real products. Clearly we should have thought that one through a little more.’ She then focused on finding Great American a great new name and facilitated its strategic plunge into bankruptcy.

Fidora was then hired to re-invert the PH Corporation, a company known for little more than world class products and happy employees. It was a status quo that worried competitors and Fidora was committed to turning it around. With a twin strategy of abandoning high margin businesses or selling them to competitors; and acquiring struggling companies in low margin industries at exorbitant premiums, she was able to execute one of the great turnarounds in corporate history.

Fidora was a favorite of employees and personally helped tens of thousands of them move onto their dream of early retirement or new careers in the fast food industry.”

Paul Sraffa, of the Institute for the Future, observed of Fiorina that she had “the worst case of testosterone poisoning of any CEO I’ve ever seen”.

The forthcoming search battle

My Observer column about Microsoft’s bid to capture the search market is here. Audio version here.

The Big Secret

One of the terrible things about being a Mac and Linux user is that one has less and less in common with the mass of humanity, which is still enmeshed in a Windows world. In the last few days, I’ve run into one friend and one colleague who are both at the end of their respective tethers because of the fact that their Windows machines have been penetrated and terminally compromised by malware. Both have the haunted look of people stuck in a nightmare. And the terrible thing is that while I mutter words of consolation and encouragement, I don’t really feel their pain because I’ve been out of the Windows world for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like. And of course I daren’t say what I’m really thinking, which is that it’s about time they learned from the experience and moved away to something more stable and less vulnerable.

This is what Larry Lessig castigates as the Mac Mindset — a kind of smugness which comes from being in on a secret that the rest of humanity doesn’t know. In my anxiety to avoid this trap, I keep quiet. But here is someone who has Shouted It Out Loud. He’s Mark Morford, a columnist on SF Gate and the headline on the piece says it all: “Why Does Windows Still Suck? Why do PC users put up with so many viruses and worms? Why isn’t everyone on a Mac?”

My only quibble is that I’d add “… or Linux” at the end. Thanks to Dale and Quentin for the link.

Fumbling the Future

An extraordinary event happened last week. AT&T, the shrunken telcoms behemoth, was bought for a mere $16 billion by one of the ‘Baby Bells’ spun out of it when the company was broken up in 1984. (‘Ma Bell’ was the universal nickname for the company, a legacy of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell.) It’s an amazing moment in corporate history — and a salutary warning for monopolists in high-tech industries. The AT&T name may live on if the new owners think it’s worth it, but effectively the company that once bestrode its industry has ceased to be.

This week’s Economist has a thoughtful piece about the story. “For much of the past century AT&T was the envy of the corporate world — the largest firm on the planet both by revenue and market capitalisation. No share was more widely held — the firm was so solid it was considered ideal for ‘widows and orphans’. Its legendary research arm, Bell Laboratories, was responsible for some of the 20th century’s greatest inventions, from the transistor to the laser, and fielded seven Nobel Prize winners. At the time of the break-up in 1984 AT&T boasted around 1m employees. So what went wrong?”

The answer, in a phrase, is that the world changed but AT&T didn’t. I came to a vivid appreciation of the extent of its corporate myopia when I was researching my history of the Net. And the funny thing is that they blew it not once, but twice.

Paul Baran, the guy who first conceived the idea of a packet-switched, digital network in the early 1960s, tried to persuade AT&T to adopt it — and was rejected. “First”, said Jack Osterman of AT&T, “it can’t possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves”.

Note the monopolistic mindset implicit in the word ‘allow’. Although the Pentagon accepted Baran’s proposal for a new network, he withdrew it because he knew that the Department would contract AT&T to implement the design and he figured they would screw it up and that the idea of a digital network would thereby be discredited for a generation.

But the idea of a digital network was resurrected by ARPA in the mid-1960s. The ARPAnet was built (by Bolt Beranek and Newman and a team of academic researchers) and was fully operational by 1972 — at which point the DoD asked AT&T if they wanted to take it over and run it. Once again the company refused!

The story of AT&T’s fate is one of hubris and nemesis, larded with ironies and accidents. Bell Labs — the company’s R&D arm — was a wonderful ideas factory, but AT&T often failed to profit from the magic the Labs produced. They invented the transistor, for example, but it was Fairchild and later Intel who capitalised on the concept. And Bell Labs was where Unix was written. Same story: by the time the company was free to exploit the operating system the window had passed. The open source genie was out of the bottle. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The economics of sharing

Although the corporate world is still baffled by the open source movement (why do these smart people invent wonderful things and then give them away?), the rest of us know that it makes sense.

That’s partly because information goods (such as software) are — like the light from Thomas Jefferson’s candle — non-rivalrous: if I give you some of my software, I don’t have less as a result. But up to now we’ve tended to assume that sharing only made sense for non-rivalrous resources. Now comes an interesting paper by Yochai Benkler arguing that sharing is emerging as a viable strategy for some rivalrous goods and services — e.g. computing power and bandwidth. The SETI@home project is one example, but there are lots of others. This also reinforces the point that P2P technology is important because it’s a tool for sharing (rivalrous) resources over the Net.

Benkler is one of those wonderful people who pours out original ideas and insights. His layer model of the Net has been very helpful in explaining IP issues to students.

BS — not!

Quentin and Martin took a break from inventing and went for a nice rural ramble at the weekend, only to find a formidable bull taking a close interest in their activities. Photos here. Wonder if they had a red rag.

What not to do in bed

It gets worse.

After the dentist’s chair, comes this:

Martin Heiddeger once said that technology was “the art of arranging the world so that one doesn’t have to experience it”. Precisely. Thanks to Dave, from whom nothing is hidden, for the link.

Tools for thought

For as long as I can remember, the Holy Grail of computing (at least for me) has been to find tools that actually help in making one a better, more efficient or more creative writer. And I’m not talking about word-processing but something that can do for authors what, say, the spreadsheet did for accountants and planners. The word processor is, well, just that — a tool that processes words. But where do the words come from? And can computing help in stimulating or generating the ideas that are expressed in words? So far, the answer seems to be “not much”.

It’s not that there aren’t lots of programs out there which help one store, index, organise and retrieve information, create ‘mindmaps’, even do brainstorming, etc. But none of these tools maps naturally onto the way one thinks — or at least the way I think. So there’s a tradeoff: given that I have to change the way I work in order to accommodate the software, do the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs? So far, the answer has usually been ‘”no”.

Enter Steven Johnson, a writer I admire. He’s produced several really interesting, stimulating, thoughtful books — notably Interface Culture. So when he published an essay in Sunday’s New York Times about a software tool he swears by, I sat up and took notice. The software in question is called DEVONthink. Johnson has given a much fuller explanation on his Blog of how he uses it. I was sufficiently intrigued to download the software and get it to index all the documents, web pages, images, etc. on my hard drive. It’s a very interesting tool with a fairly steep learning curve. And to get the most out of it one would (as usual) have to adjust one’s working methods to fit in with its underlying metaphors. Nevertheless, Johnson has persuaded me that it’s worth exploring it in more depth.

Oh — bad news for Windows users: DEVONthink is for Mac OS X only.

Skype now available for Linux

Yep!. Yippee! The only downside is that the kids will demand another headset. Sigh.

Dog bites man. And Google doing well. That’s news for you

Today’s NYT reports:

“Google … surprised Wall Street yesterday by announcing that its sales and profit margins grew much faster than expected in the fourth quarter.

The results were a sharp contrast to the company’s warnings in November that its revenue for the quarter would probably decline because of increased competition and an inevitable slowing as a result of its growth.

Google’s shares surged in after-hours trading, rising nearly 10 percent to more than $210, a record for the company, which sold shares in its initial offering in August for $85 each.

‘More humans around the world are using Google and they are spending more time with Google per human,’ the chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said last night in an interview.”

Hah! Note the use of the word “human”. Those rumours that Google is developing a search engine aimed at dogs are true!