Acorns, oaks and Silicon Fen

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This morning’s Observercolumn.

For those of us who were around Cambridge in the 1970s and 1980s, Micro Men, BBC4’s dramatisation of the days when Britain (briefly) led the home computing business, raised some awkward questions. Were our jackets really so awful? (Yes.) Did geeks use oscilloscope probes to eat takeaway noodles? (Probably.) Were the technology programmes on TV really as embarrassing as all that? (Yes.) Was Clive Sinclair's hair really as improbable as the hairpiece welded to the pate of Alexander Armstrong, the actor playing him in the film? (No.) Was Sinclair as insufferably pompous as he was portrayed? (Mostly.)

And did he assail his rival, Chris Curry (co-founder of Acorn Computers), in the Baron of Beef pub with a rolled-up newspaper shouting, “You fucking buggering shit-bucket!”? (Yes, according to the Guardian.)

Heady days, eh? But at the core of this story of rivalry between former collaborators was a problem that still plagues the start-ups in the Cambridge ‘technology cluster’, namely how to make the transition from being a small team of bright people to being a global company…

Osborne’s arithmetic

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Damn! The country needs a new government and it turns out that the only possible contenders under our daft electoral system are this crowd of old-Etonian amateurs.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said the shadow chancellor's proposed saving, outlined at the Conservative party conference this week, would take five years longer than estimated and fall £3bn short.

NIESR said Osborne’s team had made a mistake in their calculations, misreading a paper written by the thinktank earlier this year. Osborne's aides originally based their calculations on a NIESR document in the House of Commons library. After his speech the thinktank sought clarification of his assumptions. It has recalculated the figures and will present them at a conference on Monday.

Mind you, we’ve known this for a while. A year ago they misread the banking crisis almost as comprehensively as John McCain.

It wasn’t me, guv

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I’ve always believed that the best general philosophical null hypothesis is that nobody knows anything. This week’s Economist has a lovely tongue-in-cheek editorial about bank bosses which confirms the wisdom of my position.

Certainly, bank bosses displayed the hubris of all big corporate baddies: paying themselves loads, making nutty expense claims try an $87,000 rug and, in one case, playing bridge in Detroit as their firm collapsed. Compared with Kenneth Lay of Enron or Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, however, they were amateurs. Most were useless rather than venal.

Far from expertly manipulating their firms’ books, many could not understand them. Citigroup’s boss reportedly learned of its $43 billion of toxic assets only in September 2007 he was told losses were unlikely. UBS’s own post mortem found that “at no stage” did managers have a decent assessment of its subprime exposure. Merrill Lynch signalled a $5 billion write-down in October 2007, only to increase it to $8 billion a mere 19 days later. Even when they had decent numbers, executives struggled to manage their mutinous staff. One ex-boss says his job was “less management, more crowd control”. Meanwhile shareholders pushed bosses to take risks. The vast majority backed RBS’s suicidal takeover of ABN AMRO.

The paper notes that, faced with the catastrophe, corporate-governance gurus are “scraping around, like scholars of jurisprudence in a state of nature”, and suggests some common-sense measures instead:

What firms need is a culture of excellence—but that is like saying all football teams should be like Manchester United. Perhaps the clearest lesson is that big banks are as close as businesses can get to being unmanageable. Bank of America’s assets are now ten times those of Exxon Mobil, America’s most valuable firm. A balance-sheet of $2.3 trillion is beyond the ken of mere mortals. Even firms staffed only by all-knowing deities—such as Goldman Sachs—look like giant black boxes to outsiders. If the new bank bosses want to be in charge, they must shrink and simplify their firms. That way, next time round, they really can be blamed for everything.

What Ralph Lauren doesn’t want us to see!

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Wonderful combative post by Cory Doctorow.

Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model’s proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body (“Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis”). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,” etc.

However, Ralph Lauren’s marketing arm and its law firm don’t see it that way. According to them, this is an “infringing image,” and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada’s Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don’t automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn’t…

And, so, Cory goes on:

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.

Attaboy! This has also made me think about how useful it would be to have an ISP like PriorityColo.

Global Muslim Population

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From the Pew Research Center.

A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.

While Muslims are found on all five inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the Middle East-North Africa region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, more than half of the 20 countries and territories1 in that region have populations that are approximately 95% Muslim or greater.

Judge Tells Google to Revise Its Book Pact by Nov. 9

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From today’s NYTimes.

On Wednesday morning, Judge Denny Chin set Nov. 9 as the date by which Google and its partners must submit a revised settlement for the court’s preliminary approval.

The original agreement was negotiated between Google and representatives of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, who had sued the company, claiming copyright infringement, after Google began scanning books from university libraries. After the settlement was announced last October, it faced hundreds of objections from authors, academics, librarians, public interest groups and would-be rivals. Last month, the Justice Department recommended that the court reject the settlement as it stood.

The Justice Department, which submitted a 32-page filing to the court on Sept. 18, said it was concerned the agreement could violate antitrust law by giving Google “de facto exclusive rights for the digital distribution of orphan works.” Orphan works are books whose authors are unknown or cannot be found. The Justice Department also said it wanted the settlement to comply with procedures for class-action lawsuits.

The Generation Game

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Perceptive FT column by Luke Johnson.

We have entered the Digital Age, but most of those in control in business, and indeed politics, are not digital natives. By the time they get to be the definitive boss, leaders are generally in their 50s. At that point in their life, they are unlikely to be ready to reinvent what they and their company do. “The Establishment” is just that – by nature, they are not dramatic reformers.

So, in sectors such as the music industry, they cling to old-fashioned products like CDs, even when it is obvious the technology has passed its sell-by date. Believe me, I know: I owned a retailer selling CDs – and like-for-like revenues have been plunging – perhaps partly disguised by unit price cuts to maintain volumes. The same applies to film and DVDs; within a few years the format will be history. They all need to devise ways to make downloading pay, and halt the avalanche of piracy and file-sharing.

Unfortunately, a chief executive only a few years from retirement is hardly motivated to sack loyal colleagues to bring on board lots of teenagers to turn their company upside down. Psychologically, we are congenitally opposed to tearing down what we have helped create in order to build anew. Hence the status quo prevails, even if it is the demoralising task of managing decline with no salvation in sight. And so all efforts are applied to preservation in spite of a realisation that the economic model is broken – because no one is forcing the company in a new direction.