Read my, er… his lips
Isla sent me a link to Read The Words. Hence this. Lihua pointed out that Odiogo does the same thing.
Reality dawns in the Googleplex
From this morning’s NYTimes…
Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.
Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.
At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google’s facilities and find less expensive child care.
Now we know how this story ends, don’t we? Google famously doesn’t do evil. But guess what?
Although Google is rolling back its price increase slightly and is phasing in the higher price over five quarters, the outline of the original decision remains largely unchanged. At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) On Monday, Google began the first phase of its new day care plan, letting go of the outside day care firm it had been using.
Another straw in the wind. Google may be extraordinary in some ways, but basically it’s a public company, not a campaigning, do-gooding, non-profit. That’s why it caved in to the Chinese over censoring search results. That’s why it’s handing over all those YouTube access details to Viacom. And that’s why it’s beginning to pare back employee perks.
The future of the Net
Just spotted that my review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book is out. Find it in Management Today.
Word puzzles
The Naughton household is deep into a discussion about the positive side of certain words. For example, one often comes across the word ‘disgruntled’; but where — outside of PG Wodehouse — will you find ‘gruntled’? (It’s the kind of thing Bertie Wooster might say, I suppose.) And what about ‘consolate’? And when was the last time you saw anyone nicely ‘shevelled’? Eh?
Men in white hats
Spotted at Nicci’s birthday party — Julian Barnes on the left, deep in conversation with Francis Wheen (who is wearing his MCC hat). I’d forgotten to bring headgear (bad news for a guy who’s lost most of his hair) and so was reduced to wearing one of Sean’s gardening hats, which made me indistinguishable from a tramp. Sigh.
Real World
If you’d dropped a bomb on the Cavonius Centre at Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge any time in the last two days then you’d have wiped out most of the senior creative people in the BBC (plus a few academics). They were gathered for the annual media seminar organised by my colleague Joe Smith in collaboration with Roger Harrabin and others from the BBC and IBT, who now has the grand title of BBC Environmental Analyst. The purpose of the event is to get the BBC folks away from their highly-pressured environment and expose them to a spectrum of thinkers from academia and the arts world. I chaired one of the ongoing panels (with the magnificently opaque theme of ‘Things’). My fellow-panellists were a fascinating mix: Edmund de Waal, who is a distinguished potter and Professor of Ceramics at Westminster University; Dilys Williams, the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, at the London College of Fashion (both shown below); Heather Ackroyd, an amazingly inventive artist; and Tony Lake, who until a few weeks ago was Chief Constable of Lincolnshire.
The overall idea of these gatherings is to reflect on interdependence. The theme this year was “Real World: storytelling in an interconnected world”. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of collective agonising about the state of the public debate about subjects like climate change and DNA testing — and on the role of the mainstream media in fostering (or hampering) those debates. The openness and vigour of the debate between the editors and programme-makers and their bosses was impressive. The BBC continues to employ a lot of intelligent and perceptive people.
For me, one of the high points of the seminar was meeting John Lloyd, the producer/writer behind a staggering list of comedy shows. (The photograph shows him with Frances Weil of BBC Vision, one of the organising team.) He was co-chair of the event, and did it with grace, perceptiveness and wit. It’s not often that someone whom one knows only by reputation comes up to scratch. And wonderful when they surpass one’s wildest expectations.
Schindler’s Lift
Seen in a lift in Cambridge. I know it’s a corny headline, but I couldn’t resist it.
Now Viacom knows where you are
This is truly — as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center put it — one of those “I told you so” moments.
For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P. or Internet protocol address.
Both companies have argued that I.P. addresses alone cannot be used to unmask the identities of individuals with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using other records of their online activities.
The amount of data covered by the order is staggering, as it includes every video watched on YouTube since its founding in 2005. In April alone, 82 million people in the United States watched 4.1 billion clips there, according to comScore. Some experts say virtually every Internet user has visited YouTube.
Of course Viacom swears blind that the only people who will have access to this information are its lawyers (who are working on its $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google). But it brings one up sharply against the implications of cloud computing.
Is The iPhone Making Us Stupid?
Hmmm… This is beginning to turn into a meme.
That’s one of the topics Walter Mossberg gestured at this afternoon in a talk on “the Future of the Internet and Rise of the Cell Phone,” in which he declared that the PC has peaked, and that the future of the internet belongs to pocket computers like the iPhone. The future of the internet, and the future of us: “The internet is a grid,” he remarked, “and we’re all going to be living on it, and carrying it in our pocket all day long.” Mossberg delivered this assessment with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge (“people hate iPhone users,” he remarked, “because you can never have an argument about facts without them whipping out the phone and looking up the answer” – a description that I’m afraid I resemble, even though I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone) and deep reflection (in the future, Mossberg noted, we may never be free of “that subtle feeling that maybe you need to check Slate, or Facebook”)…