Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
Apple’s Secret Sauce: The Real Ingredients | BNET
Googling “secret of Apple’s success”–in quotes–gets 29,400 hits. That number will no doubt grow now that Apple has again topped Fortune’s list of the most-admired companies. A rolling stone gathers no moss, but a company on a roll gathers investors, groupies, and explainers. Like docents in a museum, they stand before the object they admire, telling whoever will listen why it’s so great and how it does what it does.
Funny, though, how the explanations vary. To Fortune, the secret is Apple’s “blistering pace of new product releases.” Actually, Apple sets “a deliberately moderate pace” to maximize its profits, says a thoughtful analysis by Christopher Meyer, consultant and the author of a book about speed, Fast Cycle Time. The secret is “staying upmarket” per to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, noting the fact that Apple dominates the market for $1000 computers. Only: Apple’s hottest product, the iPad, has competitors stymied because it’s priced below other tablets, says the New York Times’s David Pogue.
Some say the secret is vertical integration-but as Saeed Khan notes, that was also the supposed reason for Apple’s failures 20 years ago. Some, like Guy Kawasaki, say Apple invents whole new businesses by anticipating where the market is heading. Others argue that Apple wins because it surfs brilliantly on waves of others’ invention, pointing out that the iPad was neither the first tablet nor the iPhone the first smart phone.
We’re seeing two things here. The first: blind men groping an elephant. Though there are dozens of Harvard Business School cases about Apple, the company hasn’t become a specimen under the management microscope the way GE and P&G have. Instead, writers have focused on the all-important question of whether Steve Jobs is Svengali, Rasputin, or the Second Coming.
More insidious, this is a demonstration of fallacies Phil Rosenzweig skewers in his book The Halo Effect. Very often, Rosenzweig shows, people “claim to have identified the drivers of company performance, but have mainly shown the way that high performers are described.” Confusing causation with correlation, attributing virtues to a company simply because it’s doing well-such errors happen all the time. People with hobby-horse theories are especially inclined to ascribe a hot company’s performance primarily to the fact that it sounds like the horse they’re riding. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
Forget the gurus.
In fact, the secret of Apple’s success is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Apple’s Form 10K includes a remarkable paragraph under the heading “Business Strategy.” A small masterpiece of clarity and coherence, it states what Apple is trying to accomplish. Then it lists the half-dozen things Apple must do distinctively and well to succeed. Here’s the paragraph. (The italics and comments are mine.)
The Company is committed to bringing the best user experience to its customers
[Strategy starts with an unambiguous view of how a company will create value. This is Apple's: Let others do what they do; customer experience is how we play. So, if that's their game, how do they win at it?]
through its innovative hardware, software, peripherals, services, and Internet offerings. The Company’s business strategy leverages its unique ability to design and develop its own operating systems, hardware, application software, and services
[Required capability #1: Everything that a customer touches, we must be able to do ourselves. Corollary: It's ok--necessary, even--to outsource what doesn't touch customers directly, like manufacturing and logistics]
to provide its customers new products and solutions with superior ease-of-use, seamless integration, and innovative industrial design
[Capability #2: we must deliver product attributes that improve customer experience. Note the attributes not listed, like bleeding-edge technology]
The Company believes continual investment in research and development
[Capability #3: Plan and manage a research portfolio coherent with the first two capabilities and encompassing both new and renewed products]
is critical to the development and enhancement of innovative products and technologies. In conjunction with its strategy, the Company continues to build and host a robust platform for the discovery and delivery of third-party digital content and applications
[Capability #4: To own the customer experience, we must run a digital store so great that we can compel third-party providers to come through us. No one in the industry--or any industry I can think of--has anything like this]
through the iTunes Store. The iTunes Store includes the App Store and iBookstore, which allow customers to discover and download third-party applications and books through either a Mac or Windows-based computer or wirelessly through an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. The Company also works to support a community for the development of third-party software and hardware and digital content that complement the Company’s offerings
[Capability #5: Others do this too, of course, with bigger and often more open communities. What people complain about in Apple's development community is a feature, not a bug; "complement the company's offerings" is the key phrase]
Additionally, the Company’s strategy includes expanding its distribution to effectively reach more customers and provide them with a high-quality sales and post-sales support experience.
[Capability #6: Elsewhere in the 10K, Apple says its stores "control the customer experience" and notes that they are in desirable (i.e. high-rent) locations and staffed with knowledgeable and experienced (i.e., well paid) people. As for post-sales support, every Apple owner knows that its support is the industry's best--not perfect, but the best, whether on the phone or at the Genius Bar, which is itself a stroke of genius. If customer experience is your game, customer service is not a cost to be minimized]
The Company is therefore uniquely positioned to offer superior and well-integrated digital lifestyle and productivity solutions.
There you have it: The six ingredients of Apple’s secret sauce. There’s nothing special about them. Here’s what’s special:
First, they work together as a system that is at unity with itself. Each capability reinforces and amplifies the others; and to win the game they play, no other capabilities are needed.
Second, Apple actually does what it says. There’s a long list of ways in which Apple could get distracted from its strategy. (I noted a couple of them above.) What sets Apple apart is the ability to those six things very well and to the relentless exclusion of anything else.
Photo courtesy flickr user Michael Bentley
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Abuse of Private Manning
Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama’s support to do so.
Private Manning is in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. For one hour a day, he is allowed to walk around a room in shackles. He is forced to remove all his clothes every night. And every morning he is required to stand outside his cell, naked, until he passes inspection and is given his clothes back.
Military officials say, without explanation, that these precautions are necessary to prevent Private Manning from injuring himself. They have put him on “prevention of injury” watch, yet his lawyers say there is no indication that he is suicidal and the military has not placed him on a suicide watch. (He apparently made a sarcastic comment about suicide.)
Forced nudity is a classic humiliation technique. During the early years of the Bush administration’s war on terror, C.I.A. interrogators regularly stripped prisoners to break down barriers of resistance, increase compliance and extract information. One C.I.A. report from 2004 said that nudity, along with sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation, was used to create a mind-set in which the prisoner “learns to perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting.”
Private Manning is not an enemy combatant, and there is no indication that the military is trying to extract information from him. Many military and government officials remain furious at the huge dump of classified materials to WikiLeaks. But if this treatment is someone’s way of expressing that emotion, it would be useful to revisit the presumption of innocence and the Constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Philip Crowley, a State Department spokesman, committed the classic mistake of a Washington mouthpiece by telling the truth about Private Manning to a small group (including a blogger): that the military’s treatment of Private Manning was “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” He resigned on Sunday.
Far more troubling is why President Obama, who has forcefully denounced prisoner abuse, is condoning this treatment. Last week, at a news conference, he said the Pentagon had assured him that the terms of the private’s confinement “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.” He said he could not go into details, but details are precisely what is needed to explain and correct an abuse that should never have begun.
For the Record (March 17, 2011)
This editorial incorrectly reported that Pfc. Bradley Manning is shackled while exercising in the recreation room in the Marine Corps brig. He is only shackled while walking to and from that room.
Private Manning, unlike most other prisoners, is never allowed to mingle with other prisoners. We consider that to be “solitary confinement,” but the Pentagon says it is not because he is allowed to shout to prisoners elsewhere in his cellblock. Our editorial criticized Private Manning’s detention conditions because he must strip every night and hand over his clothes to a guard (unlike most other prisoners). The Pentagon says this is not forced nudity because he is then given a Velcro-secured wrap-around “smock” that he may sleep in.
What is Obama thinking?
Satellite Photos - Japan Before and After Tsunami - Interactive Feature
This terribly tragic.....
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Giant Ant Hill Excavated
This is incredible! I wish it were higher quality but you get the idea.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Greg's bite: Microsoft pays Nokia $1 billion to use Windows 7? | MacTech
By Greg Mills
Talk about mutual desperation or a marriage from hell. "Bloomberg" reports that Nokia has held out for US$1 billion from Microsoft to use Windows 7. Microsoft head honcho Steve Ballmer seems to think he can buy his way into the smartphone market that Microsoft abdicated over the last few years.
Nokia and Microsoft both have seen Apple eat their market share with the viral iPhone and iOS since it was launched. At one time Microsoft had some traction in the semi-smart phone market with its rather primitive phone software. The market shunned the Microsoft OS as it was light years behind Apple's iOS. Nokia, likewise, had a giant share of the dumb phone market and has seen its share drop dramatically since the iPhone 1 taught the world what a true smartphone could do.
A few weeks back the CEO of Nokia famously pounded his chest with a visceral proclamation of defeat at the hands of Apple and Android. The dumb phone market is doomed to sink, to represent a minor league market as consumers choose smart phones as the difference in price between dumb and smart phones is erased. Why buy a featureless cell phone, when for the same money you can get a full featured smart phone?
Nokia, despite the enormous market share they enjoyed, failed to realize the days of the "just a cell phone" devices was over. Now, too late to the party, their desperation has led them to "jump off a burning oil platform into the sea." The dramatic description likens staying with the status quo and being burned to a crisp by Apple or jumping into unknown waters seeking software solutions from an outside source.
The development of the Apple and Google infrastructures -- which includes both the operating systems and well developed app stores -- is a very hard act to follow. The Nokia software department was hopelessly floundering; management knew it but was unable to fix the problems.
Microsoft has seen a very low level of acceptance for its Windows 7, sort of a smartphone comparison to the awful Windows Vista computer OS that was just about completely shunned by the PC market, for a long list of good reasons. With the revelation that Nokia demanded and got a billion dollars cash from Microsoft for adopting WIndows 7 comes the question, "Did Microsoft also pay other handset makers to launch their Windows 7compatible handsets?" If not, the dismal failure in the market place would have me think the handset makers ought to also demand serious money from Microsoft or quit supporting the failed Windows 7 OS.
Sometimes bigger isn't better, it's just bigger. Grasping at "the wrong straw" may well turn out be the last major gaff that takes Nokia down for the count. A failure for Nokia-branded Windows 7 smart phones will likely bring down both Nokia and Microsoft's "too lame, too late to the party" smartphone OS offering that have to be at least a year off. Apple isn't sleeping at the switch. Already hopelessly behind, another year is an eternity in the fast developing smart phone business of today.
The CEO of Nokia seems to forget that if he likens Apple and Android to the fire on the preverbal oil platform, jumping into the sea is also hazardous as there is a deadly great white shark circling the waters who eats half baked products for lunch. That shark is also Apple. The stock market gets it and has seriously discounted both Nokia and Microsoft, expecting the worst. Bigger isn't better, it's just bigger -- and more spectacular when it fails. Windows 7 as a platform hasn't been well supported by the developer community so far, despite begging, cajoling and outright bribery by Microsoft.
The power of a substantial three-point system is impossible to beat. You need solid hardware, solid software and an app store that can compete with Apple and Android. Windows 7 isn't that substantial, their app store is lame and there isn't a good reason for that to change. Nokia should have gone with Android, but that also has its risks as Apple is suing every handset maker who produces handsets for that platform and patent infringement suits are going to hit the fan this year. Look for the Android platform to get seriously hurt by Apple's legal assault.
The smart money has already laughed off the Nokia/Microsoft collaboration as two has beens, trying to resurrect a dead duck. Nokia stock has taken a 25% hit and there is a strong push within Nokia to push back on the deal with Microsoft, which hasn't been signed yet.
History is full of giant companies that didn't see the direction their market was going and slowly faded to black. As I sometimes muse when I wear my oriental wise man hat, "those who stand too long in the road of progress will be run over." Nokia and Microsoft Windows 7 are very likely road kill under the runaway Apple smart phone and iPad machines. Both Nokia and Microsoft failed to see the future and will pay the price.
That's Greg's Bite for today.
(Greg Mills is currently a graphic and Faux Wall Artist in Kansas City. Formerly a new product R&D man for the paint sundry market, he holds 11 US patents. Greg is an Extra Class Ham Radio Operator, AB6SF, iOS developer and web site designer. He's also working on a solar energy startup using a patent pending process for turning waste dual pane glass window units into thermal solar panels used to heat water see: www.CottageIndustySolar.com Married, with one daughter, Greg writes for intellectual property web sites and on Mac/Tech related issues. See Greg's art web site at http://www.gregmills.info He can be emailed at gregmills@mac.com)
Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work • The Register
When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia was abandoning its development of its own smartphone platforms and APIs, and betting the farm on somebody else's, many people asked why it was necessary.
Nokia had spent 15 years trying to develop and maintain its own software, which it regarded as strategic to maintaining its independence. Elop's decisions have ensured that Nokia didn't just get another option to run alongside its own, but it would abandon these, writing off the investments it had already made. In his opinion, these weren't good enough.
But why? Nokia had (and still has) one proven and successful smartphone platform, and had spent years bringing another one to maturity. It had, belatedly, unified both under one API for developers. Yet Elop judged that neither of these two high-end platforms would ever gain the developer support they would need to stay competitive.
Nokia had been watching the Symbian software as it was created, since the mid-1990s, and licensed the operating system before Symbian was even created. Symbian proved to have many advantages over the recent competition in some important areas. With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and it uses the antenna better. Symbian's power consumption and performance on comparable hardware are also best of class, despite the baroque middleware added over the years by Nokia. Yet Nokia's phones were considered uncompetitive in the marketplace, because new products from Apple and Android had raised the bar for ease of use, particularly for new data applications, and Nokia's user experience was awful.
The UX matters: it's the first thing potential customers see when a friend passes them their new phone in the pub. A well-designed UX is consistent, forgiving and rewarding; Nokia's user experience was inconsistent, unforgiving and hostile. Nokia's designers honed in with meticulous attention to the wrong detail. Apple's iPhoneOS UI had some unusual features – smooth graphics that played transitions at 60-frames-per-second, thanks to a dedicated graphics chip. Instead of redesigning the entire UX, Nokia acquired expensive professional-grade video cameras to determine the animation speed, and having confirmed that yes, it was 60fps, tried to recreate the transitions.
Touch input was welded onto Nokia's Symbian S60 user interface – which had originally been designed for alphanumeric keypad-based phones back in 2000 – and it was a clumsy fit. Punters expected a "direct manipulation" UI, which this plainly wasn't. Long overdue rationalisations to the confusing S60 menu hierarchy or settings weren't executed, making it very hard to do the simplest things.
Nokia showed a demo in 2007, nine months after the iPhone was announced, but before it had even landed on non-US shores. "We can do this passing fad for touch screens, too," Nokia assured developers.
But it was, at best, a stop-gap. And Nokia was still relying on this ugly mess for its "flagship" two years later. The question as to why Nokia surrendered its independence lies in why it took so long to engineer a competitive UI, and then under new management, decided that it couldn't.
I've called it the "for want of a nail" question: if Nokia had a UI, it would not have had to lose its independence. And as Nokia gave up its independence, Europe lost its last global technology platform. US and Japanese companies now dictate the market.
Dead ends
Now the lid is being lifted on this saga.
A great introduction comes from veteran mobile developer and co-author of a couple of technical Symbian books, Mark Wilcox. Wilcox had worked inside and outside Nokia before joining the Symbian Foundation several months after it launched. I'm surprised his account hasn't got more coverage in blogland since it was published last week. It would be the basis for a good disaster movie for techies – but one where the ending is so depressing nobody would want to watch it.
Through incredible software mismanagement, Nokia simultaneously pursued two dead ends, writes Wilcox, neither of which worked. Nokia management had belatedly realised it needed a better story to tell developers, and in early 2008 acquired Trolltech, which has a very successful and well-regarded C++ framework called Qt. Qt doesn't specify a look and feel, though, but the Trolltech had plenty of experience creating these for potential customers, and saw little point in simply recoding a legacy UI that already looked dated. Having done as they were asked, and made Symbian programmable via Qt, they set about modernising and simplifying UI development.
Next page: Design patterns were 'reverse engineered from code'
Brilliant piece on a tragic failure. I am not sure their move to Microsoft will herald any better news.
India Painting Her Car for the Big Class Race
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Apple updates software for the Apple TV | MacTech
Apple has updated the software for the US$99, streaming-only Apple TV to version 4.2 It adds support for AirPlay in iOS 4.3, support for Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound when playing Netflix videos and the ability to access MLB.TV and NBA League Pass Broadband content
There are also new slideshow themes; you can view photos with the new Scrapbook, Photo Mobile, and Holiday Mobile slideshow themes. Apple TV 4.2 also improves the on-screen keyboard, letting you search and enter names and passwords more easily, according to Apple.
You can update the Apple TV software via iTunes.
I am buying
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Saturday, March 05, 2011
India and Amara on Mt Tolmie
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Aviary Beat Creator
This is a cool Chrome App that allows you to create beats. Very simple UI that works. Here is a simple little snippet I created in a few minutes......
The REAL Death Of The Music Industry
Updated and correct information on the music industry. This is fascinating stuff if you have any interest in the music industry. Give it a read....
Christchurch earthquake - The Big Picture
The devastation in Christchurch is unbelievable. I was there 20 years ago....the city is remarkably like Victoria. It is almost the exact same population and has a strong British history and feel to the place.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want to Kill Publishers, But Apple’s Subscription Strategy Will
Apple should clearly offer a lower percentage on subscriptions (say 10%). However, as far as offering the users information to publishers (it's opt-in not opt-out) Apple is clearly siding with the consumer on this one.
For Mobile Apps, It’s 1996 All Over Again
It's interesting to note how much faster the app economy is growing then did the web during the same early stage.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Video: Davis 3 Wheeler car (1948) - Boing Boing
Video: Davis 3 Wheeler car (1948)
"This little chariot can really run you around in circles." I'd certainly like a Davis 3-Wheeler. And a 1950s voice like the narrator too. (Thanks, Jeff Cross!)
A brief history of the BlackBerry UI • reghardware
About half the people with a BlackBerry know that if you press space twice you get full-stop space. But only a few of them know that you can use space in email addresses to get full-stops and @ symbols. Tell them and their eyes light up with the thought that their little tool has just become that much more productive.
This is the major problem with a user interface, and in particular mobile phone user interfaces: discovery. On a PC you can "lead" users into shortcuts and how to use things. A mobile UI should be just as obvious.
Ten years ago, Nokia had the reputation for being leader of the pack with user interfaces. There were two reasons for this. One is that they really did have the best UI. The other is that market dominance meant that they were the most familiar. So even complicated, not-so-obvious things such as pressing the “menu*” button to switch off the keyboard lock became natural.
That’s the thing with user interfaces. Once you have become habituated to something it becomes second nature. Why should a square mean “stop” when the road sign is octagonal? It’s all about balance: a balance of features against complexity.
Nokia gained the lead when Christian Lindholm brought psychologists in to understand how people related to phones. Before then the decisions had been made by engineers. One of the many fruits of this was the Nokia 6310, still cited as the best business phone ever. An early Bluetooth device, it really got the balance of ease-of-use against features right. One of the other, spectacular ease-of-use successes was the 3310 and the Navi-key interface.
All about buttons
Ask a product manager what would make their phone simple and they say “dedicated buttons”. Let’s have a button for the camera, one for turning the light on and off, one for GPS, one for Wi-Fi. Soon you have more buttons than a Cadbury’s factory and it’s horrifically complicated. What made Navi-key great was that in addition to the numbers there was up/down, cancel and a single softkey.
You want the fewest buttons for the tasks you want to complete. The problem comes when you add features. There is a balance between the number of buttons and what you want the phone to do. Start adding features to a phone with too few buttons and you’ve no idea what to press to do what.
Where the BlackBerry got it right, from day one, is knowing what it was about: messaging. And particularly email. Indeed, first generation BlackBerries didn’t do voice, and when it was added, it was only with headphone. The BlackBerry has always been about email, a strength it takes from its “focus group of one”: Mike Lazaridis, RIM’s CEO. Instead of asking lots of naive users what they would like the device to do, the BlackBerry was built around Lazaridis’s view of what a device should do.
This single-mindedness has helped keep the focus on mail, but as the number of features has grown the device has had to evolve. What’s not shown, until OS 6.0, is that the foundations for a messaging-led platform make everything else work that bit better.
Next page: The first generation of BlackBerries
Saturday, February 05, 2011
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
The odds were astronomical.......
One in a million chance. Went out for dinner with our eBay hosts in Richmond, London (at a great pub called the Duke) and ran into David Fahey (an old friend from University). Literally the odds of this happening must have been a million to 1. Great to see him and I hope to catch up with him on my next trip to San Francisco.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
One on One: Tim Wu, Author of The Master Switch
This is the next book I will be reading. It has received tremendous reviews.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Back to the Blog
It has been quite the hiatus for this blog. I won't go into the details as to why but most of them have been around finding a blogging tool that would work for me. My old standby, Flock, has changed significantly and is no longer viable. I am currently checking out MarsEdit. If has Flickr integration but no YouTube integration. It remains to be seen if any of them will work for me......I will let you know.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
"Obama Should Follow in FDR's Footsteps" - Paul Krugman
There are lots and lots of things that need attention in our cities and counties, starting with, but by no means limited to, infrastructure. Labor and raw materials are relatively cheap due to the recession, and interest rates will never be lower, so why don't we hire people to do what needs to be done?:
Obama should follow in FDR's footsteps, by Nick Taylor, Commentary, LA Times: As President Obama weighs his options for adding jobs and pumping up the economy ... he might look back for guidance to Franklin Roosevelt.Indeed, Obama's experience so far resembles FDR's first uneven stabs at job creation. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination in 1932... When he took office, with the unemployment rate at 24.9%, he created the Civilian Conservation Corps... But it was too limited... The "CCC boys" ... never numbered more than 300,000... Roosevelt continued his efforts with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration..., it put 2 million people to work by the fall of 1933...These efforts still left far too many people out of jobs. As winter approached, relief administrator Harry Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to create a temporary jobs program that would give the private economy a few more months to pick up steam. The Civil Works Administration put more than 4 million workers into jobs during the winter of 1933-34. They mostly repaired roads, parks and public buildings, but there were jobs for teachers and other white-collar workers too.The CWA ended, as designed, after just five months. But unemployment remained unacceptably high. Like Obama today, Roosevelt had midterm elections to think about. His critics accused him of socialism and fretted publicly that large deficits would ruin the country. They insisted that workers would ... never be weaned off the government's largesse.But despite his vocal opponents, in January 1935, FDR announced his intention to launch the massive jobs program that became the Works Progress Administration. ... The WPA addressed a range of long-standing infrastructure needs, including roads and bridges, hospitals and water treatment plants, and airports. Its workers fought floods and forest fires and cleaned up after hurricanes. Its sewing rooms made clothing and blankets that went out to disaster victims. The WPA also employed nurses, doctors, teachers, librarians and artists. By the fall of 1936, 3.3 million people were on the WPA payroll. The stimulus provided by those jobs buoyed the economy. By the spring of 1937, after Roosevelt's landslide reelection, the country's unemployment rate had dropped to 14%.FDR then, again like Obama, heard calls to cut spending and balance the budget. ... And he heeded them. He slashed WPA spending by two-thirds ... for the year starting July 1937. Half as many workers — 1.65 million — would get WPA paychecks.At the same time, Roosevelt tightened bank reserve requirements. Deductions for the new Social Security System took more money out of the economy. ... That fall, industrial production fell, the stock market plunged and, by the end of the year, unemployment had surged, with another 2 million workers losing their jobs. Republicans called it the Roosevelt recession.In the spring of 1938, Roosevelt decided he'd had enough of budget-cutting. He resumed spending, and soon the WPA rolls were back above 2 million, on their way to an all-time high of 3.4 million.The lesson for Obama in all this is that stimulus works, and the sooner and more aggressive, the better..., a push today on new infrastructure would also provide lasting and necessary benefits. ... An America prepared today to meet the future will be applauded long after this recession is consigned to the history books. ...Millions of people out of work, vast needs throughout the nation, and a president unwilling to fight to bring the two together because, I don't know, it's not bipartisan? Whatever the reason, there are many, many areas where we could put people to work where the benefits exceed the costs, including valuable public goods that the private sector will not provide, but we don't seem to be willing to allow the government to broker these exchanges. It's frustrating. People could be helped, and it would make us all better off, but it's hard to see how this could possibly happen at the scale that is needed.
Update: I should have waited until this came out before doing this post:
Building the Bridges to a Sustainable Recovery, by Robert H. Frank, Commentary, NY Times: Last year’s economic stimulus program helped stem a crisis that was poised to rival the Great Depression. ... Now, those stimulus payouts are waning... As a result, a fragile economic recovery is faltering. ...All the while, however, we’re facing vivid examples of failing infrastructure across the country. Clearly, the maintenance and rebuilding of bridges, roads, water systems and the like can’t be postponed forever. And the work will never be cheaper ... than right now, when high unemployment and excess capacity have put the opportunity cost of the necessary labor and equipment near zero. ...According to data compiled by the civil engineers’ society, planned spending across 15 categories of infrastructure, including aviation, drinking water systems, energy programs, levees, roads, schools and wastewater treatment, will fall short ... by a cumulative total of more than $1.8 trillion in the next five years. ...Deferring maintenance does nothing to alleviate our national indebtedness; in fact, it makes the problem far worse. According to the Nevada Department of Transportation, for instance, rehabilitation of a 10-mile section of I-80 that would cost $6 million this year would cost $30 million in two years, after the road deteriorated further.If such a project is at all representative, spending an extra $100 billion nationwide on interstate highway maintenance now would reduce the national debt two years from now by several hundred billion dollars...Some people object that infrastructure spending takes too long to roll out. But many projects could be started immediately. And remarkably low long-term interest rates imply that markets expect several more years of sluggish economic activity, so even projects that take a little longer would still be timely.But won’t this extra spending make the deficit problem worse? A better question is this: Why is anyone worried about short-run deficits in the first place? Deficits are a long-run problem..., the short-run imperative is to increase total spending by enough to put everyone back to work as quickly as possible. ...
With the midterm elections looming and deficit hysteria at a fever pitch, it is far from certain that even the president’s modest proposal can gain Congressional approval. If it can’t, our infrastructure clearly isn’t the only thing that needs fixing.
This is from Economist's View by Mark Thoma.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Very Cool Docking Station
I was blown away by this concept design for a docking station for your iphone and ipad (and ipod too). Now I just need that 27 inch iMac (and iphone and ipad and ipod).
For the full story check out - http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/09/10/for-the-apple-geek-of-the-day/
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Pizza Night with the Nephews
We had Marc and Conrad over for Thursday night pizza. This is the first one of many I hope they can attend while they are down here at University.
The future of screen technology
Predictions for the future of technology usually end up looking like something off The Jetsons or Back to the Future, but a few brilliant minds from the Open Innovation experiment came up with a vision that looks a tad more realistic.
Mom and Dad's 50th Wedding Anniversary
