Month: October 2006

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Nothin’ stupider than a man chasin’ his OS

Both BizWeek & the NYTimes run interviews with Microsoft bigwig Steve Ballmer this week. I’m not sure why there’s a PR push just now. Maybe it’s due to the impending release of the new version of Windows, but that’s still months off. Could be to get the business world’s attention away from the Google guys, I guess.

Anyway, the interviews both have points of interest. The BW piece centers on the high valuations for recent transactions (Google buying YouTube, News Corp. buying MySpace, and FaceBook talking a minimum of $1 billion to sell). Ballmer seems to be saying that these businesses just aren’t worth it, and might be hinting that we’re heading to another dot-com bust. (But he hedges his bets by saying that MS might just pay such high prices, depending on the circumstances.)

The BW interview also addresses questions about Microsoft’s play into consumer electronics, via Xbox and Zune. Several years ago, there was an article in Wired about how Microsoft was rewriting the outsourcing equation by not manufacturing any of the components for the Xbox. The model worked so well, MS was losing about $100 on each Xbox sold. Bang-up job. (With the new Xbox, launch costs led to a $1.26 billion loss in fiscal 2006. Given MS’s cash & equivalents of around $48 billion, this isn’t a huge hit, but it’s still pretty amazing.)

The NYTimes interview focuses a lot more on the new version of Windows, which is the unsexy part of the MS business. The interviewer seems intent on proving that MS won’t be able to sell an operating system after this generation, since we’ll all be downloading bits and pieces via them thar interwebs or something. Ballmer tries to explain gently that this won’t be the case:

Q. Doesn’t that mean that software product cycles are going to be much shorter, months instead of years?

A. Things will change at different paces. There are aspects of our Office Live service, for example, that change every three months, four months, six months. And there are aspects that are still not going to change but every couple of years. The truth of the matter is that some big innovations — and it’s a little like having a baby — can’t happen in under a certain amount of time. And, you know, Google doesn’t change their core search algorithms every month. It’s just not done.

I bring this stuff to your attention for two reasons. First, even though this seems like boring business-stuff, it actually is going to have an impact on how you use a computer on a day-to-day basis in the years ahead. As ‘regular’ readers know, I’m interested in how businesses work, and what their choices indicate about the way they perceive their markets. Ultimately, it helps me understand the way they perceive the end-user, providing me with yet more perspectives on human psyches, and what people think we’ll spend money on.

The second reason for this post is because there’s a Miller’s Crossing moment. It comes in the Times piece, when the interviewer asks how the company’s getting along since Bill Gates announced his departure in 2008.

A. With Bill Gates making the transition out of day-to-day involvement at Microsoft, what is the biggest challenge you have to overcome?

Q. Well, there are sort of two. First, it’s not like Bill’s written every line of code or designed every product or done anything like that for many, many years. But Bill’s been an incredible contributor. If Office 2007 is a great product, give Bill 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the credit. We have to make sure that — whether it’s 5 or 7 or 10 percent — we get those values someplace else. And second, with Bill people have understood that we’re committed to long-term innovation. Bill’s been emblematic of that. We’ve shared that vision all along the way. But I think I have to pick that up. Because people want to know that the buck-stops-here person is committed to continuing to invest and do things.

Maybe it’s because of his shiny dome, but all I could think of was how much Ballmer delivering that answer in the style of Johnny Caspar’s “Leo ain’t runnin’ things!” rant.

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 13, 2006

It’s the Friday the 13th edition of Unrequired Reading, dear readers!

Maxon Crumb’s not a hockey-mask-wearing serial killer, but he did come off as a weird bird in the great documentary about his brother, Robert Crumb. Here’s a good profile about him in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Gunter Grass is actually creepier than Max Crumb. Still, he wasn’t a serial killer for the SS during World War II. Sez Tim Cavanaugh:

It’s not so much Grass’ hypocrisy as his self-satisfaction. In what fucked-up parallel universe is it considered persuasive to argue, at this late date, that postwar attacks on the West German establishment (and frequently more-than-tacit support for the East German terror state) in any way obviate, or mitigate, or do anything else but compound the error of supporting the Nazis during the war? Why is it the default assumption that Grass’ anti-capitalism was a rejection of National Socialism rather than a continuation of it? (I actually think it may be neither, but among Germans who are irate at Grass over the lifelong SS coverup there seems to some sense that he’s let down his core principles, so it’s worth asking what those core principles are.)

Enjoy.

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There was creepiness aplenty in HP Lovecraft’s stories. In NYROB, Luc Sante writes about the new Library of America edition of Lovecraft’s work, and Houellebecq’s book about the demented writer of Rhode Island (I visited Lovecraft’s grave once, which evidently is going to grant me invulnerability to harm from nerds):

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, “where. . .they ought to have been left.” Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult — there is no other word — that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

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Beck creeps some people out, but his Sea Change album helped me through some heartbreak a few years ago. Here’s an interview about his new record, work habits, and religion.

And here’s a piece about the unique packaging for that new record.

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Must be Friday the 13th if Gadaffi is making sense. It’s pretty much an article of faith in modern times that countries with great natural resources will fail to develop human capital on a par with countries that have little by way of natural resources. Or, as Kyle Baker put it, “If you can get an A without trying, why work for an A+?”

Give that man a laptop!

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A while back, I explained why I love Vegas: it’s like an alien theme park of planet Earth. Here’s a piece about architecture, engineering and culture in Sin City.

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Vegas is no Transgondwanan Supermountain.

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Congrats to Orhan Pamuk for winning that Nobel literature prize. I’ve got a couple of his books somewhere in the library downstairs, but I won’t even pretend I’m going to break one out in honor of his honor.

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On the other hand, I oughtta get around to reading Bernard-Henri Levy somedarntime. This profile’s got some neat passages, including:

So why has France been quite so vitriolic about America? “France and Germany,” he corrects in fluent English. “It has nothing to do with what America does and was long before Iraq. It is about the idea of America, Rousseau’s social contract, where you decide to join a society. Its people have no roots, no memory. This is seen as an insult to what a real community should be, which is about blood and the soil.”

and

So what browns him off about Blighty? “We, you and France, are the two most snobbish countries on earth — full of invisible keys to invisible doors.” Isn’t America just as excluding, but on grounds of materialism? “Not true,” he insists. “Wealth has to be earned. There is still a very puritanical view of wealth. Without philanthropy it is not respected. Money might be god, but it is a guilty god.”

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Rounding out this week’s Unrequired Reading: an obscure reference from the Simpsons!

Chief Wiggum: “All of our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine.”

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F-books

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

This NYTimes lede serves double duty: it sets up a review of Sony’s new e-book and provides more proof that women should never talk about technology.

(Sorry, Carly)

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Are you on drugs?

An Italian TV show has been surreptitiously drug-testing 50 members of parliament, allegedly finding that 12 MPs tested smoke weed and 4 tested positive for cocaine:

The programme sent a reporter to interview lower house deputies allegedly for a programme about the 2007 draft budget currently going through parliament. . . . But unbeknown to each of them, the make-up artist employed by the show was dabbing their brow with swabs, and their perspiration was later tested for cannabis and cocaine.

Any guesses how our own House of Reps would fare?

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Like Letting Pitcher Fly Plane

No one needs to remind me that I’m a mean person. I get pretty constant reinforcement.

For example, when Amy said, “It looks like Cory Lidle was the pilot of that plane that crashed in NYC,” my first response was, “It couldn’t have been Jaret Wright?”

I’m a mean person AND a Yankees fan. Sue me.

(Back in college, my buddy Toure responded to the news of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s helicopter crash with “Damn! Why couldn’t it have been Eric Clapton?”)