Category: Uncategorized

Happy 100th anniversary of getting your ass flattened by an asteroid, Siberia!

What I’m reading: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, along with more 10-K statements and annual reports for my Top Companies issue.

What I’m listening to: 5:55 by Charlotte Gainsbourg again. And again.

What I’m watching: Yankees-Mets, The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman, and the Roberto Benigni scene from Night on Earth.

What I’m drinking: Harp, at a semi-business get-together Saturday night.

Where I’m going: Nowhere for holiday week. Still more writing and layouts to do!

What I’m happy about: A week from today, this issue will be over. Oh, and yay! Germany loses!

What I’m sad about: Not a lot. I’m too busy to be sad. Which is sad in itself, I admit.

What I’m pondering: When Gillian Welch & David Rawlings are going to put out another album.

Working at home for several days, then coming into the office to square away a bunch of little details with people . . . only to discover that your desktop computer is dead!

Good thing I back up my issue and conference files on a 4gb thumb drive, and keep my (non-company) laptop on hand!

Sure would be nice to get to my old e-mails, though . . .

Sorry about the lack of posts, dear readers. This issue is really eating up all my time. I promise there’ll be some good Unrequired Reading tomorrow!

What I’m reading: I finished Endless Things, by John Crowley, this weekend, but I have so much work to do on my Top Companies issue that I’m probably only going to be reading 10-Ks and annual reports for the next week or so. Oh, and some more Cromartie High School.

What I’m listening to: Boxer, by the National.

What I’m watching: Sumo marathon on ESPN Classic.

What I’m drinking: An awful lot of Hendrick’s G&Ts; that’s trade show life for ya!

Where I’m going: Nowhere. In fact, I’ll probably be working at home much of the week.

What I’m happy about: That my flight home from San Diego was only 40 minutes late. Oh, and that my wife and my dog were waiting both for me at the top of the stairs when I walked in the door at 1:45am on Saturday.

What I’m sad about: George Carlin died last night.

What I’m pondering: Which of my neighbors left a Jack Chick tract in my mailbox entitled, Love the Jewish People. Don’t get me wrong; it’s pretty awesome, even if it doesn’t reach the heights of Dark Dungeons. That’s the problem the history-oriented tracts have when they match up with the comic-narrative ones. Of course, this was the all-time awesomest. (I’m pretty sure I know which neighbor it was.)

“Paradise Lost: They told him to go to Hell. They should have finished the job.”

Sorry for the lack of posts today, dear reader. I spent most of the day transcribing my Pfizer interview from Tuesday: 65 minutes on the digital recorder added up to 4,000 words, and that’s after I elided some sections that I know I can’t run in the magazine.

Anyway, I’m settling in to read, and just came across a word I’d never encountered before, which I figure I’ll share with you:

columbarium

n. (pl. -baria) a room or building with niches for funeral urns to be stored. a niche to hold a funeral urn. a stone wall or walk within a garden for burial of funeral urns, esp. attached to a church. Origin: mid 18th cent.: from Latin, literally ‘pigeon house’.

What I’m reading: Dæmonomania, by John Crowley, and some comics by Jason, the Norwegian cartoonist who’s currently doing the 1-pagers in the NYTimes magazine.

What I’m listening to: 5:55, by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

What I’m watching: The third season of The Wire, and Bowfinger.

What I’m drinking: Cherry Coke. It was that kinda weekend.

Where I’m going: On a quick trip to Louisiana next weekend, for Amy’s godson’s birthday.

What I’m happy about: That Rufus had a good time at the opening of the local farmers’ market.

What I’m sad about: Harvey Korman’s death. “That’s Hedley!” (oh, and Sydney Pollack and Yves Saint Laurent, too)

What I’m pondering: What intimation of mortality led me to go downstairs on Sunday morning and start pulling books from my library and putting them in the “I will never get around to reading this in my lifetime” pile. Later in the day, I found a neat article by Luc Sante about The Book Collection That Devoured My Life:

Over the years I’ve gotten used to the inevitable questions about my accumulation of books. No, I haven’t read all of them, nor do I intend to — in some cases that’s not the point. No, I’m not a lawyer (a question usually asked by couriers, back in the days of couriers). I do have a few hundred books that I reread or consult fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire, and I have many, many books speculatively pointing toward some project that is still barely a gleam in my eye. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live 40 minutes away from the nearest really solid library. I have some books that exist in the same capacity as the more recondite tools in the chest of a good carpenter — you may not need it more than once in 20 years, but it’s awfully nice to have it there when you do. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind — my brain isn’t big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help.

For Memorial Day, George Will offers the story of Frank Buckles, the last man alive to serve the U.S. military in WWI. (He’s 107.)

As a Mac convert, my interest in the decline/irrelevance of Microsoft is more observational and less practical. Every so often, I look at prices for Windows laptops, just ’cause, and then think, “There’s nothing I’d need one of these machines for.” But I’m fascinated by the sight of MS in this state of disarray, and not just because of my adoration of failure. Their inability to adapt to the new world isn’t simply a failing on the part of their executives; rather it looks like a big-ol’ example of the sclerotic nature of empires.

There are plenty of sites devoted to this issue, but a few articles on the topic of MS’s problems ended up in my RSS feed in the past week, so I thought I’d share them with you. It began with a BusinessWeek cover article about the company’s failed bid to acquire Yahoo (a bid that may develop into some sort of partnership/buy-in option, according to this weekend’s reports). The piece discusses MS’s rationales for the deal and its online ad strategy to battle Google, but a red flag went up for me after this passage:

“Microsoft’s biggest fear is that once you start putting Google [software programs on the Internet], then the price Microsoft can charge for its software will erode markedly,” says David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. “Just the threat means that Microsoft has to be able to offer advertising as a choice.”

Mull that one over: Is Yoffie saying that, because the internet is making MS’s core business — operating systems and office software — irrelevant, MS needs to, um, spend $45 billion to buy an also-ran in the business of selling ads on the internet? Doesn’t that seem like a non sequitur? Just because selling ads online is Google’s core business, why would it mean that MS has to go whole-hog after that market?

• MS core competencies: building & selling operating systems and office applications
• Google core competencies: building search engine & selling text ads

I think Yoffie’s argument would make more sense as, “MS’s lead business is eroding in the long term, so the company is looking for new business opportunities.” But trying to justify this enormous acquisition in terms of “sticking it to Google” looks like folly to me.

(Oh, and another key point of the article is that MS is trying to undercut the foundation of Google’s ad revenues by arguing that ads from search results aren’t as valuable as ads that are served up on regular web pages, tailored to individual users by tracking their movements on the web. That is, MS can serve advertisers better by following them around and snooping in on their web usage.)

This article by Chris Seibold approaches the MS dilemma from another angle. He contends that MS’s big problem is that it got away from its old practice of bullying smaller companies and stealing technologies, and tried to become a “me too” business. Seibold sees the XBox, the Zune, and online advertising as dilutions of MS’s mission, which is building software.

I’m not sure how viable that strategy is, or whether it’s simply a way of consigning MS to a slow death. In the pharma industry, which I’ve observed for almost a decade, the “me too” business plays a necessary role. And at least these “me too” therapies fit into the basic business of pharma companies. MS’s decisions to get into a gaming platform war with Sony, or compete with the iPod and the iTunes store, are markedly different than a pharma company devoting R&D dollars to go after a promising field a few years behind a competitor’s project.

In the NYTimes this weekend, Randall Stross reports on the Single-Era Conjecture, “the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras.” He points out that MS had years to prepare for a transition into the internet age, but failed to make the leap in any meaningful way.

Stross also makes the point that MS’s online business was profitable just a few years ago, but that’s because it was centered on users paying MS for dialup access. Once the broadband infrastructure grew out far enough, the online unit began posting a loss, tied as it was to an obsolescing business model. This one really gets at my question of whether MS is just too big to keep up.

But the article that really sums out the trouble MS is having turns out to be another BW one on the phenomenon of major corporations choosing not to upgrade to MS’s new Vista operating system.

That’s that core competency I was talking about: building and selling an OS. Vista reached the market years late, has memory-hogging features that appear designed to get users to buy new hardware, and still manages to have compatibility and driver issues. Acquiring Yahoo (or just its search-ad biz, as is rumored) isn’t going to convince people to start upgrading their computers & OS.

Any of my geekier or more business-oriented readers have thoughts on this?