McGee's Musings

New business models on Amazon’s infrastructure

I’d have to agree with Virginia Postrel here. The article is a very succinct and thought-provoking summary of Amazon’s plans to make elements of its technology and distribution infrastructure more generally available. Amazon’s plans strike me very much as an example of the real time lags we need to account for when trying to understand technology as a strategic, and frequently disruptive, force.

Fixed Costs “By the Drink”

One of the most interesting business articles I’ve read in a long time. And it’s short….

Here are the core summary grafs from the article.

The repercussions if that happens? Well, look at what’s going on in the media. The Internet created a platform for user-generated content. Now, blogs, videos, music, animation and websites from individuals and small companies constantly challenge traditional media companies. YouTube got bought by Google for $1.7 billion. TV networks are rushing to put content on the Web. Newspapers have lost readers to blogs.

Media are only a fragment of global industry. Imagine that same scenario plowing though one consumer sector after another: food, clothing, cosmetics, sporting goods, musical instruments and so on. It could be a wonderful, vibrant, scary chaos. [Amazon’s new direction: Point, click, make a product to sell to the world]

Science and democracy

I came across the following quote courtesy of my friend Morry Fiddler at DePaul’s School for New Learning. I wanted to make sure I captured it for future contemplation:

Science is a kind of open laboratory for democracy. It’s a way to experiment with the ideals of our democratic societies. For example, in science you must accept the fact that you live in a community that makes the ultimate judgment as to the worth of your work. But at the same time. everybody’s judgment is his or her own. The ethics of the community require that you argue for what you believe and that you try as hard as you can to get results to test your hunches, but you have to be honest in reporting your results, whatever they are. You have the freedom and independence to do whatever you want, as long as in the end you accept the judgment of the community. Good science comes from the collision of contradictory ideas, from conflict, from people trying to do better than their teachers did, and I think here we have a model for what a democratic society is about. There’s a great strength in our democratic way of life, and science is at the root of it.

Lee Smolin, “Loop Quantum Gravity,” The New Humanists, John Brockman, editor, 2003

Blog Tag Game – 5 things people may not know about me

Just got tagged by Dina in this latest blog game. Seems only just, as we met courtesy of blogging even though we live half a world away from one another. We did manage to have dinner in Cambridge two years ago when our travel schedules meshed.

5 things most people may not know about me? Here goes:

I am in the Guinness Book of World Records as part of the world’s longest kickline. On November 16, 1991, in celebration of the Princeton Triangle Club’s 100th anniversary, 535 Triangle alumni formed the world’s longest kickline. The kickline beat the previous record of 516, which had been set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Minnesota Vikings. The record kickline, which included alumni (the oldest being Whitney Landon ’17) and undergraduate members of the club, took place before the Princeton-Yale football game. Triangulites kicked for nearly a minute to “You May Be In the Hasty Pudding” (from Triangle’s 1934 show, Stags at Bay), played by the Princeton University Band, which was incidentally founded by Triangle members Joseph Hewitt ’07 and Arthur Osborn ’07. I was one of the 535 alumni kicking away.
One of the first things I did during my MBA career was to write a version of Turkey Bingo for my section. The program was a simple BASIC program written on the school’s DEC-10 machine to generate a Bingo card with names of members of the section distributed randomly on each Bingo card. You filled in a cell if that particular person made a comment during class. If you got a Bingo, you had to get yourself called on and use the “phrase of the day” in your comment in order to win. Not all of the faculty considered this a good use of my time 🙂
I started snowboarding at age 45, although I am on hiatus this season at the orders of my orthopedic surgeon.
I was held up at gunpoint in my New York apartment the day before my 30th birthday in 1983
I’m a huge fan of the theater and have been involved in amateur and community theater productions for nearly 40 years. I have been an usher, stage carpenter, stage electrician, pin rail grip, follow spot operator, stage hand, props manager, production stage manager, set designer, lighting designer, tour manager, director, and producer. But, most importantly, I met my wife, Charlotte, doing community theater in New York City as part of the Blue Hill Troupe.

I think I will tag:

Some new data to support the value of full text blog feeds

I have long been an advocate of full text feeds for blogs. Here’s some data to support the contention from Amit Agarwal.

Full text feeds pay off for this blogger

I love Amit Agarwal s analysis on the full-text vs. partial text debate. I HATE partial text feeds. I am subscribing to a few now (Dan Farber, for instance) but I find I link to them far less often than people who give me full text feeds. What does that do? Well, read Amit s analysis. And, yes, I did steal Amit s content and put it on my link blog.

MIT’s John Maeda on design and simplicity

The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)

Rating: 4 out of 5

Author: John Maeda

Year: 2006

Publisher: The MIT Press

ISBN: 0262134721

Here is an example of a short, little, book that benefits from the author’s decision to keep it focused. Maeda is a designer/computer scientist at MIT’s Media Lab and he consciously limits this book to just 100 pages of reflection on why and how you might seek simplicity in a technology-centric world.

While I easily read this book in an evening (while waiting for my 13-year old to finish hockey practice), it is a book and set of ideas I can expect to revisit multiple times. Although Maeda’s own background is primarily in product design, his insights are equally applicable to other design realms.

For a long time, I’ve maintained that if you are serious about improving knowledge work for yourself or others, then design has to become one of your core skills. This book should be on your shelf. Maeda also provides a website specifically for the book, laws of simplicity, and has a blog, Simplicity, he has been writing for the past two years. Both look to be excellent resources that I’ve added to my reading lists.

Tags: design simplicity

Leveraging digital imagery in business processes

Going Visual: Using Images to Enhance Productivity, Decision-Making and Profits

Rating: 3 out of 5

Author: Alexis Gerard

Year: 2005

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0471710253

This is one of those examples of a gem of a good idea that would be more valuable if it weren’t bulked up to fit into a book size format. It could be a substantial article idea or even an excellent blog, but it proves a bit disappointing as a book.

The basic notion is to become more systematic about taking advantage of the cost and ease of digital imagery in a variety of business processes. Gerard and Goldstein offer case studies of a property management firm, a small entrepreneur, and outdoor advertising making effective use of digital photography in their respective businesses.

For example, using digital photos to help manage multiple properties in place of detailed reports is obvious, once someone has pointed it out. The essential notion of examining business processes to identify opportunities where digital images can enhance or improve the process is an excellent insight and the case examples give you plenty of insight into how to apply the concept to your own situations. The particular management framework the authors suggest feels thin.

For the $20 it will cost you at Amazon and the hour or two it will take to get through (if you read slowly), this is probably worth while for the case examples alone. Although the authors did create a blog and website to accompany the book, the site appears to be essentially dormant, which is unfortunate as this is a topic that lends itself well to this format.

Tags: digital-imagery business-process

More on email and project management

Lars Plougmann started a discussion last August of the role of email in project management that triggered a post on my part back in October. Lars has posted a nice summary of the discussion that flowed from his original post with links to many interesting posts on the topic. His conclusion:

Email is about messages and messages have proven useful for thousands of years. (Part of the reason that RSS is successful is that a feed can be presented as messages). Email software takes the strong conventions pertaining to messages and integrates them with the centuries old inbox paradigm – which itself was a way to transition from an industrial society to the information processing organisation by mimicking a conveyor belt. Altogether a very powerful concept which is the reason that email is how work gets done in today’s businesses.

It is only for a decade or so that we have achieved the ability to work together in the new ways that we have started to call collaboration. Our challenge is to explore what we can do with collaboration while weaving into it the message style of communication. Messages and inboxes (a.k.a. email) are an undeniable part of the future, but as concepts they will be fused with transparent, discoverable, content-persistent, workflow-enhancing, buddy-list-integrated, taggable and action-supporting collaboration tools.

mind this.

Worth your time to explore, both for the discussion and some other voices examining the changing nature of work.

Excellent new resource on Web 2.0 fo knowledge workers from Kathleen Gilroy

If you are trying to understand, or if you find yourself helping others understand, the fuss about blogs and wikis and basecamp and all the other tools for productive knowledge work that constitute today’s web, here is an excellent new resource. Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter Group has distilled her experiences into a nicely focused review of this terrain. Rather than getting caught up in the details of the technology, she anchors her observations in the “what’s in it for me” perspective that busy knowledge workers will appreciate and value.

Recommended.

Web 2.0 for Business Advantage Published Today

I am pleased to announce the publication of a new white paper Web 2.0 for Business Advantage: A Personal Guide to Profiting from the New Web.

I have been immersed in the world of Web 2.0 for three years now and I still find it difficult to sort out what is going on and what this new way of using the Internet means for me and for my business. I wrote this Guide to Web 2.0 in the first person because so much of what I read about Web 2.0 is abstract. Here I wanted to tell my own stories and experiences and explain things in plain terms that make sense for the small business person, student, educator, or non-profit executive.

Web 2.0 for Business Advantage explores what is driving the dramatic adoption of Web 2.0 and how you can profit from it. The guide covers key advantages that can be had from smartly deploying Web 2.0: building an online presence; personal information management and the new desktop; and the new collaboration.

In each section we cover the big ideas and new capacities that are driving the opportunity. We also talk about our experience with three business problems that were solved with Web 2.0 solutions and explore what happened as we worked to implement the new models and services: podcasting for learning; innovation in financial services; and learning networks at the American Library Association.

You can see the full table of contents and download an excerpt at our site. You can purchase a pdf of Web 2.0 for Business Advantage for $9.95 at the Otter Group Store.

Cognitive Edge: They did not respect or sit still for the devotional sacrifice

Dave Snowden(pdf), formerly of IBM’s Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity, has been blogging at Cognitive Edge for a relatively short while. Here’s just a little tease from one of his recent posts. Go read the rest of the post and meditate upon it. No surprise, I suspect, that the wisdom came from the women.

…

SCENE 3: ONE YEAR LATER. GLAUCON ARRIVES FOR LUNCH.

Socrates: How was your son’s birthday party?

Glaucon: How did you know there was a party?

Socrates: Are you not still alive?

Glaucon: It was a glorious and treasured day. All the guests were ecstatic. The children were filled with joy. The gods have smiled on my family. I no longer fear for safety or security.

Socrates: And the cause of this surprising change in fortune?

Glaucon: I did what you suggested. I listened to the women

Socrates: What did they tell you?

Glaucon: Many things. But in short they said to make boundaries, create attractors, stabilize the patterns we desired and disrupt the patterns that threatened danger and harm.

Socrates: I do not understand. Is there a story here?

…

Cognitive Edge: They did not respect or sit still for the devotional sacrifice.