Context Magazine Future Imperfect
"When we look at wireless, we see the same exuberance we see whenever there is a new technology. People make wild predictions. What people typically miss are the deeper patterns that govern how people will actually use their new possibilities."

"Companies are chasing applications that people don’t care about—especially those that foster shopping—and the devices being produced are vastly too slow and confusing."

redux [08.13.00]
The Standard Deconstructing the Web
"The Web is disintegrating into bits. When the dust settles, what's important for a successful long-term strategy is not Web site design but the flexibility of your information architecture."

"New Internet devices and applications are different not only because they are designed to do different things, but also because the mindset of the person who uses them influences the kind of interaction that makes sense. You cannot shove a Web page onto a cell phone's tiny screen. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense from the user's point of view. The information I want delivered to my cell phone is different from what I want on my home computer. Web pages are designed for sedentary, reflective use. The phone is for urgent, short communications."

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"In part 1 of this series I voiced my first complaint against the ubiquitous technology pushers: by letting their work develop out of a one-sided preoccupation with the technological milieu rather than immersion in the meaningful contexts affected by their inventions, they inflict technological "answers" upon us without any serious reference to the supposed problems."

"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

NPR : All Things Considered People Who Like Fake Dogs
"Robert Siegel talks with Sherry Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turkle has studied people's relationships with computational objects for the past 20 years. She says recently some computers have been designed to ask humans to "nurture" them and humans respond. Turkle says that the attachment of AIBO owners to their robot dogs raises questions about what it means to love an object that doesn't know you're there."

redux [10.27.00]
Wired News Is Tech a Partner, Pet or Master?
"Determining what it means to be human has never been easy, and recent advances in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and genetic engineering haven't helped.

"The definition of what it means to be human is going to become even more slippery over the next 20 years," said Harvey Ardman, co-chair of this year's Camden Technology Conference."

"Joy and others argue that many tech enthusiasts have avoided asking some vital questions. One of the key questions, Ardman said, is whether these tools are "partners, pets or superiors?"

"We'll be looking at what changes we're going to be asked to make or explore in this new age," Ardman said. In many ways, it will be an exercise in cultural anthropology."

redux [09.88.00]
Wired Congratulations, It's A Bot!
""When kids play, they create an entire world that's alive, and it never objects to them. A kid's imagination is a completely open architecture, and there are no bounds to what a toy can do," he explains.

"That's the future of toys. Technology's role is to become transparent. If you give the cues of autonomy, the imagination fills in the blanks, because that's what it's meant to do."

As processing power and sensors improve, the difference between simulated autonomy and actual autonomy will blur. Already it's difficult to relate to these new technological creatures without imputing to them the sorts of feelings we routinely discover in, say, our pets. And when you throw in realistic human behavior, not to mention silky skin, things become rather surreal.

"These are not toys anymore," says Chung as the screwy signal scrambles his face again. "These are way beyond toys."

"So what are they?" I ask. For once, Chung pauses. "They are the next iteration of our attempt to re-create life.""

redux [05.25.00]
The New York Times What Do You Mean, 'It's Just Like a Real Dog'?
[requires 'free' registration]
"What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at what ages can children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or people? Research into these questions is still in its earliest stages. There was a flurry of interest in children's reactions when Tamagotchis, virtual pets from Japan, first appeared a few years ago and then started dying on their young owners. But the topic is attracting more attention now as seemingly intelligent toys and other robots appear on the market in increasing variety and numbers. "

"Again and again... researchers have asked the children: ''Is it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?''

"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the answer they settled on was, 'It's not alive in a human or animal kind of way, but in a Furby kind of way.' "

redux [04.21.00]
The Third Culture A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object ? the relational artifact ? is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings?and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users? emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."

"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."

George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

First Monday The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar
"In the present paper, I explore how the Internet has affected the flow of information between in and outside Myanmar (Burma). I show that there is a strong difference between the way information was presented before and after the introduction of the World Wide Web.

Within the last century, the country has been marked by political instability (Eliot, 1997; Freedom House, 2000). Particularly since its separation from British colonial rule in 1948, Burma has witnessed significant political change, violence and unrest. Since the early 1960s, Burma has essentially been an isolated state, with closed borders and a military government. However, the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War seem to suggest that isolationism is growing less common worldwide. Importantly, meteoric advances in communications have also paralleled the fall of isolationism.

In my study, I examine two political events in Myanmar connected to student uprisings, in the hope of documenting how the Internet - as an easily researched symbol of modern communications - may be affecting the political strategies of one of the last isolated states."

redux [01.20.01]
The Guardian Unlimited Filipinos rally to oust the president: C U @ the revolution
"Millions of ordinary Filipinos, communicating with each other via mobile phone text messages, swarmed on to the streets of the capital, Manila, in scenes reminiscent of the 1986 uprising which ousted the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos."

"Most people heard about the planned swearing-in of Ms Arroyo via the text messages, the same means that galvanised a spontaneous uprising on Tuesday evening, when Mr Estrada's impeachment trial collapsed after he bullied and bribed senators to block the admission of vital evidence."

"The text message doing the rounds late last night said it all: "I guess we've won again."

The Standard Net Sustenance
"From South Asia to South America, one hears tales of isolated rural poverty yielding to connected economic development, courtesy of Internet connections. Poor families in India and subsidence-level villages in Africa may get online with used 386s and marginal connections – the Net reaches parts of the Congo via shortwave radio – but once online, they are connected to information about clean water and health, to global markets and income.

Indeed, from my experience, it is clear that in many instances poor people are adopting the Internet because they are poor. Computers and the Net are enabling the world's less affluent to plug into global communication for less cost than conventional telephony or even postal service. In some places, the Net is the only means for communication."

redux [11.29.00]
NPR: Morning Edition Cell Phone Rally
"NPR's Eric Weiner reports on the latest in the effort to unseat Philippine president Joseph Estrada. Filipinos send 30 million cell phone "text messages" daily- more than anywhere else in the world. Activists are using the technology to organize rallies and respond instantly to the latest corruption charges. (5:19)"

redux [07.07.00]
The New York Times Manila's Talk of the Town Is Text Messaging
[requires 'free' registration]
"Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone.

"There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back." ."

"Sending e-mail on mobile phones, has also taken off in richer parts of the world: Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and in Japan and other East Asian countries, particularly among teen-agers. But in the Philippines, where incomes are far lower, it is even more popular. And it has spawned an entire subculture, complete with its own vocabulary, etiquette and tactical uses. It has become particularly popular here, in large part because text messaging is cheap while traditional telephone service is spotty and Internet access by computer is expensive."

redux [10.10.00]
MediaChannel.Org A Tower Aflame: Media, Metaphor and Revolution
"When the Moscow television tower burst into flames at the end of August, the fire blacked out 10 million TV screens and made news all over the world. And so did President Vladimir Putin's sinister comment: The fire at the Ostankino tower is a metaphor for the state of the nation.

Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols — indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment. "

"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."

Media In Transition What is Information? The Flow of Bits and the Control of Chaos
"Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points-- they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information society is to be our society, let it be disorganized."

The Register France backs Jabber IM for 3G parlez-vous
"So France Telecom has stumbled upon a backbone for handheld peer-to-peer communications that makes SMS look positively Neanderthal.

As wise men have argued , punters are far more willing to spend money on point-to-point communications than on buying crappy, pre-packaged, warmed-over 'content', so France Telecom may have stolen a march on the rest of the slumbering cellular networks, and done so with typical Gallic flare."

redux [04.17.01]
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Conversational Technologies
"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day.

Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."

"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

redux [03.19.01]
Slashdot Clay Shirky Explains Internet Evolution
"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."

"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.

Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well."

redux [02.18.01]
First Monday Content is Not King
"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."

The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.

For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."

redux [01.15.01]
Nando Times The power of e-mail
"Nicole Thompson's third-graders can tell you all about the penguins and killer whales that populate Antarctica. They know about the months of darkness that grip Iceland each year and the fine tea that grows in Darjeeling, India. The Greenbriar Academy children have learned those facts - and countless more about countries large and small - thanks to a simple e-mail message from Thompson that has raced around the globe and brought more than 20,000 responses in six weeks.

It's crazy, just crazy," Thompson said. "At most, I thought we'd get about 2,000 replies.""

Davenetics Looking Forward to 2001
"Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication - not consumer storefronts - is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the past year seemed to go in the opposite direction."

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world.""

SecurityFocus Diseas’d Ventures: A Critique of Media Reportage of Viruses
"When it comes to the subject of computer viruses, few people have any sense of history. It is as if public consciousness of the topic is afflicted by a neurological disorder that destroys long-term memory. How narrow the world becomes when all one can recall is the events of five minutes ago (Internet time) or a couple of virus hypes so massive they couldn't be avoided even if one shunned the Internet altogether."

"I give the media, a favorite but deserving whipping boy, a good share of the blame for this short-term collective memory. This is because of the way in which crises of all kinds - real or, frequently imagined - are covered by the media. Crisis reporting as a whole is almost always a simplistic portrayal of reality. It is distorting in that it tends to take over a substantial part of the news, becoming an invariant backdrop to everyday life."

MSNBC One year later, has the ‘Love’ died?
"It’s been one year since millions of computer users around the world clicked on that attachment, hoping for a romantic surprise. Instead, most got a surprise day off work, as businesses screeched to a halt while frazzled technology workers struggled to rescue data from the LoveLetter virus. Since that day, there have been virus scares, but nothing has come close to the scorched-earth path of LoveLetter or 1999’s Melissa virus. In earthquake parlance, does that mean LoveLetter was “The Big One,” or are the world’s computer users now being lulled into a false sense of security?"

SatireWire Business Proverb "Success Built On Failure" Being Taken Much Too Literally, Says Study
""Success is built on failure" has long been an accepted proverb in business, but according to researchers at Stanford University, hundreds of dot-coms and other companies seem to have taken the phrase entirely too literally in the mistaken belief that the bigger the failure, the larger the eventual success.

"We're not saying there's no truth to sayings like, 'You must fail in order to succeed,' but frankly, those maxims are primarily used to make you feel better about messing up," said Prof. Dan Levin, co-author of the study conducted by Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "Honestly, you're not supposed to rely on them as a guide on how to conduct business, and you're not going to dominate the market if you make yourself crash and burn.""

redux [07.17.00]
NPR : All Things Considered Failure
"A new magazine arrives on-line today, after a few false starts. Failure magazine is, as its title implies, about failure: battles lost, sports blunders, products that didn't catch on. The fact that someone would even come up with an idea for such a magazine suggests that, in an age when dot-coms come and go like buses, the very notion of failure may not have the stigma it once did when Willie Loman first walked the boards."

redux [06.03.00]
The New York Times Magazine I'm a Loser
[requires 'free' registration]
"If you go back to the early 1800's, to be a failure meant basically one thing: to go bankrupt in business. Today if we say I feel like such a failure, we think generally of someone who's a loser, somebody who has so me defect in his personality. The meaning of failure has fundamentally changed from being a crisis you pass through to being more of an identity. My understanding of the failure ethic in Silicon Valley is that the profits of success are so enormous that the risk of failing is worth it."

Salon Microsoft: Free-software licenses are the devil's work!
"The motivation to cut costs, or at least to avoid unnecessary expense, makes particular sense overseas. Why should companies in India or China or Indonesia choose to subsidize an American corporation by buying expensive licenses to software over which they have no ultimate control? The context takes on special force when one considers that Microsoft is already spending millions of dollars in punitive attempts to force such countries to stop unauthorized use of Microsoft software. It's not hard to see each dollar spent by Microsoft in the war against piracy as a dollar of advertising for free software.

One could be tempted to chalk up the latest speech by Mundie as another example of unintentional free-software marketing. But the speech is also a clear indication of where Microsoft sees the fight for the future of the software industry taking place."

Wired News Argentina Mulls Open-Source Move
"Argentina may become the first country in the world to require all government offices to use open-source software, pending the outcome of a bill recently introduced in the nation's congress."

""We are against any law that impedes free competition," he said. "There should be a transparent bidding process, where every program is analyzed objectively."

But switching to open-source software would mean big savings for the government, which is already crippled by a $145 billion debt, said Mario Albornoz, the director of the Institute of Social Studies of Science and Technology."

Doc Searls Getting past fear and fudding
"There are millions of customers and perhaps billions of users involved. Both Microsoft and open source software from countless sources have functional ubiquity. They co-exist and already work together (as well as apart) in all kinds of ways. What's more, the open source side could stand to benefit from a better perception of customer demand, and the Microsoft side could stand to benefit from a better understanding of the goods that come from virtues other than private ownership.

In fact the real argument isn't around who's stealing intellectual property, or who's fudding whom, but rather around building common infrastructure."

Dan Gillmor Microsoft's Attack on Open Source: Linus Torvalds Replies
"One of the greatest scientists of our time, having done more for modern technology (and thus, btw, for the modern economy) that Microsoft will ever do, acknowledged the fact that he did so by being able to use the knowledge (what we now call "intellectual property") gathered by others.

Mundie throws all that away, because he wants Microsoft to own it all, and make tons of money on it.

I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less."

Tim O'Reilly Microsoft's Shared Source Program is a Validation of Open Source Disguised as an Attack
"The world of computing has changed, and the smart people at Microsoft are trying hard to figure out how to stay ahead of the pack. They're doing a lot of things right--they've got a big story in .NET. But if you think the battle between closed source and open source is interesting, just wait till you see the battle between closed and open services in the emergent network-centric operating system Microsoft is so eager to see replace the current desktop-centric platform."

Fast Company Hard Cell
"In many ways, the Smartphone's evolution is a classic story of high-tech innovation within a big company. It starts with a small team of engineers at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, who were given a hazy but intriguing mandate. Gradually, they came to believe that they could produce a breakthrough product -- even if outsiders were dubious. Repeated crises erupted along the way, including a near-death experience in February 2000 when their division was sold to the San Diego subsidiary of Japan's Kyocera International Inc. For a while, it appeared that no one wanted the Smartphone project to continue. Yet the engineers pressed on in skunk-works fashion, improvising solutions as needed, until they emerged with a product that attracted enthusiastic mobs at trade shows, media events -- and even the passenger lounge at Chicago's O'Hare airport."

strategy+business Top 10 Innovation Themes
"Does history repeat itself when companies seek ways to innovate? Are there patterns among the business strategies chosen by successful companies from one decade to the next?

To find out, we studied nearly 200 business strategies, most from the past 20 years, but some from a century ago. From this research we identified 10 essential “innovation themes,” which are repeated and proven over time."

redux [03.06.01]
First Monday Intermittent Aberrations: Can Mature Companies Innovate?
"A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn. The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration."

redux [11.28.00]
Salon The Art of Innovation
"A whiz kid might make a technological breakthrough and create a corporation to exploit it. But even a new-economy corporation can't last long without what old-economy corporations depended on: a reliable, skilled workforce, which takes time to assemble; effective distribution systems, which take trial and error to perfect; and customer loyalty, which is earned only gradually. It was this kind of environment that nurtured old-economy innovators.

One whiz kid's invention, followed by a second whiz kid's innovation, followed by a third, is merely a recipe for a stock bubble. Technological innovation will continue to come from youth, but for corporations to thrive, they need gradual innovations, not just revolutionary ones.

Take, for example, the case of Paul Cézanne."

redux [11.07.00]
Fortune Getting Beyond the Innovation Fetish
"Jennifer Brown, the executive vice president of e-business at Fidelity Investments, has a serious problem with innovation in her group. There's too much of it.

"We have more good ideas than we can handle," she confesses. "We have so many good ideas here--truly innovative ideas--that sometimes our people get a little frustrated that we can't act on most of them.""

"At times like this, a cold economic reality kicks in: The more innovations there are, the less valuable any given innovation is likely to be.

"Another thing that makes cashing in on innovation so difficult is that, as any good intellectual property lawyer will complain, the very digital technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper for innovators to innovate also make it faster, easier, and cheaper for imitators to imitate. In the e-world, today's innovation is tomorrow's imitation is next month's commodity. The Net is a fabulous medium for "fast followers"--firms such as Microsoft and AOL, which do a fabulous job of spotting an innovation trend and leveraging resources to make it their own."

Inc.Com Best Beats First
"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM."

"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.

"We can already see the fundamental laws of management and commerce reasserting themselves. Consider America Online, clearly a new-economy star that got there by being better, not first. As Kara Swisher describes in her book aol.com, AOL lagged far behind CompuServe and Prodigy, and as late as 1992 had only 200,000 members compared with Prodigy's nearly 2 million. AOL beat out the early leaders not because it had the ultimate solution, but precisely because it knew that it didn't. So long as AOL continues the process of nonstop improvement and evolution -- step-by-step improvement in the eyes of the customer -- it will likely remain strong."

BusinessWeek The Innovator's Dilemma
"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."

MSNBC Exploding hacktivism
"“Hacktivism” is a bastardization of the words “hack” and “activism.” In truth, it’s neither. Rather, it has become a cheapjack pseudo-politically hip moniker for the activities of apolitical teenage miscreants devoid of talent, creativity and passion."

"It should come as no surprise that, given a corner of the global stage, these self-described “hacktivists” overnight turned themselves into outraged political beings.

Chinese vandals ran their little pre-mixed programs against less than notable U.S. based Web sites, while freshly brewed red, white and blue American digital patriots “retaliated” against sites based in China."

"The underlying problem with so-called “hacktivism” is the same that afflicts the armchair activist who believes he or she is “doing good” by e-mailing Congress a preformatted 150-word rant written by some burned-out advertising executive turned “grassroots” lobbyist."

Attrition.Org Cyberwar with China: Self-fulfilling Prophecy
"Voltaire once wrote, "If God didn't exist, Man would have to invent Him." It would seem that the popular press has taken this axiom and turned it on its ear. At the time of this writing, we are inundated with Chicken Little style warnings of an impending "cyberattack" by Chinese crackers. These cautionary tales may or may not be real, but they are real in their consequence.

A recent Wired News article warns the cyber-going public of an impending "week-long all-out crack attack on American websites and networks" by Chinese hackers during the first week of May. The logic? May 1st is "May Day" celebrated in China, May 4th is "Youth Day" in China (all those Chinese script kiddies will be feeling wholly patriotic) and May 7th is the anniversary of the US "accidental" bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Holy fortune cookie, Batman! Could this be the end of the Internet in America?"

The New York Times Free Rides Now Passé on Information Highway
[requires 'free' registration]
"There never was such a thing as a free lunch over the Internet. But for a while a determined freeloader could find a Web site that would pick up the tab for all sorts of other goods and services, from computer keyboards to photo developing, in return for little more than looking at a few ads.

No more."

redux [01.05.01]
Seattle Union Record Was 'free' such a good idea?
"As Microsoft, along with everyone else, wrestles with the challenge of how to make money on the Internet, you cannot help but wonder if Bill Gates & Co. regret a pivotal decision in the evolution of the Web.

When Microsoft decided in 1995 to make Internet Explorer and fold it into Windows, the action more than any other may have cemented the concept of “free” on the Internet."

"Microsoft won the browser wars but in so doing indelibly emblazoned in users’ minds the conviction that nothing on the Internet should cost money."

evhead Pricing Matters
"Back when I did direct marketing, we were well-aware that people were irrational about pricing. The only way to really find out the right price for a product -- especially an information-based product, for which prices can be so arbitrarily set -- was to test a few, by sending different offers to random samplings, and see which resulted in more profit. Actually, it would be unusual if more than one (or any) of the prices produced any profit at all. And the results were all over the map. A higher price could sometimes bring in not just more money, but more orders, because of the increased perceived value. Then again, a price 20% lower could increase sales by 100%. You could guess but never know, and you were often surprised.”

redux [12.20.00]
ZDNet Let's cough up the cash for Web content
"The Web is going through its own Great Depression as big sites continue to go belly-up. Meanwhile, revenue from banner ads drops because many of the banners are linked to...other dot-coms.These ominous signs do not foretell the death of the Web. But sooner or later the free lunch has to end. Information wants to be free, but information providers want to be paid."

"The Web is not one of those magical plants that can grow in midair. It needs cash to live."

The Economist Mayhem in May
"For all their entertainment value, the anti-globalists’ demonstrations cannot be dismissed as a recurring juvenile joke. How to reduce poverty in the third world—and whether globalisation is a help or a hindrance—is one of the most pressing moral, political and economic issues of our times. Undeniably, anti-globalism demonstrations have moved these questions higher up the public agenda. Whether they are pushing governments towards more enlightened answers is quite another matter."

redux [04.16.01]
Salon Follow The Money
"Garson set out to write a book about the global economy, a daunting subject that instills equal amounts of terror and confusion in most ordinary souls. Interest rates and currency exchange speculation do not usually make for riveting, or comprehensible, reading. But the remarkable thing about "Money Makes the World Go Around" is that her investigation of the movement of capital around the world ends up as easy to swallow as that cool Singha beer on a hot day at the beach.

The result is subversive, a sugar-coated exposé of the way the world works that is halfway digested before you realize how radical it truly is. And by then it's too late. You're stuck: Now you know why peasants in Thailand pay the price for bad loans made by Citibank and Chase Manhattan, or why the unrestricted flow of billions of dollars around the globe in a ceaseless search for higher and higher rates of return ends up benefiting very few people."

redux [04.10.01]
Feed The Three Stooges Play Zunil
"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.

Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."

Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."

redux [03.08.01]
Feed This is Planet Earth
"Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures?"

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

redux [04.23.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

redux [02.18.01]
The Third Culture The Globalization Debate
"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."

According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."

redux [02.14.00]
The Standard Europe Network of dissent
""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.

But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."

redux [03.24.00]
Civilization Magazine Supercivilization and its Discontents
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.

A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.

Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.

This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.

How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."