Winer on Facebook’s Strategy
Brilliant take. The Icarus/Jenga strategy.
We’re about to enter a phase when one vendor tries to break out from the rest, the way DEC did in the age of mini-computers, the way IBM did with the PC, the way Microsoft did in graphic operating systems, and the way Google did in what we may come to refer to as the web.
We’re now headed into new territory, and Facebook is making a bold bid, maybe the boldest one ever, to dominate.
But it won’t work, it can’t, they’re up against forces that are inexorable. Every time through the loop the bidder gets a little further, only to fall to earth once again.
Baby GS Analysts Start Their Spin
Part of the larger offensive on the part of Goldman Sachs (We aren’t evil! We swear!). Here’s Ezra Klein whoring himself out to an unnamed Harvard grad (composite character?) who worked at Goldman. He asks some hard hitting questions like:
The impression of the Ivy-to-Wall Street pipeline is that it’s all about the money. You’re saying that it’s actually more that Wall Street has constructed a very intelligent recruiting program that speaks to the anxieties of the students and makes them an offer that there’s almost no reason to refuse.
And this kid spits out some really amazing insight. That working at Goldman Sachs is actually a sacrifice (emphasis mine):
But the cultural effect of all of this — and even with regulatory reform, we need to think about that — is that a lot of people decide to sacrifice much more time than they normally would because the money is so good, and then they believe they deserve extremely high pay because they’re giving up so much time.
And that every one of these tools really just wants to go save the world:
People on Wall Street work very hard and they feel they chose this path because there was a reward promised to them. And now, when it’s being taken away from them, they get very angry. If the reward hadn’t been offered to them, they feel they would’ve followed their passion and become a journalist or something.
Look for more of this as the PR machines spin up.
The Yon Thing
I don’t really get all the damnation. He’s being ostracized by the milblogger community for critiquing McChrystal. But, he’s just doing what he’s been doing – continuing to provide his own perspective – and he’s done that quite well for years now. Guess that his interests no longer with jiving with the whole military-leadership-fetish thing irks many.
On the Air Traffic System and the Flight Ban
So. Complex aircraft are designed to operate within a certain design envelope. Such as flying through air. Not glass, sand, and rock particles. What do you do when, suddenly, the normally stable environment literally explodes, spewing streams of exactly that into the flight paths of thousands of aircraft? You stop the system and start testing to gather data to see if you’re still within the envelope.
You don’t continue to send thousands of people on death rides as the test though, because that’s just irresponsible and stupid, regardless that it’ll cost some incompetent airline CEO some money. (This is a guy who you’re going to have to bail out when oil spikes because he doesn’t understand the context within which he operates anyway.)
The next step is not to run around screaming like about government intervention and how you’re unfairly being forced to treat your customers like they’re human or matter – by paying for stuff like… y’know, food, water, shelter in places far from home. (The jackasses from RyanAir are proving themselves to be essentially what Walmart was years ago btw.) No, the next step is to pipe that the data from the tests to an information system that lets you see where this volcanic death dust is, where it’s modeled as going, and distributing that information to passengers, governments, airlines, and airports.
Now it’s a common threat we all understand and are dealing with. We’re making fact-based decisions and it’s time to start letting flights get off the ground.
Then again. Not too much time can be spent slapping these people around. They’re just highly overpaid professional managers of a system (that, again, they don’t seem to understand) not thinkers. The system is designed to move the most stuff the most places in the shortest time. Unfortunately, ever higher energy prices have sapped away at what redundancy and resiliency was built into the system – the ability to survive a big STOP. Until these jokers find a way to fill their jets with anything other than something guaranteed to go up in price, we’ll keep seeing them clamor to put innocent people’s lives in danger while nervously shifting around and glancing at their stock prices.
Analysis of Volcano-Induced Systems Disruption
Brilliant analysis here with lots of smart visualizations.