Microsoft’s Decline: Chart (BI)
Comments (2)CHART OF THE DAY: Consumer Compute Shift – Business Insider.
Like many, I’ve been declaiming the imminent demise of Microsoft, and I’ve been doing that since about 2002. Partly, my argument was motivated by my desire to showcase OpenOffice as the better option, and open source ways of making and distributing software superior to the enclosed hive of Microsoft. But I also believed my propaganda. Microsoft’s business model, of putting Windows on enterprise desktops and limiting choice to its “office” products, worked fine in the days when the Internet was an academic exercise but self-destructive in the present age of the more capable Web.
The former age–whose persistent ghosts are not to be dismissed as old-CIO tales–was a heavy one, and, as we say, locked the user into the vendor’s product universe. The present age is much lighter, or will be, must be, inexorably. In this day and age, with mobile finally ascending (took its time, but more because of business reasons than technological), and with the cloud gaining the reality of being backed and invested in by enterprise-class businesses, the tools, the apps, are available and usable (provided there is the bandwidth) as the result of open standards, and other open protocols and technologies. This is good: the open market gives rise to new businesses. But it also threatens established ones, or at least those whose steps have been more clumsy than nimble and unable to grab the multiplexed audience’s attention as something other than a 20th century hangover. Yes, I’m exaggerating. This is a blog.
Of course, IBM was able to pirouette astonishingly effectively, as was Apple. And in the case of IBM, the analogy is suggestive, as it kept its legacy business while still opening itself to disruptive novelty. (Sun, of course, was hanged by its legacy businesses and obligations and though it proclaimed open source ambitions and even acted on those, it rather infamously failed to connect its claims to revenue in any convincing way.)
I see now a landscape that is actually not too different from what I’ve imagined for some time: A world where there is a burgeoning international field of interesting–and sometimes innovative–technologies, companies, projects, some open, some not, but all (or at least most) using tools that do not lock the user into the vendor’s product but rather appeal to the user on the basis of quality and character. In short, on the basis of what we use for any other commodity or thing we wish to use.
From my perspective, the growth of the cloud and the rise of a more level market (even profoundly weighted by Apple), is generally good. It also makes my own profession, as a community strategist, more interesting, as the one element that any organization actually needs to make its products collaboratively is a functioning community, and they quite often do not come spontaneously into being, at least not in the way that is desired by both the sponsoring company and the non-company participants.
I tend too to avoid Valley writing, as I’m always skeptical that it is not just self-congratulatory marketing. But….
I’ve long refused reading the books of the top minds of the Valley, probably from fear I could be convinced and would have to change my “fixed mindset” as I recently discover my brain was working. Hopefully, I’m not yet 30 and YES, I did read one of these books and YES, it’s a game-changer for me at least.
Chris Anderson’s “Maker : the new industrial revolution” is a brilliant book, one of the kind you can’t close without DOING something. And it really matches with all my current thoughts on a community-based world (may sound familiar for US readers, it’s a new world for Europe at least, and what I experience in Asia confirms it’s a US exception). By the way, this post and a few other to come will go into a new category (after “Playing with Data” and “Going social in Asia”), say hi to “The…
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Libraries
Ebooks are not an improvement; they are an addition. They can’t be used as an excuse to take books away from the everyday world and into the virtual world. We all know that browsing an index is nothing like being in a bookshop or a library. Libraries and publishers will come to an arrangement about ebook lending and that could work very well as a satellite service for library users – providing we keep Planet Library. For kids in particular, ebooks aren’t the answer. Put six picture books of front of a child and she’ll soon find her own way. Give her a library shelf of books and she can pull them out all over the floor. Early reading is physicality – the taste, smell, weight of books.
via We must protect and reinvent our local libraries | Jeanette Winterson | Books | The Guardian.
Nigeria’s BlackBerry addiction offers hope for Research in Motion | Technology | The Guardian
Nigeria’s BlackBerry addiction offers hope for Research in Motion | Technology | The Guardian.
The popularity of BlackBerrys in Nigeria is partly born of necessity. Erratic internet services and a nonexistent landline network are plugged by unlimited data bundles, costing about £12 a month. Unpredictable phone networks force those who can afford it to own two handsets.
“I already have another smartphone, but I need a BlackBerry pin number to socialise with friends and get babes. BlackBerry has an edge because of the pinging,” George Emeka, a university student said, using the colloquial term for its instant messaging service.
Others are getting more bang for their buck. Yahya Balogun, who lives in a Lagos slum, used eight months of savings to buy a secondhand model. The taxi driver has caught on to the growing number of high-end businesses who advertise and communicate using BlackBerry pin numbers as well as traditional means. “All my clients in [upmarket district] Victoria Island own BlackBerrys. It is a good investment,” Balogun said.
Obama System, ‘the Optimizer,’ Targeted TV Viewers for Support – NYTimes.com
Obama System, ‘the Optimizer,’ Targeted TV Viewers for Support – NYTimes.com.
The history of the successful 2012 Obama campaign, and that of the failed Romney, uhm, effort, is being written. It comes down to differing approaches to “reality,” that is, the actuality of people in their milieu–cultural, social, economic. The evidence from the Republicans points to a culture of utter disregard to reality and belief in their own beliefs. But this, I’ve suggested, is simply symptomatic of the right-wing arc since Reagan, whose “morning in America” cheerfully announced that reality did not matter–a point that swirled in the cultural mind with “don’t worry be happy” like thick honey.
More interesting, and as the article I cite suggests, there is in fact an extraordinary change going on in public political commentary–and to a degree, academic, though I suspect that group has been exasperated for some time by the obtuse reticence to meet reality directly of many in the field.
That change is the radical move away from an exegetical tactic of interpretation to a numerical analysis. The former is a kind of interpretive appreciation that invokes the critic’s experience, judgement and basic knowledge to arrive at an assertion whose truth value survived not on the basis of its falsifiability (as Nate Silver has pointed out, being wrong, really really wrong, is not fatal to the career of a pundit) as on the supposed plausibility of the account. Plausibility here would mean something like, “yes, that makes intuitive sense” to the reader. Again, not falsifiable, that is, not provable or disprovable, not even by evidence: after all, errors are always possible.
But why be wrong at all? And what does this supposed interpretation give us that is not given better by a rigorous account and rigorous methodology that provides falsifiable–right/wrong–answers?
About the only thing that the cadre of professional pundits has to claim for itself as valuable is itself. But perhaps there ought to be a reassessment of this claim for value. Because right now, the evidence very strongly suggests that there is a lot more value in looking at the data openly, and with real accountability as to method and outcome, than in gut feelings. Who wants to be wrong when one can be right?
newspeak 