I’m amused that this URL shortening service <http://âž¡.ws/> let’s you make links in Braille; i.e. <http://âž¡.ws/⠑⠝⠞⠓⠥⠎⠊⠁⠎⠍> Needless to say using it reveals bugs or unfortunate behaviors in many of the steps along the way.

Possibly the most common prescription handed out by managers is to set goals; it’s a cheap trick for clarifying incentives.  The authors (Harvard BSchool) of this amusingly titled paper Goals Gone Wild suggest it should come with a warning label.  The paper includes a few examples of each of the deadly side effects.  These warnings are well known in the liturature on applied behaviorism.

I liked this bit of damning with faint praise from the Q&A –

Sean Silverthorne: So, are you against incentives and goals?

Max Bazerman: No, my coauthors and I are not against incentives. We believe in incentives. And each of us has found goals useful in limited domains. …

A useful paper as it is exausting running counter to conventional wisdom.

Below I’ve drawn a very rough piece-wise linear summary of the Dow Jone’s average over the 20th century.

It might be better to treat the 1900-1950 period as three sections, two flat bits on either side of that roller coaster.  I think it’s reasonable to say that in seven of the ten decades the market was flat.  A sobering thought if your only spend four decades in the market in service of your retirement.

I am sorry to see the Sam Ruby is considering a move to Microsoft.  Like anybody of my age in this industry the strategic landscape I have lived in has always been substantially shaped by Microsoft.  They, and that means primarilly Bill Gates and his closest advisers, have played the game extremely well.  Their place in the ecosystem has given them mind boggling power.  They have played those card to their advantage with surprising skill.  Repeatedly I have watched in awe as they have crushed, absorbed, and underminded competitive threats around them.

Of course their scale means they get a very long time to puzzle out how to get that right.  I do not trust Microsoft.  No doubt there many good people there.  Vast pools of good intentions.  But the nature of the company’s role in the market and the fundimental dynamics of what is required for them to maintain that make for repeated disconnects between the goals of the individuals and the outcome that is best for the firm.

Microsoft’s core strategic requires that the commoditized everything around them.  If your a developer or partner of microsoft you upside is capped.  Open standards, and open platforms are fundamentally their greatest competitor.  Strategically they must come into those communities to assure that they remain tame.  This is often something their individual representatives in those communities do not fully appreciate.  At least until it is too late.

Sam has done a just beautiful job playing a role of that kind that coming out of IBM and into the Apache Software Foundation.  He succeeded in part because he is amazingly talented at the art demanded in that role back on the home front.  He succeeded because he was extremely clear in his own head about where he was trying to go.  He succeeded because he had a thirst to puzzle out what was new about open source that IBM didn’t know.  But importantly, what he was trying to do was fundimentally in synch with IBM’s strategic best interests.  IBM’s IP portfolio is well served by an open vibrant diverse industry.  IBM isn’t threatened by the successes of others, since it always has the option of taxing those others via it’s IP rights.  IBM other business, services, ought to love open source (of course open source is only part of puzzle of making a vibrant industry).

I wish him luck, but it makes me sad.

This is a very lovely milestone in improving the way we vote, contratulations to all involved.

Another item for the hyperbolic discounting attention management (Ainslie) pile.

TimeSnapper (note scroll down to the free version).  This app takes a snapshot of your desktop.  Latter you can play that back as a time lapse movie. This helps you see where the time went.

I don’t use a PC so I haven’t tried TimeSnapper.  On the Mac there is a substitute: Gawker. Gawker is a tool for making time-lapse movies using your Mac’s iSight camera, but it can be used to record your desktop. I’ve enjoyed watching my days, and to my surprise I’ve enjoyed seeing what my machine does at night.

Apparently people use TimeSnapper to prove to their clients that they were actually working on the project during the hours they claimed.  Obviously this could be used for all kinds of abusive monitoring.

Which reminds me.  I gather that some years ago the US Post Office was well known for having the most horribly polarized employee/management known.  Visiting my local Post Office during an open house I was amazed to discover that they had built the place with high ceilings.  In that space they had built walkways from which the management to observe the workers.  These walkways were enclosed with tiny spy holes; to assure that workers didn’t know when they were being watched.  The staff was as amused as I was.  The observation posts hadn’t been used in years.

Update: Karim Lakhani mentions Freedom, A mac app that disables your networking for up to eight hours.

I hear the Firefox plugin – LeechBlock is popular.

Tip of the hat to John Sequeria who mentioned TimeSnapper.

This makes my brain hurt, but in a nice way.  It’s seems like the other end of machine learning.  Interesting times.  My EE trained brain found this overview particularly straight forward.

The four horsemen of the digital apocalypse  are cpu, storage, communication, and content, aka Moore’s law and his friends mean that costs are always falling, capablities are always increase, and displacement opportunities are always popping up.  These are the drivers that keep pulling the rug out from under any industry that’s built on them.  The telecom industry, the entertainment industry, the content based industries.

Muzac didn’t stand a chance, but how did it manage to last for decades?  It was originally a high tech company, repurposing the latest military electronics for consumer markets.  In that way it is a classic example of firm based on an opportunity created by Moore and his friends.  But it’s long survival comes on the other side of the equation; the difficulty of displacement – or something like that.  It appears that a lot firms bridge a gap between what falling commodity cost of these things and their customer’s inablity to move that fast.  The installed base moves in fits and spurts.  The firms struggle to manage that.  There is a tension, if they can get the gap larger they capture more revenue.  But large gap creates a tension where competors can step into.

To take an example the Telecom industry didn’t lower prices for decades.  Their network effects made routing around them very hard.  But finally the largest customers started to route around them.  Much later the industry suffered a vicious restructuring.

Which brings me to today’s question? We have numbers, i.e. communications capacity doubles ever 9 months.  So what’s the number for cloud computing and why do EC2’s price trends appear to be unconnected the price trends of their cost of goods?

The economy is like a receding tide.  What is exposed in draining tidal pools is  fascinating.  But, it is often ugly.  The creatures are desperate for funds.  The New York Times, unable to roll over it’s short term debt accepts terrible terms to borrow money from a Mexican Billionaire; presumably that is the end of that family owned firm.  Here in town a local investment firm has discovered that one of their executives was  embezzling  money from the retirement funds, with the help of this buddies in the escort service he was running on the side.  My alma mater recently discovered the managers of one of the firms they had entrusted with their endowment has bought a 3 million dollar house for a former wife and 80 thousand dollars in teddybears!

I see the Muzac filed for  bankruptcy.  Which makes me consider substituting musical chairs for the tide pools.

I had a job one summer.  Sticking the many legs of expensive electrical devices into a testing device, pushing a button, writing down a number.  Over and over again.  I sat on an uncomfortable stool in Southern California and it rained once.  I missed it.  Everybody else ran out of the building but I finished the one device I was testing first.  The parking lot was steaming when I got out. 

I had a little studio apartment with a pool outside the door.  The  chlorine  in the pool was so strong nobody swam.  The board outside the building advertised the pool, but not the stewardesses.  It also mentioned the Muzac.  A box set into the wall piped Muzac into the room. You could adjust the volume, but not turn it off.  I silenced it by blowing sand under the contacts.  At work one day I shifted on my stool only to be shocked awake.  In bed, the bit of sand had shifted.  The factory and apartment shared the same play list.

I’ve been wondering.    I suspect the newspaper industry won’t survive this recession; but when the great depression swept thru the economy presumably entire weak industries came to an end,  But we forget, what were those industries?  I can’t even imagine.  What those businesses do?  I  experienced  it, Muzac in apartments, but I can barely imagine a world where in a real estate developer would feel that Muzac was a feature worth bundling into his offerings.  Did the Muzac  corporation  had salesmen going around and closing deals with developers.  I think there are hints, about the depression that is, in opening of the Music Man.  They complain about the model t-ford, the uneeda cracker, the mod-ren store; which hints at what was being displaced.  The cracker barrel industry?  “…  Well I don’t know much about bands but I do know you  can’t make a living selling big trombones…”

It is the  fundamental  nature of a recession that the economy is running below its potential.  This is a collective failing and not an individual one.  But the fault can be observed through out the system.  Lenders slow lending.  Staff is not replaced.  Hiring proceeds more slowly.  Projects are  deferred.  The effect permeates the entire system from top to bottom.  Down at the country club board members feel out of it if they can’t chat up their recent layoff.

Each place in the system has it’s own tangled logic for it’s reluctance to proceed and the cumulative effect of these drags the entire system down. Consider hiring, the pool of good talent has expanded  tremendously, due to all those layoffs.  Planning a layoff?  You should probably overshoot.  That will give you some open  requisitions  that you can then use to draw on some of that great available talent.  But then, in this chilly climate, once you have those  requisitions you’ll be tempted  husband them and move slowly.

Consider lending, over at Bronte Capital in the midst of a long  (somewhat self interested)  posting where in he labors to make the  argument  that the US banking system is probably solvent.  He blocks out a first order model of why banks are not lending.  The brief form is that they have  numerous  existing loans on their books with a face value of say 90 cents on the dollar.  But in fact if these are held for their entire life they are probably actually worth 75 cents.  Meanwhile if the bank were to sell those loans in todays uncertain times they might get fifty cents on the dollar.  Set aside that these numbers help to shed a tiny bit of light on what the nature of the banking problem is.  Banks aren’t lending because why write a new loan at 100 cents on the dollar when you can buy loans at 50 cents on the dollar?  Then recall, again, that in this chilly climate they husband these options, move slowly, and nothing happens.

No doubt you are doing your bit to keep the economy down.  Call it thrift!  You may need this excellent solution to your cash storage problems.