<<Read George Gilders "Telecosm".>>
OT-A review of Gilder's Telecosm:
commentarymagazine.com
I don't pay much attention to Gilder and haven't read Telecosm but the review is interesting in its commentary about technology and investing.
"Reading Gilder also raises the question of why information technology should have engendered such widespread messianic feelings. I myself am a technology enthusiast who believes that the information revolution has produced some fairly amazing results. But as in the case of many high-flying NASDAQ valuations, they cannot possibly be as amazing as their most enthusiastic cheerleaders believe. As for whether the bandwidth revolution will also lead to a wholesale social transformation comparable to industrialization, or will simply end up being a more effective way of delivering tasteless Hollywood movies to teenagers, that is a question whose answer will only come to us in the fullness of time.
WHY, THEN, do those convinced that the revolution is already triumphant shake their heads so sadly at those of us who "just don't get it"? True, people want to feel good about themselves, and it helps to believe that one is contributing to some higher social purpose while pursuing self-enrichment. But it must also be conceded that the information-technology revolution really does have more going for it than previous advances in, say, steam or internal combustion (or, one suspects, than the coming revolution in biotechnology).
The mechanization of production in the 19th and early 20th centuries rewarded large-scale organization, routinization, uniformity, and centralization. Many of the great works of imagination that accompanied this process, from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, depicted individuals subsumed by huge machines, often of a political nature. Not so the information revolution, which usually punishes excessively large scale, distributes information and hence power to much larger groups of people, and rewards intelligence, risk, creativity, and education rather than obedience and regimentation. Although one would not wish to push this too far, it is probably no accident that the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes did not survive the transition into the information age."
And further OT:
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
commentarymagazine.com
A review of a book that grapples with the interesting problem of why we are so wealthy (despite the market in 2000) and the rest of the world is so damn poor.
And back on topic:
Microsoft’s cunning plan
economist.com
With .NET, Microsoft’s plan is to establish a new platform. Instead of writing
PC software that runs on Windows, the idea is that programmers will write
Internet software that runs on .NET. Like Windows, .NET will provide the basic
blocks from which more complex software can be constructed. The key
difference is that, whereas PC software runs on a single machine, .NET
software will involve interactions between many machines connected via the
Internet and providing services to each other.
This is, to some extent, already happening on the Internet. Online publishing,
for example, involves millions of machines (web servers) providing a service
(offering pages) to other machines (PCs running web browsers). All this is
possible because the protocols for formatting, requesting and transmitting
web pages have been standardised. Microsoft’s aim with .NET is to provide
the framework for machines to offer other services, such as credit-card
authentication, airline reservations or English-French translation, over the
Internet. And by providing a complete set of tools to build and link such
services, Microsoft hopes to establish a new standard, just as it did with
Windows .
Using the .NET platform, services such as messaging, project management
and accounting, all provided “on tap” over the Internet, can be woven into the
Office suite. Microsoft will be able to charge a subscription for these services,
rather than relying on sales and upgrades to maintain its applications
revenues. Since many Office users seem to have chosen not to upgrade to
the latest version because they are happy with their existing versions of the
software, this is a canny move. It also explains Microsoft’s announcement on
December 21st that it would buy Great Plains Software, a provider of on-tap
accounting, finance and payroll services, in a $1.1 billion share-swap.
And lastly, in a lighter vein:
Musical taste and dementia
economist.com
In some elderly people, brain damage can stimulate an interest in youth music
As the father of a preteen and a teenage daughter I am leaving instructions with my wife that, if she catches me voluntarily listening to InSync or Britney Spears, it will be time for me to be "put down". |
