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Friday, December 07, 2001 |
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The Economist. Look at these graphs. Holy S**T, Japan is in a world of hurt. Are we going to see this too? The financial economist would tell you that all they need to do is be more aggressive in their reform of their financial system. I don't agree. That is only part of it. Japan's system was a fast follower (much like Microsoft). They need something to aim at. Without a target to show them the way, they are doomed.
The problem occurred when Japan sped past us on the economic curve. We are only just getting to the same brick wall they hit five 9 years ago. We need to figure out a way to get over this wall soon, or we will face the same consequences.
This is also a lesson for Microsoft (the ultimate fast follower). It has killed all of its rabbits. It needs to create some more. The investment in Groove was one. How about an investment in a .Net competitor? $50m would do it. The benefit to them is that for every $1 invested in rabbits there would be $100 in return (and not directly but rather from the value it would provide in focusing its organization on killing the rabbit). However, I don't think Bill Gates is adroit enough for this strategy. It requires a deft touch. This is something Microsoft, the testosterone soaked bull in the china shop, would find difficult to do. This is the point of failure.
6:41:31 PM 
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Cool. Here is the way to subscribe to the RSS feed for your favorite Yahoo Group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/messages?rss=1
Cut and paste this URL into your subscriptions area of Radio.
Warning: 1) you only get the headline and not the description and 2) you get the entire months archive when you first subscribe.
1:05:51 PM
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Here is more on Trillian:
>When we began development of our IM DLLs, jabber wasn't as prominent as it is today. We ended up writing our own engines for each of the IM mediums, and at this point we just don't feel like dropping them outright. having our own DLLs means having more control over the features you see in the IM products, and giving us easier access to update and enhance these features. As mentioned, we might include a jabber DLL for the purposes of chatting with friends on jabber, but there hasn't been major demand for this at the current time.<
12:41:48 PM
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John Udell on event driven software for Internet-scale Web Services. Three companies in the running: KnowNow (soon to be Sun if past history is a guide), Microsoft, and UserLand. Cool. (Where is AOL and Apple in all of this??)
>If this event-driven style is going to be an important feature of the Internet landscape, we should expect to see other examples of its use. And that's exactly what I am seeing. Over at UserLand Software, for example, Dave Winer's crew has added pub/sub capability to the xmlStorageSystem, and also to Radio UserLand. In the latter case, a publisher of an RSS channel can specify, using a cloud element, a registration procedure that a reader of the channel can use to sign up for change notifications.
If I want to find out about changes immediately, rather than on the usual hourly schedule, I'll call ourFavoriteSongs.rssPleaseNotify, and ask it to alert me — by means of XML-RPC, SOAP, or HTTP POST.
The pub/sub style is also woven deeply into Hailstorm. All of its services are kinds of data storage, and many of its XML-based APIs support registration for change alerts. Here too, web services protocols are the building blocks, but the real action takes place at a higher level of abstraction. <
10:12:30 AM
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Business 2.0 on Enron's demise.
>For all the vats of ink spilled during the past few weeks on the sudden, dotcom-like demise of Enron, exactly how the seventh-largest corporation in America careened into bankruptcy remains a bit of a mystery to most people. Sure, there were troubles: shrouded limited partnerships, restated earnings, credit downgrades, and the incapacitation of the company's main energy-trading business. But how does a company with nearly $50 billion in quarterly revenue simply disappear overnight? <
10:05:20 AM
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A memory my father sent me this morning about today (one of many things not to forget about the past):
Sixty years ago today I was sitting with my Grandpa Isaac in the dining room at the farmhouse, waiting for dinner. It was about 1:00pm, and my Grandma "Chrissie" and my Mom were in the kitchen preparing the Sunday dinner, while my Dad was still "finishing up" the endless farm chores.
The radio was playing some Sunday music, when ABRUPTLY an announcer broke in with an urgent flash news bulletin, that Pearl Harbor is being attacked by Japanese bombers!!!
I shall never forget the serious and far away look that came over my Grandpa's face, and he said, "We're in it now". He was 59 years old(born in 82) and I was nine. He came home on a stretcher with malaria from the Spanish American War in 1898 -- age 16.
9:31:03 AM
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Reply made to the K-Logs group concerning RSS e-mail, browser-based editing, and data aggregation.
9:22:12 AM
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WSJ. Local guerrilla 802.11b networks go for it.
<"I've got Aspen nailed!" says Mr. Selby, 35 years old, as he gestures at a dozen antennas atop low-rise buildings. "I've opened the network up to the masses."
Some of the nation's big corporations have racked up billions of dollars in losses trying to bring high-speed Internet access to all who might want it. But the 6-foot-4 Mr. Selby, an avowed ski bum, is doing it in his own small way with a combination of Russian military-surplus antennas and electronic parts from a hardware store. His antennas allow anyone in a 45-square-mile area around Aspen with a computer and a $120 plug-in card to surf the Web over the airwaves free at speeds 30 times as fast as with a standard modem.
Mr. Selby quickly sold his house in Detroit and plowed $80,000 into broadening the network. He began scouting out locations for other antennas. Last year, a former high-tech executive who lived in a mountaintop home gave him permission to put up an antenna in exchange for free wireless service. That increased the network's wireless coverage by five square miles. Mr. Selby soon made the same barter deal with other mountaintop residents.
Word of the free network began spreading. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, and Sky Dayton, founder of Internet-service provider Earthlink, unexpectedly tapped into Mr. Selby's network while in Aspen for a conference earlier this year. Mr. Dayton opened his laptop in his hotel room and found he could choose from four guerrilla wireless networks, including Mr. Selby's, to reach the Internet. "I was floored," Mr. Dayton says.> Combine this with a desktop Website/Web apps, dynamic DNS, and a billing system and we are talking revolution at the grass roots.
8:43:25 AM
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WSJ. Japan hits the skids. This may be our future.
>The government announced this morning that Japan's real gross domestic product shrank 0.5%, or an annualized 2.2%, between July and September, compared with the previous quarter. That puts Japan technically in a recession -- its fourth in a decade -- under the common definition of two straight quarterly contractions. The government also revised down the second quarter's contraction in GDP to 1.2% from 0.7%.<
8:31:28 AM
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NYT. AOL at an inflection point. AOL's growth is slowing fast. What does it need to do in order to jump-start growth? Move aggressively towards building a services platform that isn't tied to its role as an ISP. My suggestion: desktop Web apps that leverage its strong IM presence.
Why services? AOL's "control" over a large network of users gives it the ability to extend software driven services beyond its base. For example: I want to use AIM because it connects me to the millions of AOL subscribers that use it.
AOL-branded desktop Web apps that connected to AOL's core subscribers (via P2P) would create a new and potentially huge revenue stream without costing much to deliver.
8:22:02 AM
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Tora Bora cave fighting overview pic. "Cave Rats"
8:01:03 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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