With our obsession for newness, those of us who work in the tech industry often fail to understand the historical roots of our technologies. Case in point: telegraph operators more than 150 years ago were sending short messages called "graphs" that were surprisingly similar in form and content to Twitter tweets.
One remarkable example was recently discovered in the Museum of Telegraphy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It is the transcript of a telegraph operator's comments during Abraham Lincoln's famed Gettysburg Address in 1863. The transcript was shared with me by a friend on the museum staff, and I'm pleased to reproduce it here:
=====
Still waiting for the Pres. to commence his speech. #gettysburg
Good heavens, I should have foresworn that fifth corn dodger for lunch. #gas #dontask #gettysburg
Starting now. Pres. waves to crowd. #gettysburg
Four score and... WTF is a score? 25? #pleasespeakenglish #gettysburg
Okay, it's twenty. So "87 years ago the country was founded." Why not just say that? Duh. #gettysburg
Heh-heh-heh. He said "conceived." Heh-heh. #gettysburg
"Now we are in a great civil war." More duh. #gettysburg
@zebekiah1134 I know, it's my own fault for buying lunch from a wagon. #gas #gettysburg
Hoping to get in two miles this afternoon. Depends on how long this speech goes. #gettysburg
"It is altogether fitting and proper that we should dedicate this cemetery." Ooookay. #gettysburg
Saw @matthewbrady this morning, taking pictures of guys with big beards. #muttonchopsrule #gettysburg
"The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here." #nokidding #gettysburg
Hey you in the hat. Yes, you. Take it off, you're blocking my view. #gettysburg
"This nation shall have a new birth of freedom." Great, finally we'll get some details. #gettysburg
"Government shall not perish from the earth." Good to know. #gettysburg
Where's he going? #gettysburg
What, that's IT? I waited five hours in the sun for THAT?? #ripoff #votedemocrat #gettysburg
Maybe I'll make it four miles. #outahere #gettysburg
=====
Posted April 1, 2012
2011: The microwave hairdryer, and four other colossal tech failures you've never heard of
2010: The Yahoo-New York Times merger
2009: The US government's tech industry bailout
2008: Survey: 27% of early iPhone adopters wear it attached to a body piercing
2007: Twitter + telepathy = Spitr, the ultimate social network
2006: Google buys Sprint
Sabtu, 31 Maret 2012
Kamis, 29 Maret 2012
Mr DeMarco, Would you consider a debt-equity swap?
From Bloomberg:
But for places like Las Vegas and the Central Valley of California, where many people are 40-70 percent underwater, it is hard to see how default and large losses aren't inevitable. A debt-equity swap would allow people to move freely, which aligning incentives between lenders and borrowers.
The U.S. government has spent $190 billion to shore up the companies since they were taken into federal conservatorship in 2008 after their investments in risky loans soured. DeMarco said adding to the firms’ costs would be a violation of his legal responsibility to restore them to financial health.
Using principal forbearance instead of forgiveness so far has been better for taxpayers, DeMarco said. Forbearance reduces monthly payments while requiring borrowers to pay back the full amount of the loan when they sell the house.
“If the borrower is successful on the modification, allows them to stay in their house and they stay in their house and start making mortgage payments, the taxpayer gets to share in the upside of that borrower’s success,” DeMarco said in the Bloomberg Television interview. “If we forgive the principal up front and the borrower is successful, that upside all goes to the borrower and is not shared with the taxpayer.”There is another way to allow taxpayers to get the upside of borrowers' success--replace the debt they owe with a shared equity arrangement. The taxpayer may be better off with principal forbearance for houses that are 10 percent underwater, because through amortization people can get themselves right-side up in a relatively short time (particularly if they can get a refinance at a low rate of interest).
But for places like Las Vegas and the Central Valley of California, where many people are 40-70 percent underwater, it is hard to see how default and large losses aren't inevitable. A debt-equity swap would allow people to move freely, which aligning incentives between lenders and borrowers.
Rabu, 28 Maret 2012
Andrew Zimbalist on Frank McCourt's sale of the Dodgers
From ESPN:
"It's problematic," Zimbalist said. "He was looking for some kind of ongoing income stream and he got it. Here's a guy who borrowed practically all the money to buy the team for $430 million and now he's selling it for $2.15 billion and he's coming out with a healthy capital gain -- it's repulsive. This is someone who doesn't deserve to walk away with a healthy profit after eight years of running the Dodgers in the most egregious, the most inefficient, the most self-interested, and the most vainglorious, idiotic way possible. It really is repulsive that he will still be making a profit in some way."If ever there were a parable about how some people can thumb their nose at the rules and make out like bandits, the story of McCourt's ownership of the Dodgers is it.
A poignant moment from a poor country
The laundry here "ruined" a couple of my shirts--whoever ironed tore the collars a bit from the bodies of the shirts. Being an American, I threw them in my trash basket.
The man who cleans my room, upon discovering them in the trash, asked if he could have them. I said, "of course."
He then asked me to write a note, saying that I had explicitly told him he could have them, lest anyone think he might have stolen them. Of course I did that as well. He seemed extremely happy to have the shirts.
The man who cleans my room, upon discovering them in the trash, asked if he could have them. I said, "of course."
He then asked me to write a note, saying that I had explicitly told him he could have them, lest anyone think he might have stolen them. Of course I did that as well. He seemed extremely happy to have the shirts.
Selasa, 27 Maret 2012
When liberals undermine liberalism
I consider myself a liberal. On social issues, I am very liberal; on economic issues, while in general I like markets, I think governments can and should correct large market failures (such as failures in private insurance markets and negative externalities), that the one percent (maybe even the ten percent) should pay higher taxes than they do now, and that there should be a floor on living standards.
It therefore drives me crazy when liberals embrace waste and hypocrisy. So the following paragraph in the LA Times caught my eye:
The whole thing reminds me of perhaps my all time favorite Onion headline.
It therefore drives me crazy when liberals embrace waste and hypocrisy. So the following paragraph in the LA Times caught my eye:
Instead, the rail authority has agreed to run fewer trains at slower speeds on tracks shared with commuter rail systems, Amtrak and freight trains. In the early years, passengers will probably have to transfer trains to get from one end of the system to the other. The concept, known as the blended approach, was pushed last year by Bay Area politicians, who fought the original plan to run high-speed trains through the region on 60-foot high viaducts over local neighborhoods. The idea has attracted support in Southern California as well.So places that will rail against the automobile are doing everything possible to make sure "bullet train" service (whose potential for success I am skeptical about anyway) cannot possibly be a competitive transport mode. The "blended" system will also make freight rail relatively less competitive with trucks, and will waste a lot of money that could be better spent on places California really needs to spend money, such as K-12 education and state universities (and no, I do not work at one).
The whole thing reminds me of perhaps my all time favorite Onion headline.
Sabtu, 24 Maret 2012
Mark Twain on Monetary Policy (h/t Patricia Harris)
First published in 1879 as "Mark Twain as a Presidential Candidate."
My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation. I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get.
Senin, 19 Maret 2012
New data since I posted yesterday
From this morning's Economic Times (one of India's leading newspapers).
NEW DELHI: The number of India's poor fell to 29.8% of its population in 2009-10 from 37.2% in 2004-05, one of the sharpest falls ever. This suggests India has not only grown faster than the world economy, but that this growth has lifted millions out of poverty.
In absolute terms, the number of poor in the country declined by around 13% to 354 million during the fiveyear period with rural poverty falling faster thanurban poverty. During the period, rural poverty declined by 8 percentage points to 33.8%, almost double the decline of urban poor by 4.8 percentage points to 20.9%.
It is interesting that India started a war on poverty in 2006, and it seems to be winning. Not that one thing necessarily caused the other, but it is some coincidence.
"This is not surprising. Such an outcome is on expected lines as this is the period when the government increased the expenditure on flagship programmes substantially. We gave money to the people and the result is a direct impact of that," said Mihir Shah, member, Planning Commission.
The numbers also re-affirm the impact of the government's flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme that entitles 100 days of work at a minimum rate of Rs 100 per day to all rural households. The scheme was launched in 2006 and has single-handedly transformed rural India.
Minggu, 18 Maret 2012
What would Rawls say?
Since India liberalized its economy in 1991, PPP GDP per capita has increased from about 1400 in 1992 to about 3200 in 2009 (see Penn World Tables, I am using only two significant digits because the exact numbers depend on definition). That is 5 percent per capita per year; by any standard this is an impressive performance. Eyes, moreover, don't lie--I have been coming to India for eight years now, and one can see living standards improving. This is gratifying.
But in an enormously important dimension, India has not improved at all. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the share of undernourished people in India moved from 20 percent in 1992 to 19 percent in 2008; the number of hungry rose from 177 million to 224 million.
China has done much better, having cut the rate of hunger nearly in half over the same time period (from 18 to 10 percent), despite the fact that its GINI coefficient is higher.
But in an enormously important dimension, India has not improved at all. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the share of undernourished people in India moved from 20 percent in 1992 to 19 percent in 2008; the number of hungry rose from 177 million to 224 million.
China has done much better, having cut the rate of hunger nearly in half over the same time period (from 18 to 10 percent), despite the fact that its GINI coefficient is higher.
Sabtu, 17 Maret 2012
Rail transit and what is physically possible
I have written posts in the past that reflect my admiration for John Kain's work in transportation economics. He is known, among other things, for training legions of students: "bus good, trains bad."
In general, buses are cheaper and much more flexible to operate than trains. But a visit to Bangalore made me wonder if it can really thrive as a city without a metro system (which it is currently in the process of building). Bangalore is very dense and the streets are, for the most part, very narrow. Congestion is already terrible, and is composed mostly of auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, and scooters. The city already has many buses, that move dreadfully slowly. To get from the airport into the business district, a distance of 40 kilometers, takes a minimum of 90 minutes.
People who know these things better than I have told me metro systems are never cost effective. In this particular case, however, I can't help but wonder.
In general, buses are cheaper and much more flexible to operate than trains. But a visit to Bangalore made me wonder if it can really thrive as a city without a metro system (which it is currently in the process of building). Bangalore is very dense and the streets are, for the most part, very narrow. Congestion is already terrible, and is composed mostly of auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, and scooters. The city already has many buses, that move dreadfully slowly. To get from the airport into the business district, a distance of 40 kilometers, takes a minimum of 90 minutes.
People who know these things better than I have told me metro systems are never cost effective. In this particular case, however, I can't help but wonder.
Rabu, 14 Maret 2012
"Green Jobs" will be real, but invisible
John Whitehead quotes Joe Romm:
(h/t Mark Thoma)
Last week economist William Nordhaus slammed global warming deniersand explained that the cost of delaying action is $4 Trillion. As I wrote, Nordhaus’s blunt piece — “Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong” – is worth reading because, like most mainstream climate economists, he is no climate hawk.Those costs are real. Those costs shift the supply curve for stuff in. Those costs reduce employment. So "Green Jobs" are largely not those building windmills and solar panels (the total number of these jobs will be small relative to the economy). "Green Jobs" will be the jobs saved from cost reductions associated with reduced greenhouse gases. This is why good environmental policy is also good economic policy.
(h/t Mark Thoma)
Selasa, 13 Maret 2012
Why owning a house may not be the American Dream
Lots of societies outside of America seem to have a preference for home-ownership. I have spoken to policy makers and scholars in several countries--India, Bangladesh, South Africa, Peru--about the importance of a well functioning rental sector. Rental housing allows for mobility, and for people to use savings to invest in such things as small businesses. Rental housing is also a way for small entrepreneurs to earn a return on investment.
Yet everywhere I go, I am told that people don't want to rent, they want to own. The principal reason seems to be security of tenure; in places where enforcement of contracts remains an issue, fear of abuse by landlords sours people on renting as an option. And so it is that people want to be owners.
Many countries in Western Europe--Germany and Switzerland in particular--do not have fetishes about homeownership. But tenant protections in these countries are strong (see this piece on Germany and this piece on security of tenure beyond lease terms in Switzerland), so renting is sort of "owning-light" in these countries.
Yet everywhere I go, I am told that people don't want to rent, they want to own. The principal reason seems to be security of tenure; in places where enforcement of contracts remains an issue, fear of abuse by landlords sours people on renting as an option. And so it is that people want to be owners.
Many countries in Western Europe--Germany and Switzerland in particular--do not have fetishes about homeownership. But tenant protections in these countries are strong (see this piece on Germany and this piece on security of tenure beyond lease terms in Switzerland), so renting is sort of "owning-light" in these countries.
Minggu, 11 Maret 2012
Who are you going to hug?
As I watch the ridiculous controversy over Barack Obama's hugging Derrick Bell, I can't help but think that if only people who agreed with me hugged me, I would never be hugged.
When I wrongly and mistakenly supported the second war in Iraq, my wife and daughters all told me how wrong and mistaken I was. And yet they continued give me hugs, thank goodness.
When I wrongly and mistakenly supported the second war in Iraq, my wife and daughters all told me how wrong and mistaken I was. And yet they continued give me hugs, thank goodness.
Jumat, 09 Maret 2012
The Real Significance of the New iPad
The reactions to the New iPad announcement this week were all over the map.
Some places said it was basically a yawner (link), while others bought into the "end of the PC" rhetoric (link) . Some people even warned all developers to stop programming for the keyboard and mouse, even for complex applications like computer-assisted design (link).
My take: I think the announcement was both more and less important than people are saying. Here's why:
This is not the end of the PC era
I'm sure I'll get some push-back from people who disagree, but I think the whole "PC era" meme from Apple is self-serving hype. Of course they want to convince you that the world is shifting away from a market where Apple has less than 10% worldwide share to a market where Apple has well over 50% share. I'd say the same thing if I still worked at Apple. And the iPad is shiny and sexy, while Windows PCs are old and boring, so I want to believe that the PC is dead. It makes me feel all Jetson-y. But think about it rationally for a minute.
First of all, what exactly was the PC era that is now supposedly ending? Was it the years when Windows was the dominant API for software innovation? That ended in the late 1990s with the rise of web apps. Was it the era when PCs outsold smartphones? That ended last year.
To many people, the end of the PC era seems to mean that tablets are starting to replace PCs as thoroughly as PCs replaced minicomputers. Or that the keyboard and mouse are going away. I don't buy it. We've been declaring the PC dead for at least 15 years, but we're still using them today because for certain tasks, PCs are the best way to get work done. It may be unsexy and it may seem old-fashioned, but if you're working on a big spreadsheet a mouse and numeric keypad are incredibly productive. And if you're writing a report, a keyboard is still the easiest way to input text (for now) and edit (for the foreseeable future).
Kind of like a steering wheel and pedals are still the best way to drive a car. I could do that with a multitouch tablet as well (three-finger swipe to the right means turn at the next corner, four fingers down means apply brakes), but sometimes direct control is the best approach.
And yes (comma) I have tried Dragon (pause) Naturally (pause) Speaking (pause) many times (period) (space) And I found that by the tame I went back and fixed all the types it created (comma) I had not saved any time (comma) plus it was difficult to speak in the sort of sentences I wanted to write because you know I kind of speak more casually than I write (period)
My point is not that touch and speech input and tablets are useless. I think they're great, and I've been playing with them for more than a decade. But I'm going to have the most productivity if I can choose the best tools for a particular job, and that means I still need a pointing device and keyboard for some sorts of work.
Now, if Apple were saying that the PC will be less dominant than it was in the past, I'd have no trouble with that. Although we're not seeing the overall death of the PC, we're definitely seeing a narrowing down of it. For tasks like reading or interacting with content, a tablet is far superior to a traditional PC, and if that's all you do with your PC, by all means get rid of it. But PC-like devices (or maybe mice and keyboards that connect to tablets) are going to linger for the sorts of work that they do best.
So if you have a touch-sensitive screen connected to a keyboard and mouse, do you call that hybrid device a PC or a tablet? I don't really care; it's a game of semantics at that point, and semantics are the playground of companies that want to score marketing points. Which brings us right back to Apple and its enormous tablet market share.
(Oh and by the way, the tablet needs a stylus for certain types of work. One of Steve Jobs' strengths was his willingness to revisit his assumptions when he was wrong, and this is one of those cases. I worry that since Jobs died, Apple may now get locked into his religious opposition to the stylus. That would leave Apple vulnerable to a competitor who does the stylus right by tuning the hardware and software to work together.)
What does matter about the new iPad
Two things stand out to me. The first is the screen. Yes it's very pretty, but that's not the point. The Retina display is a very nice feature in a smartphone, but in a tablet it's far more important because tablets get used more for reading long-form text like novels, textbooks, and magazines.
For displaying photos and videos, enormous screen resolution isn't actually all that important; what matters most is color depth. If you have millions of colors, the pixels blend together and most images look real even at 150 dots per inch. But for reading, where you have sharp contrasts between black text and white background, much higher resolution is needed. At 264 pixels per inch, the new iPad's screen is close to the 300 dpi resolution of the original LaserWriters, which most people found an acceptable substitute for printed text, and which drove a revolutionary change in publishing. I doubt Apple's display has the same contrast ratio as printed paper, which is also important for readability, but I still think it's likely to give a much nicer reading experience to all those students who are supposed to use iPads as their new textbooks.
Apple posted a clever widget that shows a magnified image of text on the old and new iPads. I pasted an image from it below. Yes, in real life the dots are tiny and it will be hard for some people to see the difference. But eyestrain hinges on little details like this, and as a longtime publishing guy, I can tell you that resolution matters.
On most other hardware specs, the iPad is very good but not overwhelming. Gizmodo has a good comparison here. It shows that the upcoming Asus Transformer matches up pretty well on a lot of the specs, although it's a bit pricier and has less powerful batteries. You could be forgiven for thinking that Android's within striking distance of iPad.
But then there's the software, and this is the second place where I think the new iPad stands out. As a systems vendor, Apple innovates in both hardware and software, so you have to look at both areas to understand the full iPad offering. Apple is innovating very aggressively on the software side. Speech recognition is now being bundled with iPad, and although as I just said I don't think it's ready for writing a long report, Apple has a history of tuning and improving its technologies over time, and I bet we'll see that happen with speech. The keyboard isn't dead, but if Apple makes speech work well, the tablet can more thoroughly displace the PC in a few more use cases (like creating short messages).
Then there are the new iLife tablet apps, which were probably the most compelling part of the whole announcement. I'm very impressed by the way Apple refactored photo editing for touch, and I can't wait to play with it.
Add together the high-res screen, the long-term path for speech, and the new apps, and the new iPad looks like a formidable product.
Hey Google, copy this
Think of it from the perspective of an Android tablet product manager. You don't just have to beat Apple on hardware, but you also have to figure out how to duplicate a rapidly-growing list of Apple-branded software features that are either bundled or sold at ridiculously low prices.
Yes, Google is working to copy any features that Apple adds, but how good is it at integrating UI functionality and crafting exquisite applications? Would you want to bet your product on Google's ability to craft end-user software?
And thanks to Apple's volumes and wickedly controlled supply chain, its prices are low enough that no products other than Amazon's subsidized tablets can get down under them. So as an Android cloner, you're stuck at rough parity on price, and you are increasingly falling behind on integrated software features. It's an ugly life.
And then there's Microsoft
It'll be interesting to see how Microsoft deals with all of this. Windows 8 is an effort to recast Windows for tablets, but will Microsoft be willing to go toe to toe with Apple on app pricing? Undoubtedly not; that would involve giving up most of the Microsoft Office revenue stream. So Microsoft has to walk a difficult line in which it embraces touch tablet functionality, but attempts to convince people that they still need to pay big bucks for good old Office. The first try in that direction, Tablet PC, demonstrated that you can't just cut the keyboard off a PC and call it a tablet. Windows 8 is much more tablet-centric, but if it makes people feel like they're buying a tablet, they may start looking for tablet-like pricing in their apps, and Office sales could collapse like a house of cards.
If that happens, we'll all stop talking about the end of the PC era and talk instead about the end of the Microsoft era.
Some places said it was basically a yawner (link), while others bought into the "end of the PC" rhetoric (link) . Some people even warned all developers to stop programming for the keyboard and mouse, even for complex applications like computer-assisted design (link).
My take: I think the announcement was both more and less important than people are saying. Here's why:
This is not the end of the PC era
I'm sure I'll get some push-back from people who disagree, but I think the whole "PC era" meme from Apple is self-serving hype. Of course they want to convince you that the world is shifting away from a market where Apple has less than 10% worldwide share to a market where Apple has well over 50% share. I'd say the same thing if I still worked at Apple. And the iPad is shiny and sexy, while Windows PCs are old and boring, so I want to believe that the PC is dead. It makes me feel all Jetson-y. But think about it rationally for a minute.
First of all, what exactly was the PC era that is now supposedly ending? Was it the years when Windows was the dominant API for software innovation? That ended in the late 1990s with the rise of web apps. Was it the era when PCs outsold smartphones? That ended last year.
To many people, the end of the PC era seems to mean that tablets are starting to replace PCs as thoroughly as PCs replaced minicomputers. Or that the keyboard and mouse are going away. I don't buy it. We've been declaring the PC dead for at least 15 years, but we're still using them today because for certain tasks, PCs are the best way to get work done. It may be unsexy and it may seem old-fashioned, but if you're working on a big spreadsheet a mouse and numeric keypad are incredibly productive. And if you're writing a report, a keyboard is still the easiest way to input text (for now) and edit (for the foreseeable future).
Kind of like a steering wheel and pedals are still the best way to drive a car. I could do that with a multitouch tablet as well (three-finger swipe to the right means turn at the next corner, four fingers down means apply brakes), but sometimes direct control is the best approach.
And yes (comma) I have tried Dragon (pause) Naturally (pause) Speaking (pause) many times (period) (space) And I found that by the tame I went back and fixed all the types it created (comma) I had not saved any time (comma) plus it was difficult to speak in the sort of sentences I wanted to write because you know I kind of speak more casually than I write (period)
My point is not that touch and speech input and tablets are useless. I think they're great, and I've been playing with them for more than a decade. But I'm going to have the most productivity if I can choose the best tools for a particular job, and that means I still need a pointing device and keyboard for some sorts of work.
Now, if Apple were saying that the PC will be less dominant than it was in the past, I'd have no trouble with that. Although we're not seeing the overall death of the PC, we're definitely seeing a narrowing down of it. For tasks like reading or interacting with content, a tablet is far superior to a traditional PC, and if that's all you do with your PC, by all means get rid of it. But PC-like devices (or maybe mice and keyboards that connect to tablets) are going to linger for the sorts of work that they do best.
So if you have a touch-sensitive screen connected to a keyboard and mouse, do you call that hybrid device a PC or a tablet? I don't really care; it's a game of semantics at that point, and semantics are the playground of companies that want to score marketing points. Which brings us right back to Apple and its enormous tablet market share.
(Oh and by the way, the tablet needs a stylus for certain types of work. One of Steve Jobs' strengths was his willingness to revisit his assumptions when he was wrong, and this is one of those cases. I worry that since Jobs died, Apple may now get locked into his religious opposition to the stylus. That would leave Apple vulnerable to a competitor who does the stylus right by tuning the hardware and software to work together.)
What does matter about the new iPad
Two things stand out to me. The first is the screen. Yes it's very pretty, but that's not the point. The Retina display is a very nice feature in a smartphone, but in a tablet it's far more important because tablets get used more for reading long-form text like novels, textbooks, and magazines.
For displaying photos and videos, enormous screen resolution isn't actually all that important; what matters most is color depth. If you have millions of colors, the pixels blend together and most images look real even at 150 dots per inch. But for reading, where you have sharp contrasts between black text and white background, much higher resolution is needed. At 264 pixels per inch, the new iPad's screen is close to the 300 dpi resolution of the original LaserWriters, which most people found an acceptable substitute for printed text, and which drove a revolutionary change in publishing. I doubt Apple's display has the same contrast ratio as printed paper, which is also important for readability, but I still think it's likely to give a much nicer reading experience to all those students who are supposed to use iPads as their new textbooks.
Apple posted a clever widget that shows a magnified image of text on the old and new iPads. I pasted an image from it below. Yes, in real life the dots are tiny and it will be hard for some people to see the difference. But eyestrain hinges on little details like this, and as a longtime publishing guy, I can tell you that resolution matters.
On most other hardware specs, the iPad is very good but not overwhelming. Gizmodo has a good comparison here. It shows that the upcoming Asus Transformer matches up pretty well on a lot of the specs, although it's a bit pricier and has less powerful batteries. You could be forgiven for thinking that Android's within striking distance of iPad.
But then there's the software, and this is the second place where I think the new iPad stands out. As a systems vendor, Apple innovates in both hardware and software, so you have to look at both areas to understand the full iPad offering. Apple is innovating very aggressively on the software side. Speech recognition is now being bundled with iPad, and although as I just said I don't think it's ready for writing a long report, Apple has a history of tuning and improving its technologies over time, and I bet we'll see that happen with speech. The keyboard isn't dead, but if Apple makes speech work well, the tablet can more thoroughly displace the PC in a few more use cases (like creating short messages).
Then there are the new iLife tablet apps, which were probably the most compelling part of the whole announcement. I'm very impressed by the way Apple refactored photo editing for touch, and I can't wait to play with it.
Add together the high-res screen, the long-term path for speech, and the new apps, and the new iPad looks like a formidable product.
Hey Google, copy this
Think of it from the perspective of an Android tablet product manager. You don't just have to beat Apple on hardware, but you also have to figure out how to duplicate a rapidly-growing list of Apple-branded software features that are either bundled or sold at ridiculously low prices.
Yes, Google is working to copy any features that Apple adds, but how good is it at integrating UI functionality and crafting exquisite applications? Would you want to bet your product on Google's ability to craft end-user software?
And thanks to Apple's volumes and wickedly controlled supply chain, its prices are low enough that no products other than Amazon's subsidized tablets can get down under them. So as an Android cloner, you're stuck at rough parity on price, and you are increasingly falling behind on integrated software features. It's an ugly life.
And then there's Microsoft
It'll be interesting to see how Microsoft deals with all of this. Windows 8 is an effort to recast Windows for tablets, but will Microsoft be willing to go toe to toe with Apple on app pricing? Undoubtedly not; that would involve giving up most of the Microsoft Office revenue stream. So Microsoft has to walk a difficult line in which it embraces touch tablet functionality, but attempts to convince people that they still need to pay big bucks for good old Office. The first try in that direction, Tablet PC, demonstrated that you can't just cut the keyboard off a PC and call it a tablet. Windows 8 is much more tablet-centric, but if it makes people feel like they're buying a tablet, they may start looking for tablet-like pricing in their apps, and Office sales could collapse like a house of cards.
If that happens, we'll all stop talking about the end of the PC era and talk instead about the end of the Microsoft era.
Banks seem to be lending
The Flow of Funds data for the fourth quarter of 2011 is out. Total net lending by commercial banks and savings institutions has been solid for two quarters in a row, and the fourth quarter was quite strong. This is indeed a good sign.
Eduardo Porter reminds me of a favorite Joan Robinson quote
...the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. From Economic Philosophy.
Kamis, 08 Maret 2012
James Q. Wilson the teacher
The past few days have brought encomiums to and reflections of the work and life of James Q. Wilson (see here for example). But I have yet to see anything about Wilson the teacher.
When I was 17 years old, I took Government 30, American Government, from Wilson, Sydney Verba and H. Douglas Price. The whole course was good, but I found Wilson to be an awe-inspiring figure. He behaved the way I thought a Harvard professor was supposed to be--he was elegant, he had an easy-to-listen-to voice, and despite the fact that we had been a national champion debater, he never spoke too quickly or aggressively.
Both the style and substance of his lectures were memorable. Leonard Bernstein once wrote of Beethoven that has never had a note out of place--every note followed inevitably from the previous note. The same was true with Wilson and words. The prose coming out of his mouth was flawless, but never flowery. I remember that some of my classmates didn't like this--they deemed the polish to be slickness. To me, however, the pristineness of his language meant that it never detracted from the substance he was communicating. His lectures were also models of organization and clarity; as such, he made sophisticated ideas easy to grasp.
Because I was a 17 year old naive liberal from Wisconsin (a state once known for clean government and progressive traditions), I came to college thinking that people got involved in government because they wanted to do good. Wilson managed to convey the idea that bureaucrats, members of congress and interest groups often behaved in, well, their own interests. This may seem obvious, but it was actually a bit of a bolt out of the blue for me at the time. But the great thing is that he conveyed these "conservative" sentiments without demeaning the idea that there is a role for idealism in government.
When I was 17 years old, I took Government 30, American Government, from Wilson, Sydney Verba and H. Douglas Price. The whole course was good, but I found Wilson to be an awe-inspiring figure. He behaved the way I thought a Harvard professor was supposed to be--he was elegant, he had an easy-to-listen-to voice, and despite the fact that we had been a national champion debater, he never spoke too quickly or aggressively.
Both the style and substance of his lectures were memorable. Leonard Bernstein once wrote of Beethoven that has never had a note out of place--every note followed inevitably from the previous note. The same was true with Wilson and words. The prose coming out of his mouth was flawless, but never flowery. I remember that some of my classmates didn't like this--they deemed the polish to be slickness. To me, however, the pristineness of his language meant that it never detracted from the substance he was communicating. His lectures were also models of organization and clarity; as such, he made sophisticated ideas easy to grasp.
Because I was a 17 year old naive liberal from Wisconsin (a state once known for clean government and progressive traditions), I came to college thinking that people got involved in government because they wanted to do good. Wilson managed to convey the idea that bureaucrats, members of congress and interest groups often behaved in, well, their own interests. This may seem obvious, but it was actually a bit of a bolt out of the blue for me at the time. But the great thing is that he conveyed these "conservative" sentiments without demeaning the idea that there is a role for idealism in government.
Selasa, 06 Maret 2012
Not sure when it will pop, but it must be a bubble
Rental yields on housing in India are now at times less than one percent in some large cities; people have been saying to me "it's OK--we are getting 15 percent appreciation."
Senin, 05 Maret 2012
A nice sentence by Peter King of Sports Illustrated
Peter King is, by far, my favorite football writer. But I liked this non-football related gem today:
Dick Ebersol has urged me not to mention anything about politics in this presidential-election year. And so I won't. But as a college grad and father of two college graduates and a husband of a college graduate, boy, am I dying to.
The wonders of great design
I am making my annual visit to the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad (I will report on rent data collected by students here in a couple of weeks). The temperature is in the upper 90s F. today, and yet I was comfortable eating lunch in an open air setting, specifically here:
This is the atrium of the Academic Centre, which was designed by John Portman (the picture comes from the ISB web site).
The air flows so well through it that it is comfortable to sit in, even when the outside temperature is very high. Portman thus created functional space that doesn't need to be air conditioned, even on beastly hot afternoons.
This is the atrium of the Academic Centre, which was designed by John Portman (the picture comes from the ISB web site).
The air flows so well through it that it is comfortable to sit in, even when the outside temperature is very high. Portman thus created functional space that doesn't need to be air conditioned, even on beastly hot afternoons.
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