Laughing Meme

Love this quote from Borthwick regarding news.me and shipping:

“I ran a new product development group within a large company and I would like to dispel the simplistic myth that big companies don’t innovate. There is innovation occurring at many big companies. The thing that big companies really struggle to do is to ship.” – John Borthwick – news.me

People ask me why I focus so relentlessly on shipping as opposed to the rest of the software development life cycle. In part because it’s hard. It’s often the hard problem. And it gets harder the longer you do it, aka it gets harder the more important the thing you’ve built is.

Found this post about why Borders, but not Barnes and Noble, is bankrupt.

“Failure to adequately address the internet sales channel and the subsequent ebook market. Specifically, the decision to outsource Borders.com to Amazon.com. To be fair, Borders.com was costing the company millions of dollars in losses each year ($20m I think when they decided to outsource) and one could argue that the outsourcing solution was a case of letting the most efficient etailing organization (Amazon.com) handle the job and turn a big negative into a profitable business. In the short-term, this saved a lot of money. In the long run, the internet is too important to outsource in this manner” – Mark Evans

“Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worthwhile?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. This is not too difficult: it is harder not to make his subject and himself ridiculous by shutting his eyes too tightly.” – G. H. Hardy

Recently was given an axiom which turns out to be folks engineering wisdom, namely:

Optimizing a system requires sub-optimizing the subsystems. Conversely optimizing a subsystem sub-optimizes the global system.

Chewing on that as it relates to technology and organizations.

Thoughts?

(In particular I was thinking about the related corollary this afternoon, namely, “We work hard to be able to be this dumb.”)

“It is time for some truth in advertising. If I will present my thesis adviser with this analysis, she will probably hang me, rez me, hang me again, and then /gkick me out of my PhD program.” – Armory Data Mining.

Great, accessible look at population stats.

It’s cheating to start a blog post with a quote from Winston Churchill. He was that good. – Fred Wilson

I’ll probably steal that line some day.

Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here. – Dan Cederholm

This is the idea I’ve been trying to place with again, really starting just this week, rejecting the consensus about how to blog that’s emerged over the last couple years, and holds up Digg-ability and Techcrunch-i-tude as good indicators. Dan, of course, said it better.

It’s probably an indicator of slipping into my dotage, but a new stray link and I’m happily back wandering through those early archives, even my own, having stumbled across a rather odd review of the rather minor Ruled Britannia, circa 2003 earlier this evening.

Power rises linearly with the number of processors, but as the square of the speed of a processor. – Greg Pfister

Which means the best hope for extending the battery life of your iPhone is grid computing.

One of the most interesting workshops at the NYC Anarchist Book Fair this year was Matt Hern’s talk “Against Tolerance”. And one of the most useful ideas I took away was an off hand comment on hope vs. optimism, which he attributed to Cornel West, who attributes it to Havel.

You have to draw a distinction between hope and optimism. Vaclav Havel put it well when he said “optimism” is the belief that things are going to turn out as you would like, as opposed to “hope,” which is when you are thoroughly convinced something is moral and right and just and therefore you fight regardless of the consequences. In that sense, I’m full of hope but in no way optimistic. – Cornel West

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. – Václav Havel

I’m finding it useful.

“[New York] is the company town for money” – Richard Lefrak

“If a fish market in the right Manhattan neighborhood today could get hold of “wild native oysters” and market then as such, because this is how New York operates, it would probably be able to charge outstanding prices and have New York Times readers, after the article on wild oysters came out, gladly paying the price. [...] And for all that, they would taste like cultivated ones.” – Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster

“…it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated… when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else.” – Bill de hOra

“Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. … Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.” – Danah Boyd

Photo by bowbrick