An interesting thought to start the day.
The Mantra of Entrenched Industries
By Tim O’Reilly
CJ Rayhill, our CIO, and the organizer of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference, passed on a fabulous quote from Robertson Davies that aptly captures the hopes of entrenched industries: “The world is full of people whose notion of a [...]
I’d have to agree with Virginia Postrel here. The article is a very succinct and thought-provoking summary of Amazon’s plans to make elements of its technology and distribution infrastructure more generally available. Amazon’s plans strike me very much as an example of the real time lags we need to account for when trying to understand [...]
The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Rating: 5 out of 5
Author: Chris Anderson
Year: 2006
Publisher: Hyperion
ISBN: 1401302378
The book length version of The Long Tail has now been published. Based on Chris Anderson’s seminal Wired article, the book expands and elaborates on the article’s thesis [...]
Let My People Go Surfing : The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Rating: 4 out of 5
Author: Yvon Chouinard
Year: 2005
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 1594200726
I got this book as a Christmas present from my brother-in-law. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise and that would have been unfortunate because [...]
[Cross posted at Future Tense]
Dave Winer may work best with a river of news approach to RSS feeds, but I seem to fall more into the “compost heap of knowledge” school. I finally got around to an item from Tom Peters’ blog from earlier this month, which pointed at a Sunday New [...]
[Cross posted at Future Tense]
“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Paul Saffo
Last month I had an opportunity to listen to Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future speak at the CIO Magazine CIO|06 The Year Ahead conference in Phoenix. I was there as part of CIO’s Enterprise Value Award [...]
(cross posted at Future Tense)
One of the most profoundly important (and disturbing) things about the Internet is that fundamentally no one is in charge. One of the individuals responsible for that design is David Reed, a computer scientist from MIT.
As far back as Jethro and Moses in Exodus, we’ve applied hierarchy [...]
Doc Searls points to an excellent essay by Paul Graham on What Business Can Learn from Open Source. It’s full of thought-provoking observations. Here’s just one sample:
The third big lesson we can learn from open source and
blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of
flowing down from the top. Open [...]
Rex is right. Go read what Kevin Kelly said.
Then think about how the same logic applies inside organizations. Organizations that continue to try to apply top-down control will increasingly fall behind those organizations that can figure out how to tap the same kind of bottoms-up logic that has driven the web over [...]
All of the Copyfight coverage
of the Grokster case is worth following. This one reminds me the
differing mindsets of executives and policy makers. I was lucky enough
to learn strategy from Mike Porter as he was writing Competitive Strategy. His course was the hottest course at the Harvard Business School.
Several years later, I went back to [...]
