Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

Business

Is Amazon Inside Apple’s OODA Loop?

John Boyd was a legendary US fighter pilot during the Korean War who later became a fighter pilot instructor. He had a standing bet with his students: he would meet you in the air at 30,000 feet and you would get on his tail. He would reverse the positions and get you in his guns in [...]

Lenin’s Rope: Universities Help Disrupt Universities

Lenin famously bragged that “Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” It would surely gall him to learn that the art of destroying capitalists with their own products has been mastered not by a militant, vanguard-led proletariat but by entrepreneurial capitalists. It appears that even universities, finally, are getting the hang of [...]

Draw This…

Henry Blodget is the former head of Internet research at Merrill Lynch. (Background: once upon a time there was something called Internet research. And once upon a time there was something called Merrill Lynch).  NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer convicted Blodget of touting stocks in public while sending emails disparaging those same securities. Spitzer was [...]

Peak Apple: Understanding the Foxconn Deal

Apple has quickly raised worker wages to address the highly publicized problems with working conditions in its supplier network. The decision protects Apple’s pristine brand and costs the company next to nothing. It cleverly exploits the high-minded principles and low-level economic literacy of those of us who are its devoted customers. A series of well-researched [...]

Amazon.com: America’s #1 Tax Evader?

== Update: On September 7, Amazon relented and made a deal to pay sales taxes on shipments to California (no doubt the trenchant analysis that follows persuaded them to do the right thing). For details of the deal see http://goo.gl/kNwjQ. Now every other state in America needs to make a deal with Amazon — even if they [...]

“We are Going to Pass” -10 Reasons VCs Turn Down Startups

Every few years, Silicon Valley grows strong, flies high, makes beautiful music and then, like the Phoenix of ancient myth, burns to ashes and starts the cycle again. At the moment, the Valley is a frenzy of startups. The rest of the country may be in the economic doldrums, but dozens of technology companies are being [...]

Toujour L’Audace

In early 1997, Steve Jobs spoke at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference. At the time, he was an advisor to Apple CEO Gil Amelio, who had just bought Next from Jobs. (That July, Jobs pushed Amelio out in a boardroom coup and regained control of the company he had founded). I embed Jobs’ fascinating talk [...]

The Long Slide: Amazon Sells More Digital than Printed Books.

I have always loved printed books. I like discovering them and reading them. I like how they look, feel, and smell. I like rooms filled with books like the reading room of the British Museum or the New York Public Library or the rare book room at Shakespeare’s. I like the cluttered shelves of professor’s [...]

Finally — a People’s Diesel Comes to the US

I fell in love with diesel engines back when they had glow coils, sulfuric fuel, and took 30 seconds to start. Diesel was the sound and smell of progress in every real factory and many cities. What was not to like? For good reason, California never shared my enthusiasm. Diesel engines coughed up a lot of [...]

Five Thousand US Janitors have PhDs. So?

With a kid in college, I naturally wonder whether the cost is worth it. So take a look at the following BLS data on a couple of million people who went to college but did not end up doing work that requires a college degree: NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES WITH COLLEGE DEGREES   What is going [...]

Inside Job: Charles Ferguson Brings his Camera Home

Charles Ferguson has done it again. His second film, Inside Job is a good movie and an extremely important one. Whether you enter the theater Democrat or Republican, you will leave it ready to man the barricades against Wall Street. You will also leave the theater much smarter: despite an MBA and more than a [...]

A Tribute to Our New Apple Masters

I praised Steve Jobs for his presentations, his products, and his audacity. I have criticized him for his imperiousness, his meglomania, and his high control business strategy. Like you, I shoulda bought the stock when it fell to $80 during the crash (“Apple is trading for it’s friggin’ CASH!” I yelled at my wife and myself at the [...]

Tax Cars, Not Gas

If, like many people, you think that we are burning more carbon than is healthy for the planet, you are likely of the view that we need to put a price on carbon. You would assert that like any other kind of pollution, our carbon output represents what economists like to term an externality:  the market [...]

The Kindle: Dead, Deadly, and Dominant

Just before the launch of the iPad, I ventured the safe prediction that Amazon’s ebook reader, the Kindle, was kindling. It was doomed to  be crushed by Apple’s reactionary, if magical, iPad. As hardware, the Kindle is history, but as software it is brilliant, with enduring advantages over Apple’s iBook. During the last four months, Amazon has [...]

Visa, Mastercard, or iPhone?

Google and Apple will soon compete with Visa and Mastercard to process your payments in stores, restaurants, and online. Both companies will be pulled into payment processing because both  have built two valuable networks: one of developers who build apps, the other of consumers who buy them. But the developer network has diminishing returns, whereas [...]

Celebrating Cheap Crap from Africa

For reasons best known to her, my loving wife decided to wear a white skirt to our Fourth of July barbecue. But it was not the charred remains of salmon, beef, or tofu that did the skirt in. Before our guests had arrived, she noticed a blue stain spreading across her dress like the sky [...]

"Remember: Your Mother Owns a Bank"

The Jamkid and I caught Muhammad Yunus at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this afternoon. Yunus is the Bangladeshi banker who received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit loans to women. He also serves as the godfather of social enterpreneurship – the fashionable and laudable notion that many social causes are best organized [...]

Holy Cow Batman! Facebook just stole our Internet!

 TechCrunch just reported that Facebook has taken control of the Internet. Huh? What is the fuss about? Well, Facebook announced today a plan to reshape the Internet as profoundly as Apple is reshaping mobile computing. They today published a social software platform called the Open Graph. Founder Mark Zuckerberg called it “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web”.  [...]

The Empire Strikes Back: iPhone 4.0

In one year Apple and Google have gone from allies to antagonists to epic combatants. The contest is really just beginning — and it is shaping up as a replay of the battle fought 30 years ago between Apple and Microsoft.  At today's release of iPhone OS 4.0, Steve Jobs took a swipe at Amazon, Adobe, [...]

The People's Republic of Apple

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the three most important technology companies in the world and they  now mirror the world's three most important economies. Apple is China, booming but autocratic. Microsoft is Europe, wealthy, stagnant, and declining. Google is the USA, an immature but powerful force for freedom prone to arrogance and to fighting too many wars at [...]