Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

Technology

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 [...]

Will Technology Burst Higher Education’s Bubble?

Imagine a market with incumbents whose core processes are unchanged since medieval times that is held together by huge federal subsidies and protected by a system of self-accreditation designed to exclude rivals. Imagine that the resulting enterprises exploited their monopoly power by overcharging customers and wasting the revenue that resulted on guaranteeing senior employees lifetime [...]

Protection That Makes You Weaker

I have taken up running and, like boomers everywhere, I worry about hurting myself. Data suggest that between a third and half of runners get hurt running every year, making running a surprisingly high risk exercise. Why is this? Journalist Chris McDougall wondered why he was getting hurt when humans have been running for two [...]

Hang 30: Time Surfing

Been awhile since we showed first rate surfing videos. This one from Aussie Rip Curl, uses a “30 camera array” and six world class surfers to enable editors to shift perspective, freeze frame from a combination of angles, and create the “Matrix” like illusion of perspective. Pretty cool. They also produced a video on how [...]

Seven Forces that Doom Bookstores and Publishers

During the past few years, the music industry has been hammered. As music went digital, it was pirated, deconstructed, and mashed. As music stores and labels disappeared, their lobby, the RIAA, screamed bloody murder. But amidst the carnage, a funny thing happened: the music industry grew larger even though it had fewer labels and far fewer retailers. Revenue [...]

One more thing: Real artists ship.

In preparation for landing at SFO, I had closed the MacBook Air and turned off the iPad, but as I touched down, my iPhone beeped. The text from my son made my heart sink: Steve Jobs died . At least three people left the plane in tears. I felt like someone had unplugged my compass. Steve Jobs [...]

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 [...]

Get Well, Steve

A quick search will verify that JamSideDown has both criticized and admired Steve Jobs more than any other CEO. I dislike his high control business strategy and personality but I think that he is America’s finest CEO and that every leader should study his public presentations. He embodies “the intersection of liberal arts and technology” [...]

My Two Worst Technology Predictions

In the spirit of the New Year, it is time to take stock, confront shortcomings, and resolve to improve. I’ll get 2011 off to a clean start byI confessing to two whopping errors. There were plenty of small things that did not work out as I said they would, but two of my predictions were [...]

Cory Booker: Tweet Theater or the Politics of Engagement?

In September of 1965, Hurricane Betsy devastated New Orleans. The damage was not as bad as Katrina forty years later, but large bits of Lake Pontchartrain again ended up in the poor and largely black Ninth Ward. Residents fled to the George Washington Elementary School on St. Claude Avenue, which had been hastily converted into a [...]

WikiLeaks: A Problem, Not a Solution

In rushing to defend and celebrate WikiLeaks, an unruly collection of progressives, libertarians, and hackers are guilty of basic and careless policy mistakes. Some believe that WikiLeaks is a basic first amendment matter. It should not be. So far, with no exceptions that I am aware of, leakers get punished and publishers do not. Once [...]

Wave Goodbye to Traditional Telcos

A third wave is about to hit the telecommunications industry. It is very unlikely to damage the industry, but it will force some of its biggest players to once again become dull and regulated. Consumers will celebrate because telcos that provide only dumb pipes are not a problem, they are a solution.  The first wave to [...]

A Whitman Deer in California Headlights

It’s a good time to live in the Bay Area. Not only do you get to watch the Giants absolutely pulverize the Texas Rangers, but you get to watch Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina spend a great deal of their own money on vanity campaigns. Politico reports that as of last week, Meg has spent [...]

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 [...]