Sherlock

It's weird, but the kindle changed my relationship with books. Before the kindle they were something sacred, and a I had a big spreadsheet with the books I had, I had read and I wanted to have, and annotations regarding the lent status.

Now I read more, but value each individual book less. It's weird.

I bought a kindle for the exact same reason. I already lent half of my books a couple of weeks after the kindle arrived, and here, to lend a book its to lose it.

When i put my manager hat it turns into a nighmare.

If you, hypotetically, are managing a cash cow business, your first mission as a manager is to protect that business. You have to develop long term relationships with clients, spot early all the competition, grow organically your main business and control costs so you don't end in jail when the bad times arrive.

Here comes the first problem. Usually, in the business sense, innovation isn't something 100% new, is something 10-30% new. You know, the car still have 4 wheels but now it comes with a sensor that makes parking easier. The problem appears when your innovations start to compete with your main product. To compatibilize that stuff (think the way MS killed the IE team) requieres very large amounts of quality managment, something that is as scarce as high quality programmers. Think politics (hey, that is MY business!), incentives (you told me to control costs, else I would have done that!) or resistance to change (that will be a failure, it will make us look bad in front of X and Y), etc.

The proposition of the author is one of the classics propositions to sterilize change: to spin off. Make the change independent from the current managers, let them suffer their rigidity... but it may not be the better business decision to spin off somthing that will compete with yourself in 80% of the business.

The article just tries to (mis)analize a management problem without relevant expertise in management and from an investment point of view, and commits the usual mistakes that inexperienced managers make to a level that is doesn't even spark the usual insighful analysis from a engineering POV from the HN crowd.

Warning: user perspective ahead:

I have to agree with this. I work as an analyst in an investment bank, and my tools include MsWord, Excel, PP and rarely a python script. MSWord and PP are completely interchangeable with they OO or google docs equivalents, but Excel is just another story, and its not just the learning curve, the software has a lot of features and capabilities that their competitors simply don't have (even for my less technically versed coworkers)

I suppose that i read the entire sentence before parsing it, just because i need a slight rational effort to decode it.

Weird, as a non-native and non-fluent english speaker, I don't suffer that effect.

When you do this with mortages you get a financial crisis!