Two things are interesting in this story. One is that this guy is doing extraordinarily well, much better than the vast majority of traditionally published writers. He is, indeed, an outlier. The other interesting thing about this is how much more money this outlier can make by self-publishing. If that is true for other outliers, that should strike fear in the hearts of traditional publishers, who make most of their money from these outliers.
This is correct. Once a company has to go to the trouble of producing quarterly and annual financial reports and filing them with the SEC and making them available to the world, most companies conclude they might as well do a real IPO and get some pop from building a market in their stock.
Traditionally there are three reasons to go public: (1) need capital, (2) founders or VCs need to cash out, or (3) have 500+ stockholders. Reason (3) has driven some otherwise cash rich companies with somewhat patient VC money to go public, and I expect it is what the SEC is looking at here. If pools try to buy, the SEC may look through the pool structure and count each of the pool investors as a separate investor, making it hard to keep under the 500 holder limit. A few non-tech companies that do not need capital have recently gone the "perma-private" route, with private exchanges set up to facilitate trading, but that is difficult to do, especially as more and more employees join up and expect stock and push on the 500 holder limit.
This analysis seems right to me. MSFT's annual cash flow from operations is in the $24 billion+ range. MSFT has $44 billion of cash in the bank. What is MSFT going to do with all that cash? Watch Google slowly eat its business? I'm surprised MSFT hasn't invested more in web services -- $2 billion seems small given its resources. Could it be a shortage of opportunities?
This is a thoughtful review of Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants." The book itself is very thought-provoking, so much so that I haven't stopped thinking about it since reading it a month or so ago. The criticisms in this review are certainly valid, and this is one of those books I doubt anyone could agree 100% with, but what is missing from this review is an appreciation for Kelly's valiant attempt to grapple with the enormity of what technology has wrought, and the even greater enormity of what technology seems poised to do in the future. That's what kept me thinking since I put the book down and, while I am not sure I'll end up exactly where Kelly is, I have to give him a great deal of credit for a big think that really stimulated my synapses.
But how much would it cost Tazo to upgrade their landing page to be merely mediocre-but-usable? I would think that for a company of Tazo's size and success, the cost of doing this would be trivial.
When the government hands out cash to the poor, it's a "handout" that creates a "culture of dependency." When the government hands out cash to the banks, it's a "bail-out" that creates a "sound financial system." Right.
These are sales numbers for one of the author's books (4 copies sold!), not sales numbers for Google Books as a whole. Still, an interesting point about Google's deeper selection than Amazon making Google the more natural virtual card catalog of books.
Interesting history of the suit. But while the article sees a future for the suit, to me the suit is history. Suits once denoted upper class, and sumptuary laws prevented lower classes from looking upper. Now suits denote lower middle management in an old economy company. No one aspires to that. Jeans, sweats and t-shirts are the new class separator, indicating which of us have earned the freedom from having to wear suits.
Interesting if somewhat unfocused think-piece. What struck me is how forward-looking we were in 1956; Tomorrowland's vision of a future in space looked so clear back then. What would we put in Tomorrowland today?
The person interviewed in this article seems to say they are not strangled by data: "The role of data in design at Google gets exaggerated. People forget that design at Google is just as often faith-based as data-driven." So while that may or may not be true, I think the header for this post doesn't accurately reflect what is in the article.
The article answers this question by explaining that the billboard is part of a Facebook tie-in deal to promote Facebook Places in connection with the upcoming New Years in Times Square event.
Key statement in Tilson's analysis: "the stock is priced for perfection." He is not saying Netflix is a bad business, he is just saying that its current price is so rich it has to continue to do extremely well to justify that rich price, and there are big concerns looming that suggest it may not do as well. Should also read Reed Hastings's response: http://seekingalpha.com/article/242653-netflix-ceo-reed-hast....
Steve Eisman, who was featured in Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" as one of the few who foresaw the housing bubble, recently gave a presentation titled "For Profit Education: Subprime Goes to College." Worth flipping through: http://www.scribd.com/doc/32066986/Steve-Eisman-Ira-Sohn-Con...
It is rare to see a truly performance-based employment system at a company because, as this post (and the comments) show, in order to execute well you have to continuously cull the low performers from the herd. This creates a culture of fear, especially in those likeliest to be culled. This is not unique to Netflix -- each year General Electric culls the bottom percentile of its management. The trick is to have performance criteria that are clearly understood so that the process is not arbitrary and capricious. Companies that do not cull low performers tend to attract low-performers who ultimately ensure that the company itself gets culled. It's a tough world out there.
Edward Tufte says this is "Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn." It is discussed in Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information and he even sells a poster of it: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters.
I get suspicious when articles talk in terms of "the Chinese" and "the Americans" and "the Germans." That is painting with such a broad brush. You know you are not the same as everyone else in your country, but it is so easy to fall back on the assumption that people in other countries must all be the same. It is really hard to write insightfully about the variety and complexity of real life, so instead we get articles like this.
It is common for people on the outside to think everyone on the inside is the same. This article makes the very helpful point that it is not enough to be a "lawyer." You must get a "lawyer who understands startups." Otherwise it's like an iPhone app developer hiring a programmer whose only experience is pushing COBOL punch cards through an insurance company's circa 1976 DEC mainframe. Sure, he's a programmer, but he's not likely to be of much use.
Kind of sobering to realize that in 1996 I was building duplo doll houses with my daughter while Larry and Sergey and were building a duplo server housing that grew into a $190 billion company.
I had always heard that the Google logo's color scheme was derived from the duplo colors. Seems to be the case.
These are good (albeit mostly intuitive) reference checking tips. What amazes is me is how rarely anyone bothers to check references. I've been listed as a reference many times, but estimate I've been called much less than 10% of the time. That's probably because it's a pain to do this, and many companies won't give you helpful responses (and it may be that no one cares what I think), but all this suggests to me that the most important reference checking tip is to do it.
Over last 5 years, Apple's net income increased 7x, growing from $2 billion to $14 billion. Over this same period, Microsoft grew its net income only 1.5x, from $13 billion to $19 billion. While it is amazing that Apple is almost worth $300 billion, it is truly staggering that Microsoft is still worth $240 billion.
At least shoppers with bar code scanners are still visiting stores. What should really be striking fear and terror into the hearts of retailers are shoppers who never set foot in stores anymore, people who, like me, order everything online.
How? With 23,000 employees you can staff up a lot of internal projects. And with $30 billion in cash you can afford to acquire a lot of external projects.
Why? I think Google has a different philosophy than Apple. Where Apple seems like a design shop with a minimalist ethos (its highly-polished product line famously fits on a conference room table, and it prides itself on what it doesn't do), Google seems more like a start-up incubator hoping, by early release and rapid iteration, to see some of its ideas catch on, knowing all along that many will fail.
Instead of focusing on engineering schools, if NYC wants to attract engineers it should focus on its elementary, middle and high schools. Engineers value education. Engineers usually do not make enough to afford fancy NYC private schools, and most engineers are not going to send their kids to NYC's public schools. So even if NYC succeeds in attracting young engineers, it will lose many of them as they start to raise families and leave looking for better public schools for their kids.
I think it's art, and applaud them for it. Reminds me of Brian Eno's (supposed) definition of originality: do something that's so time consuming or difficult that no one else would ever bother.