Ged Carroll

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  • STRATFOR breach

    I got an email about 40 minutes ago announcing that STRATFOR were looking into a breach of their servers and email. I’ve always found their analysis on international issues informative and insightful which has helped in my work thinking about international projects with NGOs and in my writing here on this blog. It is one of a a number of media outlets that I pay a subscription to.

    Given that Stratfor position themselves as not only domain experts in territories around the world and geopolitics, but also opsec (operational security); the data breach is a shockingly bad own goal. It will be interesting to see how their brand manages to recover. The hackers have made off with a trove of government, academic, media contacts as well as general people like me who are curious about what’s going on in the world.

    Dear Stratfor Member,

    We have learned that Stratfor’s web site was hacked by an unauthorized party. As a result of this incident the operation of Stratfor’s servers and email have been suspended.

    We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other web sites. We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained.

    Stratfor and I take this incident very seriously. Stratfor’s relationship with its members and, in particular, the confidentiality of their subscriber information, are very important to Stratfor and me. We are working closely with law enforcement in their investigation and will assist them with the identification of the individual(s) who are responsible.

    Although we are still learning more and the law enforcement investigation is active and ongoing, we wanted to provide you with notice of this incident as quickly as possible. We will keep you updated regarding these matters.

    Sincerely,

    George Friedman

    Cryptonome have more details here: complete with the obligatory Pastebin links. Twitter currently has a lively discussion on the hack.

    Update (February 2023): Stratfor bought all its subscribers an Equifax monitoring package for their credentials and offered discounted subscriptions. It revamped its infrastructure and carried on. Stratfor never completely recovered from the breach. It eventually sold itself to a larger group Rane. As part of Rane the Stratfor work continues and they still sell expert consultancy.

    Rane have since embraced social media to promote its content to prospective customers. The quality is the same high standards as what it used to be under Stratfor before the data breach.

  • IWC 59210 movement

    Why does someone who spends his working day thinking about the future and all things digital care about the IWC 59210 mechanical watch movement? A modern quartz movement watch can be more accurate.

    An analogue watch has some advantages over a digital display in terms of legibility and the ability to see how much time one has until an appointment, but that can have quartz movement behind it.

    I like a mechanical watch movement because:

    • The movement of a good mechanical watch is an object of beauty in itself. The great watch companies take as much pride in making the insides look as beautiful as the watch exterior. It is rare to see that detail in the design of modern products outside those designed by Apple
    • You have a lifelong relationship with a mechanical watch. Companies like Rolex will service your watch for you every few years or so and will even refurbish it if necessary. Patek Philippe have used the same strapline in their advertisements for years: You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. Good quality design is products that you will want to own until you wear them out, or they wear you out. It is also a good way towards creating more environmentally friendly products and I haven’t even got on to challenge of battery disposal…
    • Finally, I like to be able to know the time all the time. I wear my watch in bed, in the shower, in fact it only comes off if I find it getting in the way typing. Part of this comes from having done scuba diving when I was younger; your watch became part of you. I had a quartz watch and moisture got in stopping the watch dead. A friend had an automatic watch movement in a Seiko which had a little damp in but kept on going. Both of use eventually invested in good quality Swiss watches

    The IWC 59210 is a marvel of the watchmakers art. It holds up to eight days power when fully wound up and runs at 28,800 beats per hour which is a marvel for a mechanical device that small.
    IWC calibre 59210
    The IWC 59210 movement goes into the Portofino range of watches which have a case that is not as technical as the style of watches that I like, but make a nice dress watch if you like that kind of thing. More related content can be found here.

  • iPhone pragmatism

    Despite working as a digital strategist and creative thinker (whatever the hell that means) agencyside, I have a very pragmatic relationship with technology both past and present from the iPhone to my original Mac. I have had Macs since 1989, primarily because they were the closest thing I found to a computer that just worked.

    I had analogue mobile phones from my time DJing and having friends who worked in cell phone service centres. My first phone that I had to buy was digital, the mobile phone was a Motorola; mainly because One2One (now Everything Everywhere) sold a package where you paid just over 100 pounds and had a phone for 12 months, with a small amount of inbuilt local call time. At the time I used it as a more reliable version of my pager. Even back then SMS proved to be more reliable than the pager that I had used previously

    I went from Motorola to Ericsson, mostly because Ericsson handsets were really well made and then moved to Nokia when Ericsson merged its handset business with Sony. I moved from Nokia to the Apple iPhone and a Samsung feature phone for two reasons:

    • Apple had an address book that worked. My address book didn’t brick the phone. I haven’t had that bad problems with data corruption and it syncs with my computer. It has all the productivity applications I enjoyed on my Nokia phones like MetrO and QuickOffice. The iPhone also has major flaws. For instance, the browser isn’t great, but I put up with it because I can sync my bookmarks for it across from the Safari browser on my Mac. The biggest think that I miss was the Nokia keyboard and laptop layout on the Nokia E90 Communicator
    • My Samsung phone could take two SIMs which is a boon for traveling. This is something that most phone manufacturers don’t provide for markets outside the developing world

    My iPhone was also expensive, like the price of a cheap laptop kind of expensive, which means that I look at it in a different way to previous smartphones. Instead of getting rid of my phone every 18 months, I am thinking closer to three years, just like my laptop.  An additional factor  is that whilst the first iPhones were a radical leap forward,  the iPhone 4 and 4S don’t have sufficient must-have value for me to move on until my current phone dies or the next iteration of the iPhone comes out.

    Now I wouldn’t say that I am an everyman for the iPhone using population; but this has to have some effect on sales. For every iPad that Apple sells there maybe at least a few iPhone upgrades put on hold as an opportunity cost.

  • Barusch gets story wrong

    Last week I commented on a blog post by Ronald Barusch called Dealpolitik: Yahoo!’s survival plan. In his post Barusch critiques Yahoo! Inc.’s pursuit of different options for the company. Part of his critique reflected on Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for the company three years ago:

    True, with hindsight the Yahoo board made a world-class blunder in turning down the Microsoft $33 per share bid over three years ago. But the board has to make the best of today’s situation.

    Whilst I agree with the Barusch central thesis that the company needs a new direction or possibly a new owner, and don’t have any particular sympathy for the board, I don’t think that the argument for new management at Yahoo! should centre around the Microsoft takeover bid.

    I explained in my comment to the Barusch article that whilst I didn’t have sympathy for the Yahoo! board, I also didn’t think that the whole picture of the Microsoft deal was reflected in the article. I think that there is a serious argument to be made for the Microsoft deal being a flawed structure, with a distinct possibility of it not a viable deal in the first place. There are two main strands to my thinking:

    • First of all the destruction of value meant that many Microsoft shareholders were opposed to the deal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a bad deal for all Yahoo! shareholders. (Only the ones that initially opposed the deal. Since the Microsoft deal at the time offered cash for the first 50 per cent of shares and Microsoft shares for the last 50 per cent shares. Given the state of Microsoft’s share price over the past decade or so and the state of the Microsoft online services line, cash would be preferable.)
    • The second and more important strand is that the deal had a number of antitrust roadblocks to cross. Whilst Microsoft is a bit player in the search engine advertising market, it is already a convicted monopolist in its server and tools business. This important because Yahoo! is not only a media company; but also a key contributor to a number of critical open source projects; having contributed to PHP, the Debian Linux distribution and Hadoop. Given this, the deal would have been exposed to antitrust risk in the EU. A second risk of antitrust would have come from the Japanese and Chinese markets were you have national internet champions in Softbank (majority owner of Yahoo! Japan) and Alibaba trying to escape the clutches of Yahoo! instead being acquired by Microsoft

    It was interesting that neither Microsoft, the media or Yahoo! broached the likely antitrust implications publicly at that time. Which I suspect is partly a credit to good execution by Microsoft’s corporate communications team.

    The Microsoft bid was a powerful lever that helped Microsoft secure the search deal it wanted with Yahoo!. Though Microsoft has failed to reap the full commercial gains partly because it’s AdCenter technology wasn’t as good as the Yahoo! Panama project it replaced – and neither were as good as Google’s own advertising technology.

    What should the Yahoo! board have done, and what should it do next probably has more options in it than football fans arguing over the performance of their team manager and I don’t have the definitive answer.

    But I suspect my comment may have been bounced from the Wall Street Journal Online site because it throws a spanner in the works of the Mr Barusch. His nice, neat storyline with the Microsoft deal opportunity as an inciting incident into a downward spiral of a digital greek tragedy. Mr Barusch and his colleagues don’t want the evidence to get in the way of a good story

    As an aside, it also shows how powerful storytelling is as a way to game media | public relations in favour of the PR over the journalist. People like stories, they think in stories and it makes it easier to efficiently and effectively file easy copy or blog posts.

    So if the Microsoft hostile takeover bid wasn’t the inciting incident what was?

    My own personal opinion is that spiral probably goes at least as far back as Yahoo! overpaying for its purchase of Broadcast.com – a business that had some 13.5 million USD in revenue per quarter, acquired for 5.9 billion USD in Yahoo! stock back in 1999. It was a bad deal, and it adversely affected Yahoo!’s approach to strategy, risk-taking, decision-making and speed of execution. This is likely to affected Yahoo!’s thinking on its attempted acquisition of a young Google.

    I believe that the damaged approach to strategy was a major factor in Brad Garlinghouse’s famous peanut butter memo from 2006 (though as Techcrunch summised it was also a political power-play and as I mentioned at the time, Garlinghouse was as much to blame in many respects as other senior executives.)

    Investor Paul Graham thought that Yahoo! was screwed by cultural traits baked into the organisation’s cultural DNA as far back as 1998:

    • Less interested in innovating in advertising, because this would expose customers to the reality that they were overpaying for their inventory.Yahoo! was build on brand advertising driven by reach not by targeted ads so they missed why search advertising (and a good search engine was so important)
    • Yahoo! thought of itself as a media company rather than a technology innovator; back then technology companies sold software rather than advertising, so by default they must be a media business
    • Fear of Microsoft – whilst Microsoft is a big ugly mean company now, it is nothing compared to the beast it was before the internet became mainstream and the Judge Jackson trial. Graham thought that Yahoo! tried to define itself out of the footprint of Microsoft. All of this meant that Yahoo! wasn’t a Google, Facebook or Twitter-style technical talent magnet

  • Ten books that influenced my view of the world

    I started thinking about what shaped me and came away with this list of ten books that influenced my view of the world. Even the nature of being able to read was a major mind opening experience. The world opened up from me from our neighbourhood and occasional visits to the family farm in Ireland. Starting off the ten books is a series, which is probably cheating but its my list.

    Happy Venture reading system books with Dick and Dora. My first memory of reading was about a boy named Dick and a girl named Dora. They had a pet dog called Nip and a cat called Fluff. Part of the reason why these books appeared is that I related to Dick. Although I didn’t have a sister or a cat, I did share the house with a willful yellow Labrador that would get up to similar devilment to Nip. There was something of the haiku about the sentences in the book:

    This is Dick.

    Run, Dick, run.

    Nip is a dog.

    Nip, run to Dick.

    What I didn’t know to much later is that the books were carefully crafted by a husband and wife team of Australian educationalists who had done a lot of research during the second world war on primary school learning. Fred and Eleanor Schonell’s books were the standard reading system for English pretty much everywhere outside the US. There are some who think that the US Dick and Jane books by Gray and Sharp plagarised the Happy Venture books. The Schonells also created the next stage you went on to reading the Wide Range Readers. If you want to blame anybody for this blog, Fred and Eleanor Schonell would be as good a people as any.

    Ireland: a history by Robert Kee. Growing up at the end of the 1970s was a complicated time. The world was a more chaotic place than it is now (though I realise that maybe hard to believe). My Dad believed that I needed to have a good grasp of my own history and that would allow me to drive my own path. So he got me to read this dense academic history book that was originally written to accompany Ireland: a TV history – a co-production between RTÉ & the BBC. Kee was a British journalist who’d worked on Panorama with the series producer Jeremy Isaacs. Isaacs had produced The World At War in the early 1970s and my Dad had been a fan of the series because of its thoroughness and multifaceted viewpoint. To be honest with you I dreaded reading this book at the time because it was so big and there was so many words, but my Dad’s rationale stuck with me.

    How It Works – Marshall Cavendish part works. My Dad used to read a lot whilst working shifts in the shipyard. He used to buy pulp paperbacks by the likes of Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean from a second-hand bookseller in Birkenhead market. One day he came home after being to the bookseller that lunch time. Instead of the usual couple of paperbacks was an open cardboard box under his arm and inside was a 50-volume part-work magazine published by Marshall Cavendish called How It Works. I used to dip in and out of it coming out of it with the answers to questions that I never knew I wanted to ask. The articles were generally better written and illustrated than the comparable Wikipedia article and there was a serendipity in randomly picking an issue and reading. Marshall Cavendish have re-released this at different times in different editions and with different numbers of volumes. I got rid of our box of How It Works magazines and instead managed to buy them as an encyclopedia set with much more robust bindings a few years later.

    The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. I remember being at primary school and hating having to pretend being Bilbo creeping around the dragon’s lair as some sort of half-assed drama class. I can still remember vividly the polished wooden floor feeling slippery beneath my socked feet. It was accompanied by the BBC dramatisation of the book which the school had a recording of. The recording inspired me to read Tolkien’s book despite the acting lesson trauma. The Hobbit acted as an on-ramp to the Lord Of The Rings series, I was fascinated by the intricate structure of it all: the multi-layered story that Tolkien created.

    Modern Petroleum Technology – Institute of Petroleum. I had wanted to work in the oil industry for two main reasons: at the time I was living at the top of the Mersey basin which was dominated by oil refineries and chemical plants. Whilst environmentalists may see them as monstrosities in my child eyes they were a silver and fiery cathedral. The second influence was John Wayne’s portrayal of Red Adair in Hellfighters.

    My Dad managed to borrow an old edition of Modern Petroleum Technology and I read through both volumes to help me prepare for a career in the oil industry. I eventually left the oil industry to study in marketing at university, but the experience that I gained put me in good stead for my subsequent roles.

    The Art Of War – Sun Tzu. Despite having 13 chapters, The Art of War is a slim volume and an easy read. I dip into this book every so often and have done for the past 20 years. Everything else written on strategy is layered in unnecessary window dressing. I first picked up a copy of The Art of War while I was at university. There was a bookshop in the town which sold discounted textbooks way below price. I went in there looking for marketing books to broaden my source of references and came away with my first copy of this book and Accidental Empires.

    Principles of Marketing – Philip Kotler. Doing my degree meant spending a lot of time with this book in a blue and grey Prentice Hall cover. Kotler’s work is thought to be the bible for marketers. To be honest with you, by the time I had finished my course I hated Kotler, his book sat on my shelf taunting me. It is the only book that I have burned. Reading Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow made me realise how much of marketing at the time was based on the opinions of old white academics rather than rigorous research.

    Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely – I came across Accidental Empires in the library at university and it was a revelation. Mark Stephens aka Robert X. Cringely had lived and breathed Silicon Valley, working at employee number 12 at a very young Apple Computer; so he made the ideal guide to the technology industry. Unlike most books that provide a background in technology, Cringely wrote in an informal style and gave the warts and oil side to the story. The book gave me a really good primer on the technology sector which came in handy when I went to work in my first agency role for The Weber Group in their London office. Despite the fact that the book was last updated in 1997, it is still worthwhile getting a copy from your local book shop.

    Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig. I’d done and seen a lot by the time I got to college. One of the things I used to do was read a lot, especially whilst working a boring shift. I had an older friend called Mark who I had met through a summer job. He was well educated, but bummed out and used to smoke a lot of cannibis. The 9- 5 of repairing electric tools and concrete mixers gave him what we’d now call work life balance. He switched me on to ZATAOMM. On getting to college, during my final year there I spent a good deal of time sharing a house with a fellow ZATAOMM devotee. I still go back to this work and the follow-up Lila to reset my inner compass when life throws me a curve ball.

    Ogilvy on Advertising – David Ogilvy. Everything that we do whether we realise it at the time or not builds on or is a derivative of the work of people who have gone before us. Reading Ogilvy on Advertising early in my agency career brought that home as I continually saw ideas redressed and polished for new audiences. For instance, some of the posts that I have written here to do with the ethics of social media mirror the same level of respect that Ogilvy had for the audience of his advertisement campaigns.

    Those were my ten books, I hope to add to this list rather than remaining static. What ten books have influenced you? More book related content here.

    Also check out my bookshelf of non-fiction recommendations here.