Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Running Money by Andy Kessler

    Andy Kessler’s Running Money, Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets And My Hunt For The Big Score is a well written set of memoirs from a technology fund manager. Together with his partner-in-crime Fred Kittler, Kessler managed to survive the highs and lows of the technology industry in the late 1990’s, he tells the story in a very articulate way that is as powerful as Robert X Cringely’s book Accidential Empires. The expansion of the tech sector is told using the industrial revolution as an analogy.

    One of the first things portrayed in Running Money (and other books) is that the tech sector actually revolves around a relatively small group of people. In addition to writing his memoirs Kessler tries to make sense of it all and proves very illuminating to readers. In this respect it is far better than The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.

    Post-industrial, IP-driven economy

    The book looks beyond the technology sector to put a positive spin on the huge US deficit. Running Money explains that America is now an IP economy and assumes that the developing world will follow on behind as a wave sweeps across national borders moving the economic status through hunter gatherer, agriculture/extractive, industrial, service and intellectual property economies. In some respects the US with its IP economy is following Europe; what is the Swiss banking system, LVMH’s luxury brands and the continents big pharmaceutical firms if not part of an IP ecosystem?

    Conclusion

    I would recommend anybody to read Kessler’s book. I thought I would end however on some of the differences in viewpoint I have with his writing. Where some of Kessler’s writing differs from my own perspective is when he outlines his analysis of the current state of affairs and some of his future vision:

    • Kessler considers markets to be a perfect instrument in the long term; which I am not convinced about at all. Think the great depression, the S&L debacle of the 1980s for instance, markets can break and require occasional interference
    • The neat model of China being an industrial workshop for US intellectual property is simplistic. China is fast moving into building its own brands from mobile handsets to luxury watches (the first Chinese astronaut went into space with a relative expensive Chinese brand of chronograph. China and India has a huge film industry. It isn’t only China either, Japan is now a source of numerous fashion trends, hot movies in Korea have their scripts optioned by Hollywood, some of the best advertising creative teams come from South America and India)
    • Kessler talks about the entertainment industry as being part of this US IP powerhouse but this fails to see the many flaws and mismanagment in the music, media and film industries that make Worldcom seem well managed. The RIAA and MPAA have hid behind piracy to hide a deeper malaise highlighted in Michael Wolf’s Autumn of the Moguls
    • Kessler doesn’t talk about what the inevitable post-intellectual property economy looks like

    More book reviews here.

  • The English Disease

    In the 1970’s through to the present day the English Disease referred to the reputation of a small minority of football supporters from England with a penchant for violent behaviour, the likes of which has not been seen in the US since the Rodney King riots.Within the technology sector there is another English Disease, this has been touched upon by Mike King, managing director of Johnson King in this op-ed which ran in Tuesday’s FT Creative Business. I would argue that it merits as much if not more attention as the organised violence of English football hooligans as is gnaws away at the future prosperity of the UK.

    This disease is a chronic lack of ambition and vision and manifests itself in different ways:

    • Mike complains that British start-ups are reluctant to invest in marketing and PR to enhance their reputation and grow their business. They often do not recognise the value of it and even where they do, the pathetically low budget put into marketing is below the critical mass required to deliver results. There is a similar attitude whether the management team are novices or drawing down a serious package as an ‘experienced entrepreneur’. Yet the most respected businessman for these people would be Richard Branson; a modern-day Barnum who built his empire with large doses of shameless self-promotion. Mike owning a PR agency was particularly interested in this aspect of the equation! However this is only a small part of the picture.
    • Funding is not forthcoming; venture capital in the technology sector is based on trying to achieve a ten-fold return on the money. UK start-ups have lower expectations of themselves, they do not share their American colleagues dreams of being the next Oracle, Apple, Microsoft or IBM. Consequently the technology business is trapped in a self reinforcing prophetic circle, a black hole with an expanding event horizon sucking away the vision and dreams. This in turn encourages the fund managers to husband their limited cash as much as they can by cutting back on ‘unnecessary expenditure’ on things like marketing and looking for an early exit strategy through acquisition or technology licencing agreements. It is not because the UK does not have the expertise and the smarts:
    1. US chip pioneer LSI Logic was founded by Wilf Corrigan, a Liverpool docker’s son made good
    2. Apple Computer’s sizzle is in large part to a product design team headed by Geordie designer Jonathan Ives who has designed every successful product from the original bondi blue iMac to the latest iPods
    3. Cambridge boffin Alan Turing was arguably the inventor of first programmable computer and laid down the defining test for true artificial intelligence
    4. LCDs: liquid crystals were invented in the UK, but made Japanese companies rich

    The problem is that the English disease is pervasive, it affects the value of houses, how much your future pension is going to be worth and what jobs the UK citizens of tomorrow are likely to have. The FTSE has underperformed US rivals for the past decade because it does not have its share of high-growth technology companies. Vodafone and mmO2 is just a seller of wireless services, just as much a merchant as supermarket chain Tesco, Lastminute.com is an e-tailer echoing the Napoleonic-era cliche of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. ARM Holdings, the UK’s leading chip company, is a chip designer that can barely be described as a medium-sized enterprise. Software company Autonomy is noticable only for its lack of peers. Cambridge’s Silicon Fen is actually a laughable Silicon Sahara with precious few oasises.

    With such a poor technology sector, money for investment sloshes around in management buyouts (with the intention of trying to squeeze more value out of mature businesses), a cash bloated property market and overseas where entrepreneurs generally have more vision. Thus setting the UK up for economic underachievement ad infinitum. Instead the UK will be an economy based on the export of a small amount of golf sweaters, rainwear, antiques and pre-prepared curry cooking sauces. It would be side splittingly funny if it wasn’t so tragic. More related posts here.

  • Skype

    I was recommended Skype VoIP software from my friend Uri. I had not tried voice over the net since I worked on one of the pioneers in this area, an Israeli company called Delthathree. I expected metallic sounding voices and gapped and stuttered speech as signals would be distorted and delayed by network traffic. Skype is a peer-to-peer voice over the net application, you pay nothing for calls between computers and low prices between computers and phones.

    This is nothing new Net2Phone did this back in the day, both Yahoo! Messenger and Apple’s iChat allows you to do video conferencing and voice calls. Skype has something else, sizzle.

    Skype’s client software arrived just as broadband has become mainstream. Secondly the player looks and works really well, Skype had the underground cool heritage of Kazaa – both shared the same development team based somewhere in the Latvia.

    Finally the Orrin Hatch pestilence of anything that doesn’t cost the consumer must be bad has co-opted authority against open source, P2P communities and telecoms providers against any web service they would like to tax to feather their own nests.

    Usability in the Mac OS X client is second to none and very intuitive. The call quality very good as well. At least comparable to Apple iChat. The call to phones is better than VoIP services that I have used in the past. And has the convenience of being able to be done from my Mac. Encryption of conversations would be nice just to wind the powers that be up a bit more! The way I look at it, the more we make them work to read our personal mail, the better the peace dividend in five years or so as the NSA has had to increase its computing power and write wicked cool software to cope. Hell, it would be un-American not to help be everything they can be! More related posts here. 

  • Six Days by Jeremy Bowen

    I recently finished reading Six Days – How the 1967 war shaped the Middle East by Jeremy Bowen. Bowen is a famous BBC journalist who seems to have researched the book well and writes in an easy-to-read style. Bowen was in the region at the time and has supplemented his experience with later research.

    I decided to read the book as I was curious to read more about the Six-Day War. The war had been  an important event in Moshe Dayan’s autobiography. If you have the chance, Dayan’s autobiography Story of My Life is a great read for a counterpoint to Bowen.

    Bias

    In Six Days Bowen tells a story that no one involved will be happy with and covers the shooting and sinking of the USS Liberty in such a way that it prods your mind to search for answers.

    The book is as much about the failings of the surrounding Arab states and the Soviet Union as it is about Israeli aggression, though Bowen’s telling of the story leans heavily in favour of the Arabs. So long as you are aware of this slant its fine. His work doesn’t editorialise that much about it.

    Mosh Dayan

    Dayan was painted in the book as a political opportunist, at the expense of illustrating his now legendary pragmatism. I found the internal strife and prejudices between different groups of the Israelis very interesting, particularly the way the Zionists born in Israel looked down on the Jews from the diaspora who had survived world war two as being weak.

    In conclusion

    I would recommend that anyone interested should read this book. The Six Day War was an event that shaped the modern Middle East as we know it. I would also recommend that you do not rely exclusively on Bowen’s version of events and interpretation of events. Its a complex issue and you need to read multiple viewpoints. Bowen’s book is a good first start in your reading about the war. More book reviews here.

  • .mac upgrade

    After the devastation that occurred in Florida by hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne signs of a long running typhoon struck in Cupertino, California. The effects of the typhoon centred on the marketing department of Apple Computer and its data centre. Following on from the launch of GMail earlier this year, Apple has upped the capacity of my email account almost tenfold to 125MB for mail and an additional 125MB for online storage.I am one of the original paying customers for .mac services so it is no coincidence that this improvement has occurred in the two weeks running up to the annual subscription payment on my account. Whichever way you look at it, the improvement is welcome and is the most important of a raft of tweaks that Apple has implemented. The alias email address is what I use to give Renaissance Chambara its own contact details.

    Here is the text from Apple announcing the changes:

    Dear .Mac Member,

    We’re excited to announce that your .Mac membership now comes with 250 MB of combined .Mac Mail and iDisk storage. And, in another move designed to make life easier as traffic grows heavier and files grow larger, we’ve increased the maximum email message size to 10 MB.

    If you haven’t tried them yet, be sure to check out two additional enhancements recently added to .Mac Mail. There’s a new online spell checker with a customizable dictionary available when you use your .Mac Mail account through a browser. And you can now use aliases as email addresses either for fun or as protection when you need to provide an email address but aren’t entirely comfortable with the requester. If your concerns turn out to be justified, you can then simply remove the alias and create a new one the next time you face a similar situation.

    We value your membership and hope you enjoy these enhancements to your .Mac service.

    Sincerely,

    The .Mac Team Respect to the Sarasota Herald Tribune for the hurricane facts that I have linked to in this entry.