Jim Morris's Thought of the Week (or month, or year, ...)

Innovating with Information

2008-05-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

The 2008 Alamden Institute had the theme Innovating with Information. There were two days of excellent, varied speakers.Hal Varian mused about why many innovations occur almost simultaneously. He suggested looking at all the conditions surrounding them rather than the innovator. Eli Whitney might get credit for interchangeable parts but there was a long lead up to them going back to the French of

Cisco’s Connected Urban Development Conference

2008-02-25T09:31:00.000-08:00

John Chambers made a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiatives Foundation to do something about the environment and the Connected Urban Development is it. My initial suspicion that it was Cisco-serving was dispelled. From Chambers on down, all the Cisco people at the conference were focused on higher goals, were businesslike, and sincere. Because 50% of the world’s population and 80% of the

How to get attention.

2008-02-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

Here are my suggestions with how to communicate using various tools, ordered by increasing urgency of message.1. Post an event on a calendar or a public calendar. If someone is curious they can look.2. Invite, via Google Calendar, someone to an event or meeting.3. Send an email via Google Calendar to the invitee.4. Send a regular email to someone.5. Send a repeat email to someone with "[Second

We Need Debate Referees!

2008-01-16T21:06:00.000-08:00

Referees play a vital role in sports. Since political campaigns verge on being a sport, why don't we have referee's who say "Five yards for evading the question" or "Fifteen yards for talking bullshit"?The referee is a relatively recent invention. According to Wikipedia:The term referee originated in association football (soccer). Originally the team captains would consult with each other in

Al Gore

2007-12-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

As Al was getting his Nobel Prize I was finishing his book, The Assault on Reason. Chapter 1 is an intriguing assault on television, arguing that it has destroyed citizen activism. Chapers 2 through 8 are an assault on Bush, rehashing the past six years. Chapter 9 is a call for protecting and exploiting the internet to renew public communication.

Climate Change

2007-12-01T21:42:00.000-08:00

All of my reading and writing energies recently have gone into exploring climate change issues. See The Temperate Zone for a wiki. I'd appreciate advice about both the content and ways in which I could build that document into a growing forum for discussion.

The Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change Conference

2007-11-10T16:06:00.000-08:00

I spent two days at this meeting in Sacramento. They had been hoping for about 120 people and 500 showed up. There were excellent talks and the vibe was great. How could it not be with 500 idealistic, altruistic activists there? My take-aways: When marketing an innovation you need to decide what to present as new, what to present as old, and what to hide. Edison said Electricity was

Second Generation Diasporans

2007-10-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from a trip to Korea and was struck again by my exemption from Asian social discipline. It's nice that they don't mind our ignorance of their language and social customs. I almost think I could behave boorishly by American standards and get away with it.I also realized how hard it must be for American children of Asians to visit these countries. They look like natives so are

It doesn't matter if climate change is our fault.

2007-10-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

There are many issues about climate change, but arguing about whether we caused it or not is not worth our attention. The important questions are about what to do about it going forward."Breakthrough", a new book by Nordhaus and Schellenberger is a bracing lecture about getting beyond guilt.A good test of one's feelings about this is how your react to putting a mirror between the Earth and Sun to

Truth in Subject Lines

2007-09-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

Using Google Reader, I find it increasingly important that writers use the subject line of their blog entries to accurately represent the content. One of the virtues of pay-to-click advertising is that advertisers are motivated to do so. Is there any way to motivate bloggers in the same way? Alternatively, Google Reader could try applying a little artificial intelligence to the content to

MemeSourcing.com

2007-09-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

I would like a service that traced the origins of an idea or phrase. I’ll call it “MemeSourcing.” I would enter a phrase like “swift boating” and up would come a picture of a directed graph showing the people who said it, plus a theory of who learned it from whom. Before the web, such an endeavor would be the task of obsessive scholars hanging out in libraries and newspaper morgues. William

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

2007-08-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

Every news outlet behaves as if its readers read it exclusively. Each day the New York Times writes the next installment of a continuing story where its last one ended the day before. Don’t they know I’ve been getting hourly updates on the story? My biggest problem as a news junky is avoiding getting the same information repeatedly. Information retrieval experts like Jaime Carbonell noticed

For a Regenerative Blogosphere

2007-08-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

Like many bloggers, I’ve come to believe the traditional media is suspect—not criminally so, but simply because of natural forces. It was all symbolized for me by the spectacle of David Gregory, the enfant terrible of the White House press corps dancing with Karl Rove at a correspondents’ party. Once you get big you get co-opted; there’s no escape. The symbol of incorruptibility was I. F.

Advice for Newspaper Editors

2007-07-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

The printing-press-to-paper-boy distribution system is going away fast; get out while you can. Google and Craigslist are taking away your publisher’s want-ad business while they distribute your news stories for free. Your skill at discerning what is newsworthy will be valuable in the internet age, but you have to find a way to monetize it as the existing system disintegrates. Start a blog, if

The Selfish Gene vs. Global Warming

2007-06-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

Why would greedy US investors create clean technology and desperate Chinese buy it so as to spare some cheese-eating Europeans from catching a chill? That is our global warming problem in a nutshell. In Collapse, Jared Diamond presents extensive evidence that humans faced with a disaster that is generations away won’t act to avoid it. Each chapter covers a collapsed or threatened

John Seely Brown on Service Innovation

2007-06-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

The SRII symposium last week was meant to persuade us that research on services is needed. The most compelling speaker was John Seely Brown who told stories rather than lecturing. Hebeleives that many important innovations have already appeared if we could only recognize them. · From a study of an accounts-payable department, he learned that

Microsoft is Nice!

2007-05-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

Last month Microsoft Silicon Valley hosted a Carnegie Mellon/UC Berkeley conference on the New Software Industry. They provided a nice auditorium and an excellent lunch. Generally, Microsoft has been a good neighbor to our campus, which is one freeway stop away.Every Silicon Valley business discussion has an implicit subtext of "How do we avoid being crushed by Microsoft?" or "How do we overthrow

VCs: Yes to DW, DE. No to OS, AAA.

2007-05-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

At a recent venture capitalist panel hosted by Carnegie Mellon West and UC Berkeley (http://west.cmu.edu/sofcon/5404216.html), VCs Ann Winblad, Bill Burnham, and Scott Russell made the following suggestions:Invest in the Deep Web. Seek out data sources that are public, yet hard to find for Google et al. and build services based upon them. Opportunities like the sources for auto navigation systems

A New Pittsburgh Project

2007-04-13T12:43:00.000-07:00

Some friends and I, who met on the internet, are mounting a project to unite the thousands of spiritual Pittsburghers in the world. Some live there, some used to live there, some attended college there, and some are just Steeler fans. Ultimately, we hope this movement can help the actual Pittsburgh. Local foundations are supportive, and Carnegie Mellon has hired Donald Bonk to spearhead the

Gasoline is the New Tobacco

2007-04-05T11:27:00.000-07:00

For centuries, folk wisdom had it that smoking was bad for you; but it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists established a link between smoking and disease. Controversy continued, but after the US Surgeon General and Congress put the warning labels on cigarette packs, behavior started to change. When I moved to Palo Alto in the 1970s, smoking three packs a day, I was assaulted with anti-smoking

Understanding Bureaucrats

2007-03-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

I often find myself in bitch-sessions about how unreasonable bureaucrats are. Everyone has his or her story. Are these people from another planet? They're not, but you should understand their situation and motives. For most, they are in a job with no positive goals and little upside potential. They have been put in place to enforce rules, reduce an organization's risk, and control others. When

Reframing Education

2007-03-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

In Reframing Business, Richard Normann outlines a principled approach to value chains, outsourcing, and restructuring. A key idea is to reframe the whole customer experience in the way IKEA did. He suggests that services thought to be secondary to products, e.g. maintenance and updates should be considered primary. For example, your cell phone is just the physical link to telephone service and is

Campus IT Strategy Challenge

2007-03-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

Carnegie Mellon’s Andrew system was created in an era of closed systems twenty-five years ago. The internet decisively ended that era by connecting all the world’s programmers, bringing forth a storm of innovation and diversity in software applications. Now, students arrive at college with their own computers, software, games, and internet habits fully formed. Generally, the services they can get

Twenty-five Years of Andrew

2007-02-21T17:09:00.000-08:00

Twenty-five years ago, I started a project at Carnegie Mellon that created a campus computing system called Andrew. IBM paid for the development. Parts of the system still run at Carnegie Mellon and other places, but it’s time to rethink campus computing strategies. While I ponder that, here is an essay I wrote back then. If some of the technology ideas seem strange, please remember it was

Dave Farber: Master Blogger

2007-02-14T02:34:00.000-08:00

Dave Farber has often been described as the grandfather of the internet because so many of his students made crucial contributions. He’s also the grandfather of blogging: his “interesting people” mailing list has been running for several years. It is read and contributed to by a Who’s Who of technology and policy. You can read the archives at http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/

BlackBerry + Google beats Windows Mobile

2007-02-04T13:14:00.000-08:00

I spent a week hassling with a T-mobile Dash phone, taking a deep dive into Outlook, Exchange Server, and Windows Mobile. I figured I had just bought my last laptop because I’d be running everything from a handheld in a few years. I wanted to explore the state-of-the-art Windows support. Yech! Outlook is as nasty as ever. Giving up on integrating my laptop and phone, I bought a BlackBerry Pearl

Bluetooth Makes a Cable Look like an Elegant Solution

2007-01-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

When my Treo 600 finally died, I bought a Bluetooth-equipped phone and looked forward to joining all those hip people with flashing blue lights in their ears. After slogging through an incredible maze – get the earpiece to sniff around, burrow into the MS menus on the phone to find “Add Device,” and give the “0000” password – I finally got to listen to my phone through an earpiece. Who were the

Why Basecamp Doesn’t Work

2007-01-16T13:34:00.000-08:00

I often run ad hoc projects using email. We all use the “reply-to-all” command and attach Word and Excel documents. As a project extends and grows, this method begins to lose its effectiveness. Versions of files get confused, and a new arrival can get acclimated only by reading a lot of wandering mail, if one can even find it. Basic follow-up is difficult.Embarking on a project involving twenty

Your Name Here, Pennsylvania

2007-01-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

Pittsburghers are grousing that their Mellon Arena will soon be called “The Bank of New York Arena,” which would make this the first name change for a Pittsburgh sports venue. They would prefer it be torn down. They should get over it.Last week I drove past Oakland’s newly renamed McAfee Coliseum and Oracle Arena. Oakland is a model of stability compared to San Francisco, which should use the

A Huge Demographic Difference

2006-12-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley are very different. The following two charts illustrate it. However, the profiles of Carnegie Mellon graduate students are a lot more like those of Silicon Valley than Allegheny County. Figure 1. Comparing Age ProfilesFigure 2. Racial DistributionFor more comparisons between Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh, see http://www.pittsburghquarterly.com/pages/winter2007/

Can Computers Be Culpable?

2006-11-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

If they can’t, it will impede their use in many applications. While I’m confident that all the cognitive functions of my administrative assistant will be able to be duplicated someday, there are some functions, like taking the blame for missed appointments or “fudging” about my whereabouts, that can’t be duplicated. If I tell you that my electronic calendar forgot the appointment, you will tell

The US Needs a Sputnik

2006-11-06T10:56:00.000-08:00

The figures for students entering computer science are dismal. There are fewer CS students now than in 1980! At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects huge job growth in the computing sector in the next 30 years. US science students prefer biology, where many fewer jobs will exist in this same period of time. If this situation continues, all those computer jobs will be filled by

Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to be Computer Scientists

2006-10-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

This is an emerging opinion among computer professionals. Why? Biotechnology is the next big thing.Foreign students are swarming into computer science. Enough of them are better than US students that they will drive down the price of computer-savvy talent. Computer science remains a second-ranked intellectual discipline. At MIT and Berkeley, it is embedded

SaaS

2006-09-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

SaaS is pronounced as “sass.” Not, as you might think from the spelling, “sauce.” “SaSS” might be a better acronym. Rather than “Software as a Service”, it could mean “Service as the Savior of Software.” The combination of the bust, open source, and off-shoring has made the software community glum. Larry Ellison declared it a goner and the president of Oracle Online, Tim Chou, wrote a book

Where is the Web Terminal Company?

2006-09-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

There have been many past attempts to create and sell the “Network Terminal,” most notably by Larry Ellison in the 1990’s. Now that improvements in broadband, Ajax, and the many SaaS applications are rolling out, selling a box that does nothing but browse the Web seems appropriate. My spec for such a machine would be a conventional PC with as much disk as I can afford, but it all belongs to the

Is the Bay Area Good for Entrepreneurs?

2006-09-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

“Duh,” you say? Well, according to Entrepreneur.com( http://www.entrepreneur.com/bestcities/region/large.html), we rank 28th, after such hotbeds of innovation as Columbus, Ohio! There is something suspicious about this ranking, but I’m beginning to wonder whether the Bay Area is, in fact, the best place to grow a business. Housing costs are a major issue along with the general expense of doing

Software Product Management and the Endless Beta

2006-08-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

When software delivers its service over the web, we can do business differently. Our ability to control our software’s environment—all of it that runs on our servers, anyway—is helpful. The ability to fix the software without distributing updates is helpful. Since interactions between users and servers go over the net, they can be recorded and replayed. All of these things can be exploited to

Silicon Valley 101

2006-08-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

This week, I have a question. Many people come to Silicon Valley to learn the magic of entrepreneurship and innovation. If we hosted a person here for a period of time, what could we do to maximize his or her learning and the likelihood that he or she would absorb the “magic”?Have the students work in a start-upHave successful entrepreneurs speakHave venture capitalists

A Robot Has A Ball

2006-08-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

It's too hot to think this week. Here is a cool video about the most recent Carnegie Mellon robot. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9117167457978282229.The video introduces a new type of mobile robot that balances on a ball rather than on legs or wheels. "Ballbot" is a self-contained, battery-operated, omnidirectional robot that balances dynamically on a single urethane-coated metal sphere

Can Computers Generate A Next Big Thing?

2006-07-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

Today's opinion is that the next big thing will not be in computers. Yes, the Internet is still growing, but venture capitalists want to invest in things whose future growth has not already been recognized by the market. As a result, investment, excitement, and the people who follow it are migrating to biotech, alternative energy, and other things not computing.However, we underestimate the

Technorati

2006-07-07T19:44:00.000-07:00

Technorati Profile

Who Will Be The Network Police?

2006-07-06T09:57:00.000-07:00

It’s common to describe an operating system as a traffic cop that makes programs share resources fairly. Historically, the resource to be managed was memory. However, in the age of increasingly less expensive memory, we might not need a policeman for that, but we surely do for other things.Screen space remains a scarce resource, not just because of screen size but also because human eyeballs can

Genius Trumps Literacy

2006-06-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

Paul McCartney, who turned 64 this week, can’t read or write sheet music. When he wrote a symphony, Standing Stone, he used a computer to translate his sounds into music notation: He played a keyboard connected to a computer that would then transcribe the music he played into sheet music.Muhammand was illiterate. So was Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.Finally, I’m sure Captain Kirk of the

Silicon Valley is Different

2006-06-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

When I look at Silicon Valley with my Pittsburgher’s eyes, several things strike me.It’s in California, but it’s not laid back. People here are overworked. Engineers and business men and women work 60-hour weeks, and they are the lucky ones. Service workers and others without high-tech skills work 80-hour weeks on multiple jobs. People here might seem friendlier than Easterners, but it’s the way

The Endless Beta

2006-06-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

Google News spent three years in Beta release, GMail is still in Beta, and the Google Earth T-shirt notes that the Earth itself has been in Beta for 4.7 billion years. I’m beginning to get the message: In the future, many software offerings will have a minimal Alpha phase before release to the public and no Gamma phase (if that’s what you call the period after Beta). The development team will get

Teleportation, Time Travel, and Immortality

2006-05-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

With Moore's law still in effect, we need some ambitions with exponential growth. Science fiction and religion express some of our deepest desires, so let's talk about the prospects for teleportation, time travel, and immortality. Our technology won't be able to deliver these in quite the way you want, but we can approximate them in just the way today's aircraft achieved Icarus's dream of flying

Is A.I. Crap?

2006-05-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

At a meeting of leading computer scientists, a presentation by one was followed by another asking, “Isn’t this just the old Artificial Intelligence crap?” Aside from showing that rudeness is alive and well in our field, the question is useful, and its premise should be addressed. Indeed, the announced purpose of the meeting was to breathe some life into an allegedly intellectually timid computer

Forward to the Past

2006-05-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

Remember 1984? The PC was shipping, the Macintosh was introduced, AT&T was about to be broken up, and our computing model was timesharing. Technology has changed a lot since then, but we're about to go back to a centralized computing model enabled by the Internet. The PC is about to become a high-powered AJAX terminal. And AT&T is back, too. Before you shudder, realize that AT&T created our model

Hire Lobbyists

2006-04-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

Three groups of interested parties threaten the growth and health of the Internet. The first group is the communications companies such as AT&T, Verizon, etc., which are fighting to control access and service levels on the Internet. The second group is the content providers such as publishing (including print, music, and video) companies and database providers who will fight to prevent universal

Sell to the Long Tail

2006-04-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

Chris Anderson (http://www.longtail.com/), the editor of Wired magazine, observes that an Internet bookstore like Amazon.com can stock 20 times as many titles as a physical book store. A graph showing total sales of all titles ranked by quantity would exhibit a very long curve approaching zero, its long tail. While many of those titles are sold in small numbers, they collectively comprise 20% of

Don’t Compete with Microsoft™

2006-04-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

The search for new software business models is partly based on the need to avoid Microsoft. The greatest fear of a software product developer is that Microsoft will offer your product for free, and venture capitalists will often ask entrepreneurs how they intend to compete with Microsoft. However, not competing with Microsoft is easier said than done - Microsoft took away Netscape’s oxygen by

Use Advertising to Make Money

2006-04-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

If you are thinking of a business based on a web service, Goggle and Yahoo! offer you a business model that simplifies your life. Give the service for free but, to generate revenue, provide relevant advertising links. You eliminate the worries about pricing, collecting for services, and other business details, allowing you to focus on what’s really critical – creating a service that attracts a

Serve Software Engineers

2006-03-31T21:08:00.000-08:00

Clayton Christiansen suggests exploiting intense competition at points on the value chain by working upstream or downstream from those points of high competition. The downstream play is more obvious – competitive forces should result in lower prices, so one should be a buyer.The upstream play is what arms merchants do – they sell tools to the guys who are desperate to gain an edge. The global

Use Open Source Software.

2006-03-24T21:09:00.000-08:00

In the earlier days of the computer business, computer companies gave their software away to encourage hardware sales. As time went by, companies realized that selling software was lucrative as well. However, a group of programmers led by Richard Stallman created a movement that encouraged the free exchange of software. These progressive programmers believed that software and all other

Hire Great Software Engineers.

2006-03-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

In the software business you need the best minds you can get. Software engineers not only know programming but can design products, create highly reliable systems, and control costs. Hire them from a competitor, hire computer scientists and hope they become engineers, or hire Carnegie Mellon graduates who are great software engineers out of the box.

Sell Service, Not Software

2006-03-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

Google, eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, and other successful new companies are built on software. Salesforce.com, a sales support enterprise, could have sold software licenses to businesses, but it decided to simply sell access to a web site.The most compelling case for not licensing software stems from the nature of software itself – it’s easy to change and easy to copy.Changing Software. Traditional

Ride the Internet wave

2006-02-24T21:15:00.000-08:00

Now that the Intenet has taken off, it will grow more and more rapidly until every man, woman, child, and dog on earth is connected. A gravitational attraction called Metcalfe's Law encourages people to join in.Economist Brian Arthur[1] predicts the Internet will follow a pattern similar to previous large infrastructure projects, such as canals and railroads, in which the infrastructure grows