Business & Economics: August 2013 Archives
James Altucher has a cheat sheet for starting and running your own business, but I contend that almost all the items on his 100-long list can be applied to almost any career, even when you're working for someone else. Everyone has customers, everyone has investors, and everyone wants to grow. Even if you aren't an entrepreneur you can apply these principles to make your work-self awesome.
It's interesting to me that Google's interview process is so onerous considering that they admit it has little predictive value. It seems to me that a policy of probationary hires might be more productive. Perform an initial screening to weed out the obviously unsuited and then bring candidates on for six-month contracts and see how they do. It would still be more onerous than what most companies do, but a six-month track record would certainly be predictive of future results.
Frankly, the use of highly-technical trick questions strikes me as embarrassing.
A stark warning for anyone in the research and development domain: Nokia wasted $40 billion on R&D over the past decade on useless projects that never turned into products. You can hire a lot of smart engineers and spend a lot of money, but if you don't organize it well your time and energy will be spent for nothing.
More than seven years before Apple Inc. AAPL +0.94% rolled out the iPhone, the Nokia team showed a phone with a color touch screen set above a single button. The device was shown locating a restaurant, playing a racing game and ordering lipstick. In the late 1990s, Nokia secretly developed another alluring product: a tablet computer with a wireless connection and touch screen--all features today of the hot-selling Apple iPad."Oh my God," Mr. Nuovo says as he clicks through his old slides. "We had it completely nailed."
Consumers never saw either device. The gadgets were casualties of a corporate culture that lavished funds on research but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market. ...
Nokia is losing ground despite spending $40 billion on research and development over the past decade--nearly four times what Apple spent in the same period. And Nokia clearly saw where the industry it dominated was heading. But its research effort was fragmented by internal rivalries and disconnected from the operations that actually brought phones to market.
Instead of producing hit devices or software, the binge of spending has left the company with at least two abandoned operating systems and a pile of patents that analysts now say are worth around $6 billion, the bulk of the value of the entire company. Chief Executive Stephen Elop plans to start selling more of that family silver to keep the company going until it can turn around its fortunes.
"If only they had been landed in products," Mr. Elop said of the company's inventions in a recent interview, "I think Nokia would have been in a different place."
Aside from the President's general approach to space policy I haven't liked many of Obama's ideas, but here's one I can get get completely behind: wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Eliminating these pseudo-governmental corporations will go a long way towards cleaning up the mortgage market and reducing government corruption.
He proposed to "wind down" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for the first time outlining his approach to overhauling the two giant mortgage-finance companies that were taken over by the government when they failed nearly five years ago. The companies, which Mr. Obama described in an appearance here as "not really government, but not really private sector," recently began to repay taxpayers."For too long, these companies were allowed to make big profits buying mortgages, knowing that if their bets went bad, taxpayers would be left holding the bag," the president said. "It was 'heads we win, tails you lose.' "
Since early 2011, the administration has voiced support for overhauling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which long benefited from an implicit government guarantee. Years ago the companies came to symbolize a self-dealing Washington culture beneficial to both parties, and especially Democrats, but Mr. Obama's remarks on what comes next were his most specific. For several years, the administration held back from revamping the mortgage-finance system for fear of rattling a weakened market.
The President also made some good observations on the long-time government emphasis on home-ownership:
"In the run-up to the crisis, banks and the government too often made everyone feel like they had to own a home, even if they weren't ready and didn't have the payment," Mr. Obama said. "That's a mistake we shouldn't repeat," he said. "Instead, let's invest in affordable rental housing."
As a homeowner myself I obviously want the demand for houses to be high, but we will all benefit if we can avoid another government-created housing bubble.
The modern information economy relies on cryptography for security, but what if the most widely-used cryptography algorithms are cracked in the next few years? RSA and Diffie-Hellman are everywhere, in every device you use, and their failure could bring the world to a stand-still.
Alex Stamos, chief technology officer of the online security company Artemis, led a presentation describing how he and three other security researchers studied recent publications from the insular world of academic cryptopgraphy research, which covers trends in attacking common encryption schemes."Our conclusion is there is a small but definite chance that RSA and classic Diffie-Hellman will not be usable for encryption purposes in four to five years," said Stamos, referring to the two most commonly used encryption methods.
Any hints that those methods could be undermined must be taken seriously, said Stamos. They are used to protect banking, online commerce, and e-mail, as well as the mechanisms that ensure that updates downloaded by operating systems such as Windows and OSX are genuine. The result of the two encryption methods being broken would be, said Stamos, "a total failure of trust on the Internet."
