Category Archive

Glenn et. al. are exactly right.  Columbia makes cocaine because there is a market and they don’t have the ability to trade anything else.  Country’s won’t stop (and neither will people) doing something on moral grounds until there’s a viable opportunity for them to do something else.  There’s a reason poor people go into the drug trade and not rich ones.

This sort of moral posturing reminds me of the ideas behind sweat shops.  Sure, sweat shops are bad, but they’re not as bad as the alternative - no job at all.  Sweat shops are instead a good first sign that a country is creating the business infrastructure necessary in the global economy.  Remember when sweat shops were all in Malaysia.  What about China?  I’d say Africa could use a few sweatshops.

Quick example: playing golf in morning, want to know what time chic-fil-a opens: open iphone, click maps, type “chic fila” into browser, asks “did you mean chic-fil-a,” click yes, shows map with seven chic-fil-a’s in denver, click one I pass on way to golf course, gives phone number and address, click phone number, it calls, guy answers, ask what time they open - total time? seventeen seconds. Didn’t get map, but could have - complete with live traffic report. And, yes, the photo was taken with the camera on the phone.
Only thing I didn’t do was post from browser on phone - it’s pretty slow if you’re not connected to wireless. And, while I’d like it to be faster, it ain’t like my Nokia worked that great online, either.

In which I attempt to describe why Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky is one of the most beautiful records I’ve ever heard and why you should ignore many of the critics and buy it. Right now.

(And in which I shamelessly use–abuse?–better.shorter to drive some more links to my other blog, otherephemera.com.)

Am I the only one fascinated by the business world’s seeming willingness to believe that Google will succeed at whatever it tries? The company has just announced it will launch a corporate-targeted office suite, a la Microsoft, with word processing, e-mail and the like, clearly timed to compete with Vista and the release of Office 2007. The reaction is typical:

While Google’s latest foray into the corporate software market seems unlikely to topple the status quo right away, AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy said it’s only a matter of time before the Mountain View-based company becomes a major player.

“This is just the beginning,” Murphy said. “The real impact of what Google is trying to do probably won’t be evident for another five years.”

But in a fascinating article about Google’s attempt to digitize the world’s books–an effort many others, inlcuding the Library of Congress, have been working on for years, by the way–the New Yorker interviewed people who pointed out that not everything Google does turns to gold.

“Google didn’t get video search right—YouTube did,” Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said. “Google didn’t get blog search right—technorati.com did.”

And that’s the point. Google, which is so often praised for its product development process, has actually failed to launch a truly successful product aside from Search. As Business Week pointed out last year, Google’s IM service is a distant 10th to Microsoft’s, Google Finance is only the 40th most-visited financial news website, and Gmail is used by only one-quarter the number of people who use Yahoo and MSN e-mail. They claim to be aiming for a 20-40% success rate with new products, but so far only one, Google Maps, has taken off. So why the assumption that they can successfully enter the corporate office suite market?

They have no experience making sales at a B2B, enterprise level, no experience intergating with firm’s firewall and privacy issues (a huge issue for this kind of software, especially if it’s web based), and no experience integrating with network work flows. That’s not to say it won’t be a great product or that it won’t make some strides, but let’s not assume out of the gate that Google will win at everything it tries. In fact, the assumption at this point should be that it will fail.

Search continues to grow at 30 to 40% a year, giving it a huge amount of cash with which to invest in new products, so maybe someday something will hit, but right now this is a company incredibly dependent on one product. Or, as Chris would put it: Tiny little ads.

Rory Stewart likes to walk. He’s got a background in foreign service. He’s a writer. Those three facts have led to two books: The Places in Between and The Prince of the Marshes. You can read an excerpt of the latter on Slate. I read the former.

Two weeks after the United States had successfully overthrown, Rory Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan. He was, in essence, completing a walk across the entirety of the ancient world; he’d already walked across Iran and India and Pakistan and other places he clearly thinks are “cool”. And I suppose he’s right.

But, let’s be clear, walking is a slow, long process and doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a wonderful narrative arc. I’ll give credit to Stewart for this: he doesn’t impose false epiphanies on his book. There are very few emotional asides. There are few stretched metaphors between the reality he saw as he walked and the circumstances of the modern-day Afghanistan - with one exception.

The book does a wonderful job of creating a sense of place:

Herat that morning looked like an Iranian shantytown. Everything had been constructed hurriedly and recently. On the flat roofs of the half-finished shopping arcades, bare girders clustered like dead insect legs, and the walls were the same color as the sand drifts by the curb. This was the architecture of political Islam, representing its combination of Marxism and puritan theology with drab Soviet brick. Most of the men were dressed like provincial Iranians, in dirt-speckled black or faded brown. I did not like the city.

What’s most striking, and Stewart clearly intends to make this point, is just how different the world of Afghanis is from our own. In essence, Afghanistan is a brutal place. There is almost no electrical power throughout the country’s interior. The men are clearly and only in charge. Animals are abused. Gunplay is a part of every day life. The weather drives all of daily life. Everyone - everyone - lives in extreme poverty.

The one belabored metaphor in the book is between Stewart’s own walk and former ruler of Afghanistan, a guy named Bafur. Bafur took the same path sometime in the 14th Century. And he faced the same things. The point: nothing has changed.

It’s clear as Stewart walks that he’s not having much fun. In fact, whereas his walks across other parts of Mesopotamia were clearly highlighted by the hospitality of his hosts, here he just wants to finish. The book reads the same way; the last half of the book is merely about getting to the end.

I guess I know more about Afghanistan now, but I certainly didn’t read The Places in Between in one sitting. On the other hand, it was a book about a long walk; I’m not sure what I was expecting. Read it? Sure. I doubt you can find a better first person account of everyday Afghanistan.