It has been slow at the Poiesis blog, as the end of semester duties draw to an end. Meanwhile interesting operations events have occurred at our horizon of interest. Notes will follow on this topics, but here are some quick thoughts. Amazon released its annual report. Now AMZ is a 177B company. Looking at Bezos’s letter, there is an emphasized continued focus on the e-commerce challenge in India. In fact, India is the only “geographic” bullet point among the highlighted bullet points in the report. Amazon has moved into India and my prediction remains strong that Amazon is likely to win this battle out and will soon be the biggest retailer in India. (Contrast this with China). An interesting tidbit: Bezos…
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To cover 400 years of American business history or capitalism is a daunting task. Fortunately, the author Bhu Srinivasan is up to the challenge. Penguin Press, 2017. Bhu Srinivasan, 500 pages. Srinivasan, from what appears from the blurb, is a successful venture capitalist. He evinces genuine admiration for both writing and capitalism. However, the book does suffer from what any attempt to trace 400 years of American capitalism would be constrained by. The absence of a strong overarching thesis. To get around this constraint, Srinivasan devices a set of themes and chapters. (Without much ado, I reproduce the chapters classified under themes. The chapters that I thought were strong, I highlighted in bold.) Chapters: Venture, Tobacco, Taxes, Cotton, Steam, Canal, Railroads, Telegraph,…
Leave a CommentThis is third (and final) in the series of posts thinking aloud about the Facebook Kerfuffle. See the first post on the nature of Information Leakage, and the second post on FOMO and how networks fall. In this post, I spend some time mulling about societal, not social, aspects of the network, the compliance, and the complicity of everyone including researchers. I suggest some operational changes that could be helpful. This is a complicated platform problem; There is no magic bullet, but a hodgepodge of contextual solutions, but I try to frame them in an over-arching narrative. — Thinking about Facebook, I recollect a conversation that I had with a researcher on networks, and a good friend (in real life), …
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This is the second article in a series of posts on thinking about Facebook Kerfuffle. You can read the first article (on Leaky Platforms) here. In this post, I focus on how networks can fall. To illustrate the tentativeness in the growth and decay of platforms, bear with me, as I start with a Romantic Comedy from the 80s. In the under-rated classic Say Anything (above picture), John Cusack’s underachieving and kickboxing Lloyd woos Ione Skye’s accomplished and resplendent Diane, by playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”, on a boombox held over his shoulders, loudly beseeching her to come back. It is an iconic pop-culture scene, freezing the eighties — before the advent of the late nineties of Windows and the aughts…
Leave a CommentIn the light of Guardian’s investigative reporting sourced on the whistleblower at Cambridge Analytica, it appears that almost all of the internet has been upset with Facebook. After an extended silence of several days, Zuckerberg was finally on a semi-apology tour of “exclusive” interviews about the “breach” of trust or data (or both or neither). In many ways, we are witnessing a perfect storm of confusion involving politics, modern notions of privacy, the role of tech in our lives, the ethics of data-sharing/micro-targeting, and organizational leadership. Instead of ruminating on the above issues, I focus on three specific aspects of Facebook kerfuffle over a set of three blog posts. (This post is entirely focusing on the first issue.) Platform Designs…
Leave a CommentThe past is more opaque than the future. Even when we know the “rough” history of what transpired, it is sometimes hard to imagine, how things were before the natural evolution into the current “normalcy” occurred. I imagine that, very soon, it would be astounding to consumers that Amazon did not own any stores, and Apple did not make any phones. How was life before that? In this respect, Barbara Garson’s The Electronic Sweatshop is revelatory, because it discusses a mind-and-place that is hard to imagine because many automated things came to be. For examples, she writes (Pg. 177), When typewriters were first introduced, their operators were also called “typewriters”. Later they became typists. So far in the electronic office,…
Leave a CommentIn the world beset with mundane proclivities, we are mesmerized by lives that challenge our imagination. Stephen Hawking lived such a life. Prof. Hawking was a living proof that the infinite can exist in our finite bodies. His frailty underlined the finite in all of us — our physical littleness, and the small treacheries of misfortune in our meager lives — all the while as his capacious thoughts strode all of space and time. “A Brief History of Time” is often said to be the best selling book that no one had read. A statement that is “all clever and no wise”. In the 90s as a teenager in Madras, Hawking’s book and his life were distinctly inspirational to me,…
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