Status-Q

If you like Scott Adams’ cartoons you may also like his blog.

Here, from a recent post, is some advice for new graduates starting in business:

Your potential for senior management will be determined by the three H’s: Hair, Height, and Harvard degree. You need at least two out of three. (Non-Harvard schools will be acceptable if it’s clear that you “could have gone” to Harvard.)

Your hard work will be rewarded. Specifically, your boss’s boss will reward your boss for making you work so hard.

There’s no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas. There are only your own ideas and other people’s. If you want someone to like your idea, tell him he said it last week and you just remembered.

John (not doing so) in his Observer column about the record industry.

In the end, of course, rationality will prevail, because the record industry will run out of money to pay for lawyers long before kids get bored with file-sharing.

More on this subject, too, in the latest TWiT podcast, which has Larry Lessig as a guest.

I love this quote from Roger Scruton, which I found on John’s blog:

… Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.

I wrote yesterday about Paul Graham’s talk on ‘Great Hackers’. There’s an essay based on the talk on Paul’s site.

But one phrase in particular caught my attention, to the extent that I’m going to add it to my Favourite Quotes page. I’m not sure if it’s his originally, but it’s rather good:

“I’d always supposed … that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge.”

Well, even if I weren’t heavily jetlagged, I can’t say I would lose any sleep at all over the likely demise of the EU constitution.

There’s a rather nice Q&A section in the Times:

…the French are very traditional, conservative, very prone to striking and revolution (the revolution is for when their conservatism runs out).

…is from Gore Vidal:

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

I like Paul Graham’s essay on How to Start a Startup. An enjoyable read with lots of good stuff. For example, he says that having great people is more important than great ideas:

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people.

and this is an interesting viewpoint:

In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid.

Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.

It’s very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you’ll own the low end.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

So said the American philosopher George Santayana about 100 years ago. But hang on – did he? Actually, this is one of those oft-misquoted sayings – a Google search will turn up several versions, in particular using “…are doomed to repeat it”.

In The Life of Reason (1905-1906), the actual quote is:

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

which is an interesting but subtle difference; the ‘forget’ version implies a careless abandon whereas ‘not to remember’ implies, perhaps, an unfortunate mistake. Of course, he may not have intended any such distinction and he may also have used several versions himself, but it does prompt me to write my own little homage to Santayana:

Those who forget the quote are condemned to reword it!

We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change and underestimate its long-term impact. This is a frequently-quoted maxim, in several variations, and is attributed to many people including Heinlein and Winston Churchill. Whoever it was, they were right.

It’s a bit like saying that people have a rather short-term memory. Any telephone poll of ‘the greatest albums of all time’ will suggest that a remarkable number of them were released in the last year or two. The same is true for films. I think it would be much more interesting to run such a poll with the added restriction that anything from the last 5 years is automatically excluded. A very good way of judging the quality of anything, in my opinion, is how well it stands up to the test of time. But the point is that we overestimate the importance of the recent.

Anyway, what actually got me thinking about this was a Podcast I downloaded from IT Conversations. It was a discussion with Dave Gillmor about the effect of blogs & podcasts, and the likely effect on Journalism (with a capital J). I started to think that there might be some significant parallels with Desktop Publishing. Remember when the phrase ‘DTP’ was everywhere? When everybody thought they could do graphic design, and the leaflet ostensibly about the Village Fete told you more about the number of fonts on somebody’s hard disk or the quality of their dot-matrix printer?

In the long run, of course, people calmed down a bit. Graphic designers and publishers didn’t, in general, disappear, though some of the bad ones probably did. But I think the general public gained more understanding of the field, and if more amateurs proved to be quite good at it when given access to the tools, there was also greater appreciation by the non-professionals of those who were really experts. Giving a man a fishing rod is rather different from teaching him to fish.

A similar thing has been happening over the last few years with video production. There was a time when you needed a professional if you wanted to make any kind of video. Now you just need one to make a good video.

Well, now it’s the turn of journalism…