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For 22 years technology writer Robert X. Cringely has been making predictions for the year to come -- but this year may be his last. So at age 66, he's promising his 2019 predictions will also "take a look out several years...because I sense the tech industry about to enter an unprecedented correction."

And last week he unveiled his first prediction -- that Apple under Tim Cook "emulates GE under Jack Welch.... Jack Welch took GE into financial services in 1981, transforming the company and increasing its market cap by 4000 percent over his 20 years. "

Tim Cook has already started in 2019 along the same path forged by GE's Jack Welch back in 1981. This strategic shift started to show just this week with Apple directly financing iPhone sales in China and announcing an Apple credit card with Goldman Sachs... Look for Apple to start financing lots of things in 2019. Remember your car dealer would rather lend you money than have you pay cash for that ride because financing is its own profit center. So iPhone prices will continue to rise, but iPhone payments will probably decline as Apple cuts out middle men and efficiently sucks-up that aspect of the phone supply chain. This is how Apple will arrest iPhone market share declines -- by assisting sales and making even more money in the process.

I expect Apple to not just make strategic investments, but participate in strategic financing as well.... What Apple is probably closest to becoming is a hedge fund -- a very big hedge fund in fact. Apple's available financial power is approximately equal to that of the world's two largest hedge funds -- Bridgewater Associates and AQM Capital Management -- combined. So when someone tells you Apple is in decline or doesn't have a clue, they are wrong. Apple will continue to compete in its established technology markets as well as new ones. But Apple has also found a $200 billion hobby that will keep it growing for the next decade no matter where the Information Technology market goes.
Cringely notes that services "are more profitable than hardware." But Cringley has always been gracious about entertaining other opinions. In 2000 he answered questions from Slashdot readers, and last week he reminded his readers again that as technology completes its next great transitions, "I'd really like to hear your thoughts, too."

As dramatic changes (including AI) kick off what may be a new 50-year-cycle, "Everything is changing and nothing -- nothing -- will ever be the same again. I hope that's a good thing."

Time can feel like the enemy to an employee in any role, and in any industry, but it's most acutely threatening to creative types. From a report: We may tease them for their diva-like behaviors when they feel persecuted by a deadline, but we have to admit that "develop an amazing new idea" is not something that slides into your schedule, like pick up lunch or respond to new clients. Nor can systems be tweaked and extra hands hired to help hit a goal that requires innovation, the way they can when mundane busy work is piling up. And yet deadlines are a fact of life for any company that wants to stay competitive. In a recent Harvard Business School podcast, professor Teresa Amabile, whose academic career has focused on individuals, teams, and creativity, offers some guidance for managers who struggle to support or coax their creative talent. She explains that although the creative process itself can't be controlled, certain structures can set up the conditions to move it along. When possible, managers should avoid tight deadlines for creative projects. In her work, Amabile found that creative teams can produce ideas on a deadline, and creative people may feel productive on high-pressured days, but their ideas won't be inspired.

Slashdot reader pefisher writes: A lot of us on Slashdot have noticed that potential employers advertise for things they don't need. To the point that sometimes they even ask for things that don't exist. Like asking for ten years of experience in a technology that has only just been introduced. It's frustrating because it makes you wonder "what's this employers real game?"

Do they just want to say they advertised for the position, or are they really so immensely stupid, so disconnected from their own needs, that they think they are actually asking for something they can have...? Here is a Harvard Study that addresses one particular angle of this. It doesn't answer any questions, but it does prove that you aren't crazy. And it quantifies the craziness.
The study's author calls it "degree inflation," and after studying 26 million job postings concluded that employers are now less willing to actually train new people on the job, possibly to save money. "Many companies have fallen into a lazy way of thinking about this," the study's author tells The Street, saying companies are "[looking for] somebody who is just job-ready to just show up." The irony is that college graduates will ultimately be paid a higher salary -- even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance.

The Street reports that "In a market where companies increasingly rely on computerized systems to cull out early-round applicants, that has led firms to often consider a bachelor's degree indicative of someone who can socialize, run a meeting and generally work well with others." One company tells them that "we removed the requirement to have a computer science degree, and we removed the requirement to have experience in development computer programming. And when we removed those things we found that the pool of potential really good team members drastically expanded."

Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. Now an anonymous Slashdot reader reports on Carr's newest warning: It seems obvious: The more we learn about other people, the more we'll come to like them. The assumption underpins our deep-seated belief that communication networks, from the telephone system to Facebook, will help create social harmony. But what if the opposite is true? In a Boston Globe article, Nicholas Carr presents evidence showing that as we get more information about other people, we tend to like them less, not more. Through a phenomenon called "dissimilarity cascades," we place greater stress on personal and cultural differences than on similarities, and the bias strengthens as information accumulates. "Proximity makes differences stand out," he writes. The phenomenon intensifies online, where people are rewarded for sharing endless information about themselves. What the research indicates, warns Carr, is that the spread of social media is more likely to create social strife than social harmony.
The article concludes by opposing the idea that "If we get the engineering right, our better angels will triumph. It's a pleasant thought, but it's a fantasy... Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst. What it doesn't do is make us better people. That's a job we can't offload on machines."

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes: Facebook threatened to banish drag queen pseudonyms, and (some) users revolted by flocking to Ello, a social network which promised not to enforce real names and also to remain ad-free. Critics said that the idealistic model would buckle under pressure from venture capitalists. But both gave scant mention to the fact that a distributed social networking protocol, backed by a player large enough to get people using it, would achieve all of the goals that Ello aspired to achieve, and more. Read on for the rest.

At the end of September, "FacebookDragQueenGate" fell from the sky like a gift from the gods to the founders (and venture capital backers) of the Ello social network. The company promised not only to remain ad-free and to allow drag queen stage names, but even stated that they planned to allow pornographic content (something that received relatively little press, compared to the ad-free model). But critics such as Aral Balkan wrote that once Ello received venture capital funding, the backers would inevitably pressure the company to change its relationship with its users in order to make money. In an interview published in Forbes on Monday, Harvard Business School professor John Deighton was blunt: "The board will need to monetize the membership in whatever fashion ensures a profitable return of capital for the venture fund’s investors. So my advice, if they believe Ello is still viable by then, is to buy out [Paul Budnitz, the idealistic founder who came up with the 'no ads' idea]."

There is, in short, nothing to stop Ello from doing what Facebook does whenever they make a significant change to their Terms of Service: presenting users with a dialog box next time they sign in, saying, "These are the new rules, by checking this box, you are agreeing to abide by the new contract which you're not going to read." If Ello succeeds beyond its founders' dreams, then its ad-free nature might start to hinge on its founders all turning down buyout offers of tens of millions of dollars to stick to their ideals -- hardly a sure thing. Or the VCs might get enough seats on the board that they can outvote the founders and render their objections moot.

As Joshua Kopstein writes in an editorial for Al-Jazeera America, what really would have changed the game would have been a distributed, decentralized social network. I already wrote two pieces arguing that a distributed social network could work, and how -- a protocol that allows users to create profiles, "status" posts, groups, events, and other familiar social networking features as "objects" that live on their own server, but that can interact with users' profiles hosted on other servers. I don't want to re-hash all the details here, but the short version is that there seems to be nothing about social networks, as we currently use them, which would require all of the data to be stored in a single centralized system. In a distributed protocol, you could host your profile with any hosting company, and users could "subscribe" to updates from your profile, as well as the ability to receive invites to your events and your groups, and direct messages from you. Think RSS feeds, but with better support for well-defined objects like "event invites".

If your profile were linked to a domain name that you own, then if your existing hosting company ever deleted your profile (or threatened to), you could simply move your profile to a new hosting company, the same way that any person or company can currently switch their domain name between hosting providers. This, obviously, would instantly render moot any one company's policies about "real names" (or porn, for that matter) -- all you have to do is find at least one company, anywhere in the world, whose policies are permissive enough to host your profile, and that should be possible for all but the most extreme or illegal content.

This also renders moot all the worries about profile hosting companies trying to amass tens of millions of users and then stabbing them in the back, by changing the terms of service to allow them to sell user data or stuff unwieldy ads down their throat. When users can switch seamlessly between hosts, no one host is going to be able to "charge" more than the going market rate for hosting a profile (where "charging" could be in the form of monetary payment or displaying ads to the user). How much would it actually cost to host a profile for the typical user these days, complete with all their photos and status updates? It's hard to know, because other than university professors, nobody really has personal webpages any more, after they all went to MySpace and then to Facebook. But since the old days when people did actually host their own personal pages, hosting and serving data has gotten really, really cheap. For the average user, with a few hundred photos and a few hundred friends looking at them, $1 per year might be enough. Maybe they'd just have to watch one of those ads once a year that Youtube puts in front of a Beyoncé music video, and that would cover it.

Unfortunately, to many people the concept of distributed social networking is linked with the failure of Diaspora, the most ambitious attempt to create a decentralized protocol to compete with the likes of Facebook. But Diaspora didn't fail because the idea lacked merit; it almost certainly failed because people asked the same question that they asked of any other upstart Facebook competitor: Why should I join, when all of my friends are on Facebook instead? Of course people might reasonably asked the same question about Google+, but when Google launches a product, people join because they know the quality will be decent, they know that probably some of their friends will join because of the Google brand, and they know people will be buzzing about it anyway so they want to join in order to see what the big deal is.

And that brings up the story's second moral: Despite what you may have heard from your cousin who just read The Fountainhead, the products that are the most successful are not necessarily the best, by any objective measure; rather, they're usually the ones that had major backing (Google+) or were the beneficiaries of a staggering lucky break (Ello). Diaspora didn't take off, because it didn't have either one of these.

And since you cannot manufacture a lucky break, I continue to believe that the last best hope for truly free social networking -- with minimal censorship, and ads and costs kept to a minimum by market competition -- would be for a major player like Google to launch a social networking protocol, and to set up themselves as the default host for new profiles, but allowing the protocol to interoperate seamlessly with profiles hosted elsewhere. Either that, or if the system is launched by a startup or a nonprofit, make sure that you have a host of widely respected luminaries or organizations standing ready to help promote it -- if the EFF and the BoingBoing guys endorsed a new social networking system as the future of Internet freedom, people would join because it would seem uncool not to. As long as the product itself is functional, just have the right connections lined up when you launch it. Because that's what matters, and don't let the deluded ghost of Ayn Rand tell you otherwise.

zaxios writes "Merck — the pharmaceutical giant previously featured on Slashdot for drawing up a 'hit list' of doctors that criticized its drug Vioxx, and creating a fake medical journal to endorse its products — is embroiled in a new scandal. USA Today is reporting on two new studies that show Propecia, Merck's $250 million prescription medication for baldness, can make men irreversibly impotent. Lawsuits have been filed in the United States and Canada from men claiming to have permanently lost their sexual function after taking the drug. All this is reminiscent of Merck's difficulties with Vioxx, a once $2.5-billion-a-year drug, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in users."

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist summarizes an important new study on file sharing from economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf. The Harvard Business School working paper finds that given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that 'weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.' The authors point out that file sharing may not result in reduced incentives to create if the willingness to pay for 'complements' such as concerts or author speaking tours increases."

theodp writes "Citing expert testimony from a recent House Science Subcommittee hearing on Globalizing Jobs and Technology, The Economic Populist challenges the conventional wisdom that maximizing profits should be a corporation's only responsibility, suggesting it's time for the US to align its corporations to the interests of the nation instead of vice versa. Harvard's Bruce Scott warns that today's global economy is much like the US in the later 19th century, when states competed for funds generated by corporations and thus raced to the bottom as they granted generous terms to unregulated firms. Sound familiar, Pennsylvania? How about you, Michigan?"

watzinaneihm writes "A Harvard Study which uses formal economic modelling to determine "Will OSS ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position?" came to a (not so?) surprising result. Linux is likely to remain second best as long as Microsoft has a first mover advantage."

An anonymous reader writes to mention a piece on the Harvard Business School site talking about Lessons from the Browser Wars; specifically, what can be learned about first-mover advantages and the upsurge in Firefox use? From the article: "As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market."

mosel-saar-ruwer writes "Seems Harvard Business school was using the ApplyYourself web service to process applications. Sometime in the last few days, an anonymous hacker, known as 'brookbond', was able to crack the system, and discovered that Harvard had already posted acceptance letters to the website fully a month before they were to be mailed to their recipients. He posted instructions on how applicants could view their letters at the BusinessWeek forums, and approximately 119 applicants followed his advice. Today, the dean of the Harvard Business School, one Kim Clark, announced that none of the 119 would be admitted: 'This behavior is unethical at best -- a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization... Any applicant found to have done so will not be admitted to this school.'"

Eli Singer writes "The web is stripping away the layers of insulation between companies and the public by giving everyday people access to massive amounts of information. Increasingly companies are finding themselves like the emperor naked and exposed. Don Tapscott, long time tech author ( Digital Capital , Growing Up Digital and Paradigm Shift ), and co-author David Ticoll ( Digital Capital ) say in their latest book, The Naked Corporation: How The Age of Transparency will Revolutionize Business , that when a corporation is naked, it is best to be buff." Read on for the rest of Singer's review. The Naked Corporation author Don Tapscott & David Ticoll pages 348 publisher Viking Canada rating 8/10 reviewer Eli Singer ISBN 0670043982 summary A guide to acting ethically in our digitized business world.

The need for a transparency strategy, as described by Tapscott and Ticoll, is born out of the massive exposure and risk companies open themselves up to when they conceal activities from the public, or live by poor values. As they say:

Customers can evaluate the worth of products and services at levels not possible before. Employees share formerly secret information about corporate strategy, management, and challenges. To collaborate effectively, companies and their business partners have no choice but to share intimate knowledge with one another. Powerful institutional investors today own or manage most wealth, and they are developing x-ray vision. Finally, in a world of instant communications, whistleblowers, inquisitive media, and Googling, citizens and communities routinely put firms under the microscope.

Using basic tools available online, interested parties and activists can discover a companys darkest secrets and publish them to the world - instantly. Transparency theory states that because the corporation risks being stripped naked in ways it cannot control, it needs to be buff. Firms that live by good values (video) do not fear exposure.

Some firms and industries still opt for secrecy in our transparent world and they often end up paying a price for it. That is because when there is little to no visibility into how firms are operating (no transparency), there is very little trust built with customers. Low trust stifles innovation and can instill fear. This in turn creates conflict as companies try to stay closed and stakeholders try to break free.

Some stakeholders community activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the like have little or no direct power over the firm. Their main tool is transparency: the ability to learn, inform others, and organize on the basis of what they know. When community stakeholders use information to gain support of others who do have economic power like the firms customers, shareholders, or employees their power multiplies.

One example, referenced repeatedly in the book, is the Linux community. There are so many transparent elements to Linux, from the inspiration behind its conception (an alternative to closed-source software), to the GPL that keeps it open, and the overall integrity of the software and the community that develops it.

Linux's transparent nature is quickly becoming a standard component of the technology industry. In fact, what could be a better endorsement of transparent business practices than IBM shifting its business strategy to embody open values? Big blue has donated millions of dollars of once proprietary code to the open-source community, and hosts massive developer forums that blur the borders between paid developers and the community. This is all done with the objective of making IBM more transparent to its stakeholders.

The Naked Corporation is a fascinating read filled with the ideals that businesses should aspire towards this century. What makes it most enjoyable to read is that Tapscott and Ticoll ground their concepts with real-world case examples, many of them technology related.

The book is divided up neatly into three sections.

The first, The Transparency Imperative, takes three chapters to thoroughly introduce the concept of transparency, and the structure of open enterprises. Most interesting is the first chapter (available free here), which identifies and explores independently the drivers behind transparency economics, technology, demographics (the power of the Net Generation), and sociopolitical changes (the rising global civil foundation). This is a rich and inspiring study, and the authors fuse their findings at the end of the chapter, stating that:

As emerging economy firms and citizens become integrated into the global economy, they will increasingly expect and gain the ability to demand visibility into Western firms business practices Both emerging economy and Western firms will be under increasing pressure to practice what they preach about open trade and level playing fields, as well as to behave responsibly toward people and the environment.

The second section, When Stakeholders Can See, illustrates just how much information employees, partners, customers and communities can discover about a firm. Given that we live in a knowledge economy, companies cannot block information from becoming free. The ultimate exposure of poor business practices is not a question of if anymore, but of when. The whistleblowers at Enron are proof.

Section three, Being Open, teaches companies about the rewards earned by being transparent. Up until this part of the book, transparency was viewed as a defensive strategy. Now transparency is re-introduced as a core source of new value a firm can tap into. Like IBM is doing now, companies can earn massive profits by adopting a more open stance.

In addition to being a great read for managers, I believe this book should be on the reading lists of members of NGOs, activist groups, and socially responsible corporate watchdogs. This is because in outlining the need for businesses to adopt a transparency strategy, Tapscott and Ticoll also create a blueprint for how to expose opaque organizations.

The drawback of this read, quickly obvious to the reader, is that transparency, ethical business practices, and corporate social responsibility are all such new theories that few know how to effectively apply them. Then again, when thinking about the Web in its infancy, talking about the new possibilities was the first step to the future we have now.

You can purchase The Naked Corporation from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Eli Singer writes "The web is stripping away the layers of insulation between companies and the public by giving everyday people access to massive amounts of information. Increasingly companies are finding themselves like the emperor naked and exposed. Don Tapscott, long time tech author ( Digital Capital , Growing Up Digital and Paradigm Shift ), and co-author David Ticoll ( Digital Capital ) say in their latest book, The Naked Corporation: How The Age of Transparency will Revolutionize Business , that when a corporation is naked, it is best to be buff." Read on for the rest of Singer's review. The Naked Corporation author Don Tapscott & David Ticoll pages 348 publisher Viking Canada rating 8/10 reviewer Eli Singer ISBN 0670043982 summary A guide to acting ethically in our digitized business world.

The need for a transparency strategy, as described by Tapscott and Ticoll, is born out of the massive exposure and risk companies open themselves up to when they conceal activities from the public, or live by poor values. As they say:

Customers can evaluate the worth of products and services at levels not possible before. Employees share formerly secret information about corporate strategy, management, and challenges. To collaborate effectively, companies and their business partners have no choice but to share intimate knowledge with one another. Powerful institutional investors today own or manage most wealth, and they are developing x-ray vision. Finally, in a world of instant communications, whistleblowers, inquisitive media, and Googling, citizens and communities routinely put firms under the microscope.

Using basic tools available online, interested parties and activists can discover a companys darkest secrets and publish them to the world - instantly. Transparency theory states that because the corporation risks being stripped naked in ways it cannot control, it needs to be buff. Firms that live by good values (video) do not fear exposure.

Some firms and industries still opt for secrecy in our transparent world and they often end up paying a price for it. That is because when there is little to no visibility into how firms are operating (no transparency), there is very little trust built with customers. Low trust stifles innovation and can instill fear. This in turn creates conflict as companies try to stay closed and stakeholders try to break free.

Some stakeholders community activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the like have little or no direct power over the firm. Their main tool is transparency: the ability to learn, inform others, and organize on the basis of what they know. When community stakeholders use information to gain support of others who do have economic power like the firms customers, shareholders, or employees their power multiplies.

One example, referenced repeatedly in the book, is the Linux community. There are so many transparent elements to Linux, from the inspiration behind its conception (an alternative to closed-source software), to the GPL that keeps it open, and the overall integrity of the software and the community that develops it.

Linux's transparent nature is quickly becoming a standard component of the technology industry. In fact, what could be a better endorsement of transparent business practices than IBM shifting its business strategy to embody open values? Big blue has donated millions of dollars of once proprietary code to the open-source community, and hosts massive developer forums that blur the borders between paid developers and the community. This is all done with the objective of making IBM more transparent to its stakeholders.

The Naked Corporation is a fascinating read filled with the ideals that businesses should aspire towards this century. What makes it most enjoyable to read is that Tapscott and Ticoll ground their concepts with real-world case examples, many of them technology related.

The book is divided up neatly into three sections.

The first, The Transparency Imperative, takes three chapters to thoroughly introduce the concept of transparency, and the structure of open enterprises. Most interesting is the first chapter (available free here), which identifies and explores independently the drivers behind transparency economics, technology, demographics (the power of the Net Generation), and sociopolitical changes (the rising global civil foundation). This is a rich and inspiring study, and the authors fuse their findings at the end of the chapter, stating that:

As emerging economy firms and citizens become integrated into the global economy, they will increasingly expect and gain the ability to demand visibility into Western firms business practices Both emerging economy and Western firms will be under increasing pressure to practice what they preach about open trade and level playing fields, as well as to behave responsibly toward people and the environment.

The second section, When Stakeholders Can See, illustrates just how much information employees, partners, customers and communities can discover about a firm. Given that we live in a knowledge economy, companies cannot block information from becoming free. The ultimate exposure of poor business practices is not a question of if anymore, but of when. The whistleblowers at Enron are proof.

Section three, Being Open, teaches companies about the rewards earned by being transparent. Up until this part of the book, transparency was viewed as a defensive strategy. Now transparency is re-introduced as a core source of new value a firm can tap into. Like IBM is doing now, companies can earn massive profits by adopting a more open stance.

In addition to being a great read for managers, I believe this book should be on the reading lists of members of NGOs, activist groups, and socially responsible corporate watchdogs. This is because in outlining the need for businesses to adopt a transparency strategy, Tapscott and Ticoll also create a blueprint for how to expose opaque organizations.

The drawback of this read, quickly obvious to the reader, is that transparency, ethical business practices, and corporate social responsibility are all such new theories that few know how to effectively apply them. Then again, when thinking about the Web in its infancy, talking about the new possibilities was the first step to the future we have now.

You can purchase The Naked Corporation from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

trifakir writes "Scientific American talks about the imperfections of the current patent law, subject to the book of two authors from the Harvard Business School. It seems that even business people start seeing the insanity of the current patent system. This time it seems that they are not only criticizing, but suggesting some procedural amendments (e.g. patent conflicts resolved by a judge and not by a jury). Do you think that any of these has chances being heard by the big wigs?"

mshiltonj writes "The NYTimes has a story called "Report Raises Questions About Fighting Online Piracy" that talks about how the stringent enforcement of current Intellectual Property laws (see: RIAA) may acutally be bad for business. It's the not EFF or FSF saying this, it's professors at Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School. The professors say, "The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support, It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace." and "Bits are not the same as atoms. We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way.""

blogologue writes "Harvard Business School has an article up discussing The Organizational Model for Open Source. It has some good points, and I think it sums up what many of us know, but haven't quite been able to put into words yet: 'People are intimately aware of the fact that too much structure will disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful open source projects possible.'"

deadwood writes "Ever wanted to know what Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos really thought about the Segway the first time he saw it? At the Harvard Business School site, there's an excerpt from the new book 'Code Name Ginger', giving a recounting of the Apple and Amazon bosses' first impressions of the device. Steve Jobs' gut reaction, quoted in the article: 'I think it sucks!'"