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And it's happening faster than new jobs can be created.

No it isn't. We have record low unemployment, and productivity growth is sharply lower than in the past.

A big problem in our economy is that automation is happening too slowly, causing weak wage growth.

Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.

I find what you are saying very unlikely (although not impossible). Most areas in this country with high property taxes have very good schools. Often the exceptions are in areas with high private school enrollment, where public schools therefore have a higher percentage of troubled children which drags down public school quality (private schools can say no to students, public schools generally cannot). It is possible you live in this kind of area, considering you likely have a $750k+ home with only 3br/2ba which means you and your neighbors are probably at least fairly affluent.

I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now would only add further insult and injury to the insult and and injury

Paying teachers more does not improve the quality of individual teachers. Research is clear that paying someone more doesn't make them work harder. But paying teachers more does help stop good teachers from quitting and going into the private sector. It helps good students decide to become teachers instead of other careers. A 2010 McKinsey report found only 23% of our new teachers were students performing in the top third of their class. That drops to 14% of new teachers in high poverty schools. There are countries where you are able to get better teachers without higher pay, but in a country like the US where money is worshiped I find it hard to believe we can improve teachers without paying them like valuable professionals. We pay teachers less than half what some high performing countries do as a percentage of per capita GDP. Literally doubling teacher pay in many areas is likely necessary (some areas do pay teachers very well, but still not quite enough).

But better teachers are only a very small part of any realistic solution. While yes we do need better teachers, ending school segregation strategies is a much bigger win for our students. I live in a school district with $600k houses and almost no affordable living housing, so we have among the best schools in the state because our teachers don't have to work with very many troubled students. But while every grade, middle, and high school in my district is rated a 9/10 by GreatSchools.org, there are two districts bordering mine with schools rated closer to 3/4. This is where the working class employees who keep my community running live. Zoning policies keep affordable housing from being built in our school district, and funding schools by local property taxes only exacerbates the problem.

Teachers unions may be a convenient scapegoat for those who have never put much quality thought into the issue, but even abolishing teacher unions tomorrow wouldn't bring us 1% towards solving the real problems hurting our schools.

Firstly, I think you might be using an overly narrow definition of "public transportation". The private sector runs air and long-distance bus transport in much of the world without subsidies.

Secondly, an urban bus system must surely be profitable at peak usage when it's standing room only. Urban bus subsidies are about ensuring that busses still run at off-peak times of day.

And thirdly, even restricting to urban rail, Hong Kong's metro is an interesting exception which makes money through a rail plus property model.

As I said earlier, the plural of anecdote is not data, and it really isn't convincing to try to argue that the moving parts in ICE cars aren't a source of a material fraction of reliability issues that those cars suffer. Every study I've seen builds lower maintenance costs into its modelling for the impact of EV. For example:

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/med...

Brakes get a lot less wear on an EV. Most of the time, they're not used because all the braking is done by regen. I would expect tyre wear to be higher for comparable cars (eg Zoe vs Clio) because EVs are heavier than equivalents.

The difference this time is the technology curve is much steeper.

No it isn't. Productivity growth is slowing down, and has been nearly stagnant since 2004.

Previous waves of automation have taken the low hanging fruit in agriculture and manufacturing, and modern service jobs are proving much harder to automate, so it is going slower.

This, of course is bad, because a slower pace of automation means a slower pace of job growth ... which is exactly what we have seen.

I think you may be confusing me with someone who gives a shit about arguing economics with you.

You say what you like. I'll rely on McKinsey and Stiglitz, thanks.

Also, you mention Legatum as a data source. I mean, really.

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/med...

I do not believe that India's caste system is the main reason of their national underdevelopment. Remember Japan's own caste system: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... The answer lies in their manufacturing sector that still today, falls short of meeting international quality standards: https://www.mckinsey.com/busin... Notice how politely Pete Lau (OnePlus CEO) mention this in an interview: "One of the toughest challenges with India smartphone manufacturing is maintaining the same level of quality as China since the manufacturing environment in the country is not the same" https://tech.economictimes.ind...

Sure, keep telling yourself that Sparky... FYI, every organization sells or 'leverages' their tracking information by providing it to analytics firms who use it to determine how best to make money off of your trusting little self

https://www.mckinsey.com/globa...

The 5 MB PDF:

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/med...

https://www.mckinsey.com/globa...

The 5 MB PDF:

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/med...

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/med...

Oh, and finally, the program under which the Federal government provided loan guarantees to Solyndra actually made a profit for the US government.

Without the underlying numbers, "made a profit" is a meaningless statement. If you take a look at the Dept. of Energy's own rosy projections, you see that even they are not predicting the program will turn an actual (inflation-adjusted) profit.

For a loan portfolio around $30 billion, they're predicting $5 billion in interest payments over the entire term of the program, with average loan terms around 25 years. That $5 billion apparently does not account for defaults (over half a billion already over the first several years of the program, with around 20 years to go even assuming they haven't issued new loans since this 2014 report), but let's be super-generous and say they ultimately net the entire $5 billion. That's an average annual return of about 1.25% on the program's capital at risk -- not even enough to keep pace with inflation.

That's a disastrous return on invested capital that no investor in their right mind would consider (1) a success or (2) something worth even thinking about repeating.

I think I can safely predict that even you wouldn't voluntarily put your retirement savings into a fund that couldn't even keep up with inflation over a 25-year period.

What difference does it make whether there's a distinct market for fossil fuel stocks or not? What are the practical implications? Sectoral performance is clearly a real thing; that's why you can find lots of biz and scholarly articles on just that, such as this one:
http://www.mckinsey.com/busine...

The New Yorker piece is talking out of its arse. As aggregate demand for an industrial sector's stock falls, so does the stock price -- on average, and over the medium term. The whole point of a boycott is to affect *aggregate* demand. A successful boycott is one that manages to reduce aggregate demand in this way. The purpose of this story is to highlight the progress being made towards that goal for carbon-intensive power generation. Clearly, reducing aggregate demand by 0.1% will not be material; clearly, reducing aggregate demand by 50% will. Where the boundary lies between these two is a matter for debate.

And those cities generate most of America's wealth. It would be a terrible idea to decide elections by the number of counties won. If you think the election should be decided by poor people who live in the middle of nowhere, then you're wrong.

And the breadbasket states generate most of America's food.

Which is worth more - food or wealth?

Are you saying wealth should be the deciding factor in elections?

And those cities generate most of America's wealth. It would be a terrible idea to decide elections by the number of counties won. If you think the election should be decided by poor people who live in the middle of nowhere, then you're wrong.

So true! Elections should be decided by rich people. Poor people don't count at all and middle class votes shouldn't count as much as rich people's votes.

And those cities generate most of America's wealth. It would be a terrible idea to decide elections by the number of counties won. If you think the election should be decided by poor people who live in the middle of nowhere, then you're wrong.

That is spot on. And there was no need, incidentally. McKinsey has produced a bunch of cost-curves for various types of actions to reduce carbon intensity. There was plenty in there for conservative politicians to promote, had they so wished.

http://www.mckinsey.com/busine...

Is employee diversity really irrelevant as you claim? Or does it have a beneficial effect on the bottom line? Or a negative one?

http://www.mckinsey.com/busine...

It looks to me like the research is mixed, but it does have possibility to affect commercial success (particularly in companies which do most of their work in one country but sell worldwide).

So a business would be IRRESPONSIBLE not to look at diversity.

The actual non-clickbait article http://www.mckinsey.com/Insigh... says: "For example, we estimate that activities consuming more than 20 percent of a CEO’s working time could be automated using current technologies."

That's called a tool, rather than a threat to a CEO's job.

Firefighting can at times qualify as a natural monopoly, depends on things like population density. It has absolutely nothing to do with the idea that firefighting should be provided as a free government service.

Health care as a whole, however, is definitely NOT a natural monopoly. It's possible that, in certain markets, certain services might be, depends on the marginal economics of the business (driven by factors such as density for ambulance services or services requiring extremely costly imagine equipment).

It's extremely unlikely, on the other hand, that the market for primary care physicians is a natural monopoly (since the entry costs for a new provider are very low, removing one of the most important prerequisite for a natural monopoly).

Might want to read this piece (although I'm afraid it's full of analysis and rather short on ranting):
http://www.mckinsey.com/insigh...

I'm a huge fan of the ACA, and I'm glad SCOTUS upheld it. If you're going to support it, though, you should actually have some understanding of how the system it's attempting to reform works, particularly since, even in countries with single payer (like the UK's NHS), there are many competing providers.

Battery evolution has been moving along at a fairly steady pace averaging around a 5-8% improvement in capacity per year. In addition, the longevity has been steadily increasing and charge times have been steadily decreasing and cost have been dropping fairly rapidly, much faster than predicted.

If you compare today's batteries used in cars compared to those a decade ago there is really no comparison. Today's batteries have much higher capacities, much longer life and at a much lower cost.

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blo...

Here's a chart from 2012. Tesla is selling their grid storage battery packs at around $250/KWh and with the gigafactory the prices will be further reduced. This is the price point where BEVs start to become price competitive with gasoline cars.

http://www.mckinsey.com/insigh...

Battery prices are already at or below where they were predicted to be in 2020 just a few years ago.

http://theenergycollective.com...

On average, battery energy doubles every ten years.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/2009...
http://electronicdesign.com/po...

The basic premise is wrong. Automation hasn't prevented new human jobs from being created. They just aren't being created in the developed world, which has for the most part turned into a shitty place to employ people. Check out this report. It states that 1.1 billion jobs have been created since 1980 and projects another 600 million created by 2030.

Maybe the developed world ought to think about how to get a piece of the action rather than muse whether a 4 day work week or a new Soylent Green recipe will help - it won't. If you want employment to have value, then you need to encourage it, not regulate, limit, and penalize it to death. No need to "modestly" speculate how to deal with the human excess of unemployed created by your shitty labor policies when that excess could be doing something useful instead.

Finally, we ought to think about why fake stories like this are so popular.

You are rather backed by your opinions and guesses ABOUT science... Now those opinions might be reasonable and the guesses could be educated... but they are not science.

They are not "opinions" or "guesses". They are probabilities, backed by a great deal of evidence - like virtually everything in science. Higgs Boson existence? Probability. The Big Bang? Probability. Quantum mechanics? Yeah, a lot of that. To be scientific, a theory does not have to be a certainty at all; the probability just needs to be carefully quantified, and backed by observation and/or experiment.

...you have overstated your reasonable degree of confidence on issues for political gain. This has been done repeatedly which is why many of the IPCC reports have come under such savage criticism

Citation needed. The IPCC reports all state their conclusions in probabilities, which are carefully quantified, and are backed by citations of peer-reviewed studies at every stage. The vast majority of the evidence presented in the IPCC reports has proved under very close examination to be solid (NOT absolutely certain, but of sound scientific methodology). This is why they are accepted as, not the gospel truth, but the best information on the subject that we have, by every major scientific institution and government, as well as by the great majority of scientists (and nearly all climatologists).

It is THAT which is ultimately causing most of the controversy. Not the science but rather the political solution to the science.

I do agree that this is the source of the controversy. Solutions are indeed often political, but unfortunately all too often, peoples' political views about some of the solutions contaminate their views of the science, which usually leads to claims that the science itself is being politicised. I disagree with that.

Or you must sit down and talk about solutions we can all find palatable.

If only we could do that. Unfortunately, there are still far too many strident voices still trying to undermine the science, which blocks any reasonable discussion of solutions. If those voices actually had any peer-reviewed evidence of a quality that could convince a reasonable number of experts, that would be fine, but sadly these dissenting voices tend to rely on volume instead.

I'm also of the opinion that many people misunderstand the solutions that have been proposed (for example, see all the claims that a phased transition to a carbon-neutral economy would be a disastrous burden on society, whereas many economists are seeing it as an opportunity for actually reducing the many existing external costs of carbon emissions).

If you make routine and chronic care FFS, then you discourage uptake of preventive treatments and cause more expense further down the line. You also widen health inequalities, as rich folks can afford the co-pay but poor folks struggle and put it off and thus suffer worse health later on. Plus, you stifle innovation by paying for specific activities, which may otherwise have fallen away as new more efficient or effective activities are invented. That's why the UK introduced capitated payments for primary care a couple of decades ago.

Best solutions are probably the kind of episode-bundling and population health payments that Arkansas is experimenting with. They're not perfect, but they introduce value as a concept and align incentives more effectively than many current systems.
See this for more: http://www.mckinsey.com/insigh...

Another big part of the problem is the lack of accountability.

More likely it's too much accountability, everything being defined in water-fall style specifications, which can't possibly be implemented.
Less accountability, trust and iterative development have been identified to provide higher project success rates...

the responsible government employee would lose his job (and pension)

WTF? Pension is money saved up. Why should anybody ever loose that. In any line of work, that's just messed up.
There is talk of criminal neglect, do a criminal case...

But this kind of "accountability", which is more about assigning blame to someone and ruining their career, is exactly why nobody wants to do government contracts.

and the contractors would finish the job on their own dime, things would change

Yes, contractor would factor in the risk of failure, or risk of going over price and raise his prices by a factor of 10.
Or just use a shell company and let that go bankrupts if he fails to deliver the contract. Bottom line: software development is high risk, from a study of 4500 projects over $15M, 45% of it projects goes above budget and 17% threatens the existence of the company.
See: http://www.mckinsey.com/insigh...

The inflexibility of contract and specification governed software development is at the heart of the problem here. More accountability isn't going to fix that. More punishment will only cause officials and contractors to do more work to cover their own ass... Instead of taking an actual risk, which is what software project management is all about, it's about managing risk and uncertainty.

That's why numbers are reported as C02e, not C02.

See, for example, http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/sustainability/latest_thinking/costcurves, where the reports talk about GHG emissions in terms of GtC02e.

Wow, we're on Slashdot......almost like being On The Cover of the Rolling Stone.

Answers to various questions and comments:
- We support the Linux toolchain; compilers, debuggers, etc., fortunate to have some of the original gcc team. Ported pieces of various kernels to TOMI Aurora to make certain we had not left anything out and to test the memory manager. Aurora was for use in a tablet type device.
- TOMI Borealis was optimized for Big Data and unstructured data apps like MapReduce that choke at the Memory Wall. Linux could probably be ported without too much difficulty. Most massively parallel installations will use something really light weight instead.
- Potential users said give them more integer cores instead of adding FPU. We gladly cede the FP world to Itanium.
- For raw FP horsepower within a reasonable power budget, its tough to beat Nvidia's GPU approach. That is probably why 3 of the top 10 supercomputers are GPU accelerated. http://www.top500.org/ GPU-type architectures will likely be the future of scientific computing. Venray is focused on Memory Wall limited areas such as Big Data.
- From the computer architecture perspective, the distinction between Big Data and Small Data is whether the datasets will primarily fit within the onboard caches. Video compression, graphics acceleration, encryption, and much of LINPAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINPACK) would be classed as Small Data since most of the computing can be done without leaving the caches (high locality). Legacy architectures choke on Big Data since the datasets overflow the caches and there is much much less data reuse.
- MapReduce is important because it is currently the most visible Big Data application thanks to Google. http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
- Venray believes Big Data applications are the future of computing. So does McKinsey Consulting. http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation We leave it to others to accelerate MS Office and Call of Duty.
- The future of Big Data appears to be RAM resident, not disk, not even flash. (See Fred Ho's work at IBM.) https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/fredho66/?lang=en_us
- re: Mitsubish 3DRAM and other similar ventures, iRAM, Exacute, Gilgamesh, etc....they embedded DRAM into logic. Contrast with TOMI that embeds CPU cores into DRAMs.....our benefits are performance and particularly cost: http://www.edn.com/photo/294/294788-microprocessor_vs_memory_transistors_graph.jpg
- We chose a modified RISC architecture rather than a special purpose one such as Gilgamesh in order to make programming simpler with well understood Linux tools such as gcc. Submit your gcc C, C++, or Fortran to http://www.venraytechnology.com./ Statistics are returned in standard dGen format.
- TSV (through silicon vias) and HMC (hybrid memory cube) are valid attempts to push back the Memory Wall. Discussed in Part 1 for EDN. http://www.edn.com/article/520059-The_future_of_computers_Part_1_Multicore_and_the_Memory_Wall.php Decision may be determined by cost.
- Would love to dispense with caches because they add transistors. 4K data and 4K instruction caches sped us up about 10x. Unlike legacy architectures, TOMI cache lines load in a single DRAM cycle.
- Yes love Raspberry Pi. http://www.raspberrypi.org/
- Quad-

Our needs are more subtle than the constant chanting of "base load" would suggest. Most of new generation (natural gas) is for peak demand and sit unused most of the time. Utility scale energy storage for both renewable and peak demand is advancing very quickly including compressed air and pumped hydro. Google has a detailed report on how in the mid-term renewables will beat all other fuels for the simple reason the fuel is free. (note efficiency typically costs $5/MWH while coal costs $29/MWH). Google is putting their wallet where there mouth is and has/is investing almost $1B into solar. Investing in nuclear power plants and research is not now and will never be cost effective.

so your answer is to somehow create 200,000 square miles of solar cells? The cost of the cells alone would be around 600 Trillion US Dollars, or Roughly ten times the Gross World Product. That means that if every productive adult in the world did *nothing* but work on this project, it would take ten years to complete. If you take just the "luxury" product (things that are not essential to survival), then it would take 30 years to complete, and by that time it would all have to be replaced because of normal wear and tear combined with wind storms, etc...

Desertec is supposed to cost 400 Billion € -- about $560 Billion -- and provide 15% of Europe's energy needs. If it were to provide 100%, it would thus cost 3.7 Trillion. Europe, in turn, uses about 17% of the world's energy, so the total cost of suppliying all of the world's energy needs would be c. 22 Trillion US Dollars. Over 30 years, that would be just 1.2% of the world's total GDP.

Obviously, my calculations are wildly inaccurate, but the scale should be right.

It's a good job no-one has crunched the numbers and produced a cost-curve of different carbon abatement strategies, thus injecting some facts into the debate, isn't it?

http://www.mckinsey.com/en/Client_Service/Sustainability/Latest_thinking/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/client_service/Sustainability/cost%20curve%20PDFs/ImpactFinancialCrisisCarbonEconomicsGHGcostcurveV21.ashx

See exhibit 6

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/Closing_the_talent_gap.aspx

Noting: "Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching ,” we review the experiences of the top-performing systems in the world—Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. These countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5juGFSx9LiPaur6eO1KJAypB2ImVQ?docId=CNG.5337504e8f65acf16c57d5cac3cfe339.1c1

From the Article: "The United States has fallen from top of the class to average in world education rankings, said a report Tuesday that warned of US economic losses from the trend. .... ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.

Incidentally, the PISA Report on education on which the previous article is about uses a sampling of 15 year old students. It's not comparing our students with the cream of their crop. It's comparing our average students with their average students.

Most other countries are trying to make their education system more like Finland, South Korea and Singapore, not our's. Heck, even in the US, there are non-Asian parents who send their kids to Chinese school as an afterschool supplement because the math and science education offered there is often much better than what's offered in public schools.

The fundamental problem with the American healthcare system is its high cost. That's why so many people don't have coverage, and that's why attempting universal coverage right now is going to cost so much more than it should. Universal access is a noble goal, but far better to lower costs first. This report does an excellent job of breaking down exactly where we spend more money than the rest of the world. My platform is based around lowering costs in four areas: administrative costs, prescription drugs, malpractice insurance, and practitioner conflict of interest. Based on that report, my proposals would lower the average American's health care costs by over $1000 per year, without requiring any new federal spending or expansion of government power.

If I can figure all this out in my spare time, you know Congress has to know it too. Which means either A) I'm horribly wrong, or B) both parties define the problem differently than I do. Which raises the question, exactly what do they see as the problem?

Absolute horseshit and twattery. What Lomborg does is nothing like a rigorous analysis of abatement policies. If it were, it wouldn't be a book with disingenuous footnotes, it would be a cost curve. Like the ones that these guys have done:
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/Costcurves.asp

Like any cost-curve, it includes lots of actions that are net cash positive -- like home insulation. And yes, they've thought about fucking bounce-back effects too.

Sheesh, people, get a fucking grip.

Here's a source. You have to log in to see the full report, but if you click on the interactive graphic there's a section on drugs. Bottom line is that drugs in the U.S. cost 50-70% more than in other nations of similar wealth. Now why is that? We're certainly not subsidizing the drugs for those other wealthy countries like we do for for the third world.

It's a similar thing with health care in general, insurance companies are paying more and more administrative costs which are going to finding excuses why they shouldn't be paying your medical bills and it's driving the costs up. A single-payer, public plan is the only way to avoid this. For some situations like health care, unfettered capitalism just doesn't work.

As for games, well I suspect it's a lot like the movie industry, by making mediocre games that are extremely well-marketed, they are making more money than spending tons on games that have less marketing. Or at least, the mindless automatons on Wall Street with the MBAs seem to think that, you see it over and over again in U.S. companies when they hire these people who specialize in management rather than actually knowing anything about what the company does (see HP and Carli Fiorina).

A few years ago here in Germany, a study was conducted by a leading business consultancy company for a measly six or seven figure number to explain the big success of discount stores over here.

After half a year of mulling over the data, they announced they were pretty sure it had something to do with the prices.

If you understand German, here's the German cabaret artist Volker Pispers talking about it. If not, it still might be interesting to see how political entertainment looks like over here when it's good.

The entire point of stats aren't to give credit to your cause. While that is the popular thing to use them for, it is to see where the problems are or the trends

This may be seen as only different facets of the same intention. It is no argument in favour of reducing complexity into one dimension by arbitrarily selecting one variable for comparison, in this case, life expectancy.

So yes, it is entirely appropriate to make a fair comparison. Even when it doesn't agree with your world view.

Hopefully, you have patented that.

Besides, I have the strong assumption that you can normalize all the way you want, the US-system will stay the most expensive[FLASH].

CC.

The site hosting the report aren't the authors. It was written by McKinsey, who are a consultancy firm. I didn't link to the copy on their site, as it requires registration.

First one I can find is a McKinsey report: *summary *PDF of full report

They estimate that for every dollar outsourced to India, the US gains a 67c net direct benefit, plus between 45c and 47c net benefit from US labour re-employed.

Desks were implemented using Citrix for the PCs and Sunray for Solaris. Lockable drawer units could be wheeled around easily between offices. Easy, but not what you want on a daily basis.

The economics for Citrix suck as it is always cheaper to have the mips in a workstation than a server for a PC. the telephone system allowed users to login and logout of the phone so you could take the phone wherever your desk was. If you really want to be mobile, but you don't need mobiles then DECT works quite well. For real mobiles, it depends upon your deal. We paid a much lower rate between the office and the mobile.

Cool idea for management consultants. Bad idea for almost anyone else that happen to be office based. Forget books, and as for leaving documents on the server, some very interesting docs were compromised their (Restricted supplier policies/bids, contract rates, etc).

As a developer, we ended up moving every couple of months or so. Still a tremendous upheaval and altogether a dumb idea.

On the other hand, it is probably useful for some staff who mainly work elsewhere or on the road. I was on one gig where I was out most of the time doing consultancy, seriously overseas. When I was in the office, I didn't need too many books as I was mainly there for face time and to organise office support (i.e., filing, copying and so on).

As a final point, if you build an open plan office without conference facilities - best employ deaf developers. Personally, in such environments, good headphones that exclude ambient noise are wonderful.

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

Naturally, McKinsey also happens to have a long-standing and very intimate business relationship with Microsoft as consultants to their strategic planning. It should therefore be noted that Robert Uhlaner, the McKinsey executive partner who had been working as a consultant to Microsoft and who had "led the West Coast Corporate Finance & Strategy practice, supporting the firm's technology clients on strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), alliances, and premerger planning", was given a top executive position at Microsoft in February 2003, in which his aim is to "increase strategic alignment between the Microsoft's finance and business groups". That pretty well sums up what happened to Corel between the Microsoft investment and disinvestment, in just 2½ years! Questions arise as to what involvement Mr. Uhlaner had, officially or unofficially, with the Microsoft-supportive strategic advice given to Corel in late 2000 and early 2001, or with Vector's friendly and private purchasing of the Corel shares Microsoft held, which happened almost immediately after his arrival to Microsoft.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx t

Corel shareholders fight suspicious takeover deal

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx to merge their technologies into the project codenamed Deepwhite. Great idea but with somewhat misguided execution.

In 2002 Corel managed to strike a few high-profile albeit limited OEM preload deals with the likes of Dell, HP and Sony. While Corel received little in terms of revenue from those deals, even that limited success must have come as a shock for Microsoft. "How dare those ingrate nobodies invade our holy turf!" could have been the likely reaction at Redmond. With the anti-trust spotlight under a friendly operator it was time for the final strike, and how better add insult to injury than by not just taking Corel out but actually keeping the corpse within the family!

In December 2002 the Paul Allen financed Vector Group, managed by a fo

I always thought that they should market it as an embedded chip, the lynch pin being they could supply you chips that wouldn't require you to relearn a new instruction set. I.e. if you're used to programming a Mips, they'd ship you the chip with the Mips instruction set. If you programmed PPC, then they'd ship you that. That would also give companies exposure to the underlying archetecture of the chip and maybe they'd migrate to its native instruction set.

True, but why not target the Java instruction set, and create a high-performance Java chip, with a bonus of being about to also execute x86 (or SPARC or whatever) applications? Going head to head with Intel in their main market was a strategic mistake. Note that even Intel had to get out of the RAM business when they failed to dominate the market, Transmeta should have studied their competition in more detail. Or at least, hired some expensive consultants to do it for them.