Although there is some discussion of trust in the article, I am surprised that the authors did not make use of some sort of trust framework alongside Hoftstede and Hall. While I am not generally a big fan of Francis Fukuyama (who besides is infamously titled book "The End of History" has also written "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity") something like his high trust/low trust society framework might also inform a discussion of cross-cultural working groups, especially when it comes to discussion relationship and communications styles.
I too have done quite a bit of research in the field of privacy (at an advanced research facility of a large IT company). First, let me compliment you on your excellent summary - it should be modded way up. All that I have to add would be to draw attention to some of the contextual and environmental variables to which you refer. Specifically: the sense of control and reciprocity. People are more likely to divulge information that would otherwise be considered private if they know what it is going to be used for and who is going to see it. This, of course, relates to the issue of trust - if you trust the person or body to whom/which you are divulging information, you are more likely to feel comfortable in doing so because of your espectations that it will only be used for the purposes that you gave it. Reciprocity is more evident in a social context - I divulge something about me, you divulge something about you i.e. how we make friends, but it has intriguing possibilities in the commercial field (beyond discounts and loyalty points etc.)
In any event, I think we can all agree that privacy is more complex than the "you only want it if you have something hide" school of thought in the HP paper.
There is an interesting article
in
the Guardian which discusses the RotK nominations in light of the lack of
attention for the major Oscars for the first two. Here is a short excerpt:
Undeniably the success of
Jackson's epic has left Hollywood with a slight case of egg-on-face. This was a
trilogy shot right outside the establishment orbit; filmed in Jackson's native
New Zealand and funded by the independent New Line Cinema after original backers
Miramax demanded that the entire story be condensed into a single two-hour
movie.
In the view of many experts,
The Lord of the Rings was shaping up to be the biggest disaster in cinema
history. Now it has gone down as one of its greatest triumphs. Evidence suggests
that February 29 will be the date of Hollywood's official mea culpa. Assuming
that Return of the King wins best picture (and you'd be a fool to bet against
it), it will in effect be an award for all three films. The same goes for
Jackson's probable nod as best director.
RFID technology is still in its infancy and as other posters have pointed out, it will not be until individual items are tagged that the danger to privacy will arise. That is still a few years away and there may even come to be benefits for consumers besides not having to line up to have your cart scanned. In the long run the danger of having market researchers wardriving meighbourhoods to take inventories of what products people use is a possibility, but so too is compiling your shopping list in much the same way or having your washing machine warn you that there is a red sock about to go into a load of whites. No doubt the dangers will arise before the benefits (aside from price reductions due to supply chain efficiencies) however I can think of no group better qualified than/. readers to come up with ways to mitigate the bad and ideas to exploit the potential benefits.
is it intellectual property theft? I suppose that if asked about what to do if you found a wallet on the street these God fearing, law and order Republicans would, for example, say that the right (no pun intended) thing to do would be to return the wallet to its owner cash intact. So what's the difference here? Oh, you aren't really stealing digital content because... Interesting spin on lobbying from the RIAA
While your comments about the political influence about Microsoft are correct, this is not directly related to Microsoft's capacity to create jobs. Indeed, Microsoft *only* directly employs around 55,000 people worldwide, most of them in areas other than operating systems and the rate of growth of their workforce is higher outside of the US than it is within the US.
Of course, as has been pointed out in other comments posted to this article, Microsoft's political influence does not exist in a vacuum - companies such as IBM (over 300,000 employees - a much more important job creator) will also be weighing in with their lobbying resources. I doubt that they will be supporting the arguments that Linux and Open Source are bad for American security or the American economy.
It is easy for cynics to argue that Congress does not care about American jobs (although if other posters check their facts they will find that while many manufacturing sectors have been contracting in the past decade, over all NAFTA was a net contributor to jobs in the US over that period - the current job hits in the tech and financial sectors (the ones that will hit/. readers the hardest have nothing to do with NAFTA). You may also recall that one of the first things that the Bush administration did to annoy the Europeans was to bring in steel tarrifs to *protect* American jobs. At any rate, as I mentioned in my earlier post, this is an election year and politicians become much more interest in jobs - or at least in having fewer unemployed sitting around causing discontent among the electorate.
While those in power certainly have an interest in protecting American jobs there are a couple of other things to keep in mind. First and foremost, this is an election year. Sure, members of Congress have been made aware of intellectual property issues by the lobbying of the RIAA, but they have also seen what a fiasco that has the potential to be as young children and little old ladies get hauled to court. They may shy away from taking a stand on a complex computer-related intellectual property issue that might also blow up in their faces. Furthermore, although I don't expect politicians to have a sufficient grasp of economics to work this out, Open Source is as, or more likely to be a net creator of American jobs seeing as it has the potential to lower the cost of doing business of all kinds of job producing businesses, even if companies such as SCO may not do well out of it. All in all, I doubt it will have much of a lobbying impact - mostly for the first point I raised.
This is, after all, first and foremost a bit of marketing. Red Hat is trying to get the message out to customers and would-be customers that the whole SCO thing does not create uncertainty or risk over the purchase or use of their product.
Other problems with outsourcing that are not stressed in the article include the rather mixed success rates. The business journals are filled with the success stories - and so in true MBA fashion everyone piles in to copy them - but there are a lot of failures. Successful companies (aka the big players who have been doing it for a long time) have build a strategic view of outsourcing over the long term and have the rescources and processes in place to manage the projects. New comers jumping onto the outsourcing bandwagon are likely to need to add whole new layers of management (often in mid-project) to handle it, often eliminating much of the savings of outsourcing in the first place.
You are probably right - but the RIAA has made their lobbying job that much more difficult because of their heavy-handed approach in the recent past. With the stories of how the chased after grannies and children any future lobbying will not be able to be done out of sight, especially in an election year, members of Congress will be a little more cautious about jumping into such an emotive issue on the side of the RIAA.
Is this a "problem" that needs a tech fix?
on
Smart Billboards
·
· Score: 1
I know this is/. and everyone is supposed to be predisposed to boxes and gagets etc., but I really have to question whether this product addresses a problem that really requires a technological fix. From what I see in the article and the Mobiltrak website, this localizes advertising content on the basis of the characteristics of road users in a particular area at different times of the day. For the most part, in any large metropolitan area, the advertisers and market researchers already know this, that's how they decide what billboards to put where and how much to charge for them. Presumably this service offers some improvement on existing market research products in terms of timeliness, accuracy and/or cost. Even then, claims about superior targeting of advertising translating into superior results from advertising are not easy to measure in that sort of advertising.
What matters is that most people who make business decisions to use commercial software believe that the vendor is liable
They also believe, or at least behave according to, the old chestnut "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (substitute well known brand in any technology realted field for "IBM" to adapt this to any category). Those in large organizations don't want to take risks that will jeopardize their careers, but at least they are more likely to have IT departments to make recommendations. In small organizations, there is neither the in-house expertise nor often the willingness to spend on outside advice. While they may not know just how little they know, they calculate risk on the basis of what little they do know and they know the Apple and Mircrosoft brands.
Oh the wonderful irony of it all - outside expert views gagged by the UN on Internation Human Rights Day, the anniversary of adoption of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" back in 1948.
Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
When are these people going to realize that they need to get the input of someone that at least represents the people that they are going to 'govern'??
Oh they realize it all right, they even have a model for it - the International Labor Organization. It was formed as part of a burst of post WWI Wilsonian idealism and has a unique structure for an official internationla organization (and now forms part of the UN system). In addition to the government representatives, each country sends representatives from their business and union organizations - and these folks have full voting rights in the meetings and so can't be thrown out as "observers" can. Of course having set up one organization with a structure like this, the governments of this world have made sure never to do it again - why should the people who are actually involved in an issue area have any say when there is government to government horse trading to do. Much more convenient to have "observers" that they can lock out - which, of course is par for the course considering the track records on free speech and openness of most of the governments doing the talking.
One of the problems big companies tend to have with innovation is not that they don't have ideas. It's just they're so big that the next innovative idea -- if it's not equally huge -- isn't going to move the needle on their financials.
And if it is a truly revolutionary innovation, it will destroy the business of the units of the company the currently make all of the company's money... and therefore the careers of decision-makers in those business units, who tend have a lot of say into the direction of the company and so are likely to fight resource allocation to such threats being developed from within the company. They may have to buy them in later, but that's how most big companies innovate these days, they buy up small companies.
If people wanted to do video phones, we'd be doing it already. And the people who do want to do it are using webcams, online chat, etc. The technology is already there.
And it has been there for quite a while in one form or another. It seems to be the kind of thing that researches well in user concept research but then fails gain adoption by a wide user-base. It was tried in the 70's, 80's 90's (and now/soon, depending on what country you live in, via cell phone technology). This is a classic case of the difference between what people say and what they do. Sounds like a great idea in a focus group or on-street questionnaire but in cold light of reality (i.e. what you actually look like when you answer the phone) it just doesn't wash.
The parallels between rebates and hidden charges are even closer than you think. The point of rebates rather than price cuts is that a lower price applies to everyone, while a rebate (of the mail in variety) applies only to those who go to the trouble of sending it it. Sure, you may do it, but enough people are attracted by the deal but then don't take the time to do it to make it very profitable. Similarly, whether extra charges are a conspiracy or are a result of poor systems and processes that the company can't be bothered to fix, they gain because even if they have to fix some, enough consumers won't do anything about it so the company ends up winning.
Too right - restocking fees especially. Think about it, the entire history of retail models in the past hundred years has been to shift the labor and cost to the consumer. In our grandparents' day the staff would fetch things that you asked for from the shelves. This has evolved to self-selection most stores and now self-scanning is coming in. I guess retailers figure that since they can't get the consumer to restock items, they have to charge them for the effort.
Stealth inflation builds real margins
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Things such as deregulation, increased competition and globalization etc. have all squeezed profit margins. Adding these charges or systematically making mistakes that only a minority will catch all help to increase profits while keeping the headline cost of the product or service the same. Of course it makes comparing genuine prices impossible, but that's the point. It's also the point of making things like cell phone plans as complex as possible - they don't want you to be able to compare between competitors.
The fact that America, like every other developed economy, is going to have to rely more and more on a highly educated workforce is not a particularly novel forecast, but is a good topic for hand wringing. On the other hand, the implications of better and cheaper materials for manufacturing might produce a more optimistic view as it rolls through the manufacuting sector, lowering costs, creating jobs etc. Indeed, to the extent that manufacturing using these materials requires skills beyond those found in the third world, it might lead to new manufacturing jobs (or, of course, it might not, this is all complete speculation after all)
Oh, and on that note I'm surprised that no one has yet commented on the boldness of this economic forecast going as far out as this when the record of economists getting it right one or two quarters down the road is mixed (for example the IT recovery that has been a rolling two quarters away since 2000).
Amid all the talk of corporate bully tactics that will continue until the lesson is learned, it is worth pausing to consider the potential step forward in bringing more accountability to American society. The ability of groups like the EFF and the various university groups to spread information about something that a large company wants to keep hidden (and use the full force of the legal system to do so) and keep going despite all the pressure against them is certainly a "good thing".
Slashdot Mirror
Although there is some discussion of trust in the article, I am surprised that the authors did not make use of some sort of trust framework alongside Hoftstede and Hall. While I am not generally a big fan of Francis Fukuyama (who besides is infamously titled book "The End of History" has also written "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity") something like his high trust/low trust society framework might also inform a discussion of cross-cultural working groups, especially when it comes to discussion relationship and communications styles.
I too have done quite a bit of research in the field of privacy (at an advanced research facility of a large IT company). First, let me compliment you on your excellent summary - it should be modded way up. All that I have to add would be to draw attention to some of the contextual and environmental variables to which you refer. Specifically: the sense of control and reciprocity. People are more likely to divulge information that would otherwise be considered private if they know what it is going to be used for and who is going to see it. This, of course, relates to the issue of trust - if you trust the person or body to whom/which you are divulging information, you are more likely to feel comfortable in doing so because of your espectations that it will only be used for the purposes that you gave it. Reciprocity is more evident in a social context - I divulge something about me, you divulge something about you i.e. how we make friends, but it has intriguing possibilities in the commercial field (beyond discounts and loyalty points etc.) In any event, I think we can all agree that privacy is more complex than the "you only want it if you have something hide" school of thought in the HP paper.
Undeniably the success of Jackson's epic has left Hollywood with a slight case of egg-on-face. This was a trilogy shot right outside the establishment orbit; filmed in Jackson's native New Zealand and funded by the independent New Line Cinema after original backers Miramax demanded that the entire story be condensed into a single two-hour movie.
In the view of many experts, The Lord of the Rings was shaping up to be the biggest disaster in cinema history. Now it has gone down as one of its greatest triumphs. Evidence suggests that February 29 will be the date of Hollywood's official mea culpa. Assuming that Return of the King wins best picture (and you'd be a fool to bet against it), it will in effect be an award for all three films. The same goes for Jackson's probable nod as best director.
RFID technology is still in its infancy and as other posters have pointed out, it will not be until individual items are tagged that the danger to privacy will arise. That is still a few years away and there may even come to be benefits for consumers besides not having to line up to have your cart scanned. In the long run the danger of having market researchers wardriving meighbourhoods to take inventories of what products people use is a possibility, but so too is compiling your shopping list in much the same way or having your washing machine warn you that there is a red sock about to go into a load of whites. No doubt the dangers will arise before the benefits (aside from price reductions due to supply chain efficiencies) however I can think of no group better qualified than /. readers to come up with ways to mitigate the bad and ideas to exploit the potential benefits.
is it intellectual property theft? I suppose that if asked about what to do if you found a wallet on the street these God fearing, law and order Republicans would, for example, say that the right (no pun intended) thing to do would be to return the wallet to its owner cash intact. So what's the difference here? Oh, you aren't really stealing digital content because ... Interesting spin on lobbying from the RIAA
While your comments about the political influence about Microsoft are correct, this is not directly related to Microsoft's capacity to create jobs. Indeed, Microsoft *only* directly employs around 55,000 people worldwide, most of them in areas other than operating systems and the rate of growth of their workforce is higher outside of the US than it is within the US.
/. readers the hardest have nothing to do with NAFTA). You may also recall that one of the first things that the Bush administration did to annoy the Europeans was to bring in steel tarrifs to *protect* American jobs. At any rate, as I mentioned in my earlier post, this is an election year and politicians become much more interest in jobs - or at least in having fewer unemployed sitting around causing discontent among the electorate.
Of course, as has been pointed out in other comments posted to this article, Microsoft's political influence does not exist in a vacuum - companies such as IBM (over 300,000 employees - a much more important job creator) will also be weighing in with their lobbying resources. I doubt that they will be supporting the arguments that Linux and Open Source are bad for American security or the American economy.
It is easy for cynics to argue that Congress does not care about American jobs (although if other posters check their facts they will find that while many manufacturing sectors have been contracting in the past decade, over all NAFTA was a net contributor to jobs in the US over that period - the current job hits in the tech and financial sectors (the ones that will hit
While those in power certainly have an interest in protecting American jobs there are a couple of other things to keep in mind. First and foremost, this is an election year. Sure, members of Congress have been made aware of intellectual property issues by the lobbying of the RIAA, but they have also seen what a fiasco that has the potential to be as young children and little old ladies get hauled to court. They may shy away from taking a stand on a complex computer-related intellectual property issue that might also blow up in their faces. Furthermore, although I don't expect politicians to have a sufficient grasp of economics to work this out, Open Source is as, or more likely to be a net creator of American jobs seeing as it has the potential to lower the cost of doing business of all kinds of job producing businesses, even if companies such as SCO may not do well out of it. All in all, I doubt it will have much of a lobbying impact - mostly for the first point I raised.
This is, after all, first and foremost a bit of marketing. Red Hat is trying to get the message out to customers and would-be customers that the whole SCO thing does not create uncertainty or risk over the purchase or use of their product.
Other problems with outsourcing that are not stressed in the article include the rather mixed success rates. The business journals are filled with the success stories - and so in true MBA fashion everyone piles in to copy them - but there are a lot of failures. Successful companies (aka the big players who have been doing it for a long time) have build a strategic view of outsourcing over the long term and have the rescources and processes in place to manage the projects. New comers jumping onto the outsourcing bandwagon are likely to need to add whole new layers of management (often in mid-project) to handle it, often eliminating much of the savings of outsourcing in the first place.
The RIAA will lobby for a new law
You are probably right - but the RIAA has made their lobbying job that much more difficult because of their heavy-handed approach in the recent past. With the stories of how the chased after grannies and children any future lobbying will not be able to be done out of sight, especially in an election year, members of Congress will be a little more cautious about jumping into such an emotive issue on the side of the RIAA.
I know this is /. and everyone is supposed to be predisposed to boxes and gagets etc., but I really have to question whether this product addresses a problem that really requires a technological fix. From what I see in the article and the Mobiltrak website, this localizes advertising content on the basis of the characteristics of road users in a particular area at different times of the day. For the most part, in any large metropolitan area, the advertisers and market researchers already know this, that's how they decide what billboards to put where and how much to charge for them. Presumably this service offers some improvement on existing market research products in terms of timeliness, accuracy and/or cost. Even then, claims about superior targeting of advertising translating into superior results from advertising are not easy to measure in that sort of advertising.
What matters is that most people who make business decisions to use commercial software believe that the vendor is liable
They also believe, or at least behave according to, the old chestnut "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (substitute well known brand in any technology realted field for "IBM" to adapt this to any category). Those in large organizations don't want to take risks that will jeopardize their careers, but at least they are more likely to have IT departments to make recommendations. In small organizations, there is neither the in-house expertise nor often the willingness to spend on outside advice. While they may not know just how little they know, they calculate risk on the basis of what little they do know and they know the Apple and Mircrosoft brands.
Oh the wonderful irony of it all - outside expert views gagged by the UN on Internation Human Rights Day, the anniversary of adoption of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" back in 1948.
Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
When are these people going to realize that they need to get the input of someone that at least represents the people that they are going to 'govern'??
Oh they realize it all right, they even have a model for it - the International Labor Organization. It was formed as part of a burst of post WWI Wilsonian idealism and has a unique structure for an official internationla organization (and now forms part of the UN system). In addition to the government representatives, each country sends representatives from their business and union organizations - and these folks have full voting rights in the meetings and so can't be thrown out as "observers" can. Of course having set up one organization with a structure like this, the governments of this world have made sure never to do it again - why should the people who are actually involved in an issue area have any say when there is government to government horse trading to do. Much more convenient to have "observers" that they can lock out - which, of course is par for the course considering the track records on free speech and openness of most of the governments doing the talking.
One of the problems big companies tend to have with innovation is not that they don't have ideas. It's just they're so big that the next innovative idea -- if it's not equally huge -- isn't going to move the needle on their financials.
... and therefore the careers of decision-makers in those business units, who tend have a lot of say into the direction of the company and so are likely to fight resource allocation to such threats being developed from within the company. They may have to buy them in later, but that's how most big companies innovate these days, they buy up small companies.
And if it is a truly revolutionary innovation, it will destroy the business of the units of the company the currently make all of the company's money
If people wanted to do video phones, we'd be doing it already. And the people who do want to do it are using webcams, online chat, etc. The technology is already there. And it has been there for quite a while in one form or another. It seems to be the kind of thing that researches well in user concept research but then fails gain adoption by a wide user-base. It was tried in the 70's, 80's 90's (and now/soon, depending on what country you live in, via cell phone technology). This is a classic case of the difference between what people say and what they do. Sounds like a great idea in a focus group or on-street questionnaire but in cold light of reality (i.e. what you actually look like when you answer the phone) it just doesn't wash.
The parallels between rebates and hidden charges are even closer than you think. The point of rebates rather than price cuts is that a lower price applies to everyone, while a rebate (of the mail in variety) applies only to those who go to the trouble of sending it it. Sure, you may do it, but enough people are attracted by the deal but then don't take the time to do it to make it very profitable. Similarly, whether extra charges are a conspiracy or are a result of poor systems and processes that the company can't be bothered to fix, they gain because even if they have to fix some, enough consumers won't do anything about it so the company ends up winning.
Too right - restocking fees especially. Think about it, the entire history of retail models in the past hundred years has been to shift the labor and cost to the consumer. In our grandparents' day the staff would fetch things that you asked for from the shelves. This has evolved to self-selection most stores and now self-scanning is coming in. I guess retailers figure that since they can't get the consumer to restock items, they have to charge them for the effort.
Things such as deregulation, increased competition and globalization etc. have all squeezed profit margins. Adding these charges or systematically making mistakes that only a minority will catch all help to increase profits while keeping the headline cost of the product or service the same. Of course it makes comparing genuine prices impossible, but that's the point. It's also the point of making things like cell phone plans as complex as possible - they don't want you to be able to compare between competitors.
The fact that America, like every other developed economy, is going to have to rely more and more on a highly educated workforce is not a particularly novel forecast, but is a good topic for hand wringing. On the other hand, the implications of better and cheaper materials for manufacturing might produce a more optimistic view as it rolls through the manufacuting sector, lowering costs, creating jobs etc. Indeed, to the extent that manufacturing using these materials requires skills beyond those found in the third world, it might lead to new manufacturing jobs (or, of course, it might not, this is all complete speculation after all)
Oh, and on that note I'm surprised that no one has yet commented on the boldness of this economic forecast going as far out as this when the record of economists getting it right one or two quarters down the road is mixed (for example the IT recovery that has been a rolling two quarters away since 2000).
Amid all the talk of corporate bully tactics that will continue until the lesson is learned, it is worth pausing to consider the potential step forward in bringing more accountability to American society. The ability of groups like the EFF and the various university groups to spread information about something that a large company wants to keep hidden (and use the full force of the legal system to do so) and keep going despite all the pressure against them is certainly a "good thing".
yes but you can set your preferences to filter out these results for "little Timmy"...