— John Lanchester, writing on the Eurozone crisis for the London Review of Books.
— Allan Savory, pioneer of Holistic Management.
— David Cay Johnston, writing for the Nieman Foundation in a fairly hard critique of modern news “reporting”.
Horace Dediu offers up “Curated Market Intelligence” over at Asymco, and it is precisely the sort of market analysis that I’d like to think I would be producing had I decided to, you know, use my degree instead of becoming a developer-designer. It’s high-signal, low-noise, and served up in pretty easy to digest chunks, like this little bit on supply-constraned markets and what they mean for smartphones.
I am absolutely loving this blog: with the caveat that it is highly technical. I no longer remember how I arrived at it, but it’s awesome. Dig “Evolvability, Robustness, and Resilience” and the recent series on crony capitalism (which is a good fit for where the US’ macro-economy is at right now).
— Krugman, at the NYT
This dovetails several of my interests: behavioral economics, incentive design, and agile software development. Plus! A whole new youtube channel!
Apparently, piracy has become so commonplace in Somalia that there is now a formalized investment structure and conventions for two types of shares in the business. You have to bring your own assault rifle (for which you get a class-A share), but if you supply an assault skiff or a heavier weapon you typically get another class-A share. Bonus!
This is how all annual reports should work. If you are interested in economics and management, this is worth reading even if you’re not an investor in BH!
Also of note is an extended commentary on derivatives and risk, which I intend to delve into more fully at a later date.
A co-worker of mine linked up a summary of this article, which is, indeed, a scathing commentary on .NET and its many failings, even in the enterprise market.
There are to big stories in that piece, and neither is the obvious one. Yes, .NET sucks, and yes, it is cool that open-source continues to demonstrate its leverage in the most enterprise-y of enterprises. However…
Story number one has to be one of the benchmarks in which Microsoft’s trading platform gets demolished. Trade execution speed: Microsoft’s .NET solution delivers a trade in 2.7ms. Yes, 2.7 milliseconds. And that’s not fast enough anymore. There is apparently a linux based platform in use by the Chinese that can execute trades in 0.4ms. Yikes. Hard to believe that 2.7ms is 7x slower than it needs to be to compete. Other machines are the only things capable of even pressuring a system that can execute a trade that fast. I wonder how long it will be before everyone has access to sophisticated financial software agents?
Story number two is that Microsoft is down to 1—one!—stock exchange running their offering. And its the South African exchange, which is (for obvious historical reasons) aligned with the LSE. And it doesn’t sound great for MS there, either.
More writing on the wall for Microsoft? I think so. Their enterprise business is basically all that they have left, outside of (slowly eroding) marketshare.
