The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing (1975-2011)

‎Donnerstag, ‎19. ‎Jänner ‎2012, ‏‎17:29:42 | Dustin

A brilliant chart of computer sales. Note the log scale!

Isaacson on Jobs: Should He Have Been a Nicer CEO?

Date: 26-01-2012

Source: TIME

During Tuesday evening’s State of the Union address, President Obama honored the memory of Steve Jobs by underscoring the creative and technological engines that drive America. He also called attention to one of the necessary evils of progress: risk. “We should support … every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs,” said the president. “After all, innovation is what America has always been about.”

By embracing risks, Steve Jobs inspired his employees, his competition, and most of all his customers, who developed a cultish attachment to his products. So it was appropriate that even as Congress was applauding Jobs’ impact on the business world, the man who arguably knew the Apple founder best – his biographer, Walter Isaacson – was at the 92nd Street Y on Manhattan’s Upper East Side telling a standing-room-only audience of 600 of insights gained during the two years he spent interviewing Jobs.

In this case, the questions were being asked by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel. Isaacson preceded Stengel as head of TIME – and had been Stengel’s boss – so the conversation included moments of nostalgia as well as some frank discussion about managerial styles. As a boss, of course, Jobs was famously prone to extreme bluntness, which was often construed as intentional meanness. Isaacson saw it a little differently. “He intuitively did not have that filter,” he explained, pointing to an example he witnessed first hand. “When the person at Whole Foods is making his smoothie and she’s taking too long, [most people] have a filter that says, ‘Don’t jump on her.’ But Steve was brutally honest.” 

How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Date: 22-01-2012

Source: The New York Times
 People flooded Foxconn Technology with résumés at a 2010 job fair in Henan Province, China.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

The shackled boss

Date: 24-01-2012
Source: The Economist: Schumpeter

Corporate bosses are much less powerful than they used to be

EXHAUSTED after a shipwreck, the hero of “Gulliver’s Travels” wakes up on the island of Lilliput to find that he has been tied down by lots of “slender ligatures”. Gulliver is far stronger than his tiny captors; but by working together the Lilliputians subdue the giant.

The bosses who will gather in Davos on January 25th-29th are more like Gulliver than they care to imagine. They may feel big, as they hobnob with politicians and stride from one soirée to another (in sensible shoes, to avoid slipping on the Swiss resort’s icy pavements). And pundits will fret, as they always do, that Davos Men are carving up the world. But when those bosses return to work they will discover that the tiny ligatures that non-Davosites have attached to them bind ever more tightly.

Two decades ago bosses were relatively unbound. American chief executives struck heroic poses on the covers of Forbes and Fortune and appointed pliable cronies to their boards. Europeans such as Percy Barnevik, the boss of ASEA Brown Boveri, a Swedish-Swiss conglomerate, imported the American cult of the CEO to the old continent. But since then a succession of catastrophes—most notably the implosion of Enron in 2001 and the financial crisis in 2007-08—have empowered the critics of over-mighty bosses. In 2010 two legal academics, Marcel Kahan and Edward Rock, published a seminal article on “Embattled CEOs”. Since then they have become ever more embattled.

Executive pay: Money for nothing?

Date: 12-01-2012
Source: The Economist

Executive pay levels rise because of globalisation, not poor oversight

HARD work builds character, and should be rewarded. But many Britons believe the link between graft and gain has broken down. At the bottom, they see a dependency culture that costs them billions in welfare spending. At the top, pay for executives seems to soar regardless of the fortunes of their businesses.

Even some on the right are rounding on corporate excess. David Cameron, ever alive to the public mood, announced on January 8th that he would reform executive remuneration. His ideas include giving shareholders binding votes on the pay, perks and severance packages handed out by companies. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary and perhaps the most left-wing member of the coalition, is leading the raid on boardrooms.

Ed Miliband, the Labour Party’s increasingly criticised leader, wants to go even further. He argues for putting workers’ representatives on company boards and making corporate pay more transparent. Labour is the party of equality, yet the issue is a bind for him. If he is much more radical than Mr Cameron, he risks reviving his “Red Ed” reputation. If he is not, the government’s efforts will grab all the attention.

The debate over executive pay is likely to heat up over the next few months, fuelled by disclosures of bumper bonuses for bosses. The timing will be particularly embarrassing to public companies and politicians, as median real incomes are forecast to fall sharply as the economic slump continues.

China’s Top 10 Business Stories in 2011

Author: Patrick Chovanec · January 2nd, 2012 · RGE EconoMonitor

Author: Patrick Chovanec · January 2nd, 2012 · Comments (1) Share ThisPrint 0 0

As the year comes to a close, and we look forward to 2012, I continue the tradition I started last year and offer a brief look at the top stories that shaped China’s business and economic climate in 2011:

1. High-Speed Rail. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — China’s ambitious high-speed rail program embodied the highest highs and the lowest lows the country experienced this year. In January, President Obama cited the planned 20,000km network in his annual State of the Union address as a prime example of how America need to catch up to the Chinese. As if to prove his point, June saw the grand opening of the much-heralded Beijing-Shanghai line, timed to coincide with the Communist Party’s 90th anniversary celebrations. But even before then, there were signs of trouble on the horizon, starting in February when the powerful head of China’s railway ministry — the project’s godfather — was abruptly fired as part of a massive corruption scandal. Then a crash on a line near Wenzhou, in which at least 35 people were killed, unleashed a wave of fury on the Chinese internet, forcing the government to re-think the entire project amid charges of cover-up and sloppy construction. By November, with high-speed trains running at chronically low capacity and construction debts piling up, the railway ministry was asking Beijing for a rumored RMB 800 billion (US$ 126 billion) bailout just to pay the money it owed suppliers.

2. Inflation. Few issues preoccupied the average Chinese citizen — or Chinese policymakers — this year as much as rapidly rising prices.

It’s Always Sunny in Silicon Valley

Date: 23-12-2011
Source: Businessweek
Subject:

The Valley’s techies live in a bubble of prosperity. Optimism has its advantages, but some worry the region may lose touch with the rest of the world

Every so often, the best parties come to represent moments in time. Think of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966, the celeb-studded Liberty Island launch of Tina Brown’s ill-fated Talk magazine in 1999, and private equity maven Stephen A. Schwarzman’s 60th birthday bash in 2007, which featured Rod Stewart. Sean Parker’s bacchanal for the streaming music service Spotify on Sept. 22 in San Francisco may well join the ranks of these epic affairs.

The Facebook billionaire—portrayed by Justin Timberlake as a swaggering lush in The Social Network—turned an abandoned warehouse in the city’s Potrero District into a couch-filled pleasure palace. Waiters served piles of lobster, sushi, and roast pig, while journalists each were presented their own $300 bottles of DeLeón Tequila. As Mark Zuckerberg, Apple (AAPL) designer Jony Ive, author Danielle Steel, and other guests mingled, acts including Snoop Dogg, Jane’s Addiction, and the Killers—flown in on private jets—performed for the well-lubricated crowd. “All the recording artists here might not have shown up if they knew I was a nerd,” said an exuberant Parker from the stage.

The Chinese Solar Machine

Date: 21-12-2011
Source: Technology Review

Chinese manufacturers have ­dominated the international ­market for conventional solar ­panels by building bigger ­factories faster. Now they will need to ­innovate to maintain their lead.

Ten years ago, solar panels were made mostly in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Chinese manufacturers made almost none. But by 2006, the Chinese company Suntech Power had the capacity to make over a million silicon-based solar panels a year and was already the world’s third-largest producer. Today Chinese manufacturers make about 50 million solar panels a year—over half the world’s supply in 2010—and include four of the world’s top five solar-panel manufacturers. What makes this particularly impressive is that the industry elsewhere has been doubling in size every two years, and Chinese manufacturers have done even better, doubling their production roughly every year.

“Tectonic Shifts” in Employment

Date: 21-12-2011
Source: The Wall Street Journal

Information technology is reducing the need for certain jobs faster than new ones are being created.

Things Reviewed:

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution ?Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

October 2011

“The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market”

David Autor and David Dorn

June 2011

The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country’s economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role.

Why large firms are often more inventive than small ones

Date: 15-12-2011
Source: The Economist: Schumpeter
Subject: Big and clever

Why large firms are often more inventive than small ones

SOME people say it is neither big nor clever to drink. Viz, a British comic, settled that debate with a letter from a reader who said: “I drink 15 pints a day, I’m 6 foot 3 inches tall and a professor of theoretical physics.” However, another question about size and cleverness has yet to be resolved. Are big companies the best catalysts of innovation, or are small ones better?

Joseph Schumpeter, after whom this column is named, argued both sides of the case. In 1909 he said that small companies were more inventive. In 1942 he reversed himself. Big firms have more incentive to invest in new products, he decided, because they can sell them to more people and reap greater rewards more quickly. In a competitive market, inventions are quickly imitated, so a small inventor’s investment often fails to pay off.