Posts by Bernard

The fact that staff want something

doesn't make it a legitimate business requirement.

I'd like a high floor office in the Shard and a private corporate jet. They'd undoubtedly boost my productivity a few percent but for some reason the logistics team don't feel compelled to provide them for me within their budget.

The fact that I can visit the Shard observation deck or buy flights online from a variety of vendors has yet to move them to meet my expectations.

The catering staff won't even bring a muay thai to my back garden when its sunny!

How dare business segments make decisions based on strategic objectives rather than to validate individual staff members.

Cojones

Scamming a casino out of big money takes cojones. Being the on-the-ground frontman for the scam even more so.

If he has a mysterious accident or decides that life isn't worth it in the next year or two then I don't see anyone being too surprised.

just where could it go?

Inhouse?

I can see how the AWS model is a capex free way to grow their business to scale, but with a few years of reliable multi-million user traffic stats I'd think they could save a pile over 5-10 years by building their own datacentres. I'd be surprised if they're not already recruiting with that in mind for the long term.

The big thing you'd need to make that possible is a pool of developers who are familiar with and enthusiastic about your software and the kinds of problems you need to solve so that you can rapidly replicate the AWS features you rely on in an inhouse setup. I wonder how they could solve that?

Oh, look, they're running a competition.

'But sneaking it out in the hope no one will notice, and then screwing up connectivity for all, just makes the whole industry look shabby.'

Nah. It makes Virgin look shabby.

Tarring everyone with the same brush actually makes it more likely to happen. If people think they're all the same as Virgin then why bother moving?

Caps and traffic shaping are inevitable in the mobile data industry because of the precarious economics of the service, but its rare things are handled this badly, so Virgin deserve all of the good PR which follows.

So let me get this straight

For the same price as a MacBook Air you get something that Apple fans will laugh at because, despite having no onboard storage, it's too heavy (among several other things) and non-Apple fans will laugh at because it locks you into an even more restrictive eco-system than Apple's.

I wonder if Google are doing this just to get a small but valuable list of morons who'll buy absolutely anything then target them with super-premium advertising.

This issue isn't unusual to computer science

The legal system and our informal cultural norms are exactly the same.

The theoretical elegance of beginning anything from a blank page is trumped by the practical utility of working with what's already there and tinkering where necessary.

Thats why we're still nominally subjects of a monarch, why non-christians frequently celebrate christmas and why company policies and procedures rarely bear any relation to the actual workings of the firm.

Why anyone would want to share their every mundane thought is beyond me

Why anyone would listen even more so.

But neither is as baffling as why anyone would think that prosecuting them is a good idea.

If someone says something that indicates they're guilty of a crime, prosecute them. If someone says something that itself may be a crime then absent very narrow and clearly defined circumstances (such as sharing legally privelaged information) we need to change the law so that it isn't.

Prejudices of all sorts are nasty and dumb, but making them illegal is the thin end of a very alarming wedge.

That Google story is amazing

Given that a lot of their value falls in decisions they could only make as a small outfit starting from scratch, the most likely scenario if Excite had bought would be them screwing it up and noone ever knowing Google existed.

Whatever anyone's thoughts on Google a world without them is hard to imagine.

So his position is that the board are culpable for failing to spot the stupidity of his stupid decision.

He's right that they're not blameless, but it doesn't make him look any better.

As many people have said here many times

If your UK operation is too insignificant to pay a sensible amount of corporation tax your lobbying access should be proportionally small.

Having non-UK firms siphon off UK profits to low tax countries while heavily influencing legislation to disadvantage UK companies that are already at a disadvantage because they pay tax properly is clearly unsustainable.

It's the institutional equivalent of bribing your way out of paying a fee or fine. Good for you, good for the guy who gets the money. Crap for everyone else.

Given that any new laws

will principally be used to protect those who go to drinks parties with or hand over brown envelopes to the regulator I'm amazed politicians aren't all over this.

Hello regulation, bye bye expenses scandals.

'An interesting year for hardware if not the platform on which it runs'

What platform does hardware run on?

Also re: the 40% correlation being worse than chance comment, that's true for 50/50 calls (eg. The flip of a coin), but not for more complex events. Accurately predicting 2 of the last 5 sets of lottery numbers, for instance, would be a touch better than random chance.

Whether this source is impressive or not therefore relates to how improbable the events they correctly predicted are.

The Reg is good at covering technology. Like many specialist publications it gets weaker the further it moves away from that.

Arguing that corporations don't really pay taxes because taxes cause them to make decisions which have a knock-on effect elsewhere (on wages, profits or cost of goods depending on elasticities) is silly. All taxes distort the market and cause knock-on effects, but I assume you don't plan to argue that employees don't pay income tax just because some of it ends up as higher wages.

The key things here are twofold:

1) Taxes need to be raised somewhere, and most people think it's reasonable that corporations which make use of public resources (an educated populace, the police and fire services, public infrastructure) pay a share of that. The ones who think it's unreasonable rarely argue that those corporations aren't really paying taxes unless they've just finished reading an A level economics book.

2) If corporation tax is not abolished entirely (and trust me, that's not about to happen), then multinational firms which report profits in low tax regimes while doing most of their business in high tax regimes are clearly gaming the system. Tax regimes are still immature in dealing with globalisation, and they need to catch up. It's clearly unreasonable that companies which operate wholly in the UK and pay tax here are at a disadvantage to companies which do the same quantity of business here but report all of their profits in Ireland (for example).

I'm all for a sensibly competitive rate encouraging firms to set up and employ in the UK, and I'm fine with companies that make and support things abroad selling to UK consumers (though if they provide a poor service as a result then they won't sell much), but having corporate come over and cosy up to government in order to have favourable legislation written (looking at Google in particular here) while simultaneously fiddling the tax system then that's clearly not sustainable.

the irony with the heroin analogy

Is that heroin is one of the few things that would be worth promoting on Groupon.

The USP of physical addiction would keep customers coming back long after the deal ended.

I'm surprised it's this high

People, even bright people, don't think much about areas outside their expertise.

If you asked a trivial question about the influence of case law on judicial outcomes, or the way anaesthetic works, you'd find less than 100% accuracy from the relatively smart lot who spend too much time here.

General knowledge isn't that useful in getting ahead, so people who gather it tend to do so more as a hobby than anything else.

I'm amazed anyone bought this

Other web 2.0 stocks look overvalued because of the mindless herd, but their business model is plausible.

Facebook and Linkedin are overpriced, but they're otherwise sensible businesses.

Groupon was a scam from beginning to end. There's no sustainable business model and so they're not a going concern. That means any p/e ratio above 2 or 3 is overvaluing them (let alone a billion dollar valuation when they're making a loss).

Any of the potential investors for whom that was too complicated should at least have done a little research into publically available concerns about Groupon's major shareholder:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/11/eric_lefkofsky_of_groupon/

I have some sympathy for non-tech people who invested in Facebook (not too much, but some) but anyone who put their money into Groupon was essentially putting their money into a pyramid scheme with publically available information to show it was a pyramid scheme and a clear indication that the IPO was the break point at which the important people would stop trying to pretend it was a business.

Et voila...

Nokia's strategy is weird

First they tie themselves to a new Microsoft o/s that very few people have high hopes for and so which will minimise the addressable market even if the phone is great.

Then they sign an extremely restrictive exclusivity deal with the people in the UK who want you to pay through the nose for a new network that few people want or need.

If this is their plan for recovering mass market appeal and turning themselves around then I wouldnt fancy owning shares.

Why don't they refuse to sell a handset to anyone whose name doesn't begin with V to give it a sense of exclusivity?

I think technology lock-in will keep Microsoft on top for a while yet

IT people don't like windows (usually) but know how to use it.

Non-IT people don't really know anything else exists, and would grind to a halt without it.

That's why microsoft continue to be so valuable despite screwing so much up. Once you're the only platform most people know how to use it takes years of substandard delivery before you get shifted out.

Ignoring questions of whether mass insider selling will kill Facebook, marvel at the thought that 4 years work by a senior exec (but not a founder) for an already established company is deemed worth half a billion in stock on top of whatever salary she earnt.

Unless she shits gold bars I have to think that any definition of the phrase ''right place at the right time' should come with a picture of Sheryl Sandberg grinning from ear to ear on her new super-yacht.

Didn't you have an article about someone hacking the weather forecasting services not long back?

Maybe they're smarter than we think and they reverse-engineered it to change the weather.

Stockholm Syndrome

The coalition forces have done some nasty things and the US, in particular, continues to incarcerate for long periods in poor conditions without trial.

But that's a weird benchmark for saying it's okay. Especially for someone who's been through it.

It's wrong when anyone does it. It isn't right when weird militia groups do it just because western governments do it too.

is the smartphone market really getting more competitive?

Apple are about as strong as they always were and windows mobile might be good enough to get a few percent more market share than earlier versions (though it could just as easily sink without trace).

On the other hand RIM have imploded which leaves android and ios as the only serious games in town. Meanwhile htc are struggling so badly I might not replace my trusty desire s with a new model even though I love Sense and Samsung have really become the defacto Android smartphone.

That looks like less competition to me.

I wish the world would disintermediate the need for dickheads

In the meantime expect to see these kinds of predictions from Benioff with increasing frequency as his own company fails to justify its valuation and he tries to keep the analysts from noticing.

This survey could be about anything

Data network? Far too expensive and complicated. We'd love it to be cheaper or to have a 'payments holiday'

Legal counsel? Far too expensive and complicated...

'Insert business cost here'? Far too expensive and complicated...

Look at what people do, not what they say. If they stop buying SAP expect these problems to be fixed in a heartbeat.

it's an amusing irony

That the absurd valuations and wafer thin profits of these dot com firms mean that the accounting charge on share options remuneration when they go public makes profits look even worse than they did before.

Which pushes down share prices as the sheep wake up and cut their losses, which forces the firm to throw ever more stock options at employees whose 'wealth' has just halved.

Which will suppress earnings per share further and continue the cycle.

No wonder they don't have time to build a mobile strategy.

An introduction to maths

A slowing of the growth in demand for something is not a 'dropping off in demand'.

People really are scraping around to find stories about Apple based on absolutely nothing.

As for the 'analysts'. In any other industry when you get something wrong you look silly. For analysts being wrong is a sign that Apple are in decline.

Enough with this garbage please.

My mate Vince reckons that my ability to burp popular music anthems is worth a good $10bn

This is at least as accurate as the principle used to determine Groupon's value, so I'm expecting a call from Forbes imminently.

Challenger, Gray and Christmas

Best company name ever.

On the substance of the story the key question is how many sufficiently similar jobs are being advertised by tech firms doing new things and growing.

Losing your job is stressful in any situation, but its much scarier (for person and macroeconomic outlook) if the job market itself is contracting.