Steve Ballmer

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pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Therefore, in determining the level of Microsoft’s market power, the relevant market is the licensing of all Intel-compatible PC operating systems world-wide. Findings of fact, United States of America v Microsoft Corporation, Civil Action 98-1232 (Issued November 1999) (the document is available in Adobe PDF, WordPerfect 5.1 and HTML formats, but no Microsoft-proprietary ones) Steve Ballmer Life changed at Microsoft in 2000. On 13 January Steve Ballmer, who in June 1980 had become its 30th employee, was promoted from heading its sales and support operations to chief executive. Bill Gates was still the chairman and ‘chief software architect’, with oversight of how the company should build its tools and products.

This ebook published in 2014 by Kogan Page Limited 2nd Floor, 45 Gee Street London EC1V 3RS UK www.koganpage.com © Charles Arthur, 2012, 2014 E-ISBN 978 0 7494 7204 7 Full imprint details Contents Introduction 01 1998 Bill Gates and Microsoft Steve Jobs and Apple Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Google Internet search Capital thinking 02 Microsoft antitrust Steve Ballmer The antitrust trial The outcome of the trial 03 Search: Google versus Microsoft The beginnings of search Google Search and Microsoft Bust Link to money Boom Random access Google and the public consciousness Project Underdog Preparing for battle Do it yourself Going public Competition Cultural differences Microsoft’s relaunched search engine Friends Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo Google’s identity The shadow of antitrust Still underdog 04 Digital music: Apple versus Microsoft The beginning of iTunes Gizmo, Tokyo iPod design Marketing the new product Meanwhile, in Redmond: Microsoft iPods and Windows Music, stored Celebrity marketing iTunes on Windows iPod mini The growth of iTunes Music Store Apple and the mobile phone Stolen!

Except that would never have happened: Gates knew the problem was there, and would never have let Spolsky and his team forget it if they hadn’t shown him that they knew it too during that meeting. And Spolsky knew Gates knew it. He contrasts Gates – with his deep understanding of the detail of the technology – with Ballmer, at the time Gates’s right-hand person, a Harvard graduate in economics and mathematics who was Microsoft’s 30th employee. ‘Steve Ballmer would never even know to ask a question like that,’ Spolsky says. ‘No offence to the present management of Microsoft. But it’s just hard to conceive that he would even understand that question if you were in the room while it was asked. Which is unfortunate, and I think says something about where Microsoft has gone, in the last decade.’


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

Hit Refresh The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone Satya Nadella with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols Photo On the morning of February 4, 2014, I was introduced to employees as Microsoft’s third CEO alongside Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the only CEOs in Microsoft’s forty-year history. Dedication To the two families that have shaped my life: Anu, our parents and our children; and my Microsoft family Contents Cover Title Page Photo Dedication Foreword Chapter 1: From Hyderabad to Redmond Chapter 2: Learning to Lead Chapter 3: New Mission, New Momentum Chapter 4: A Cultural Renaissance Chapter 5: Friends or Frenemies?

Kevin Turner, a former Wal-Mart executive, who was chief operating officer and led worldwide sales. Harry Shum, who leads Microsoft’s celebrated Artificial Intelligence and Research Group operation, received his PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon and is one of the world’s authorities on computer vision and graphics. I had been a member of the SLT myself when Steve Ballmer was CEO, and, while I admired every member of our team, I felt that we needed to deepen our understanding of one another—to delve into what really makes each of us tick—and to connect our personal philosophies to our jobs as leaders of the company. I knew that if we dropped those proverbial guns and channeled that collective IQ and energy into a refreshed mission, we could get back to the dream that first inspired Bill and Paul—democratizing leading-edge computer technology.

In these pages, you will follow three distinct storylines. First, as prologue, I’ll share my own transformation moving from India to my new home in America with stops in the heartland, in Silicon Valley, and at a Microsoft then in its ascendancy. Part two focuses on hitting refresh at Microsoft as the unlikely CEO who succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s transformation under my leadership is not complete, but I am proud of our progress. In the third and final act, I’ll take up the argument that a Fourth Industrial Revolution lies ahead, one in which machine intelligence will rival that of humans. We’ll explore some heady questions.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

GeekWire, July 4, 2012. https://www.geekwire.com/2012/microsofts-lost-decade-vanity-fair-piece-accurate-incomplete. “What began as a lean competition machine”: Eichenwald, Kurt. “How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline.” Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair, July 24, 2012. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer. Ballmer stepped down: Bishop, Todd. “Microsoft Names Satya Nadella CEO; Bill Gates Stepping Down as Chairman to Serve as Tech Adviser.” GeekWire. GeekWire, February 4, 2014. https://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-ceo-main.

Starting as an online directory, the company reinvented itself with the News Feed, and it’s reinventing today by moving from broadcast sharing to intimate sharing: giving the News Feed over to Facebook Groups—a series of smaller networks—and treating messaging as a first-class citizen. In the most fickle of all industries, social media, Facebook still leads. Until recently, it seemed like Microsoft’s inventing days were over. The company was so attached to Windows it almost let the future pass it by. But with a leadership change from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella, the company returned to Day One and embraced cloud computing, a threat to desktop operating systems like Windows, and became the world’s most valuable company once again. Apple under Steve Jobs developed the iPhone, a device that rendered desktop computers like the Mac and portable music players like the iPod less relevant but also set the company up for years of success.

Apple is a company lacking democratic invention, constraint-free hierarchy, free-flowing collaboration, and useful internal technology. It’s stuck in Day Two, and as iPhone sales slow, it’s going to have to adjust. We’ll head to Microsoft for chapter five, where Satya Nadella is using the Engineer’s Mindset to spark a new era of invention inside the company. Nadella’s approach is a departure from that of his predecessor, Steve Ballmer, a case study in favor of implementing the systems outlined in this book. The Engineer’s Mindset isn’t exclusively the territory of those who can code. It is, after all, a mindset, not a set of computer skills. Nor is it the province of the tech giants alone. Smaller companies can apply it just as effectively.


Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, Gary Kildall, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, thinkpad, traveling salesman

They w ent through the usual rigmarole, with Gates having to sign BIG BLUES 9 nondisclosure agreem ents that said he wouldn’t think of using any infor­ mation IBM disclosed to him; that IBM could use whatever Gates happened to say; that Gates would, when pressed, insist he had never heard of a company with the initials IBM and that, even if he had, he would certainly never sue it. Gates then brought to the meeting Steve Ballmer, a college pal with a strong Nordic face and tiny icy blue eyes. Ballmer figures he was invited because his one year at business school meant that he was the only one at the company who knew how to wear a suit. The three-hour meeting was informal, with the four just chatting about opportunities in small com puters.

Estridge needed to have people push Gates hard to make sure that he could really deliver an operating system in time. W ithout an op­ erating system, there would be no interesting software. W ithout soft­ ware, the PC would make a nice paperweight. W hen Gates was sum m oned to Boca Raton for the first time at the end of Septem ber, he and Steve Ballmer worked for days on their proposal. Jack Sams, still the IBM liaison to Microsoft, got involved, too, offering avuncular advice on how IBM meetings tended to go, how to behave, who the im portant players at the meeting would be, and so forth. Sams also offered some advice that IBM now may wish he hadn’t: H e suggested that Microsoft raise its asking price in its proposed con­ tract with IBM.

The programm ers at M icro­ soft found it odd that, even though the PC was IBM ’s smallest project, it still had m ore people writing specs for Microsoft’s operating system than Microsoft had actually writing the operating system. Estridge also dispatched people to Microsoft to make sure it was keeping its work secret. H e may have been a cowboy, but even he was enough of a product of the IBM culture that he couldn’t avoid the penchant for secrecy at all costs. Steve Ballmer got a call one day from an IB M er who said he w anted to arrange a visit. Ballmer said, “Sure, maybe in a few days when things settle down.” Then he casually in­ quired about the w eather in Florida. The IBM er said he didn’t have a clue, because he was calling from a pay phone across the street from BIG BLUES 35 the Microsoft offices in Bellevue, Washington, and really wanted to come by immediately to check up on how Microsoft had filed certain docum ents.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Our primary debt is to the people who lived this story and graciously granted us entry into what is in fact their personal history—through hundreds of hours of interviews and generous access to documents, records, letters, diaries, time lines, telexes, and photographs. Among others, we are grateful to the following individuals: Scott Adams, Todd Agulnick, David Ahl, Alice Ahlgren, Bob Albrecht, Paul Allen, Dennis Allison, Bill Anderson, Bill Baker, Steve Ballmer, Rob Barnaby, John Barry, Allen Baum, John Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, Tim Berry, Ray Borrill, Stewart Brand, Dan Bricklin, Keith Britton, David Bunnell, Nolan Bushnell, Maggie Canon, David Carlick, Douglas Carlston, Mark Chamberlain, Hal Chamberlin, Roger Chapman, Alan Cooper, Sue Cooper, Ben Cooper, John Craig, Andy Cunningham, Eddie Curry, Steve Dompier, John Draper, John Dvorak, Doug Engelbart, Chris Espinosa, Gordon Eubanks, Ed Faber, Federico Faggin, Lee Felsenstein, Bill Fernandez, Todd Fischer, Richard Frank, Bob Frankston, Paul Franson, Nancy Freitas, Don French, Gordon French, Howard Fulmer, Dan Fylstra, Mark Garetz, Harry Garland, Jean-Louis Gassee, Bill Gates, Bill Godbout, John Goodenough, Chuck Grant, Wayne Green, Dick Heiser, Carl Helmers, Kent Hensheid, Andy Hertzfeld, Ted Hoff, Thom Hogan, Rod Holt, Randy Hyde, Peter Jennings, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Philippe Kahn, Mitch Kapor, Vinod Khosla, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Kildall, Joe Killian, Dan Kottke, Barbara Krause, Tom Lafleur, Jaron Lanier, Phil Lemons, Phil Levine, Andrea Lewis, Bill Lohse, Mel Loveland, Scott Mace, Regis McKenna, Marla Markman, Mike Markkula, Bob Marsh, Patty McCracken, Dorothy McEwen, Patrick McGovern, Scott McNealy, Roger Melen, Seymour Merrin, Edward Metro, Vanessa Mickan, Jill Miller, Dick Miller, Michael Miller, Fred Moore, Gordon Moore, Lyall Morrill, George Morrow, Jeanne Morrow, Theodor Holm Nelson, Robert Noyce, Tom and Molly O’Neill, Terry Opdendyk, Adam Osborne, Chuck Peddle, Harvard Pennington, Joel Pitt, Fred “Chip” Poode, Frank and Susan Raab, Jeff Raikes, Janet Ramusack, Jef Raskin, Ed Roberts, Roy Robinson, Tom Rolander, Phil Roybal, Seymour Rubinstein, Sue Runfola, Chris Rutkowski, Paul Saffo, Art Salsberg, Wendell Sanders, Ed Sawicki, Joel Schwartz, John Sculley, Jon Shirley, John Shoch, Richard Shoup, Michael Shrayer, Bill Siler, Les Solomon, Deborah Stapleton, Alan Stein, Barney Stone, Don Tarbell, George Tate, Paul Terrell, Larry Tesler, Glenn Theodore, John Torode, Jack Tramiel, Bruce Van Natta, Jim Warren, Larry Weiss, Randy Wigginton, Margaret Wozniak, Steve Wozniak, Larry Yaeger, Greg Yob, and Pierluigi Zappacosta.

“How about next week?” he asked. “We’ll be on a plane in two hours,” said the IBM man. Gates proceeded to cancel his next day’s appointment with Atari chairman Ray Kassar. “IBM is a pretty big company,” he explained sheepishly. Because IBM was indeed a pretty big company, he decided to turn to Steve Ballmer, his advisor in business matters and a former assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble. Gates had known Ballmer when he attended Harvard in 1974. In 1979, when Gates decided that Microsoft was getting difficult to manage, he hired Ballmer. Ballmer was brash and ambitious. After Harvard, he had entered Stanford University’s MBA program but had dropped out to start making money sooner.

Gates had played poker during the evenings in the Harvard dorms, and after being cleaned out, he often went to Ballmer to describe the game. As they started working together at Microsoft in 1980, Gates found he still enjoyed discussing things with his friend, who quickly became one of his closest business confidants, and he naturally turned to him after IBM’s call. * * * Figure 85. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates Gates’s ebullient college buddy would go on to replace him as Microsoft CEO. (Courtesy of Sarah Hinman, Microsoft Museum) “Look, Steve,” Gates said, “IBM is coming tomorrow. We better show those guys a little depth. Why don’t we both sit in on the meeting?” Neither of them could be sure that the call was anything special, but Gates couldn’t help getting worked up over it.


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

It might as well have added the word “loser” at the end. With the software industry doubling every year, and Microsoft fighting to capture market share in every major category, the stakes seemed high enough to justify self-sacrifice. The corporate culture reinforced this mania. It wasn’t until I finished a set of meetings with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s hard-charging, demanding, and voluble second-in-command, that I convinced myself that I had earned a break. Ballmer was in Sydney reviewing our work in Asia. When we finished his business-review meetings, a two-day-long event where Ballmer tended to shout and harangue, a colleague—Ben—suggested we unwind by going to a slide show about trekking in Nepal given by a local adventure travel company.

When the presenter mentioned that the Annapurna Circuit was a “classic trek that takes three weeks, covers two hundred miles, and gets you as far out in the Himalayas as you could imagine,” I mentally began booking the time off. Next stop, Nepal. Over a Mongolian hot-pot dinner with Ben, I joked that maybe if you went high enough into the Himalayas, you could not hear Steve Ballmer screaming at you. BACK IN NEPAL, CROWING ROOSTERS WOKE ME JUST BEFORE SUNRISE. The Timex Ironman read six o’clock. I debated snoozing a bit longer before meeting with Pasupathi for tea. The Himalayan dawn was cold; the four-season North Face bag felt like a pizza oven. But excitement over finally being in Nepal won out.

But there were no guarantees, and only hard work and smart strategic thinking would increase the odds of this calculated risk paying off. Like much of history, it seems obvious in retrospect that this was a fantastic trade-off, but at the time none of us knew. By 1999, those of us who had been at the company for a long time had done quite well. I give most of the credit to Bill and Steve Ballmer for their visionary leadership and their tenacious attention to detail. The two of them reminded me of a theory of Warren Buffett’s that I had read—whom you work for makes a big difference. Buffett recalled that a long time ago, baseball players like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig voted a full share of their World Series proceeds to their batboy.


pages: 261 words: 79,883

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Homes Have Outhouses than TiVos”: Bradley Johnson, “Analysts Mull Future Potential of PVR Ad-Zapping Technology,” Advertising Age, November 4, 2002, http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Courses/StratTech09/Lectures/Networks/Articles/tivo-losing-money.html. 128 “There are two types of laws”: Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” http://www.thekingcenter.org/prog/non/Letter.pdf. Chapter 8: Start with Why, but Know How 133 Steve Ballmer, the man who replaced Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft: “Steve Ballmer Going Crazy,” March 31, 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc. 134 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx. 135 Raised in Ohio, sixty miles from Dayton, Neil Armstrong grew up: Nick Greene, “Neil Armstrong Biography: First Man of the Moon,” About.com, http://space.about.com/od/astronautbiographies/a/neilarmstrong.htm. 138 What Ralph Abernathy lent the movement was something else: “Abernathy, Ralph David (1926–1990),” Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/abernathy_ralph_david_1926_1990/. 140 The pessimists are usually right: Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century.

And everyone there that day, regardless of skin color or race or sex, trusted each other. It was that trust, that common bond, that shared belief that fueled a movement that would change a nation. We believed. We believed. We believed. PART 4 HOW TO RALLY THOSE WHO BELIEVE 8 START WITH WHY, BUT KNOW HOW Energy Excites. Charisma Inspires. RAH!!!! With a roar, Steve Ballmer, the man who replaced Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft, bursts onto the stage of the company’s annual global summit meeting. Ballmer loves Microsoft—he says so in no uncertain words. He also knows how to pump up a crowd. His energy is almost folkloric. He pumps his fists and runs from one end of the stage to the other, he screams and he sweats.

Good Successions Keep the WHY Alive There were three words missing from Bill Gates’s goodbye speech when he officially left Microsoft in June 2008. They are three words he probably doesn’t even realize need to be there. “I’ll be back.” Though Gates abdicated his role as CEO of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer in 2000 to lend more time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he still maintained a role and a presence at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. His plan was always to completely leave the company in the care of others, but like a lot of founders, Gates forgot to do one thing that would allow his plan to work.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

Such meetings will become very popular because they save time and money and are often more productive than audio-only phone conferences or even face-to-face meetings, because people seem to be more attentive if they know they are on-camera. I've noticed that it does take some getting used to, though. If one person is on a videoconference screen, he or she tends to get much more attention than others in the meeting. I first noticed this when a bunch of us in Seattle were videoconferencing with Steve Ballmer, who was in Europe. It was as if we were all glued to The Steve Ballmer Show. If Steve took off his shoes, we'd all look at each other's reactions. When the meeting was over I could have told you all about Steve's new haircut but I might not have been able to name the other people who'd been in the room with me. I think this distortion will go away as videoconferences become commonplace.

For everything from conception to marketing, and lots of stops along the way, thanks to Jonathan Lazarus and his team: Kelli Jerome, Mary Engstrom, Wendy Langen, and Debbie Walker. Without Jonathan's guidance and persistence this book never would have happened. For their helpful suggestions throughout the project, special thanks to Tren Griffin, Roger McNamee, Melissa Waggener, and Ann Winblad. For their incisive review comments, thanks to Stephen Arnold, Steve Ballmer, Harvey Berger, Paul Carroll, Mike Delman, Kimberly Ellwanger, Brian Fleming, Bill Gates, Sr., Melinda Gates, Bernie Gifford, Bob Gomulkiewicz, Meg Greenfield, Collins Hemingway, Jack Hitt, Rita Jacobs, Erik Lacitis, Mich Matthews, Scott Miller, Craig Mundie, Rick Rashid, Jon Shirley, Mike Timpane, Wendy Wolf, Min Yee, and Mark Zbikowski.

I got pretty good at this kind of information processing. The experience of poker strategizing—and the money—were helpful when I got into business, but the other game I was playing, the postponing one, didn't serve me well at all. But I didn't know that then. In fact, I was encouraged that my dilatory practices were shared by a new friend, Steve Ballmer, a math major whom I met freshman year, when we lived in the same student dorm, Currier House. Steve and I led very different lives, but we were both trying to pare down to the minimum the course time needed to get top grades. Steve is a man of endless energy, effortlessly social. His activities took a lot of his time.


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

It is a tablespoon of doubt. 3 Keeping Score When physicians finally learned to doubt themselves, they turned to randomized controlled trials to scientifically test which treatments work. Bringing the rigor of measurement to forecasting might seem easiesr to do: collect forecasts, judge their accuracy, add the numbers. That’s it. In no time, we’ll know how good Tom Friedman really is. But it’s not nearly so simple. Consider a forecast Steve Ballmer made in 2007, when he was CEO of Microsoft: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Ballmer’s forecast is infamous. Google “Ballmer” and “worst tech predictions”—or “Bing” it, as Ballmer would prefer—and you will see it enshrined in the forecasting hall of shame, along with such classics as the president of Digital Equipment Corporation declaring in 1977 that “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

But still there is ambiguity: how much more than 2% or 3% of the global mobile phone market would the iPhone have to capture to be deemed “significant”? Ballmer didn’t say. And how much money was he talking about when he said Apple could earn “a lot of money”? Again, he didn’t say. So how wrong was Steve Ballmer’s forecast? His tone was brash and dismissive. In the USA Today interview, he seems to scoff at Apple. But his words were more nuanced than his tone, and too ambiguous for us to declare with certainty that his forecast was wrong—much less so spectacularly wrong it belongs in the forecasting hall of shame.

With no time frame, there is no way to resolve these arguments to everyone’s satisfaction—especially when reputations are on the line. This problem alone renders many everyday forecasts untestable. Similarly, forecasts often rely on implicit understandings of key terms rather than explicit definitions—like “significant market share” in Steve Ballmer’s forecast. This sort of vague verbiage is more the rule than the exception. And it too renders forecasts untestable. These are among the smaller obstacles to judging forecasts. Probability is a much bigger one. Some forecasts are easy to judge because they claim unequivocally that something will or won’t happen, as in Jonathan Schell’s forecast for nuclear war.


pages: 275 words: 84,418

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

Back then, Microsoft and Google were in the midst of a nasty battle of their own for dominance in search, and for top dog in the tech world. After two decades of being the first-choice workplace of top engineering talent, Microsoft was now losing many of those battles to Google. Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer had made it clear they took Google’s challenge personally. Gates seemed particularly affected by it. Once or twice he made fun of the way Page and his Google cofounder Sergey Brin dressed. He said their search engine’s popularity was “a fad.” Then, in the same breath, he would issue the ultimate compliment, saying that of all his competitors over the years, Google was the most like Microsoft.

Its memory and the virtual keyboard, already one of its most controversial features, still didn’t work right. Touching the letter e—the most frequently used letter in the alphabet—often caused other letters to pop up around the keyboard. Instead of appearing instantly after being “typed,” letters would emerge after annoying lags. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had been among the many declaring the iPhone a failed product because it didn’t have a physical keyboard. Apple executives were worried too. They weren’t comfortable using the keyboard either. “Everyone was concerned about touching on something that doesn’t have any physical feedback,” one of the executives said.

So, while Brin, Page, and Schmidt were pushing the Android team hard, they were also beefing up the Google iPhone team. Most notably, they put Vic Gundotra, a newly hired but well-known executive from Microsoft, in charge of running it. Gundotra, who was thirty-seven, had spent his entire career working for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, becoming their point person for the company’s relationship with all external Windows software developers—tens of thousands of geeks worldwide. Gundotra was well-known for his technical acumen, his near-Steve-Jobs-quality presentations, and his willingness to take risks and be controversial. Microsoft’s incredible growth and dominance during the 1990s was in no small part the result of his tireless evangelism, convincing legions of programmers worldwide to write software for Windows when few thought it would succeed.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Xie, Ye, “Goldman’s BRIC Era Ends as Fund Folds after Years of Losses.” Bloomberg, Nov. 8, 2015. At http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-08/goldman-s-bric-era-ends-as-fund-closes-after-years-of-losses. Yarow, Jay, “Here’s What Steve Ballmer Thought about the iPhone Five Years Ago.” Business Insider, June 29, 2012. At http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-steve-ballmer-thought-about-the-iphone-five-years-ago-2012-6?IR=T. Zenger, Todd R., Teppo Felin, and Lyda Bigelow, “Theories of the Firm–Market Boundary.” Academy of Management Annals, 5.1 (2011): 89–133. Zhou, Yue Maggie, “Coordination Costs, Organization Structure and Firm Growth.”

Many in the tech analyst community would say it prevented Microsoft from quickly seizing most of the defining trends in the past decade of ICT growth. Like many other firms, Microsoft had a clear (and, as it turned out, prescient) idea of how markets and products would evolve. In 2000, at the height of its antitrust problems in the United States, Microsoft explained what the future of computer software and hardware would look like. Steve Ballmer, the then newly minted heir to Bill Gates, described how Microsoft would create a “unified platform through which devices and services co-operate with each other.”7 Microsoft predicted the need for interconnected web services that could be used across platforms and shared between colleagues or family members.

While other innovators deserted the operating system, Microsoft was too afraid of destroying the value of Windows by launching stand-alone products that worked in other ecosystems. It believed in a future based on a Windows-controlled ecosystem for all devices and services – one ring to rule them all.8 This philosophy helped shape a corporate culture that grew arrogant and missed many of the developments in the market. Steve Ballmer’s colorful speech just after the launch of the iPhone in 2007 is indicative of the culture that permeated Microsoft: There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.9 Six years after Ballmer’s prediction, only 3 percent of new mobile phones used Microsoft’s operating system while Apple’s iOS had close to 50 percent of the market.


pages: 56 words: 16,788

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

Microsoft In a May 2001 address at the Stern School of Business entitled “The Commercial Software Model,” Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie said that the Gnu Public License (GPL)—the license that governs the Linux kernel, among other projects—posed “a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it.” A month later, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer characterized Linux as a “cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” Six years later, Ballmer and Microsoft were on the offensive, alleging in an interview with Fortune that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents. In 2009, Microsoft, calling it “the community’s preferred license,” released 20,000 lines of code under the GPL, intended for inclusion into the Linux kernel.

On the cloud, developers can employ Microsoft’s .NET stack or erstwhile competitors like Java, JavaScript, or PHP, and build software in the open source Eclipse development environment. And since 2008, Microsoft has been a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, an open source governance non-profit. In other words, the once-dominant Microsoft is adjusting to the shifting landscape; one in which the developers, not the vendors, are in charge. Steve Ballmer, famous for jumping up and down on a stage screaming, “DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!” finally seems to be putting them front and center with the company’s strategy. Netflix In an interview with Fortune in 2007, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings summed up his company’s future simply, saying “We named the company Netflix for a reason; we didn’t name it DVDs-by-mail.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

“If that works,” he told me, “it will seem like the birth of the CBS network in 1927.” Because YouTube was making no money, there was a fair amount of sneering from media executives. Like Napster, they said YouTube would be hobbled by copyright lawsuits and would be unable to monetize its enormous traffic. “Right now,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer declared, “there’s no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion. And what about the rights holders? At the end of the day, a lot of the content that’s up there is owned by somebody else.” That “somebody else,” the broadcast and cable networks believed, was them. YouTube, they asserted, built its success on their backs; thirteen of the twenty most popular videos on the site, the Wall Street Journal reported in early 2007, were professionally made, not user generated.

If you didn’t have Moore’s law, you wouldn’t have that advancement. It’s actually causal in another way.” The management pressure to double performance helps assure it. IN SPITE OF GOOGLE’S RAPID GROWTH, or because of it, by 2007 the company had become a target for lawsuits and sneers. Leading the chorus was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. In 2007, he had labeled Google “a one-trick pony,” and had derided the company at nearly every public opportunity since, telling reporters, “they have one product that makes all their money, and it hasn’t changed in five years.... Search makes ninety-eight percent of all their money.” Irwin Gotlieb, who is not in Ballmer’s adversarial camp, nevertheless shared the view that Google’s attempt to broaden its reach had been a failure.

Google’s revenues had surged 42 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007; its profits had jumped 30 percent, and as Varian had suggested, its ad clicks had risen 20 percent. “Google Inc’s Go-Go Era Apparently Isn’t Over,” said a report in the Wall Street Journal. The Times headline was: “Google Defies the Economy and Reports a Profit Surge.” As the report showed, Google hogged three quarters of all U.S. search advertising dollars, compared to only 5 percent for Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. Yet Ballmer had a point. Google had not figured out how to make money on its surfeit of products. YouTube accounted for one of every three videos viewed online, three billion of the nine billion viewed in January 2008. The impact of this new medium would forever change the way politics are conducted.


pages: 211 words: 67,975

The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty by Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Broken windows theory, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, Gavin Belson, hive mind, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, Larry Ellison, off-the-grid, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs

The Clippers were an ambitious operation, run by big-spirited macher Steve Ballmer. The former Microsoft CEO is a broad-shouldered six foot five, with a friar’s balding pattern and large hands. He doesn’t walk about the premises so much as he struts, his head jutted forward at all times. As his leaning dome bobs his large nose forward, he looks a little like if you stuffed a giant bald eagle into a collared shirt. This is an excellent look for a CEO, if slightly terrifying. A sizeable, aggressive balding man is the Fortune 500 prototype. Steve Ballmer’s vigor is well chronicled. There’s a YouTube clip titled “Steve Ballmer Going Crazy on Stage,” wherein the billionaire jumps around, yelping to the point of accreting massive pit stains.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

IBM corporate history, “The Birth of the IBM PC,” http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html. 90. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3629. 91. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3642; Steve Ballmer interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996. See also James Chposky and Ted Leonsis, Blue Magic (Facts on File, 1988), chapter 9. 92. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995. 93. Steve Ballmer interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996. 94. Jack Sams interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996. See also Steve Hamm and Jay Greene, “The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates,” Business Week, Oct. 24, 2004. 95.

“He was getting some costly lessons in bluffing,” said Allen. “He’d win three hundred dollars one night and lose six hundred the next. As Bill dropped thousands that fall, he kept telling me, ‘I’m getting better.’ ”53 In a graduate-level economics class, he met a student who lived down the hall of his dorm. Steve Ballmer was very different from Gates on the surface. Big, boisterous, and gregarious, he was the type of campus activity junkie who liked to join or lead multiple organizations. He was in the Hasty Pudding Club, which wrote and produced musical theater shows, and served with a cheerleader’s enthusiasm as manager of the football team.

So on July 21, 1980, he placed a call to Bill Gates and asked to see him right away. When Gates invited him to fly to Seattle the following week, Sams replied that he was already heading for the airport and wanted to see Gates the next day. Sensing a big fish hungry to be hooked, Gates was thrilled. A few weeks earlier, Gates had recruited his Harvard dorm mate Steve Ballmer to Microsoft as the business manager, and he asked Ballmer to join him at the IBM meeting. “You’re the only other guy here who can wear a suit,” Gates pointed out.91 When Sams arrived, Gates was also wearing a suit, but he did not quite fill it. “This young fellow came out to take us back, and I thought he was the office boy,” recalled Sams, who was dressed in the IBM standard blue suit and white shirt.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

With over 80 percent of the worldwide market in 2018, Android was clearly the dominant smartphone platform. The smartphone OS game became a two horse race, with other platforms—including Microsoft’s—consigned to irrelevance. The combined impact of the iPhone and the emergence of Android was to usher in a radically new phase in the evolution of mobile phones. Microsoft was caught flat-footed. Steve Ballmer famously gave an interview a few months after the release of the iPhone, saying, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”56 Not perceiving a serious threat, Microsoft took three full years to release its rebooted Windows Phone 7, its first attempt to move into the post-iPhone world of touch-screen‒centric user interfaces for smartphones.

Complacency, even among successful platform companies, can indeed breed failure—which Microsoft proved in the browser market during the 2000s, after it beat Netscape in the 1990s. If you cannot stay competitive, no market position is safe. A senior executive from Google even told us that he’d like to “erect a statute to Steve Ballmer” for performing so poorly in browsers and smartphones. Traditional non-platform firms have an especially difficult challenge in the digital age. But even they should not simply give in to new platform competitors. How old dogs can learn new tricks—a challenge that is difficult but possible—is the subject of the next chapter.

In terms of page views, Chrome has a huge lead, with over 60 percent share, while Firefox and IE battled for second place, with 15.7 percent and 13.7 percent, respectively. 52.Steven Levy, “Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web,” Wired, September 2, 2008. 53.Megan Geuss, “Which Browser Should You Use?” PCWorld, February 26, 2012. 54.Ann Bednarz, “Browser Wars,” Network World, November 2, 2011. 55.All quoted in “Google Cell Platform No Threat, Rivals Say: Move Seen to Give Search Engine Leg Up on Mobile Advertising,” Ottawa Citizen, November 6, 2007. 56.Jay Yarow, “Here’s What Steve Ballmer Thought About the iPhone Five Years Ago,” Business Insider, June 29, 2012. 57.Peter Bright, “Windows Phone 7: The Ars Review,” ArsTechnica, October 22, 2010. 58.Sascha Segan, “Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS,” PCMag, October 20, 2010. 59.Joshua Topolsky, “Windows Phone 7 Review,” Engadget, October 20, 2010. 60.Dieter Bohn and Chris Ziegler, “Windows Phone 8 review,” Verge, October 29, 2012. 61.Bright, “Windows Phone 7.” 62.See Sam Oliver, “Nokia Ditches Symbian, Embraces Microsoft Windows Phone for New Handsets,” AppleInsider, February 11, 2011. 63.Pete Cunningham, quoted in Kevin J.


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Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Software development inherently involves choices between features, given the finite availability of engineering resources that can be applied on a feasible timeline. This encryption work required them to delay the development of other product features that customers were asking us to add. After some animated discussion, CEO Steve Ballmer and our senior leadership team made the decision to press forward quickly on the encryption front. Every other tech company did the same thing. That November, as these events were unfolding, President Barack Obama visited Seattle. He was attending a political fund-raiser, and the White House had invited a small group of area leaders and supporters to have a cocktail in a private suite at the Westin Seattle hotel after the formal event.

Our litigation team had hammered out an agreement in principle to settle what we knew would be the single biggest class-action lawsuit to result from our antitrust loss before the federal court of appeals in Washington, DC. It covered all the consumers in California. The price tag was a whopping $1.1 billion. It would be the largest litigation settlement in Microsoft’s history. I sent Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft’s CEO, an email to let him know that I wanted to move forward, and I held my breath waiting for his reaction. Steve walked down the hall and into my office on that same morning to talk about the proposed settlement. He understood, as almost all business executives do, that the lawyers who bring class action lawsuits always ensure that they do well for themselves as part of these settlements.

A special thanks goes to Microsoft graphic designers Mary Feil-Jacobs and Zach LaMance, for moonlighting on the book’s cover art. We’re also indebted enormously to the many colleagues, peers, and friends inside and outside Microsoft who played vital roles in the events that are captured in the book. This starts with the extraordinary trio of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella, the three individuals who have served as CEO of a company that has had a truly remarkable history. Very few people have had the opportunity to work closely with all three. Each is different from the other, but they share the broad curiosity and passionate pursuit of excellence that it takes to truly make a difference in the world.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

As part of this effort, it was investing billions of dollars to improve its own online search software. Separately, it had in May made its biggest purchase ever—paying $6 billion for aQuantive, which distributed advertising across the Internet. Now that it owned this distribution engine, it badly needed additional inventory to sell through it. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was fed up with losing deals to Google. He had recently lost both of the industry’s two biggest partnership opportunities after coming exquisitely close to agreement. Each time, Google swooped in at the last minute and stole the deal away. Ballmer had flown to New York in December 2005 to negotiate a major ad partnership with Time Warner’s AOL.

It seemed to them he might be seeking specific promises from Google in order to strong-arm Microsoft to concede the same points. For all the talk, the Google team knew that Microsoft’s prior relationship with Facebook gave it a big advantage. The chances of pulling Facebook away remained small. Microsoft had been carefully cultivating Zuckerberg. CEO Steve Ballmer had flown to Palo Alto to visit his young counterpart twice. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, had also repeatedly visited Palo Alto. As Zuckerberg is wont to do, he took them on long walks. He told Ballmer that Facebook was raising money at a $15 billion valuation. But Ballmer had come with something very specific in mind.

The Los Angeles Times called the $15 billion figure “staggering.” “It tips the scales in terms of totally ridiculous valuations,” wrote the influential TechDirt blog. This was by far the highest valuation ever given to a private technology company, and one with no profits to boot! Either Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was insane, or Facebook mattered more than anyone had realized. But if the f8 platform event five months earlier had firmly put Facebook once and for all onto the technology industry map, this investment did the same thing for Facebook on Wall Street. Microsoft’s stock jumped markedly. The ad deal that precipitated the investment was barely noticed in the hubbub over the valuation.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

But Amazon would remain grossly unprofitable in India for the foreseeable future, and its intense competition with Flipkart had created a disorienting set of social and economic discontinuities that helped to summon the dogs of nationalism and divisive populism. The entire saga was a preview of the political headaches that were waiting for Bezos back home. CHAPTER 4 A Year for Eating Crow In October 2014, a few weeks after Jeff Bezos returned from his first trip to India, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appeared on the talk show Charlie Rose and threw serious shade at his company’s crosstown rival. “I don’t know what to say about Amazon. I like Amazon. Nice company. [But] they make no money, Charlie! In my world, you’re not a real business until you make some money.” Amazon’s performance at the time seemed to merit Ballmer’s assessment.

That August, an explosive newspaper article in the New York Times turned Amazon’s combative corporate culture into the subject of national attention. Over the course of that eventful year, 2015, Amazon stock more than doubled. Because he owned about 18 percent of the company, Bezos was vaulted into the ranks of the top five wealthiest people in the world, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire’s Index. It turned out that Steve Ballmer’s broadside against Amazon was a perfect contrarian indicator; it would mark almost precisely the start of one of the most dramatic increases in corporate value and personal wealth in the entire history of capitalism. * * * Of course, Ballmer had little grasp of how Amazon’s eventual engine of profitability, Amazon Web Services, was performing—and that was how Jeff Bezos wanted it.

” * * * By the end of 2015, there was little doubt left about Amazon’s ascendance. The company posted its third consecutive quarterly profit, along with 69 percent growth in sales at Andy Jassy’s booming AWS division. Amazon’s market capitalization had doubled in the span of a year and stood at $315 billion. For Steve Ballmer and the other skeptics, it was a year for eating crow. At the same time, Amazon became the fastest company in history to surpass $100 billion in annual sales, meeting a long-standing goal of Bezos and the S-team. In his annual letter to investors the following April, Bezos trumpeted that benchmark and tried to get in the final word in the debate over Amazon’s culture.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

He wasn’t surprised that IBM was coming to call—his software was becoming the global standard, after all—but he was excited about the possibilities of scale that a partnership with Big Blue might bring. Only a few weeks earlier, he’d persuaded a friend of his from Harvard, an exuberant Detroiter named Steve Ballmer, to drop out of Stanford’s MBA program and take on some of the operational duties of his growing company. Microsoft was a land of sweatshirts and rumpled khakis; Ballmer was, as Gates put it, “a good suit-type guy.” Gates asked his more presentable colleague to join him at the table for the IBM pitch.3 Ballmer may have had the suit, but Gates ruled the room.

Microsoft didn’t have its own Washington lobbying office until 1995, when the original antitrust investigation left it operating under a consent decree.3 Anyway, Bill Gates was too busy sparring with Silicon Valley to pay much attention to D.C. Despite the lovable-geek image so carefully cultivated by his PR team, Bill Gates remained the most competitive person on the planet when it came to matters involving his company. Steve Ballmer came in at number two. “At Microsoft,” marketing chief Jean Richardson remembered, “the whole idea was that we would put people under.” Their scorched-earth dominance of the software market had left competitors whimpering and dissuaded new entrants, contributing to Silicon Valley’s wholehearted embrace of the Internet in the first place.

Where the word processing programs and spreadsheets and everything else lived in the cloud, downloadable at a click of a button. Where desktop PCs and closet-sized server rooms gave way to enormous, energy-gobbling server farms processing terabyte upon terabyte of data. Where new companies using these models would disrupt the software money machine that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had presided over for two decades, derailing its business far more than any antitrust action ever could. THE GATES COMPUTER SCIENCE BUILDING Forty years since his fateful tour of duty at Shockley Semiconductor, Jim Gibbons was taking his victory lap. He’d remained at Stanford his entire career, rising through the faculty ranks to become Dean of Engineering.


pages: 199 words: 56,243

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

The ones who see things differently—and will stare you down until you do, too. They’re not fond of rules, especially those outlined by the human resources department on ‘treating your employees with respect.’” The article went on to list the most notorious of the tech industry’s villains: Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Marc Benioff, and there, second to last, the only Google representative on the list, our own Jonathan Rosenberg. Jonathan was ebullient. He was on a top-ten list featuring the biggest stars of the industry, a hard-ass hall of fame if there ever was one! A few days later, when he walked into his 1:1 with Bill, a printed copy of the article lay on the conference table.

Everyone agreed that they were correct, since they had been foundational for the company for a long time. The decision practically made itself. The meeting concluded in less than an hour, and the deal was off.* Mike applied the same approach when he was negotiating the sale of Tellme to Microsoft in 2007. He was working directly with Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft at the time, and at one point the deal was on the verge of collapse because another company came in with an unsolicited offer that was higher than Microsoft’s. Mike talked to Bill, thought through the company’s first principles again, and realized that Microsoft was the best home for Tellme.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

It is tempting to say that Microsoft would have done better had it concentrated on just one of these challenges. Then CEO Steve Ballmer recalled that “I put the A-team resources on Longhorn [Vista], not on phones or browsers. All of our resources were tied up on the wrong thing.”3 But, as many Microsoft employees have reported, there was a deeper challenge: a politicized internal culture combined with low skill at integrating newly acquired talent. Key creative talent abandoned the company. It is clear, in retrospect, that neither Bill Gates nor Steve Ballmer was capable of honestly diagnosing or dealing with this crux challenge. THE ASC I call what passes the joint filters of critical importance and addressability an ASC (addressable strategic challenge).

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, a number of industry experts predicted that it would not be a success. It would, they predicted, be a niche product, just like Apple’s Macintosh PC, and, due to strong price competition, be profitless. This conviction rested on making an analogy between the smartphone business and the older PC business. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said: There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.4 John Dvorak was a much-followed columnist who specialized in technology.


pages: 276 words: 59,165

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

In a further indication of the increasing belief in SIBs, a successful £2.5 million ($3.3 million) pilot program helping people at risk of homelessness originally launched by central government was scaled up by Kirklees to a £23 million ($30.6 million) contract.16 In the US, Maycomb Capital, an impact investment manager co-founded by Goldman Sachs alumna, Andi Phillips, has launched the first American equivalent of the Bridges SIB Funds. The fund, which was launched in 2018, aims to raise a total of $50 million and includes Prudential Financial, the Kresge Foundation and Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, among its backers.17 One of Maycomb’s investments is in the Massachusetts Pathways to Economic Advancement SIB, which was launched in 2017 by Social Finance US to focus on integrating immigrants into society. The Greater Boston area is home to a significant refugee and immigrant population that has little or no English skills.

After five years and two cohorts of 1,000 prisoners each, the British government decided to refashion the Probation Office so as to reduce reoffending and the cost to the prison service, and changed the SIB model to a fee-for-service model. 7 https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Global-Impact-Bonds-Snapshot-March-2020.pdf 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 https://www.bridgesfundmanagement.com/uks-first-social-impact-bond-fund-achieves-final-close-25m/ and www.bridgesfundmanagement.com/bridges-closes-second-social-outcomes-fund-at-extended-hard-cap-of-35m/ 11 https://www.bridgesfundmanagement.com/outcomes-contracts/ 12 https://www.bridgesfundmanagement.com/outcomes-contracts/ 13 A Newcastle University evaluation in the British Medical Journal showed improved well-being, and a publication from Newcastle and Gateshead Clinical Commissioning Group showed a reduction in costs. 14 https://golab.bsg.ox.ac.uk/knowledge-bank/project-database/fair-chance-fund-west-yorkshire-fusion-housing/ 15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ-OfYW0hs&feature=youtu.be 16 https://www.kirkleesbetteroutcomespartnership.org/ 17 https://impactalpha.com/prudential-kresge-and-steve-ballmer-back-maycomb-capitals-pay-for-success-fund/ 18 https://www.livingcities.org/blog/1203-how-massachusetts-s-new-pfs-project-will-help-make-the-american-dream-a-reality 19 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/education/27esl.html and https://socialfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/MAPath 20 https://thewell.worlded.org/the-massachusetts-pathways-to-economic-advancement-pay-for-success-project/ 21 Social Finance US. 22 https://thewell.worlded.org/the-massachusetts-pathways-to-economic-advancement-pay-for-success-project/ 23 Ibid. 24 Brookings Institution Global Impact Bond Database,16 January 2020. 25 http://govinnovator.com/emily_gustaffson_wright/ 26 https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/dsgsm1340.doc.htm 27 http://instiglio.org/educategirlsdib/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Educate-Girls-DIB-Sept-2015.pdf 28 http://www.instiglio.org/en/girls-education-india/ 29 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2018/07/13/worlds-first-development-impact-bond-for-education-shows-successful-achievement-of-outcomes-in-its-final-year/ 30 http://instiglio.org/educategirlsdib/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Educate-Girls-DIB_results_brochure_final-2.pdf 31 Ibid. 32 https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Global-Impact-Bonds-Snapshot-March-2020.pdf 33 https://www.brookings.edu/research/impact-bonds-in-developing-countries-early-learnings-from-the-field/ 34 https://www.devex.com/news/icrc-launches-world-s-first-humanitarian-impact-bond-90981 35 Learning Generation: Investing in education for a changing world, The Education Commission, 2017. 36 https://www.livemint.com/Education/XRdJDgsAbwnSAH8USzyCWM/11-million-development-impact-bonds-launched-to-improve-edu.html, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2018/09/25/a-landmark-month-for-impact-bonds-in-education/, https://indiaincgroup.com/prince-charles-backs-new-education-bond-india/ and https://www.britishasiantrust.org/our-impact/innovative-finance 37 https://www.socialfinance.org.uk/projects/liberia 38 Ibid. 39 In their book, Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works. 40 https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/unleashing-the-power-of-endowments-the-next-great-challenge-for-philanthropy/ 41 https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our-work/initiatives/innovative-finance/ 42 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/04/21/steps-catalyze-private-foundation-impact-investing 43 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/4/section/15/enacted 44 https://www.appositecapital.com/mission/ 45 https://www.gsttcharity.org.uk/who-we-are/our-finances/how-we-are-financed/our-endowment and https://www.gsttcharity.org.uk/what-we-do/our-strategy/other-assets/property-and-estates 46 Mission-Related Investment refers to the use of investments by foundations as tools to achieve their philanthropic goals. 47 http://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/unleashing-the-power-of-endowments-the-next-great-challenge-for-philanthropy/ 48 https://nonprofitquarterly.org/can-ford-foundations-1-billion-impact-investing-commitment-alter-field/ 49 https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/unleashing-the-power-of-endowments-the-next-great-challenge-for-philanthropy/ 50 https://efc.umd.edu/assets/m2e/pri_final_report_8-05-13.pdf 51 https://www.fastcompany.com/40525515/how-the-ford-foundation-is-investing-in-change 52 Ibid. 53 https://ssir.org/articles/entry/eight_myths_of_us_philanthropy and http://data.foundationcenter.org/#/foundations/all/nationwide/top:assets/list/2015 54 https://www.fastcompany.com/40525515/how-the-ford-foundation-is-investing-in-change 55 https://www.packard.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Packard_MIR_2015OCT51.pdf 56 https://mcconnellfoundation.ca/impact-investing/ 57 https://mustardseedmaze.vc/ 58 https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/from-backstreet-to-wall-st-ep-09/ 59 http://www.blueorchard.com/sasakawa-peace-foundation-invest-blueorchards-flagship-fund/ 60 https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2015/02/26/f-b-heron-foundation-is-going-all-in/#6d2f79386d2f 61 https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/03/30/mission-accomplished-how-the-heron-foundation-went-all-in/#405717a04d17 62 Ibid. 63 https://nonprofitquarterly.org/nathan-cummings-no-longer-just-experimenting-impact-investing/ 64 https://www.top1000funds.com/2019/05/foundations-should-invest-for-impact/ 65 https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2015/11/06/lisa-charly-kleissner-kl-felicitas-impact-investing/#3fa5c38138e7 66 https://toniic.com/t100-powered-ascent-report/ 67 Ibid. 68 http://www.toniic.com/100-impact-network/ 69 https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/remarkable-givers/profiles/pierre-omidyar/don%e2%80%99t-start-a-foundation-pierre-omidyar-ignores-e 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 https://www.omidyar.com/financials – The total amount committed since inception is $1.53 billion+.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

The William Flora Hewlett Foundation is now among the top c08.indd 193 5/11/10 6:24:56 AM 194 fortunes of change five foundations in the United States and supports a wide array of progressive organizations. Steve Jobs isn’t alone in his lack of philanthropy. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos hasn’t gotten around to giving away large chunks of his wealth, either. Nor has Larry Ellison of Oracle, the third-richest man in the United States, or Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who was worth $14.5 billion in 2010. Inevitably, though, these and other giant tech fortunes will one day be harnessed to some kind of public purpose, as they are too big to be disposed of privately. Only then will we have a full picture of how the technology sector’s vast new wealth is likely to affect the United States and the world.

Although the United States seems at the end of its second Gilded Age, we are still at the beginning of a golden era of philanthropy that taps the wealth created during this period. Some of today’s largest new fortunes have barely been touched for charitable or political causes—like the money of the Google Guys ($17.5 billion each in 2010), or the great wealth of people such as Steve Ballmer ($14.5 billion), Jeff Bezos ($12.3 billion), Abigail Johnson ($11.5 billion), James Simons ($8.5 billion), Steven Cohen ($6.4 billion), and on and on. By the time many of these people do get around to large-scale charity, their fortunes will likely be even bigger than they are today. Together, the Forbes 400 had a net worth of $1.5 trillion in 2008, a number that fell sharply after the crash but is now rebounding and will continue to go up as time goes on.

A hedge fund manager who was a major Obama fund-raiser, speaking anonymously to a reporter, said, “I’m appalled at the anti–Wall Street rhetoric. It was okay on the campaign, but now it’s the real world. I’m surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He’s a real class warrior.”2 Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who along with his wife contributed $100,000 to Obama’s inauguration committee, was openly critical of Obama’s offshore crackdown, a proposal that also reportedly angered Google’s high command and other Democratic donors in the tech world. This discontent cannot be ignored by the White House.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

Moreover, Apple warned that attempts to unlock the phone from the AT&T network would “cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.” Apple threatened to turn your $499 iPhone into a $499 iBrick! And it did! Asked to react to the announcement of the iPhone, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer literally laughed out loud, “Five hundred dollars fully subsidized with a plan! I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine. . . . We have great Windows Mobile devices on the market today. . . .

CNET.com, July 12, 2002, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-943519.xhtml. 210 iPod, boasting 100 million customers: Steven Levy, “Why We Went Nuts About the iPhone,” Newsweek, July 16, 2007. 210 Apple’s stock shot up 44 percent: Matt Krantz, “iPhone Powers up Apple’s Shares,” USA Today, June 28, 2007. 211 “four times the number of PCs that ship every year”: Morris, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out.” 211 Ericsson released the R380: Dave Conabree, “Ericsson Introduces the New R380e,” Mobile Magazine, September 25, 2001. 211 Palm followed up with its version: Sascha Segan, “Kyocera Launches First Smartphone in Years,” PC Magazine, March 23, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361664,00.asp#fbid=C81SVwKJIvh. 211 “one more entrant into an already very busy space”: “RIM Co-CEO Doesn’t See Threat from Apple’s iPhone,” InformationWeek, February 12, 2007. 212 the phone was exclusively available from only one carrier: In a handful of markets regulators ruled the exclusivity arrangement illegal. 212 “The bigger problem is the AT&T network”: David Pogue, “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype,” New York Times, June 27, 2007. 212 priced at a mere $99 in 2007: Kim Hart, “Rivals Ready for iPhone’s Entrance; Pricey Gadget May Alter Wireless Field,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007. 212 “cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software”: Apple, press release, September 24, 2007. 213 “I say I like our strategy”: Steve Ballmer interviewed on CNBC, January 17, 2007. 213 They ran out of the older model six weeks before the July 2008 launch: Tom Krazit, “The iPhone, One Year Later,” CNET.com, June 26, 2008, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9977572-37.xhtml. 213 60 percent went to buyers who already owned at least one iPod: Apple COO Tim Cook’s comments at Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, cited in JPMorgan analyst report, “Strolling Through the Apple Orchard: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Scenarios,” March 4, 2008. 215 the average iPhone user paid AT&T $2,000: Jenna Wortham, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” New York Times, September 2, 2009. 215 as high as $18 per user per month: Tom Krazit, “Piper Jaffray: AT&T Paying Apple $18 per iPhone, Per Month,” CNET.com, October 24, 2007, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.xhtml. 216 Apple announced its 10 billionth app download: Apple.com, “iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold,” February 25, 2010, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25iTunes-Store-Tops-10-Billion-Songs-Sold.xhtml.


pages: 230 words: 71,320

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, computer age, corporate raider, crew resource management, medical residency, old-boy network, Pearl River Delta, popular electronics, power law, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, union organizing, upwardly mobile, why are manhole covers round?

Allen went on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates. When was Paul Allen born? Paul Allen: January 21, 1953 The third-richest man at Microsoft is the one who has been running the company on a day-to-day basis since 2000, one of the most respected executives in the software world, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer's birth date? Steve Ballmer: March 24,1956 Let's not forget a man every bit as famous as Gates: Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Computer. Unlike Gates, Jobs wasn't from a rich family and he didn't go to Michigan, like Joy. But it doesn't take much investigation of his upbringing to realize that he had his Hamburg too.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

This fact, key to our current era, has been a persistent surprise. At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile, or suggested that if it does work, it is a kind of cheating, because sharing at a scale that competes with older institutions is somehow wrong. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software as communism. Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, likened Wikipedia to a public rest room. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs.

The New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/magazine/23patients-t.html (accessed January 9, 2010). 158 it also has an “openness philosophy”: “The Value of Openness,” The PatientsLikeMe Blog, December 13, 2007, http://blog.patientslikeme.com/2007/12/13/the-value-of-openness (accessed January 9, 2010). CHAPTER 6: Personal, Communal, Public, Civic 161 Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software: Lea Graham, “MS Ballmer: Linux Is Communism,” The Register, July 31, 2000, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/ (accessed January 10, 2010). 162 Robert McHenry, “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia,” Technology Commerce Society Daily, November 15, 2004, http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?


pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

While these partnerships are necessary, the exact makeup of the Producer-Performer pair may change depending on the skills needed to take advantage of an opportunity. As Mark Cuban attests, the complement he needed for MicroSolutions was Martin Woodall, but the Broadcast.com dream team included Todd Wagner. Bill Gates started out with Paul Allen, but he also had a long-term Producer-Performer partnership with Steve Ballmer, during which Microsoft created most of its value. Jobs and Wozniak created the iconic computer maker, but Jobs and Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer, were the team behind the beauty and sensibility of the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. John Paul DeJoria and Paul Mitchell founded John Paul Mitchell Systems, but years later DeJoria started another venture with his friend Martin Crowley, a talented architect who went bankrupt trying to make a business designing buildings.8 DeJoria pointed him in a different direction and set him up as an architecture buyer supplying materials from Mexico for high-end renovations.

The Carnival parent today owns nearly a dozen cruise lines, including Cunard, Holland America Line, and Princess Cruises. Arison is also the owner of the Miami Heat basketball team. Steven Ballmer b. 1956, United States Microsoft In 1980, two years after graduating from Harvard, Steve Ballmer was invited by fellow student Bill Gates to join a fledgling Microsoft as its manager of operations. Within a year, Microsoft signed its breakthrough deal with IBM to design an operating system for the company’s new product, the personal computer. Ballmer became the marketing and sales guru, and was key to realizing Gates’s vision.


pages: 580 words: 125,129

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase

Andy Rubin, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, lock screen, machine readable, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, web application

The distinction between these lifecycle phases is one of the things that Android developers need to understand about their applications… and it’s always been one of the more complicated bits of Android to fully understand. 305 Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol 306 https://developer.android.com/sdk/OLD_RELEASENOTES#0.9_beta 307 Which was later rebranded as Firebase Cloud Messaging. 308 Dogfooding (short for “eating our own dogfood”) means testing our own stuff. 309 There’s more about Peisun later, in the Managing All the Things chapter. 24. Developer Tools “Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.” –Steve Ballmer, Microsoft310 One of the reasons behind Android’s growth is the developer ecosystem that was created along the way, enabling thousands (now millions) of applications for people to find, download, and use. But this kind of ecosystem doesn’t just happen automatically, especially for a new platform with no market share.

A few months later, we got more reinforcements as another internal writer joined the effort, Scott Main. We spent all of our time creating the fundamentals to go around the reference docs, and then bringing up the website. The engineering team gave us tons of support along the way. Getting things off the ground was a total team effort.”327 310 There is a famous video you can find online of Steve Ballmer (then Microsoft CEO) saying “Developers!” over and over while pacing energetically back and forth across the stage at a Microsoft conference many years ago. On one hand, the video is a quirky piece of tech history (and a meme in the industry). On the other hand, he wasn’t wrong. For companies like Microsoft, and projects like Android, it really is all about the developers that write applications for your platform. 311 “Hello World!”

It’s costly, arduous, and at times a deeply unsexy job of supporting customers day by day in launching phones. That’s something there’s very little experience of in Google’s environment. They are talking about having a phone by the end of next year. It’s not one that is going to ignite developers.” The following day, Steve Ballmer (then CEO of Microsoft) said during a news conference, “Their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it’s hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile]. Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices.” There seemed to be a general sense of vaporware377 in the air.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

After it became clear that Google was not just an innovator but a financial powerhouse with resources to take on Microsoft, the rivalry took on a bloodlust. Just how intensely Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, despised his competitor to the south became clear in depositions that would be filed in the Lee lawsuit. The year before, in November 2004, a top Microsoft executive named Mark Lucovsky had gone to Steve Ballmer with the unwelcome news that he was leaving Microsoft. “Just tell me it’s not Google,” said Ballmer, according to Lucovsky’s sworn testimony. Lucovsky confirmed that it was indeed Google.

“Some people say ‘massive amounts.’ I try to avoid ‘massive.’ But it’s a lot.” He would not put a number on it. “The fact that we’re not transparent about it causes us embarrassment,” he says, explaining that “competitive reasons” justify the reticence. By not knowing what Google is spending, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, for instance, will have no target to aim at when apportioning his own cost estimates for infrastructure. “If I’m Ballmer, I’m probably going to pick a number that’s too high, in which case it bankrupts Microsoft—and that’s good for Google,” says Weihl. “Or he’ll pick a number that’s too low, in which case it can’t really compete.

To head the team, it hired the scientist Qi Lu, a forty-eight-year-old whose tireless work habits were legendary. Those regarding this as a coup included Google’s search czar, Udi Manber: “I have the highest regard for him,” he said. Microsoft called its new search engine Bing, and it was launched in June 2009 by CEO Steve Ballmer with great fanfare. In terms of search quality, Bing did not intimidate Google. Its relevance algorithms were basically no different from those in the previous version of Microsoft’s search, much less likely to draw out the Audrey Fino–like needles in the Internet haystack. Eventually that could change, as Microsoft would supply Bing to Yahoo for the latter company’s search engine.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

In addition to GDP and job statistics, the government should adopt measurements such as: • Median income and standard of living • Levels of engagement with work and labor participation rate • Health-adjusted life expectancy • Childhood success rates • Infant mortality • Surveys of national well-being • Average physical fitness and mental health • Quality of infrastructure • Proportion of elderly in quality care • Human capital development and access to education • Marriage rates and success • Deaths of despair/despair index/substance abuse • National optimism/mindset of abundance • Community integrity and social capital • Environmental quality • Global temperature variance and sea levels • Reacclimation of incarcerated individuals and rates of criminality • Artistic and cultural vibrancy • Design and aesthetics • Information integrity/journalism • Dynamism and mobility • Social and economic equity • Public safety • Civic engagement • Cybersecurity • Economic competitiveness and growth • Responsiveness and evolution of government • Efficient use of resources It would be straightforward to establish measurements for each of these and have them updated periodically, similar to what Steve Ballmer set up at USAFacts.org—a treasure trove of social metrics that pulls from many public and private sources. Everyone could then see how we’re doing and be galvanized around improvement. This could be tied in to the Digital Social Credit system, where people who help move society in a particular direction are rewarded.

CHAPTER 19: HUMAN CAPITALISM The concept of GDP and economic progress didn’t even exist until the Great Depression: The Federal Reserve of St. Louis, Discover Economic History, National Income, 1929–32. Letter from the Acting Secretary of Commerce Transmitting in Response to Senate Resolution No. 220 (72D CONG.) A Report on National Income, 1929–32 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1934). Steve Ballmer set up a series of measurements and facts at www.USAFacts.org that is a treasure trove of social metrics and pulls from many public and private sources. CHAPTER 20: THE STRONG STATE AND THE NEW CITIZENSHIP When Harry Truman left the office of the presidency in 1953…: Jeff Jacoby, “Harry Truman’s Obsolete Integrity,” New York Times, March 2, 2007.


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The interviewer left the room for ten minutes. When he returned, he announced, “I’m happy to say that we’re recommending you for immediate hiring into our marketing department.” This joke pokes fun at one of the most famous brainteaser questions, long associated with Microsoft and alleged to have been devised by Steve Ballmer himself. It expresses deep ambivalence about this style of interviewing. Feynman (a childhood hero of Sergey Brin’s) shows more creative thinking than does Microsoft’s so-called right answer. A true story: Brin did graduate work in Stanford’s computer science building, named for its donor, William Gates.

“I always try to get a list of people”: Agrawal interview, June 8, 2010. “It gets harder and harder”: Carlisle interview, April 7, 2010. “Not hiring someone for poor communication skills”: Posted by “libation” on the New York Times site, as comment to Wortham, “More Employers Use Social Networks.” Chapter Five alleged to have been devised by Steve Ballmer: Poundstone, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, 79–80. Feynman (a childhood hero of Sergey Brin’s): Auletta, Googled, 28. “We were offended at having four-digit numbers”: Auletta, Googled, 32. “A very senior Microsoft developer”: See www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/17.html. Tyma posed this question to his mother: See Tyma’s blog post at http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2007/03/howto-pass-silicon-valley-software.html.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

In the words of Silicon Valley marketer Tom Hayes, who did just that for Applied Materials, “When the news is negative, you want to be perceived as a good company to which a bad thing has happened.” Image matters, a lot. Perception is a company’s reality. That makes the importance of being likeable, even cute, the fourth factor in the T Algorithm. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were neither likable nor cute. In fact, the room got brighter whenever they left it. So, when Microsoft achieved a certain level of influence, district attorneys and regulators woke up one morning all over Europe and decided the easiest way to the governor’s mansion, or Parliament, was to go after the Wizards of Redmond.

And while none of them graduated, their college experiences were still instrumental in their success. Facebook went viral among college students because it grew out of a real need on campus. Gates spent three years intensely studying math and programming at Harvard before he started Microsoft, and he met Steve Ballmer there, the man to whom he’d turn over the reins of Microsoft a quarter century later. And even Jobs, who passed through Reed College in an adolescent daze, famously had his passion for design sparked there. All the bullshit, cost, and stress parents endure to get, and keep, their kids on the path to a decent four-year school is still, very much, worth it.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

They teamed up to write a version of BASIC (short for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), a compact computer language for the MITS machine, and Microsoft was born. When Microsoft had about thirty-five employees, Gates and Allen decided they needed a professional manager. They turned to Steve Ballmer, who had lived down the hall from Gates at Harvard. Unlike Gates, Ballmer, the son of Swiss immigrants, hung around Cambridge long enough to get his Harvard degree in math and economics. Brainy Ballmer then headed to Stanford for a master’s, but quit to take the Microsoft job as head of marketing, user education, and systems testing

He then sued PeopleSoft to eliminate the takeover defense it had put in place to deter Oracle. As Matthew Symonds, a writer at the Economist and author of another Ellison biography put it, “He stalked PeopleSoft a long time until it was weak enough to fall into his hands.” The same winner-take-all philosophy drove Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, his longtime number two at Microsoft and fellow 400 member. Ballmer had a reputation for being even more competitive than his boss. Once they had defeated such 1980s competitors21 as Apple, Novell, and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), they turned their collective attention to the Internet.

More than a century after New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley advised young fortune hunters in a now-famous editorial to “Go West, Young Man,” his maxim has taken on a fresh resonance with the transformation of the West Coast into a new kind of frontier. Now, instead of prospecting for gold or wildcatting for oil, the would-be billionaires moving out West are making their lucre in industries based on ideas. The West Coast not only has Bill Gates and several other Forbes 400 fortunes generated by Microsoft, including Steve Ballmer (2006 net worth: $13.6 billion), Paul Allen (2006 net worth: $16 billion), and Charles Simonyi (2006 net worth: $1 billion); it also has dozens more billionaires than does the East Coast. * * * New York’s down, California’s up In 1982 New York was at the top of the heap, with more 400 members than any other state.


pages: 317 words: 89,825

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

This time, not only did I feel more relief and build trust with my staff, but also people began telling me about all sorts of mistakes they made, mistakes they’d been previously sweeping under the rug. That offered them relief, improved our relationships, and gave me more information so I could do a better job managing the business. In 2007, almost a decade later, I joined the Microsoft board. Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO at the time, is this big, boisterous, friendly guy. He would talk very transparently about his mistakes, saying stuff like: “Look here, see how I really screwed this thing up.” This led me to feel connected to him. What an honest thoughtful guy! And I realized: oh, it’s just normal human behavior to feel more trusting of someone who is open about mistakes.

The Comic’s Comic, October 3, 2011, http://thecomicscomic.com/2011/10/03/not-seen-on-snl-parody-of-the-netflixqwikster-apology-video. Chapter 7: The Keeper Test Eichenwald, Kurt. “Microsoft’s Lost Decade.” Vanity Fair. July 24, 2012. www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer. Kantor, Jodi, and David Streitfeld. “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.” The New York Times, August 15, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html. Ramachandran, Shalini, and Joe Flint. “At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks.”


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Nevertheless, McNerney oversaw a period of expansion in the aircraft engines business, and was solidly in contention for the top job as Welch’s retirement neared. The third and final true contender to become the next CEO was Jeff Immelt. At 6 foot 4 inches, Immelt towered above Welch. His father had worked at GE in the aviation business, and after graduating from Dartmouth, Immelt went to work for Procter & Gamble, where he shared a cubicle with Steve Ballmer, the future CEO of Microsoft. After getting an MBA from Harvard Business School, Immelt joined GE. Early in his career there, Immelt distinguished himself by deftly managing a major refrigerator recall for Welch. After that, he was promoted repeatedly, making his way up through plastics, the same proving ground where Welch made a name for himself.

The Vitality Curve is still in use at companies large and small. In the years after Welch popularized stack ranking at GE, the practice became widespread not just at companies like Ford and 3M, where it led to lawsuits, but also in the tech industry. The practice flourished at Microsoft for years under Steve Ballmer, Immelt’s former cubicle-mate. Unsurprisingly, it led to mass disaffection and an erosion of cooperation, as colleagues were pitted against each other. “This caused people to resist helping one another,” said one Microsoft employee. “It wasn’t just that helping a colleague took time away from someone’s own work.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

In a world that is nice and prizes conformity, routine work and standardisation of opinion, the contrast to normal behaviour by those who are unreasonable, is very apparent. In some examples this signals enormous amounts of grit, and there seems to be a correlation between the disagreeableness of some legendary entrepreneurs and their success. Steve Jobs was famous for his prickliness, Bill Gates threw tantrums, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer threw chairs, Andy Grove of Intel was so fierce that a subordinate fainted during a performance review, and Jeff Bezos is known for going into rages that his Amazon colleagues call “nutters”. According to a biography, Bezos’ notable put-downs include: “I’m sorry, did I forget to take my stupid pills today?”


pages: 327 words: 102,322

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

The bigger danger was that some global mammoth would simply smash the small Waterloo upstart. The rival Balsillie and Lazaridis worried about most was Microsoft after it signaled an interest in wireless e-mail by joining a short-lived venture with semiconductor maker Qualcomm in the late 1990s. At the same time Microsoft executives, including CEO Steve Ballmer, began asking RIM staff questions at trade shows about how BlackBerry worked. Microsoft’s combative generals would not be thrown off by the playful ruses that kept Yankowski at bay. Nor was Balsillie inclined to mess with them. “I had an expression: Never moon the gorilla,” Balsillie says. “Microsoft was the gorilla.

They made their last pilgrimage to Las Vegas in early January for the Consumer Electronics Show, the industry’s annual showcase for the latest mass market technology breakthroughs. They met in private with Lenovo’s executive team, led by chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing, to explore licensing RIM’s phone software to the Chinese handset maker. They sat down with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, a longtime BlackBerry admirer. Side by side they glided through the convention, stopping to stare in wonder at Samsung’s arena-sized marketing display for its high-end, Android-powered Galaxy Note smartphone. BlackBerry, Balsillie mused, was still late with its 4G phone and had only a fraction of the marketing muscle needed to compete with the sprawling Korean manufacturer.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

Despite his reputation as a programmer, according to Bill Gates, “for the first three years, most of the other professionals at Microsoft focused solely on technical work, and [Gates] did most of the sales, finance, and marketing, as well as writing code” (Gates 1995, 41). The other key Microsoft employee, Steve Ballmer, was a math major at Harvard with Gates. Gates reflects that “Steve and I led very different lives, but we were both trying to pare down to the minimum course time needed to get top grades” (40). He tells one instructive story: [Steve] and I would pay very little attention to our classes and then furiously inhale the key books just before an exam.

Ballmer, not originally especially interested in computers, quickly becomes the second-most important Microsoft employee, specifically surpassing the extremely talented computer scientists (Bob Wallace, Paul Allen, Nathan Myhrvold, etc.) who might have shared power. Instead, what Gates needed was exactly what he found in his “alter ego,” Steve Ballmer. In no small part that must be due to Ballmer’s ability to think “algorithmically”—to see multiple paths to manipulating the objects in a problem field, regardless of bounds that may have been imposed by external forces, just as he and Gates algorithmically “gamed” the Harvard system. Perhaps even more openly than Gates’s, Ballmer’s personality exemplifies the techno-egotist subject that has its own power as virtually its only focus.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

“When I was an academic, I thought that was great, because you don’t have to dirty your hands with development,” Hinton says. “But in terms of actually getting the technology to a billion people, Google is far more efficient.” He was also concerned by an article in Vanity Fair titled “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” which explored the ten-year tenure of chief executive Steve Ballmer through the eyes of current and former Microsoft executives. One of the story’s big revelations was the way Ballmer’s Microsoft used a technique called “stack ranking” to review the performance of its employees and weed out a certain proportion of them regardless of their actual performance and promise.

University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos called them “tribes”: Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2015). an article in Vanity Fair: Kurt Eichenwald, “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” Vanity Fair, July 24, 2012, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer. Brought up by his grandfather: Jennifer Bails, “Bing It On,” Carnegie Mellon Today, October 1, 2010, https://www.cmu.edu/cmtoday/issues/october-2010-issue/feature-stories/bing-it-on/index.html. After Twitter acquired Madbits: Catherine Shu, “Twitter Acquires Image Search Startup Madbits,” TechCrunch, July 29, 2014, https://gigaom.com/2014/07/29/twitter-acquires-deep-learning-startup-madbits/.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

No one had heard of their college, but while their Stanford classmates found the heavily quantitative material of the first semester’s courses a challenge, the two engineers yawned. Their work experience also stood them in good stead. Kagle took a manufacturing course and impressed the second-year students, including one who would later invite him to join his venture capital firm. Kagle and Wozniak befriended two others who also came from the Motor City area: Steve Ballmer (future president of Microsoft) and Scott McNealy (cofounder and longtime CEO of Sun Microsystems). General Motors had sent Bob Kagle to graduate school, and it was understood that it was to General Motors that he was to return. But as graduation neared and he negotiated the details of where he would be working, he was dismayed that the company was going to send him to lonely exile: the finance group in New York, preparing reports for the board.

Feeling as if he had been granted emancipation papers, Kagle joined Boston Consulting Group in 1980 and three years later was recruited by Dave Marquardt to join Technology Venture Investors. He was able to repay his alma mater with a grant of Microsoft stock—Marquardt, thanks to the Stanford business-school connection to Steve Ballmer, had been the sole venture capitalist permitted to invest in Microsoft. Kagle learned the nuts and bolts of venture capital investing at a desk set up in the office of TVI’s avuncular founder, Burt McMurtry. In retrospect the moment of his joining turned out to have been the last of the 1980s go-go days for investments in early-stage companies.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

For a couple of decades, Microsoft would remain a smaller player in the internet domain – at least compared to its dominant position in computer software. And it ceded key parts of the internet business, be it the e-commerce or internet search or messaging markets, to other companies. Faced with the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the firm flubbed again. Steve Ballmer, the then CEO of Microsoft, dismissed Apple’s new gadget, saying: ‘It has no chance of gaining significant market share.’40 Of course, the iPhone went on to become the dominant mobile device in the United States and Microsoft’s own mobile ambitions were left in tatters. The company launched its first Windows software for mobile phones in 2000 only to mothball the project 15 years later, with the market all but left to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android software.

Anthony, ‘Kodak’s Downfall Wasn’t About Technology’, Harvard Business Review, 15 July 2016 <https://hbr.org/2016/07/kodaks-downfall-wasnt-about-technology> [accessed 14 December 2020]. 39 Wire Staff, ‘May 26, 1995: Gates, Microsoft Jump on “Internet Tidal Wave”’, Wired, 2 May 2010 <https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/> [accessed 25 February 2021]. 40 Joel Hruska, ‘Ballmer: IPhone Has “No Chance” of Gaining Significant Market Share’, Ars Technica, 30 April 2007 <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/04/ballmer-says-iphone-has-no-chance-to-gain-significant-market-share/> [accessed 7 January 2021]. 41 Chris Smith, ‘Steve Ballmer Finally Explains Why He Thought the IPhone Would Be a Flop’, BGR, 4 November 2016 <https://bgr.com/2016/11/04/ballmer-iphone-quote-explained/> [accessed 7 January 2021]. 42 W. F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923), pp. 200–236. 43 Amanda Lenhart, ‘Chapter 3: Video Games Are Key Elements in Friendships for Many Boys’, in Teens, Technology & Friendships (Pew Research Center: Internet & Technology, 6 August 2015) <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/08/06/chapter-3-video-games-are-key-elements-in-friendships-for-many-boys/> [accessed 25 February 2021]. 44 Douglass C.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

However, the company misread the dominant mobile form factor (the touchscreen); platform business model (app stores and services, rather than operating system sales); the role of the device (which became the primary computing device for most purchasers, rather than a secondary one); the extent of its appeal (everyone); its optimal price point ($500–$1,000); and its role (most functions, rather than just work and phone calls). As is well known today, Microsoft’s mistakes came to a head beginning in 2007, when the first iPhone was released. When asked about the device’s prospects, Microsoft’s second-ever CEO, Steve Ballmer, infamously laughed and replied, “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world. . . . And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine.”14 Microsoft’s mobile operating system never recovered from the disruptive force of Apple’s iPhone and iOS, nor of Google’s Android, which targeted many of Microsoft’s typical Windows manufacturers, such as Sony, Samsung, and Dell, but was free-to-license and even shared a portion of app store revenues with the device makers.

The most interesting GAFAM company in the Metaverse era may well be Microsoft, one of the leading case studies for displacement in the mobile era. Since the very first Xbox released in 2001, investors and even company executives mused as to whether its gaming division was essential, or a distraction. Three months after Satya Nadella took over as CEO from Steve Ballmer, company founder and chairman Bill Gates said he would “absolutely” support Nadella if he wanted to spin off Xbox, “But we’re going to have an overall gaming strategy, so it’s not as obvious as you might think.” The first multi-billion-dollar acquisition Nadella made was for Minecraft—and in a move that now seems obvious but was unconventional at the time, opted against making the title exclusive to its Xbox and Windows platforms (or even better on them).


pages: 165 words: 47,193

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

No one was thinking that a computer or Internet company might produce a marketable smartphone. Palm’s CEO observed in 2006, “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”6 Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer was no more prescient. In January 2007, he asked mockingly about the coming wave of phones, “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.”7 A couple of months later, the computer industry pundit John Dvorak said, “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone” since there was “no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.”


Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

In part, that is because P&G itself isn’t a marketplace brand the way Tide, Pampers, and Crest are. Those individual brands are managed by the global category teams that have grown up around them. Those teams have become a magnet for marketers who want to hone their brandbuilding expertise to the highest possible pitch. Among the alumni of P&G’s brand-building academy are Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; Meg Whitman, formerly of eBay; Jeff Immelt of GE; James Hackett of Steelcase; and Scott Cook of Intuit. But because little had been done to shift brand building significantly toward an algorithm, a great deal of knowledge about building brands existed only in the oral history of the company and in the heads of its current brand-building experts.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

The arrival of computer companies transformed the event, and within a few years it would become the largest digital technology exposition of them all, drawing audiences upwards of 150,000 and all but paralyzing Sin City for a week each January. Apple didn’t attend CES. Steve preferred to announce his products in an environment he controlled. Microsoft didn’t control CES, but it certainly overshadowed everyone else. Chairman Gates, who relinquished his CEO title to Steve Ballmer in 2000, gave the keynote speech eight years running. Gates was a natural choice as the show’s semipermanent celebrity speaker, and he used the dais as a bully pulpit. In 2000, Microsoft really was the computer industry. Some 90 percent of the world’s personal computers ran its Windows operating system.

Gates was the only one who could reasonably think about dominating his awkwardly named but clearly inevitable “consumer-electronics-plus” era. He was powerful, and very, very smart: despite his penchant for dense verbiage, he had done a wonderful job describing the future of computing as we now have it, some fifteen years later. All he and Steve Ballmer had to do was execute the strategy. If they could, they would steer the company through its transition to this future, and in so doing return Microsoft to the kind of growth that investors wanted to see. No one knew it at the time, but Gates’s speech that January morning in Las Vegas marked the apex of Microsoft’s hegemony.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

High-end portable devices for business people had been available since the turn of the century; the Palm Pilot was succeeded by the BlackBerry. But Apple aimed its products at consumers and then opened its systems to enable developers to provide ‘apps’. Combine the music player with the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone, add a screen, and you could devise almost unlimited applications for a gadget that would fit in your pocket. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, laughed derisively when the iPhone appeared – who, he asked rhetorically, would pay $500 for a phone? 20 A lot of people would; ten years on, more than 1.5 billion smartphones had been sold. The smartphone changed the nature not just of entertainment, but of business communication.

In developing his concept of conviction narrative theory, Tuckett suggests that a decision-maker must manage the ‘emotions evoked during narrative simulation’ in order to develop sufficient conviction about a proposed decision. 20 Tuckett’s thesis was formulated after listening to participants in financial markets describing at length how they did in practice make the decisions. The Reverend Bayes was rarely discussed. Successful businesses are built around narratives. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs resisted Olsen’s scepticism that anyone would want a computer in their home, and developed a fresh narrative around personal computing; Jobs successfully embraced – and Steve Ballmer, Gates’ successor, rejected – the later narrative which took the computer from the phone to the cloud and the pocket. Sam Walton, who founded the Walmart chain of stores, recalled that ‘I have concentrated all along on building the finest retail company we possibly could. Making a personal fortune was never particularly a goal of mine.’ 21 Bill Allen, a modest man who was dragged to the CEO’s office against his will, understood the inspirational power of narrative. 22 He made Boeing the world leader in civil aviation by choosing to ‘eat, breathe and sleep the world of aeronautics’.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

That other employee was J. Allard. He had been imploring Microsoft’s C-suite to take the internet seriously, but to no avail. “I was a lonely voice,” Allard would later say. He had been hired in 1991 to build TCP/IP, the basic protocols used by the internet, into Microsoft’s networking software. Allard recalls Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s executive vice president and Gates’s right-hand man, saying about TCP/IP, “I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know what it is. My customers are screaming about it. Make the pain go away.” At the time, personal computers running Microsoft Windows operated either as stand-alone machines, used mainly for basic programming, word processing, spreadsheets, and video games, or as part of local area networks (LANs).

Because the price of personal computers had fallen to the point that renting a mainframe computer was no longer necessary, companies started to combine PCs in LANs to share resources, such as files and printers, and therefore save money. Stand-alone PCs and LANs, however, could not communicate to other computers over the internet—which is why Windows customers were yelling at Steve Ballmer. Without prompting, or even permission, Allard led the development of Microsoft’s first internet server in 1993. Until then, Microsoft products couldn’t share resources over the internet. The sole function of Allard’s server was to distribute TCP/IP code to customers, eventually making it one of the ten most used servers on the internet.


pages: 207 words: 57,959

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

“I don’t even remember my twenties,” he says. “I was probably working fourteen to sixteen hours a day. And I loved it. I was changing the world.” He would respond to any challenge and became an in-house entrepreneur, with a contagious enthusiasm to ignite others to create new Internet businesses. Steve Ballmer, who would become Microsoft’s CEO, noticed Richard, as did many other Microsoft executives. Richard became a superstar and was selected Microsoft’s Employee of the Year in 1994. However, the pace of technology change caused Richard to start to feel old almost overnight, certainly by 1996. “I went very quickly from being celebrated as employee of the year to being called old school.”


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

As important as their early success with the Apple II was, however, their greatest impact came seven years later, when they took the inspiration of people like Engelbart and Kay, and created a mass-market personal computer that set a new standard for participation. Before we get to that, we need to return to 1976, and move from Silicon Valley to New Mexico, where Gates and his partners, including former Harvard friends Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer, were writing programs for the Altair computer. That was the year that Gates wrote a famous letter to the hobbyist community complaining about rampant software theft. He claimed that nothing would please him more than establishing a business model for the community that would allow him to hire ten programmers to write software full time for the hobbyist market.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production. They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none.” Consolidation was rife, as Oracle swallowed up struggling companies in order to maintain market share through sheer inertia. After laughing off the iPhone in 2007, Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft was stuck firmly in the midst of a ten-year rut. While the big tech dinosaurs were limping through this extinction event, a nimbler breed of SaaS companies was coming onto the scene, but there were a lot of doubts about them. They only worked for small businesses. Their “dial-up software” couldn’t be configured or integrated into larger systems.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But some people at Coinbase—including Brian—still had to be persuaded. Fred grew antsy as he watched other crypto exchanges add Ethereum while Coinbase dithered. If Coinbase blew off Ethereum, it could be a strategic mistake like those taught in business classes—for example, when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed the arrival of the iPhone. In 2007, a laughing Ballmer infamously predicted Apple would sell none of its new $500 phones while saying Microsoft, safe in its Windows fortress, would control the mobile market. Ballmer’s hubris stranded his company for a decade in the tech wilderness. Fred didn’t want Coinbase to make a similar mistake.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In 1977, Ken Olson, the president of one of the world’s largest and most successful computer companies, Digital Equipment Corporation, told an audience that there was “no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”7 He stuck to this view throughout the 1980s, long after Microsoft and Apple had proved him wrong. Thirty years later, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told USA Today that there was “no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”8 These anecdotes, besides being funny and amazing in a nerdy kind of way, do have a point, and it’s not to bring ridicule down on long-deceased American inventors. It’s to recognize that we are all susceptible to misinterpreting the technological tea leaves, that we are all blinkered by prevailing systems of thought.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

To serve this need, Amazon, which has vast amounts of excess storage, has a service called EC2, for Elastic Compute Cloud. Likewise, Microsoft has Azure, a cloud-based operating system that will let companies develop and run Web applications without setting up their own data center. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has predicted that nearly all Internet data centers will be outsourced in this way by 2020. Cloud computing will lead to a single, integrated e-memory experience. Every device will act as an access point to recall from your e-memory. And every device will also become a source of information feeding into your e-memory, helping to record your experience.


pages: 255 words: 76,834

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

In the aftermath of the biggest Apple keynote ever, I walked up to The Man himself, and he looked right past me. That was disappointing. There was the intersection of the iPhone with skeptics. It didn’t take long after the Macworld keynote announcement for people to start proclaiming their doubts about the product, and perhaps none has become as famous as the derisive commentary from Steve Ballmer, then the CEO of Microsoft, whose first reaction to hearing about the iPhone was: “500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.”9 Time has proved Ballmer laughably wrong.


pages: 270 words: 79,068

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

Since most organizations are run by Ones and have a team of Twos (sometimes Functional Ones) reporting to them, replacing the CEO can be extremely tricky. Do you promote someone from the executive staff even though they are likely a Two? Microsoft did this in 2000 when they replaced Bill Gates, a prototypical One, with Steve Ballmer, literally his number two. Or do you reach deep into the organization and pull a One from a level lower where they are likely to exist? General Electric famously did this with Jack Welch in 1981. It was an incredibly bold move by GE—not only did they promote an executive two levels down in the organizational chart past all of his superiors, but in doing so they named the youngest CEO in the history of GE.


pages: 274 words: 72,657

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Cal Newport, call centre, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, fear of failure, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, meta-analysis, peak-end rule, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, TED Talk

Because of the facilitators’ questions, people in the villages are made to “see” what had been in front of their eyes the whole time. And that’s not a serendipitous “aha!” moment, it’s an engineered moment. How do we engineer powerful insights in more ordinary organizational situations? Consider the way Scott Guthrie handled a situation at Microsoft in 2011. He’d been tapped by Steve Ballmer to lead the company’s fast-growing cloud computing service, called Azure. Guthrie visited Azure customers, and their feedback about their experience with the service was clear: Azure’s underlying technology was good, but it was hard to use. Guthrie knew Azure would never meet its growth expectations until it was much more customer-friendly.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

For years thereafter both companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars luring each other’s workers and retaining those who got offers from rivals. Of course, Sandberg’s net was cast much wider than Google. She poached Microsoft’s top advertising executive, Carolyn Everson, to head sales, even though Everson had only recently taken the Microsoft job. (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was so upset that Everson took careful note of the golf club he was swinging when she gave him the news. Fortunately, “He didn’t try to hit me,” she says.) In Everson’s interview with Zuckerberg, her prospective new boss seemed still to be wrapping his head around why companies needed brand advertising.

The texts would be taken from things Barry heard at Facebook, some consisting of phrases that embodied the company culture as he saw it, and others arising from the company’s attempts at self-definition. These efforts had been under way for about two years, while Zuckerberg was still smarting from his failure to convey the importance of his mission during the Yahoo! crisis. In 2007, on a walk with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Zuckerberg had asked how his company communicated the qualities its employees should exemplify. Ballmer told him that Microsoft had lists of self-defining qualities. Zuckerberg had gone home and written a bunch of those out and pinned it to the office refrigerator. The list wasn’t all that popular—someone took offense to the specification of “high IQ” and scratched it off the list.


pages: 307 words: 17,123

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry by Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, business continuity plan, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, digital divide, iterative process, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, Nicholas Carr, platform as a service, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business

For example, when I heard that Microsoft (finally) announced that it wanted to enter the SaaS business with a CRM product, I fired off an e-mail to select journalists: ‘‘Well, it’s 7:29 A.M. in Singapore, and I just read that Microsoft announced a new offering to compete with us while I was asleep.’’ I included the interoffice memo that I had written (I’d done this before; tactics dictate strategy), and the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about my response on its Web site. They included what I said in the e-mail and even reiterated their ‘‘favorite line’’ of the memo: ‘‘Steve Ballmer has publicly fretted that he would not be ‘out-hustled by anyone,’ but the fact is that Microsoft is being out-hustled by everyone.’’ Even better, they ran the entire memo in another section. No doubt, sending carefully chosen members of the press well-crafted office memos is one more way to get your story told.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

And, he told us, the Israeli entrepreneur continues to perform in unimaginable ways.12 While the Holy Land has for centuries attracted pilgrims, lately it has been flooded by seekers of a different sort. Google’s CEO and chairman, Eric Schmidt, told us that the United States is the number one place in the world for entrepreneurs, but “after the U.S., Israel is the best.” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has called Microsoft “an Israeli company as much as an American company” because of the size and centrality of its Israeli teams.13 Warren Buffett, the apostle of risk aversion, broke his decades-long record of not buying any foreign company with the purchase of an Israeli company—for $4.5 billion—just as Israel began to fight the 2006 Lebanon war.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

In 2001, Microsoft embarked on its most ambitious upgrade to its dominant Windows operating system with a project code-named Longhorn. The software took five years to complete, with a major reset halfway through, and finally launched in 2006 as Windows Vista. By the time Vista reached the market, its developers had cut many of its features and failed to deliver the innovation that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had envisioned half a decade earlier when the project began. The bizarre thing is that these examples weren’t exceptions—they were the norm. The core problem was that most software projects started with meticulous requirements gathering, and then planning out months or years of work, with hard dependencies between myriad teams to deliver a final, working product in the end.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The most popular phone in America at the time was the Motorola RAZR, which had much the same utility as the flip phones of 1997. The first iPhone, however, played movies, took high-resolution photographs, offered maps, navigated the Web, and stored music just like the iPod. Some competitors didn’t quite get it. Hearing the proposed price, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, laughed out loud. “$500! That is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.” Fortunately for Apple, the form appealed to just about everyone else in the world. In less than eight years after the launch, Apple would sell more than 600 million units of various iPhone versions—made in China—bringing in more than half a trillion dollars in revenue and counting, over 230 million iPhones grossing over $155 billion in 2015 alone.

$7.7 billion versus $7.4 billion and eighty million hands: Apple Computer Inc., 2007 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2007). Jobs took the stage and “Every once in a while”: Steve Jobs, Keynote presentation of the iPhone at Macworld, San Francisco, January 9, 2007. “the most expensive phone”: Steve Ballmer, interview at Nortel, Innovative Communications Alliance, Power Lunch, January 17, 2007. 600 million units: Apple Computer Inc., 2015 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2015). Silicon Valley’s Tesla: Claire Cain Miller, “An All-Electric Sedan, Awaiting Federal Aid,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The most popular phone in America at the time was the Motorola RAZR, which had much the same utility as the flip phones of 1997. The first iPhone, however, played movies, took high-resolution photographs, offered maps, navigated the Web, and stored music just like the iPod. Some competitors didn’t quite get it. Hearing the proposed price, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, laughed out loud. “$500! That is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.” Fortunately for Apple, the form appealed to just about everyone else in the world. In less than eight years after the launch, Apple would sell more than 600 million units of various iPhone versions—made in China—bringing in more than half a trillion dollars in revenue and counting, over 230 million iPhones grossing over $155 billion in 2015 alone.

$7.7 billion versus $7.4 billion and eighty million hands: Apple Computer Inc., 2007 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2007). Jobs took the stage and “Every once in a while”: Steve Jobs, Keynote presentation of the iPhone at Macworld, San Francisco, January 9, 2007. “the most expensive phone”: Steve Ballmer, interview at Nortel, Innovative Communications Alliance, Power Lunch, January 17, 2007. 600 million units: Apple Computer Inc., 2015 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2015). Silicon Valley’s Tesla: Claire Cain Miller, “An All-Electric Sedan, Awaiting Federal Aid,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.


pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

There, by the pool at Kutcher’s house, with his wife, Demi Moore, sitting close by, Kutcher had pitched them on ownership of the company. Sean “Puffy” Combs, the rapper, had also tried to negotiate an ownership deal with Ev. Each time, Ev had politely responded, telling the rich and famous, who were never told no, “No.” It happened with CEOs too. At a dinner at Bill Gates’s multimillion-dollar house in Seattle, Steve Ballmer, the chief of Microsoft, told Ev if he ever wanted to sell the company, Microsoft would be very interested. Ev politely declined Ballmer. For Ev it was never about the money or the celebrities. It always went back to Ev’s vision of building something that gave people from nowhere—like, say, Clarks, Nebraska—the same equal voice as those from somewhere.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

It was—there was an enormous number of people that put in personal sacrifice and it was paying off in spades. It was a beautiful day.” • • • The iPod had been regarded by a lot of pundits as Apple getting lucky, a fluke, a one-shot. When Apple entered the cutthroat cell phone market, it was predicted the iPhone would flop. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer famously said it would never get any market share. But the iPhone was a hit from the start, and Apple used its old playbook of rapidly adding features and models. Apple released the iPhone in mid-2007. By the end of the year, 3.7 million iPhones had been sold. By the first quarter of 2008, the sales volume of iPhones exceeded sales of Apple’s entire Mac line.


pages: 297 words: 89,820

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

He is not shy in claiming that Apple is the only company taking big risks and accomplishing some magic in the personal computer world. He thinks he knows why. "I think back to Detroit in the seventies, when cars were so bad," he says. "Why? The people running the companies then didn't love cars. One of the things wrong with the PC industry today is that most of the people running the companies don't love PCs. Does Steve Ballmer [Microsoft] love PCs? Does Craig Barrett [Intel] love PCs? Does Michael Dell love PCs? If [Michael Dell] wasn't selling PCs he'd be selling something else. These people don't love what they create." Jobs paused for effect. "And people here do." For the record, none of those three guys has anything but good feelings about PCs.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

In the past five years, from 2010 through 2014, Zynga racked up annual losses totaling more than $800 million; Groupon lost nearly $1 billion; and Twitter reported annual net losses that added up to more than $1.5 billion, according to the 10-K forms they filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Old-guard tech CEOs seem baffled by the phenomenon of companies that operate for years in the red. “They make no money! In my world you’re not a real business until you make some money,” Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, said about Amazon in 2014, a year when the company lost $241 million yet saw its market value climb to $160 billion. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, another old-guard business guy, expressed similar astonishment about Salesforce.com. “There’s no cash flow,” he said about that company in April 2015.


pages: 292 words: 81,699

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. “It’s OK! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Steve Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and some shady ethical decisions made it necessary to devote way too much management attention to fighting the US government.


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

I said that I drink too much coffee and colas, and that I'm a colon cancer statistic just waiting to happen. I said I'd love one. She handed it to me and there was a pause as she looked around my office: an NEC MultiSync monitor; a Compaq workhorse monitor; a framed Jazz poster; a "Mac Hugger" bumper sticker on my ceiling and my black-and-white photo shrine to Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer. "The shrine started as a joke," I said, "but it's sort of taking on a life of its own now. It's getting scary. Shall we worship?" It was then that she asked me, in a lowered tone, "Who's Jed?" She had seen me keyboard in my password - like HAL from 2001. And so I closed the door and told her about Jed, and you know, I was glad I was able to tell someone at last


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

‘Well, at least I can beat you in golf!’ Son declared, overflowing in confidence at the one thing he was better than Gates at. When Son stood up he was quickly surrounded by a throng of luminaries from the computer industry wishing him well and wanting to shake his hand, chief amongst whom was Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft. At this massive convention Son had been given equal billing with Gates as the main attraction, but still felt nothing but respect and tremendous affinity for his American counterpart, whilst marking their rivalry having reached a new level. Son had only gambled in a casino once – when he was a student at Berkeley he had been to Las Vegas – and he had thrown all of his money away on the night.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he had visited Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of Florence’s sidewalks. In 2002, when he came to the conclusion that the light wood floors in the stores were beginning to look somewhat pedestrian—a concern that it’s hard to imagine bedeviling someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer—Jobs wanted to use that stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the color and texture using concrete, which would have been ten times cheaper, but Jobs insisted that it had to be authentic. The gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a fine-grained texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola outside of Florence.

Jobs waved his arms and started laughing. “I sent him one,” he said. Hertzfeld replied, “He needs six.” The iPhone was immediately dubbed “the Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s the most expensive phone in the world,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC interview. “And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” Once again Microsoft had underestimated Jobs’s product. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cell phone market.


pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

It’s not hyperbole to state that the fate of the planet and our ability to live a sustainable future in which technology can freely flow to the billions who do not yet have access depends on our understanding and production of rare metals and our avoidance of conflict over them. I Metals, Metals Everywhere Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was incredulous. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” Ballmer prophesied during a CEO Forum before Steve Jobs released the iPhone in June 2007. But, by the end of the first week of sales, most storeroom shelves were bare; Apple and its AT&T partner sold hundreds of thousands of phones.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The mortgage deduction alone costs $70 billion a year, with three-quarters going to homeowners with annual incomes of over $100,000.10 Four times as much goes to the wealthiest fifth in mortgage interest deductions as on social housing for the poorest fifth. Some tax breaks that do not amount to much in total are worth a great deal to the few who gain from them. The USA gives tax breaks to wealthy owners of racehorses and professional sports teams – halving the $2 billion price that Steve Ballmer, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, paid for the LA Clippers basketball team. UK tax breaks include £3 billion a year in reduced capital gains tax for individuals selling their businesses. According to Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, in the tax year 2013/14, £1.8 billion of this benefited just 3,000 people, who each sold their company stakes for more than £1 million.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

During all this time, Jobs has reportedly received neither a salary nor a cash bonus—his entire compensation has been in Apple stock.20 It’s a compelling story, and the list of Apple’s successes is long enough that it’s hard to believe it’s all due to chance. Nevertheless, because Apple’s history can only be run once, we can’t be sure that we aren’t simply succumbing to the Halo Effect. For example, as, I discussed in Chapter 7, the iPod strategy had a number of elements that could easily have led it to fail, as did the iPhone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer looks silly now for scoffing at the idea that consumers would pay $500 for a phone that locked consumers into a two-year contract with AT&T and didn’t have a keyboard, but it was actually quite a reasonable objection. Both products now seem like strokes of genius, but only because they succeeded.


pages: 342 words: 99,390

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history by Gregory Zuckerman

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Robert Shiller, rolodex, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, technology bubble, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two-week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their BlackBerries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Ballmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the BlackBerry away and enjoy life. So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out. …... I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years.


pages: 362 words: 99,063

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

“NEC hired me for the sales department, mostly because of my blog. When I went into the interview, they had a stack of my blog posts printed out right there.” From his job at NEC, Robert got invited to a “Most Valuable Professional” meeting at Microsoft of the top corporate customers. At that meeting, someone confronted CEO Steve Ballmer publicly, saying, “You need to create a better image for Microsoft.” Ballmer responded, “OK, I’ll give a dollar to anyone in this room who comes up with a good idea right here.” Robert stood up and said, “Put a more public face on the company.” He explained how, outlining what amounted to a strategy for corporate blogging—long before the concept of “corporate blogging” existed.


pages: 364 words: 101,286

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carbon-based life, discounted cash flows, diversification, double helix, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, electricity market, Elliott wave, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, full employment, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, informal economy, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, new economy, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, power law, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, stochastic volatility, transfer pricing, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

The conference-goers, among the best-known financiers, entrepreneurs, and CEOs in Europe—preeminent risk-takers, all—listened at first in bemusement. Not your usual conference speaker. Then they got sucked into his strange story. Some said he made more sense than their CFOs. Afterwards, in our audiencefeedback survey, they rated him as best speaker of the day—tied only by Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO. As a scientist, Mandelbrot’s fame rests on his founding of fractal geometry, and on his showing how it applies in many fields. A fractal, a term he coined from the Latin for “broken,” is a geometric shape that can be broken into smaller parts, each a small-scale echo of the whole.


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

Refusing to trust that any one plan would prove perfect, they kept recombining different pieces of the puzzle until, by 2013, the company found a first step: selling the handset business to Microsoft would buy the company time. Siilasmaa’s quiet, consultative style even persuaded Microsoft’s famously incandescent Steve Ballmer to negotiate in good faith. At no point did Siilasmaa think about Nokia as just a financial entity. The company contained huge meaning for employees, business partners, customers and the Finnish nation as a whole, all proud of a business that had pioneered one of the coolest technologies of their lifetime.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

The catch, naturally, was that these three revolutionary new products were in fact one product, combining a touch screen, a music player, a phone, and Internet access. “And we are calling it: iPhone,” Jobs concluded. The audience laughed and hollered and threw claps over their heads. But outside the Moscone Center, skepticism was en vogue. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer considered the prospect of a $500 cell phone to be beyond ludicrous. (“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” he said. “No chance.”) In June 2007, a few days before the iPhone appeared in stores, the media and advertising company Universal McCann issued a blockbuster report on Apple’s new product.


pages: 370 words: 105,085

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

And therefore the most useful operating system is the one that has the most useful applications. The logical conclusion of this is that if you're trying to sell operating systems, the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software for your operating system. That's why Steve Ballmer was jumping around the stage shouting "Developers, developers, developers, developers."1 It's so important for Microsoft that the only reason they don't outright give away development tools for Windows is because they don't want to inadvertently cut off the oxygen to competitive development tools vendors (well, those that are left), because having a variety of development tools available for their platform makes it that much more attractive to developers.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Although Microsoft stated in its internal memos that it would not lead a campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt against open-source products, it feverishly implemented the well-worn corporate tactic of disinformation, using everything in the company’s powerful marketing arsenal to discredit the reliability of Linux. Launching a direct attack against the bulwark of F/OSS, the GPL, Microsoft representatives described this legal agreement with three of the most feared words in the United States: cancer, communism, and un-American. In 2001 during a media interview, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, stated unabashedly, “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” (quoted in Greene 2001). Even amid various advertising campaigns, none of these words ever stuck. Microsoft’s early assaults against Linux only fueled an existing anti-Microsoft sentiment among developers.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

As Walter Isaacson’s biography reveals, Jobs was not a nice guy or an easy person to get along with, especially if you were close to him. Yet he wanted to instill a level of aesthetic perfection in Apple products so that they would remain distinctive and never fall into the rut of “mechanical reproduction” or pure salesmanship (which is where he saw Microsoft going under Steve Ballmer’s leadership). He saw himself as a designer of things that people didn’t even know they wanted until he created them. But there’s more to Apple products than their beauty. Their common aesthetic suggests that they are connected to one another, a “family” of products. The iTunes app acts as both a commercial and a community hub, allowing music and other entertainment to be purchased with ease, and linking all the products to the ever-evolving “cloud” that represents designers’ dreams of connectivity.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

Michael Kassan would come to CES with his friend Irwin Gotlieb to walk the floors of the various hotels that house the exhibitions. Then CES expanded its reach, and Michael Kassan assumed an outsized role. In 2010, to broaden their support in the tech community, CES called on Kassan to help lure Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, a MediaLink client, to attend MediaLink’s cocktail party. Ballmer become a regular at this event. Kassan started stumping for more advertisers to attend CES. Gary Shapiro, the president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, which produces CES, liked the idea, and Kassan offered a deal Shapiro welcomed.


Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

After I presented these studies in a talk at a Google campus some years ago, I was immediately brought by my excited hosts to their impressive whiskey room. This is where coders retire for a dram of liquid inspiration when they run into a creative wall. I was also introduced on this visit to the concept of the Ballmer Peak (Figure 4.1). Attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, this is the extremely high but very narrow peak of a curve describing one’s level of coding skill as a function of blood alcohol content (BAC): Figure 4.1. xkcd on the Ballmer Peak (xkcd.com) Legends circulate of coders, in proper engineering fashion, hooking themselves up to alcoholic IV drips to remain hovering around the BAC sweet spot.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

So remember the 21-year-old Finnish computer student, Linus Torvalds, who in 1991 was writing the kernel of an open-source operating system – just for a hobby, he said – which quickly morphed into Linux, now the most widely used computer operating system in the world. At the time, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux ‘a cancer’, but today even Microsoft has embraced the movement by using Linux in its own products.43 ‘The story of open-source software is a little portal to the future for us,’ Muirhead told me, and he is optimistic. ‘Once you put something in the commons, you can’t take it away,’ he explained, ‘so every single day the knowledge commons grows and becomes more useful.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review. Jeff Bezos fit comfortably into this mold. His manic drive and boldness trumped other conventional leadership ideals, such as building consensus and promoting civility.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

When asked in a survey whether they “like the idea of having one portable device” to fulfill all their needs, only about 30 percent of Americans, Japanese, and Germans said yes.37 They seemed to prefer carrying around a separate phone, a separate camera, and a separate music player instead of a single device that could perform all three functions. Echoing the survey results, then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” The iPhone didn’t prove the survey wrong. As author Derek Thompson explains, the survey accurately measured the participants’ “indifference to a product they had never seen and did not understand.”


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

Mr Lane, for instance, not only believes in the mom test but also has a “sister theory” to explain market inertia. This is mainly because he has a sister who spent a long career as an executive with an American airline, where she “fought every technological change over 30 years, even though she couldn’t say why”. Mom, however, is invoked most – if not necessarily heeded. According to an industry legend, Steve Ballmer, now the boss of Microsoft, conducted a mom test before the launch of Windows 95, using his own mother as the guinea pig. When she had finished trying it out, Ms Ballmer asked, “How do I turn it off?” Her son, somewhat irked, pointed to the start button. “You go to the start button to stop?” asked his mother, quite perplexed.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Its groundbreaking design and novel features, including multitouch screen, powerful mobile Internet browser, accelerometer, and GPS made it an instant hit, with rapturous reviews and sales of over 6 million handsets in its first year. The iPhone had plenty of doubters prior to its release. These included Microsoft cofounder Steve Ballmer, who said, “$500? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine.” Two thousand seven and later years proved the skeptics very wrong.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Microsoft gave Trower a small group of researchers and he went off to build a simulator and a graphical programming language. They named it the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. Then, however, Gates retired to start his foundation, and everything changed at Microsoft. The new chief executive, Steve Ballmer, had a very different focus. He was more concerned about making money and less willing to take risks. Through Microsoft veteran and chief strategy officer Craig Mundie, he sent Trower a clear message: tell me how Microsoft is going to make money on this. Ballmer was very clear: he wanted a business that generated one billion dollars in revenue annually within seven years.


pages: 490 words: 117,629

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David F. Swensen

asset allocation, asset-backed security, Benchmark Capital, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, classic study, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, junk bonds, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pez dispenser, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, the market place, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

In sharp contrast to management’s loss of a mere opportunity, when share prices decrease, shareholders lose cold, hard cash. Options-based compensation schemes represent a no-lose game for management of publicly traded companies. Microsoft provides a textbook example of using option grants to insulate employees from share price declines. In April 2000, chief executive Steve Ballmer faced a problem of low morale among employees concerned about the consequences of the Justice Department’s antitrust activity and a four-month, 44 percent stock price decline. To boost spirits, Ballmer awarded more than 34,000 Microsoft employees stock options priced at the then current stock price.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Jack and Suzy Welch, “The Case for 20-70-10,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 1, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-10-01/the-case-for-20-70-10. 134. Ibid. 135. Kurt Eichenwald, “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” Vanity Fair, August 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer. 136. Tom Warren, “Microsoft Axes Its Controversial Employee-Ranking System,” The Verge, November 12, 2013, http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-ranking-internal-structure. 137. David A. Garvin, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld, and Liz Kind, “Google’s Project Oxygen: Do Managers Matter?”


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The Rupert Murdochs, Sumner Redstones, and Sam Zells of the world asked for Lee by name when working with J.P. Morgan. He also hosts an annual confab in Deer Valley that draws an enviable roster of heavyweights, including DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, and the NBA commissioner, David Stern. (Shortly after the deal, Dimon asked Lee to join him for dinner at the Post House, a steak house in the Lowell hotel on East 63rd Street. Moments after sitting down, Lee pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and put it down on the table next to him.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

But despite all the spectacle, after a strong opening weekend—when Apple says it moved 270,000 units in thirty hours or so—sales were actually relatively slow. For now, the app selection was locked, the phone ran only on painfully slow 2G networks, and nothing was customizable, not even the wallpaper. And it was lambasted for being too expensive. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously scoffed, “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan?… That is the most expensive phone in the world.” The hit features were probably Safari and Maps—two media-rich, multitouch-powered experiences that set the stage for everything the iPhone was capable of. That, and the touchscreen itself.


pages: 493 words: 139,845

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

So I pitched the idea, showing why I thought Microsoft needed expertise in these areas. I talked about where technology was moving and where Microsoft would want to be moving. I presented the argument about the kinds of people who were located in Cambridge who wouldn't relocate. Surprisingly, it took just a few weeks actually for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to say “yes” to the idea. It all happened very quickly. Ghaffari: Was the idea to set up the New England Research Center largely your initiative or Christian's, would you say? Chayes: I think this one was more my initiative. Christian was very happy. He was doing well, and we had a great team at the Theory Group.


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

And it is leadership like that that we think is a role we can play in terms of helping develop useful models and frameworks for the industry. Yourdon: I’ve got a bunch of questions that I can’t avoid asking because I’m sure everyone will want to know—and that is the question of whether Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer hired you or promoted you into your position, or whether you have any other tidbits, you know, about them that you want to talk about. Scott: Well, I actually worked for Kevin Turner, who was our Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft, but Steve was a part of the interview process, and I’d actually worked with Bill on a number of different things even before coming to Microsoft—so it’s probably the only job where I’ve gone into the job knowing the senior executives and the company reasonably well before coming to take the job.


pages: 470 words: 144,455

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Piracy is just another way of boosting market share. Microsoft had exactly this in mind when they made a big push to get their products translated into Chinese and distributed across that country. They knew they would be pirated; they knew that they would make less than one sale for every ten copies used. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has been quoted as saying: “If you’re going to get pirated, you want them to pirate your stuff, not your competitors’ stuff. In developing countries, it is important to have a high share of the piracy software.” When China enters the free world, they will already be Microsoft compatible. Until then, Microsoft isn’t losing anything.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The IDA used ‘flagship marketing’, aggressively targeting the big global names, whose vote of confidence would then make it easier to attract others. They got Apple to invest in 1980, then leveraged that to persuade Intel to move in. Next they went for Microsoft. It worked every time. ‘I’m normally the sales guy,’ says Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, recalling the extraordinary job the IDA did on him. ‘That is the first lunch I’ve been to where the government was selling to me!’ The IDA chiselled Ireland’s quirky international image into appealing new forms. The traditional American view of Ireland was ‘a romantic misty isle peopled by characters straight out of The Quiet Man and full of bog roads and stray donkeys’, says White.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

The fear that AI could one day develop to the point where it threatens humanity isn’t shared by everyone who works on AI. It’s hard to dismiss people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk out of hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Other tech moguls have pushed back against AI fears. Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has said AI risk “doesn’t concern me.” Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, has argued, “There won’t be an intelligence explosion. There is no existential threat.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that those who “drum up these doomsday scenarios” are being “irresponsible.”


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

One manifestation of the breadth of what can be patented is the famous patent issued in 2002 for swinging sideways while on a swing. That patent was issued to a five-year-old child. See U.S. Patent No. 6,368,227 (issued Apr. 9, 2002). 70. See Posting of Adrian Kingsley-Hughes to Gear for Geeks, Ballmer: Linux “Infringes our intellectual property” http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=154 (Nov. 17, 2006, 06:55), discussing Steve Ballmer’s assertion that Linux infringes Microsoft’s patents at the Professional Association for SQL Server conference in Seattle on November 16, 2006); Roger Parloff, Microsoft Takes on the Free World, FORTUNE, May 14, 2007, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm?


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

In a meeting with the W3C, the international consortium that helps devise standards for the Web, a vice president of the Direct Marketing Association reportedly “proposed that Do Not Track signals should actually permit data collection for advertising purposes, the very thing the mechanisms were designed to control.” The Association of National Advertisers then published an open letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, criticizing his company for automatically enabling Do Not Track on its Internet Explorer 10 browser (which at the time hadn’t even yet been released). Even the most cursory privacy measures, it seemed, would be vigorously contested. But the effort was doomed from the beginning. The Privacy Bill of Rights called for corporations to sign up voluntarily, with enforcement entrusted to the congenitally toothless FTC.


pages: 559 words: 157,112

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Carrying a portfolio of his work, Simonyi entered Suite 819 relaxed and confident, thanks to his mistaken impression that Metcalfe had already called to smooth the way. In fact, he was an unexpected visitor. Bill Gates being tied up at the moment with a delegation from a Japanese manufacturing company, Simonyi was escorted instead into the office of Steve Ballmer, a friend of Gates’s from Harvard. Unlike Gates, Ballmer had stayed at Harvard to graduate, after which he signed on to be Microsoft’s maniacal chief salesman and hyper-motivational troop leader. “I projected supreme confidence and everything,” Simonyi recalled. “I had a great portfolio and so Ballmer was incredibly impressed.”


pages: 483 words: 145,225

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody

barriers to entry, business logic, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, ghettoisation, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, hypertext link, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, thinkpad, VA Linux

In the face of these developments, claims that free software is a technological laggard—or that GNU/Linux is unable to scale—are patently untenable. So, once again, Microsoft has changed tack. During 2001, it abandoned its arguments based on technology and turned, with what looked like increasing desperation, to the area of intellectual property. This new campaign culminated in the remarks of Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, to the Chicago Sun-Times in June 2001, when he said, “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” That the head of one of the most powerful companies on earth could describe a program started by a twenty-one-year-old computer student in his bedroom, and whose only fault is that it provides freedom to its users, as a “cancer” is a sad reflection on the priorities and values of this executive.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Well, I can’t, I don’t have that program at all, so it doesn’t put me in a morally compromised position. . . .” See http://www.oreilly.com/tim/archives/mikro_discussion.pdf. 27 Google is now running on well over a million servers: Google does not actually disclose this information, but in July 2013, Microsoft then-CEO Steve Ballmer noted that Microsoft Bing was running on almost that number; Google serves many more users, and the number has only grown since then. See Sebastian Anthony, “Microsoft Now Has One Million Servers—Less than Google, but More than Amazon, Says Ballmer,” Extremetech, retrieved March 29, 2017, https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/161772-microsoft-now-has-one-million-servers-less-than-google-but-more-than-amazon-says-ballmer. 28 one of the most significant books of the twentieth century: Elizabeth Diefendorf, ed., The New York Public Library’s Books of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 149. 29 “What Is Web 2.0?”


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

As institutions influence behavior and incentives in real life, they forge the success or failure of nations. Individual talent matters at every level of society, but even that needs an institutional framework to transform it into a positive force. Bill Gates, like other legendary figures in the information technology industry (such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos), had immense talent and ambition. But he ultimately responded to incentives. The schooling system in the United States enabled Gates and others like him to acquire a unique set of skills to complement their talents. The economic institutions in the United States enabled these men to start companies with ease, without facing insurmountable barriers.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

Strategically, Musk saw V2 as step one toward the comprehensive, global-center-of-all-money X.com. “That required a lot more software than what PayPal had,” Musk recalled. “So therefore it made sense, in my view, to use the most powerful development system in the world”—Microsoft. In July 2000, the X.com team traveled to Redmond and met with Microsoft’s top brass, including CEO Steve Ballmer. The company’s weekly newsletter reported on the meeting with enthusiasm: Our engineering team recently had a meeting with some very senior members of Microsoft—so senior that some of them report directly to Bill Gates [then-chairman of the board]! What does Microsoft want with us? Our advice!


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Others justified their sales to governments as their patriotic duty. But there were eighteen million software programmers in the world. If Microsoft could recognize those programmers in a more meaningful way, it could tap their brainpower for good, and invite the best to come to Redmond. When Moussouris pitched Steve Ballmer’s generals in 2011, they were receptive but not ready to pull the trigger. They needed more data. For the next two years she compared herself to Cassandra, “doomed to know the future but nobody believes her until she can show them the data.” By 2013 she had two years’ worth of data showing that Microsoft was now losing bug reports to third-party brokers and intermediaries.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As Princeton economist Alan Blinder explains, the mere threat of offshoring creates an environment that depresses wages.11 It has proven to be an effective tool to coerce concessions from employees or to fend off unionization, with extortion commonly practiced even by the largest and most illustrious US firms. For example, some 40 percent of Microsoft’s employees already work abroad, yet chief executive Steve Ballmer has threatened to export even more jobs if Democratic politicians close foreign tax havens. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out” of the United States, citizen of the world Ballmer asserted.12 Any obligation of industry leaders to nurture the American economy and its workers by even the most profitable and bluest of blue-chip US multinationals has been vitiated by Reaganomics.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

We talked to a headhunting firm, and the guy was candid with me and said, “Look, we can’t recruit a COO for you because anybody who is capable of doing that job for a company at your level would demand to be the CEO.” And I thought, “That’s kind of crazy. How could they be the CEO? They don’t know the business or the customers. How could we just plunk them down?” In retrospect, that was pretty good thinking; look at Microsoft: it took them 20 years to hand off from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer. He needed 20 years of training to take that job. Jack Welch was at GE for 20 years before he became CEO. Sometimes it does work, but I think for these fragile little companies, just putting a generic manager at the top is oftentimes disastrous. There was no way we could have hired first-rank businesspeople in that environment.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

The naked mole rat was a superior beast, not only insensitive to pain but parthenogenic: The queen of the colony fertilizes and gives birth without assistance from the males. Munger and Myhrvold held an animated conversation about the sex life of mole rats while the others sat listening in numb disbelief.6 The next morning, Gates took Buffett and Munger over to Microsoft so that his number two, Steve Ballmer, and half a dozen engineers could interview them, almost as anthropologists, so strange did it seem to them that these two incredibly brilliant men were such latecomers to the world of computers. They were like a couple of cavemen savants discovered in the bush who had seen an airplane but wouldn’t take a ride.