Mobile Future, can Yahoo! really show the way?

Business Insider reports that Yahoo CEO Marisa Meyer is considering giving iphones to all Yahoo! Employees. It seems she agrees with those in the company who feel that their IT department’s commitment to Blackberry is holding them back and that their engineers would benefit from using devices that they aim to deliver services to; not Blackberrys. This was known at Sun Microsystems as “Eating our own dog food” The article finished with what I assume to be a Business Insider editorial comment,

“Yahoo should be innovating for the future, and BlackBerrys are not part of the future. They are part of the quickly fading past.”

The article also states that Meyer is not so wedded to Apple, and might consider Android. The unspoken question is whether Yahoo! is part of the quickly fading past.

On another note, I use all three devices, although the Apple device is an ipod touch and since like everyone I am unhappy with what I have, and am already looking forward to replacing both the phones. …

Labour’s Lost Mayor

sack boris projected

This article was started just after the election in May 2012, and only finished over the Xmas break of 2013, nearly 20 months later. Some of the tenses may thus be a bit odd. I have backdated this in the blog to the time I started it. However RSS feed consumers and Facebook will publish this as at today. The article talks about the candidates, Labour’s manifesto, the role of London Mayor, how Labour sought to hold Boris to account for his record and character and briefly questions whether London is a coherent political entity. I have tried to ensure the article is contemporaneous to the time of the election. (I didn’t quite manage it.)

As I’ve said, I have been busy over the last year campaigning for Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London and for a Labour group on the London Assembly. Now we have the perfect vision from hindsight others have been writing about the London election, Labour’s victory in the Assembly and failure to win the Mayor election. I thought I’d join in. Many blame the candidate, but I feel the issues are deeper than that and that lessons need to be learned. …

Influences on my economics

There are three books which have changed my thinking about economics over the last few years. I originally questioned whether these books are revolutionary but they have added to my thinking in very basic ways. These books all look to address the economics of information, or the wealth unleashed by I.T. and the internet. My thinking about this started in the early 1990’s, Dan Remenyi at Henley Management School introduced me to the ideas that Information was the 4th Factor of Production, that Industrial Age economics was insufficient as it was unable to explain why companies that invested in negative or zero profit IT projects, as measured by ROI, outperformed those that didn’t, and that an industrial age balance sheet was incapable of evaluating an information system asset.

The three books all relate to the evolution of society and its economics, the empowering of knowledge workers and their relationships with Capital, and hence capitalists. …

Let’s take back the Internet

Rebecca Mackinnon previews the arguments for digital liberty, exploring the contention points between people and power. I suspect it needs to be informed by Kondratiev cycles, , she takes her start point as the historical achievement of political liberty but we shouldn’t be looking back 300 years.

The steel, oil,  & silicon technology revolutions have spawned social democracy, enviromentalism and the digital liberty movement respectively. Each of these reactions have spawned political movements to achieve their goals. …

New-ish corporate stakeholders

Peter Drucker & Will Hutton developed and articulated theories of stakeholder constraints on corporate behaviour. Of course, as far as Marx was concerned the only moderator of corporate behaviour was the proletariat, the organised working class; but these later theorists argue that suppliers, consumers and neighbours/regulators are also now inhibiting factors on the company with in my version of the model, neighbours and their law enforcement entities should be having a final word. Law enforcement should be interpreted broadly to include the HSE, HMRC (for low wages and tax compliance), the Equal Opportunities Commission and now the Information Commissioner’s Office. Much of consumer and environmental protection is enforced by local authorities.

The development of feminism, and latterly green (consumerist) responses to companies, including now, campaigns against climate change are new factors in the neighbourly and employee stakeholder constraints upon the company.

Hutton has expressed his views more recently in Hutton 1999,The Stakeholding Society: Writings on Politics and Economics, ISBN: 978-0-745-62078-7 January 1999 Polity.

Drucker’s most famous work might be, Drucker, P.F. (1955) The Practice of Management. Heinemann, London.

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