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. …

Real Copyright Reform

The Inspiration

Today’s copyright law in the US and the UK only serves the interests of a minority of participants in the creative industries and the knowledge economy. The debate in Britain about the Digital Economy Bill is actually trying to avoid confronting whether the UK and by implication the World’s intellectual property law framework is fit for the 21st Century.  Jessica Litman at the University of Michigan’s Law School has published a paper called Real Copyright Reform, see the Abstract & Download, in which, among other things, she argues there are four roles, and its her paper that inspired my blog snip, Copyright Stake Holders, dated 30th March, and that copyright law needs to serve a balanced interest of all participants. (Interestingly she misses the interests of non participants). …

Scalable Computing

The “Scalable Computing” section of the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network has published an “article, called “Cloud – why now?” by me, Dave Levy. It is a brief article looking at some of  the thoughts I developed over the last year about why organisations are developing new architectural models for IT delivery and how they’ll do it. It looks at the computer science, the economics and the way in which scale is self fulfilling. The scale of the problem, of which there are three dimensions, (data, complexity & connectivity) inspires scalable IT, which itself enables the scale of the solution, and enables higher levels of scale. …

Free, the right price for software

Economic systems are about how to use scarce resources and the Price Mechanism is the way in which a optimal resource allocation occurs. Economists use a branch of theory called “Welfare Economics” to analyse and model the efficiency of the productive economy, and a theoretically maximally efficient set of states can be defined within a model, known as the Pareto-efficiency frontier. A perfectly competitive market meets the efficiency requirements, imperfect or distorted markets do not. Distortions can be caused by the existence of monopolistic markets, taxation, externalities or missing markets.

Traditional Welfare economics rarely considers how copyright and patent law create barriers to entry to markets and thus husband the growth of monopolistic markets, where supply is restricted and prices driven up. It needs to be born in mind that overpricing products such as software which are inputs to the economic process as well as output, means that some otherwise efficient goods will not be produced; they cost too much.

It should also be born in mind that the majority of the world’s software is not licensed or charged for, although much of this free to use software is not traded at all, remaining the proprietary goods of their owners who use them to produce other goods and/or services. Benkler in his book, “the Wealth of Networks”, suggests there are nine business models for pursuing value in software, of which only three of them involve trading rights i.e. charging for software. If there was no software copyright i.e. copying was legal and free the only price, software would still be written. The overpricing of software distorts both today’s market and the innovation creating tomorrow’s. The price mechanism should ensure that resources that are scarce and consumed should be payed for. Software is not scarce, although the people that write it and the machines that run it are. Resources such as software should be free.

This was meant to be an essay based on some slides I have been trailing inside the company, but I discovered how hard it is and how much time it takes to actually put ideas into essay form while preparing the paper behind what became Monopoly & Prices, see below. So this is more of an abstract, I shall upload the essay when finished to my personal site downloads page, actually to a landing page on this blog.

Thanks once again to Beggs, Fischer and Dornbusch, whose Economics 8th Edition reminded me of my Welfare Economics.

ooOOOoo

This is a reprint of an article originally published on my sun blog. It was copied to this site on 3rd August 2013. much earlier than most. …

Are blogs losing their infuence?

Are blogs losing their infuence?

Richard Morgan sent me this article, “Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?” dated March 10th 2009, which argues that while blog authority ranking according to Technorati remains fairly static, the scores of the various blogs are declining. Technorati uses an inlist scoring algorithm which may be part of the problem, but it would seem to me that micro-blogging is impacting the strength of the voice of blogs as a communications tool, which is what the article argued. In some way’s not just micro-blogging, but the various places where people can and do record what they do and think. …  …

The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

I have been discussing the efficacy of our internal search tools and how hard it is to find stuff, and to be honest, assumed that it was the crapness that most users accuse their IT colleagues of. However a colleague, Bernard Horan recommended that I read “Searching the Workplace Web“, which suggests a different answer. Searching the Workplace Web argues that intranet’s are different from the internet and that more flexible, and different search algorithms are required to search an intranet; the most successful internet search algorithms are not necessarily going to work well on an intranet. …

McKinsey on strategy, services and product

On my sun/oracle blog I wrote a note/précis of an issue of the McKinsey Quarterly. The keynote article, “Distortions & deceptions in strategic decisions” looks at the flawed human values often inserted into major business decisions. They quote a major acquisition decision taken by a dominant player and suggest that the major advocate of the merger wanted it for personal political gain. They look at ways in which these human factors can be brought into the open and evaluated in the decision making process. Despite identifying over-optimism as a frequent occurrence once a proposal has been made, the decision not to proceed is often taken in private and so collaborative decision making cannot neutralise these human shortcomings. One suggestion is to ask the proposer, what their next best proposal is. …

Throughput Computing

In February 2016, I undertook an exercise to copy as many as made sense, of my original blog articles across from the oracle site to my/this wordpress blog. This article represents the highlights of the original record of my day.  The Oracle blog has now gone, as have the all the pointers to Sun resources, including the presentations. I rescued and rehosted Andy Ingram’s, Workload based Systems Design 2005 which I have rescued and reposted because it was important then and remains so today, well maybe, maybe not in 2019.

Sun finally launched it’s chip multi-threading systems, promising a revolution in throughput and cheaper MIPS/Watt. This was done at a synchronous event in New York & London with a webcast for those who couldn’t make it in person.  Jonathan Schwarz travelled to London to speak to his European customers, as did  I. I recorded this on my sun oracle blog in several articles.  …