The “Twittergate” story, where a French computer hacker called “Hacker Croll” managed to steal over 300 sensitive documents from Twitter, makes very instructive reading. Tech Crunch tells the story and draws some interesting conclusions about just how simple it is to hack popular internet applications and cause havoc. Well worth a read.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Is Google turning into Microsoft?
Great, thoughtful post from Anil Dash, VP of Six Apart, asking whether Google is having a “Microsoft moment”. He defines it like this:
This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change.
Well worth a read.
New rules for a new age?
Shoshana Zuboff was the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and in a remarkable post she has apologised for all the harm she and her colleagues have done to the business world.
I have come to believe that much of what my colleagues and I taught has caused real suffering, suppressed wealth creation, destabilized the world economy, and accelerated the demise of the 20th century capitalism in which the U.S. played the leading role.
We weren’t stupid and we weren’t evil. Nevertheless we managed to produce a generation of managers and business professionals that is deeply mistrusted and despised by a majority of people in our society and around the world. This is a terrible failure.
She now believes business schools should be teaching new rules:
1. Graduate to the I-Space: focus on customers as individuals as Amazon, ebay and Apple have done and not on the administrative
2. Advocate don’t alienate: listen to what customers want and help; don’t just build products and sell
3. Collaborate and federate to compete: you can’t do it alone.
As it happens the apology might not be without its self-serving side: Ms Zuboff has written a book called The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism.
Technorati Tags: books, economy, philosophy
Data the saviour
A great piece by Frederic Filloux in the online newsletter Monday Note on the power of data for journalists. He cites several great examples such as Bloomberg, the NYT "Remade America" piece using Immigration Explorer as well as examples of map-based data on debt and crime.
There is about to be an explosion of public data in the US thanks the Government’s initiative to open it up. Will this save journalism? No, says Filloux, but it will empower it. Read the piece and look at the examples and let me know what you think…
Technorati Tags: data,journalism