Seb Paquet sent me a link to Delusions of Facebook - Should you be a Facebook Startup? I am immediately reminded of McLuhan.

The medium is the message.

When Microsoft Windows came along, many people only noticed the obvious. Windows made it easy to build a good-looking application. Microsoft offered a standard API which was usable. Microsoft Windows was used by millions of people. What a great platform for a business! However, a lot of good companies (such as Netscape, Word Perfect, Novell, Stacker, Lotus) were crushed by Microsoft because they tried hard to complement what Microsoft was offering. These companies were often not bought, just made irrelevant. Microsoft destroyed the software industry over time and few people beyond Microsoft benefited from it.

One tragic mistake some people have made is to assume you can simply move to a new platform when the time comes. The mere fact that you use Microsoft Windows this year does not preclude you to support MacOS next year, does it? But platform-dependence builds up while you are not watching and is a lot more insidious than one might think. I am not even talking about the fact that your users are on one specific platform: these are business concerns. You grow a lot of technological dependencies toward a platform without ever realizing it. Anyone who has switched from Windows to Linux, or from Linux to MacOS or from Windows to MacOS has some idea of these hard-to-describe dependencies. And over time, once you have adopted a new platform, you just work differently.

There was a large number of companies in the Unix/DOS era who just assume they could port their stuff to Windows. Most failed. Meanwhile, Oracle made platform-independence a requirement for their software from the get-go. They are still around and going strong. (Ironically, they try hard to lock their own customers into their own software.)

Then the web arrived. Again, several companies from the desktop era try to adapt themselves to the web… most failed. Even Microsoft has a very hard time adapting. And the giant of today (Yahoo!, Google…) did not even exist in the desktop-era.

So, if all you build is a facebook application, it is what you are. Even if, in theory, you can recast your technology as something else, using a new platform, it does not make it practical. If facebook makes your application irrelevant, or breaks it in some way, your company may very well die on the spot.

And, you know what, this is a great thing sometimes. As a researcher with an interest in applications, I know I will be busy for years to come.

For all my adult life, the American dollar has been worth more than the Canadian dollar, often much more. No longer! We reached parity today. Maybe Americans should reflect on what this means for them that the value of their currency is going downward so fast. (Hint: stuff is going to cost more.)

It just came to me lately that the Web forms a world of its own, with its own political views. It always strike me how little government presence there is on the Web. In most Western economies, the government account for a large share of the economy (certainly above 20%). On the Web, I would say that official government sites account for less of 2% of all Web sites I visit (anyone has numbers to back this up?).

I pay taxes to Quebec and Canada. I carry a Canadian passport. I have to live by the local laws. Whenever I do anything, I can see the influence of the rule of law. I have to stop my car at every street corner. I see police cars drive by almost weekly. Shops are strictly limited in what they can do. If someone steals from me, I will walk to a police station and fill in some paperwork.

However, my Web persona is very different. My server (daniel-lemire.com) is hosted somewhere in the USA. I rarely think about the local laws. They are pretty much irrelevant. If Amazon.com were to cheat me, the first thing I would do, is to search the Web for similar cases using Google, not call the cops.

The economy on the Web is very different from the economy off-the-grid.

In a brick-and-mortar shops, a great deal of time is spent on having to deal with rules and obligations. If you want to improve your neighborhood, you probably should chat with a local politician. Starting a shop or a factory requires months of work and lots of paperwork.

The Web (or the Internet at large) is very different. If you want to stop SPAM, the last thing you want to do is go to your local politician. There are rules, but the most important ones are not enforced by governments. There are no prisons, but people can setup filters to ignore you. Starting a shop or a web service can only take days. You can also tear down a service or an online shop in seconds.

My point is that the Web is a distinct society, one that is far more libertarian than anything seen in the physical world. It is something of a wild west.

If the libertarians are right, then the Web should see great economic and cultural growth. We always need a frontier were forward-thinking people can express themselves.

Somehow, I had missed this: Lulu.com is a website where you can upload your word or PDF document and have your book published, for free, right there.

Amazing.

Stephen Downes points us to an article about the apparent negative correlation between economic growth an university funding. Here are some good quotes:

Universities, while they’re virtuous institutions … do not necessarily promote economic growth and development, because resources have to be taken from the private sector or somewhere to pay for them

There is very, very, very weak evidence that more spending on state universities actually leads to more college graduates — let alone higher-quality ones.

See also my posts An upcoming revolution in science? The end of academic journals?, A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education and Big schools are no longer giving researchers an edge?

Subscribe to this blog
in a reader
or by Email.

Warren Buffet, who used to be the second richest man in the world, ran an experiment in his office. He asked his staff to check which fraction of their income they paid in taxes. Surprisingly, he pays a much lesser fraction in taxes than his staff does. This is a great quote:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

How can this be, when the majority of the people are much poorer than Warren and thus, ought to tax Warren a lot. No, Warren says he does not even do tax planning: he pays whatever he is being asked to pay.

This is explained away by the fact the poors tend to vote for more tax breaks for the rich. I couldn’t find a quote, but I think it is a well known fact that the poors tend to mistrust the governments to redistribute the wealth.

“People can’t do elementary mathematics” is another explanation. I don’t like this explanation, but that is what it comes down to. In Quebec, we used to have a child care system where poors got lots of money in tax deduction whereas the rich got very little. Then the government created child care programs so that everyone pays the same and gets more or less the same. The problem with this is that it is a measure that benefits the wealthy only, but gives the illusion of wealth distribution because everyone is suddenly apparently equal (except that the rich pay less taxes than they used to).

I’m often amazed at how uneducated about money people are. Take “tax returns”. A tax return is the government sending you back the extra money you paid. This is not an income. Having a large tax return is also a bad thing: this means that you gave the government a large interest-free loan. Yet, time after time, I see people who consider tax returns an income. Heck! The government could probably start taxing tax returns and many would agree!!!

Another one I like is how many people in Canada think that the goods are cheaper in the USA. For example, if you see a $30 printer in the USA, is it cheaper than the corresponding $40 printer in Canada? Depends on the exchange rate, doesn’t it? You’d be amazed how many people do not get that part for the simple reason that they never understood rules of 3.

Repeat after me: income-neutral costs favor the rich. All you need to understand are basic fractions here. The rich should pay more for government services whenever a cost is involved.

(Why am I writing about politics these days? Must be a reaction to Dion’s coming to power.)

Slashdot reports that Amazon will let you use a powerful Xeon-based machine for $0.10 per hour. This means that for $10 per hour, you can have 100 machines cranking away on some task. You need to be a Linux user though. That’s what I call Highly Affordable Computing.