WebWriting.com

A detailed analysis of Gen Y in the workplace - from one of our own.

Teresa over at Making Light writes about the “convential wisdom” that publishing is a “winner-takes-all-contenst” where only the best sellers matter. “It’s not true, and it’snot becoming true.”

Thanks to popular culture most people are familiar with parts of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.  If my post on due process piqued your interest then you may have done some research and read about grand juries or eminent domain.  An article on findlaw from May of 2004 higlights the importance of the final right guaranteed in the subsequent amendment - the Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused the right “to have the Assitance of Counsel for his defence (sic).”

I started this post several months ago and never had a chance to elaborate.  I’m flying on business tomorrow for the first time since the liquid scare and in checking the TSA website found the following disclaimer: “Bringing a prohibited item to a security checkpoint - even accidentally - is illegal.“

I guess I should bring my lawyer with me to the airport.

Taking a page out of the Bush (or is it the Rove) playbook, IBD puts up a list of examples of how a number of companies’ boards were bullied or stood up to ‘Activist Investors.’  The folks at IBD may have the best of intentions in defending the board of directors of these companies but they seem to conveniently forget that the board members tend to be minority holders, at best, and when the owners - i.e. stock holders - believe the company needs to make a change or that the board is not operating in their best interest, it is their right to do something about it, whether they are correct or not. 

Wire reports that the Senate Commerce Committee is deadlocked on some net neutrality amendments in a current telecommunications bill.  The amendment basically says that a service provider cannot prioritize their own packets over competitors’ that are traveling on their lines.  It does not prohibit prioritization by type (e.g. all video can go faster than all e-mail).

I showed my wife the included quotation of Senator Ted Stevens’ attempt to explain why the amendment is bad.  After reading about his e-mail problem her first question was “Did he check his e-mail since Friday at 10?”  Well put.  Perhaps Senators should not use anecdotes from their own experience with technology to make laws.  I wonder why we have Senators who are obviously ignorant of technology involved in regulating it.

This is an election year.  It is a good time to promote some churn in Congress and elect new young faces into Congress.  Let’s elect some people who can represent the United States of America in the 21st century.

Paul Graham writes wonderful essays on technology an sociology including his recent The Power of the Marginal.  A choice quotation to whet your appetite:

“The big media companies shouldn’t worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.”

I told a friend today that 5 years from now I bet we’d be watching more YouTube than regular televsion.  Then I though about the past few days and realized that today I watch more YouTube than regular televsion.  The Marginal is going mainstream.

Clint Deboer writes 10 reasons why HD DVD is doomed to failure.  There is precisely one reason that HD DVD is doomed to be the next laserdisc (at best): there is nothing better about it.  That is a lie - there is lots of new technological improvements, but if you ask the average consumer what they think, they will tell you that they see nothing new.  Comparing the DVD to HD-DVD transition to the DVD to VHS, most consumers will tell you they buy or rent DVDs because they can skip the previews, don’t have to rewind and the picture never gets fuzzy in the middle of the movie.  Compared with the videophiles who bought DVDs for better quality, most people are only now buying HD TVs and starting to realize that DVDs actually look and sound better.

Clint is right on the mark comparing the HD-DVD format wars to competing video game systems.  Another big difference is that (small children aside) most consumers do not watch the same movies daily whereas people do play the same video games repeatedly.  The only consumer media formats that have gained wide acceptance have been the unified ones: from LPs to tapes to CDs and from VHS to DVDs.  All new DVD players can also play both SACD and DVD-Audio but those formats are dead in the water.  If there was new software (i.e. movies) available exclusively on HD-DVD then we may see increasing interest.  When faced with the proposition of having to buy a new player and then pay double the price for the same exact material (better quality aside), consumers will go with what’s cheap and easy.

As a budding Entrepreneur, reading Fred Wilson’s VC Cliche’s I can’t help but recognize everything I’ve heard while touring the VC circuit.  His latest cliche especially rings true: best way to raise money is to ask for advice and the best way to get advice is to ask for money.

Business Week interviews Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen about his Innovator’s Dilemma and the future of Apple Computer. The money shot has nothing to do with Innovation or Apple. Christensen’s last comment is the take away:

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot — about whether managers ought even to think about what Wall Street says. In the 1960s, the average investor held shares for over six years. In that world, it made sense to frame the job of the manager as maximizing shareholder value. But today, 10% of all shares are owned by hedge funds, and do you know what their average holding period is? It’s just 60 days! And another 85% of the equities are owned by mutual funds and pension funds, and the average tenure there is 10 months.

Their time horizon is shorter than even that of even the shortest-term managers. So I don’t think it’s right to think of [these investors] as shareholders of your company. They’re investors who temporarily own securities in your company at a particular point in time. They’re responsible for maximizing the stock value of their investments. You as the CEO are responsible for maximizing the long-term health of your company. “

If CEOs should no longer align themselves with these short term shareholders who drive the stock price, how do you give them the right incentives to maximize long-term health? If the board, to whom the CEO reports, represents the shareholders, and their best measure of shareholder satisfaction (aside from getting voted out) is stock price, how do they measure whether a CEO is maximizing long-term health?

Christensen is on to something and he opens the door to a bevy of questions that could drastically change the foundation of corporate structure.