Finance Geek

What goes up must come down. That’s especially true for real estate and more especially for high-end markets like Manhattan and the Hamptons. Following the boom and bust cycle on Wall Street, both markets have swooned in recent years after soaring in the

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More signs emerged this week the U.S. housing market is turning the corner. …

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On the way in this morning I was thinking about Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice iPhone application, whether they will approve Spotify’s app (I really hope so), what it all means for the ecosystem and whether I should write a blog post on the topic.  Then I saw the following on Techdirt which sums up my thoughts perfectly:

As we wait to hear if Spotify’s mobile app gets approved (I heard a rumor that it was, but have seen no proof yet), we hear of another questionable Apple iPhone rejection: the Google Voice iPhone app has been forbidden from the iPhone, though the reasons aren’t entirely clear. Still, it does show that Apple doesn’t care who you are, or how big a name. If it doesn’t like your app, too bad. Once again, this seems like an argument for why more open solutions will win out in the end. Not only do users not have to worry about arbitrary rejections like this, but innovation will happen much faster on open platforms where each innovation doesn’t need to be approved by a mercurial secret cabal.

In the long run Apple will not win out if it continues to put its partners and own interests ahead of its customers interests.

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Are Republicans too pessimistic about the economy? I put this question to Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) this week, and it would be hard to describe his response as optimistic. The senator trash-talked Vice President Joe Biden’s recent defense of the stimulus in the New York Times, and he warned that any economic rebound will be short-lived because of the runaway spending-and-borrowing plans of the Obama administration.
Truth be told, respected economists like Donald Marron, Keith Hennessey, Bruce Bartlett, and Kevin Hassett have all carefully chronicled the fact that the Obama stimulus…

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By some indicators, previous downturns were more severe. But none since World War II has caused so much pain on so many fronts.

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From The Business Insider, July 28, 2009:Last February, Microsoft offered to buy all of Yahoo for $40 billion.  Last summer, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo’s search business for $1 billion. A couple of months ago, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said it w

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From The BUsiness Insider, July 28, 2009:Last February, Microsoft offered to buy all of Yahoo for $40
billion.  Last summer, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo’s search business
for $1 billion. 
A couple of months ago, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said

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The Obama administration is unhappy with the slow pace of mortgage bailouts that banks and other lenders are crafting under the government’s Making Homes Affordable plan. And so administration officials gathered financial executives in Washington to “knock heads” a bit, or to “encourage” lenders to move faster, depending on which news account of the meeting you believe.
Critics are unhappy with the banks for not staffing up fast enough to administer the program, which relies on government subsidies to help homeowners lower their mortgage payments to 31 percent of…

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The White House is sitting down with mortgage servicers this week to discuss their role in fixing the nation’s growing foreclosure crisis. Critics say both sides are not doing enough to keep people in their homes. Dorothy Herman, President and CEO

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As Wired.com predicts, Apple and AT&T reject a Google iPhone application for its innovative Voice service. But Apple may have gone too far this time in protecting its partner and is inviting the feds to step in to open the mobile marketplace.

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Most Americans agree our current health care system is a mess.  Few, however, agree on how to fix it.
How to control runaway costs?  How do you ensure that the tens of millions of uninsured Americans have access to quality care (without running

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INDEPENDENCE — Hail and strong winds continue to pummel Northeast Iowa crops and farm buildings. Producers spent Monday assessing and cleaning up damage from Friday’s severe thunderstorm.

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A good news and bad news scenario is shaping up for the Obama adminsitraion’s health care plan.  The Associated Press reports, a bipartisan group in the Senate is close to a compromise. …

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China’s GDP growth and stock market are the envy of the developed world. But recent events stand in stark contrast to the “strong, prosperous and successful”
China that President Obama described at the opening of this week’s strategic
economic

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I haven’t written much about Enterprise 2.0 recently, perhaps because the slow rate of adoption has stemmed the flow of interesting startups in this area, but I remain convinced that it’s time will come.  That conviction was strengthened this morning when reading the chapter on the economics of abundance in Anderson’s Free.

Early in the chapter he describes how he and his colleagues used to receive regular emails from their IT department asking them to delete unnecessary files from shared drives, and how that changed with the realisation that storage is now cheap and abundant and it therefore no longer makes sense to ask people to spend their (scarce) time deleting files.  Critically, this realisation took a long time to dawn on them because the IT department was in the happy world of managing measurable storage costs and stepping outside that to thinking about people’s time was a move into the unknown.

So it is with enterprise 2.0.  Historically the scarce resource has been server space and the resources of the IT team who had to deploy and support enterprise apps.  In the world of enterprise 2.0 both those scarcities disappear.  The apps are hosted outside the enterprise, the employee takes care of deployment (in her browser) and support is handled directly by the app provider.

A significant part of the raison d’etre for IT departments is therefore under threat and it is little surprise that they resist the trend towards enterprise 2.0.

The chart below is copied from Anderson’s book and describes five changes in the optimal organisational model brought about by the shift from scarce to abundant computing.  Four of five apply directly to enterprise IT, and all are an anathema to most CIOs.

Any cultural change is slow happen, and on this scale particularly so, which explains the slow roll-out of enterprise 2.0.  This also suggests that maybe the way forward in the short term is to target companies too small to have strong IT departments – a strategy employed by Basecamp, one of the most successful companies in this space.

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