Because much has changed in the year and a half since I wrote that first epic post comparing my DROID2 with an iPhone 4 – for starters, my iPhone 4 now runs the new iOS 5 operating system and my DROID2 now runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread — I thought I would revisit the comparison, having had over a year to use both devices in various capacities.

Long story short: I still prefer my DROID2 (although to a lesser extent than before).

So, what were my big observations after using the iPhone 4 for two weeks and then switching back to my DROID2?

• Apple continues to blow me away with how good they are at
  • UI slickness: There’s no way around it – with the possible exception of the 4.0 revision of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (which I now have and love on my Motorola Xoom!) – no Android operating system comes close to the iPhone/iPad’s remarkable user interface smoothness. iOS animations are perfectly fluid. Responsiveness is great. Stability is excellent (while rare, my DROID2 does force restart every now and then — my iPhone has only crashed a handful of times). It’s a very well-oiled machine and free of the frustrations I’ve had at times when I. just. wished. that. darn. app. would. scroll. smoothly.
  • Battery life: I was at or near zero battery at the end of every day when I was in Asia – so even the iPhone needs improvement in that category. But, there’s no doubt in my mind that my DROID2 would have given out earlier. I don’t know what it is about iOS which enables them to consistently deliver such impressive battery life, but I did notice a later onset of “battery anxiety” during the day while using the iPhone than I would have on my DROID2.
• Apple’s soft keyboard is good – very good — but nothing beats a physical keyboard plus SwiftKey. Not having my beloved Android phone meant I had to learn how to use the iPhone soft keyboard to get around – and I have to say, much to my chagrin, I actually got the hang of it. Its amazingly responsive and has a good handle on what words to autocorrect, what to leave alone, and even on learning what words were just strange jargon/names but still legitimate. Even back in the US on my DROID2, I find myself trying to use the soft keyboard a lot more than I used to (and discovering, sadly, that its not as good as the iPhone’s). However:
  • You just can’t type as long as you can on a hard physical keyboard.
  • Every now and then the iPhone makes a stupid autocorrection and it’s a little awkward to override it (having to hit that tiny “x”).
  • The last time I did the iPhone/DROID comparison, I talked about how amazing Swype was. While I still think it’s a great product, I’ve now graduated to SwiftKey(see video below) not only because I have met and love the CEO Jonathan Reynolds but because of its uncanny ability to compose my emails/messages for me. It learns from your typing history and from your blog/Facebook/Gmail/Twitter and inputs it into an amazing text prediction engine which not only predicts what words you are trying to type but also the next word after that! I have literally written emails where half of my words have been predicted by SwiftKey.

     

• Notifications in iOS are terrible.
  • A huge issue for me: there is no notification light on an iPhone. That means the only way for me to know if something new has happened is if I hear the tone that the phone makes when I get a new notification (which I don’t always because its in my pocket or because – you know – something else in life is happening at that moment) or if I happen to be looking at the screen at the moment the notifications shows up (same problem). This means that I have to repeatedly check the phone throughout the day which can be a little obnoxious when you’re with people/doing something else and just want to know if an email/text message has come in.
  • What was very surprising to me was that despite having the opportunity to learn (and dare I say, copy) from what Android and WebOS  had done, Apple chose quite possibly the weakest approach possible. Not only are the notifications not visible from the home screen – requiring me to swipe downward from the top to see if anything’s there — its impossible to dismiss notifications one at a time, really hard (or maybe I just have fat fingers?) to hit the clear button which dismisses blocks of them at a time, even after I hit clear, I’m not sure why some of the notifications don’t disappear, and it is surprisingly easy to accidentally hit a notification when you don’t intend to (which will force you into a new application — which wouldn’t be a big deal if iOS had a cross-application back button… which it doesn’t). Maybe this is just someone who’s too used to the Android way of doing things, but while this is way better than the old “in your face” iOS notifications, I found myself very frustrated here.
• Cursor positioning feels a more natural on Android. I didn’t realize this would bug me until after using the iPhone for a few days. The setup: until Android’s Gingerbread update, highlighting text and moving the caret (where your next letter comes out when you type) was terrible on Android. It was something I didn’t realize in my initial comparison and something I came to envy about iOS: the magnifying glass that pops up when you want to move your cursor and the simple drag-and-drop highlighting of text. Thankfully with the Gingerbread update, Android completely closes that gap (see image on the right) and improves upon it. Unlike with iOS, I don’t need to long-hold on the screen to enter some eery parallel universe with a magnified view – in Android, you just click once, drag the arrow to where you want the cursor to be, and you’re good to go.
• No widgets in iOS. There are no widgets in iOS. I can see the iOS fans thinking: “big deal, who cares? they’re ugly and slow down the system!” Fair points — so why do I care? I care because widgets let me quickly turn on or off WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS from the homescreen in Android, but in iOS, I would be forced to go through a bunch of menus. It means, on Android, I can see my next few calendar events, but in iOS, I would need to go into the calendar app. It means, on Android I can quickly create a new Evernote note and see my last few notes from the home screen, but in iOS, I would need to open the app. It means that on Android I can see what the weather will be like from the homescreen, but in iOS, I would need to turn on the weather app to see the weather. It means that on Android, I can quickly glance at a number of homescreens to see what’s going on in Google Voice (my text messages), Google Reader, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, but on iOS, I need to open each of those apps separately. In short, I care about widgets because they are convenient and save me time.
• Apps play together more nicely with Android. Android and iOS have a fundamentally different philosophy on how apps should behave with one another. Considering most of the main iOS apps are also on Android, what do I mean by this? Well, Android has two features which iOS does not have: a cross-application back button and a cross-application “intent” system. What this means is that apps are meant to push information/content to each other in Android:
  • If I want to “share” something, any app of mine that mediates that sharing – whether its email, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Tumblr, etc – its all fair game (see image on the right). On iOS, I can only share things through services that the app I’m in currently supports. Want to post something to Tumblr or Facebook or over email in an app that only supports Twitter? Tough luck in iOS. Want to edit a photo/document in an app that isn’t supported by the app you’re in? Again, tough luck in iOS. With the exception of things like web links (where Apple has apps meant to handle them), you can only use the apps/services which are sanctioned by the app developer. In Android, apps are supposed to talk with one another, and Google goes the extra mile to make sure all apps that can handle an “action” are available for the user to choose from.
  • In iOS, navigating between different screens/features is usually done by a descriptive back button in the upper-left of the interface. This works exactly like the Android back button does with one exception. These iOS back buttons only work within an application. There’s no way to jump between applications. Granted, there’s less of a need in iOS since there’s less cross-app communication (see previous bullet point), but when you throw in the ability of iOS5’s new notification system to take you into a new application altogether and when you’re in a situation where you want to use another service, the back button becomes quite handy.
• And, of course,  deluge of the he-said-she-said that I observed:
  • Free turn-by-turn navigation on Android is AWESOME and makes the purchase of the phone worth it on its own (mainly because my driving becomes 100x worse when I’m lost). Not having that in iOS was a pain, although thankfully, because I spent most of my time in Asia on foot, in a cab, or on public transit, it was not as big of a pain.
  • Google integration (Google Voice, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Maps) is far better on Android — if you make as heavy use of Google services as I do, this becomes a big deal very quickly.
  • Chrome to Phone is awesome – being able to send links/pictures/locations from computer to phone is amazingly useful. I only wish someone made a simple Phone-to-Chrome capability where I could send information from my phone/tablet to a computer just as easily.
  • Adobe Flash performance is, for the record, not great and for many sites its simply a gateway for advertisements. But, its helpful to have to be able to open up terrible websites (especially those of restaurants) — and in Japan, many a restaurant had an annoying Flash website which my iPhone could not open.
  • Because of the growing popularity of Android, app availability between the two platforms is pretty equal for the biggest apps (with just a few noteworthy exceptions like Flipboard). To be fair, many of the Android ports are done haphazardly – leading to a more disappointing experience – but the flip side of this is that the more open nature of Android also means its the only platform where you can use some pretty interesting services like AirDroid (easy-over-Wifi way of syncing and managing your device), Google Listen (Google Reader-linked over-the-air podcast manager), BitTorrent Remote (use your phone to remote login to your computer’s BitTorrent client), etc.
  • I love that I can connect my Android phone to a PC and it will show up like a USB drive. iPhone? Not so much (which forced me to transfer my photos over Dropbox instead).
  • My ability to use the Android Market website to install apps over the air to any of my Android devices has made discovering and installing new apps much more convenient.
  • The iOS mail client (1) doesn’t let you collapse/expand folders and (2) doesn’t let you control which folders to sync to what extents/at what intervals, but the Android Exchange client does. For someone who has as many folders as I do (one of which is a Getting Things Done-esque “TODO” folder), that’s a HUGE plus in terms of ease of use.

To be completely fair – I don’t have the iPhone 4S (so I haven’t played with Siri), I haven’t really used iCloud at all, and the advantages in UI quality and battery life are a big deal. So unlike some of the extremists out there who can’t understand why someone would pick iOS/Android, I can see the appeal of “the other side.” But after using the iPhone 4 for two weeks and after seeing some of the improvements in my Xoom from Ice Cream Sandwich, I can safely say that unless the iPhone 5 (or whatever comes after the 4S) brings with it a huge change, I will be buying another Android device next. If anything, I’ve noticed that with each generation of Android, Android devices further closes the gap on the main advantages that iOS has (smoothness, stability, app selection/quality), while continuing to embrace the philosophy and innovations that keep me hooked.

(Image Credit – Android text selection: Android.com) (Image Credit – Android sharing: talkandroid.com)

But as my girlfriend once pointed out, the problem with asking academic advisors that question is that academic advisors tend to be academics – and in academia, you can make a career out of studying anything. Outside of academia, that is not so true. Look no further than the paradox of how we have record high unemployment for recent college graduates despite almost every startup I’ve spoken with expressing concerns about finding and retaining qualified employees?

Obviously, our education system is failing to meet the needs of our students and employers. But, other than hope that the system miraculously fixes itself, my advice to students is this: take classes that teach broadly employable skills. You don’t need to take a lot of them, and nobody’s asking you to major in a something that you don’t want to – college is, after all, about broadening your horizons and studying what interests you. But, in a competitive job market and a turbulent economy, the worker that is in the best position is the worker who can move between industries/jobs easily (getting out of bad jobs/industries and moving into better paid/more interesting ones) and who can quickly demonstrate value to their boss (so as to make them indispensable faster).

So what sort of skills am I referring to? Off the top of my head (I’m sure there are others), three come to mind:

• Accounting – All organizations that deal with money need people with accounting chops. From my experience, the executives/employees who are the most versatile across industries are the CFOs — they can plug into almost any business or organization and can quickly help their employers out. You may not want to be an accountant, but in a pinch, having those skills can help you get hired or find work as you figure out your next move.
• Programming – Programming as a skill is relatively generalizable. While I wouldn’t necessarily get an iPhone developer to write an operating system (or vice versa), folks with programming chops can quickly get up to speed on new projects at new companies, and, as a result, can quickly crank out functioning code to help with their employers.
• Statistics – You don’t need to be a math genius to be hireable. But, as computers become faster and more important, more organizations are turning to number crunching as a way to stay competitive. Not only will “data scientists” and statisticians become more in demand, individuals who have familiarity with those tools will be in a better position at their companies and be able to quickly help out a new employer.

The skeptic will point out that a lot of this can be outsourced. And, that’s certainly true – but in my experience, there is not only a limit on what companies are willing to outsource, there is also just huge value for any employee to tack those skills onto what they are already doing. A salesperson who is also good at crunching statistics on who to sell to next is far more valuable than a “regular” salesperson. A marketing guy with programming chops probably has a better understanding of a product or a technology than a “regular” marketing guy. And, a operations guy who also understands the nitty gritty financial details is going to be able to do a better job than an operations guy who doesn’t. Not to mention: the skills are broadly applicable; so if one company doesn’t have a good spot, there’s always another organization somewhere that will.

As corny as it sounds, my first thought after hearing about “Occupy Wall Street” wasn’t about right or wrong or even really about politics: it was about John Steinbeck and his book The Grapes of Wrath . It’s a book I read long ago in high school, but it was one which left a very deep impression on me. While I can’t even remember the main plot (other than that it dealt with a family of Great Depression and Dust Bowl-afflicted farmers who were forced to flee Oklahoma towards California), what I do remember was a very tragic description of the utter confusion and helplessness that gripped the people of that era (from Chapter 5):

“It’s not us, it’s the bank. A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster.”

“Sure,” cried the tenant men, “but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.”

“We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.”

“Yes, but the bank is only made of men.”

“No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

And therein lies the best description of the tragedy of the Great Depression, and of every economic crisis that I have ever read. The many un- and under-employed people in the US are clearly under a lot of stress. And, like with the farmers in Steinbeck’s novel, its completely understandable that they want to blame somebody. And, so they are going to point to the most obvious culprits: “the 1%”, the bankers and financiers who work on “Wall Street”.

But, I think Steinbeck understood this is not really about the individuals. Obviously, there was a lot of wrongdoing that happened on the part of the banks which led to our current economic “malaise.” But I think for the most part, the “1%” aren’t interested in seeing their fellow citizen unemployed and on the street. Even if you don’t believe in compassion, their greed alone guarantees that they’d prefer to see the whole economy growing with everyone employed and productive, and their desire to avoid harassment alone guarantees they’d love to find a solution which ends the protests and the finger-pointing. They may not be suffering as much as those in the “99%”, but I’m pretty sure they are just as confused and hopeful that a solution comes about.

The real problem – Steinbeck’s “monster” – is the political and economic system people have created but can’t control. Our lives are driven so much by economic forces and institutions which are intertwined with one another on a global level that people can’t understand why they or their friends and family are unemployed, why food and gas prices are so expensive, why the national debt is so high, etc.

Now, a complicated system that we don’t have control of is not always a bad thing. After all, what is a democracy supposed to be but a political system that nobody can control? What is the point of a strong judiciary but to be a legal authority that legislators/executives cannot overthrow? Furthermore, its important for anyone who wants to change the system for the better to remember that the same global economic system which is causing so much grief today is more responsible than any other force for creating many of the scientific and technological advancements which make our lives better and for lifting (and continuing to lift) millions out of poverty such as those who live in countries like China and India.

But, even keeping that in mind, I — a firm believer in freer markets and globalization — am hard-pressed not to sympathize with the idea that the system has failed on its promise of expanding prosperity for a broad swath of the population. What else am I (or anyone else) supposed to think in a world where corporate profits can go up while unemployment stays stubbornly near 10%, where bankers can get paid bonuses only a short while after their industry was bailed out with taxpayer money, and where the government seems completely unable to do more than bicker about an artificial debt ceiling?

But anyone with even a small understanding of economics knows this is not about a person or even a group of people. To use Steinbeck’s words, the problem is more than a man, it really is a monster. While we may not be able to kill it, letting it rampage is not a viable option either — the “Occupy Wall Street” protests are a testament to that. They may not be generating any policy recommendations which can stop the problem, but their frustration is real and legitimate, and until politicians across both sides of the aisle and individuals across both ends of the income spectrum come together to find a way to “tame the monster’s rampage”, we’re going to see a lot more finger-pointing and anger.

(Image credit – Wikipedia)

Yes, that’s right. I’d give up Facebook and Twitter before I’d give up Google Reader.

I’ve always been disappointed by Google’s lack of attention to the product, so you would think that after announcing that they would find a way to better integrate the product with Google+ (a product I recently came out as being fairly positive on) that I would be jumping for joy.

However, I am not. And, I am not the only one. E. D. Kain from Forbes says it best when he writes:

[A]fter reading Sarah Perez and Austin Frakt and after thinking about just how much I use Google Reader every day, I’m beginning to revise my initial forecast. Stay calm is quickly shifting toward full-bore Panic Mode.

(bolding and underlining from me)

Now, for the record, I can definitely see the value of integrating Google+ with Google Reader well. I think the key to doing that is finding a way to replace the not-really-used-at-all Sparks feature (which seems to have been replaced by a saved searches feature) in Google+ with Google Reader to make it easier to share high quality blog posts/content. So why am I so anxious? Well, looking at the existing products, there are two big things:

• Google+ is not designed to share posts/content – its designed to share snippets. Yes, there are quite a few folks (i.e. Steve Yegge who made the now-famous-accidentally-public rant about Google’s approach to platforms vs Amazon/Facebook/Apple’s on products) who make very long posts on Google+ using it almost as a mini-blog platform. And, yes, one can share videos and photos on the site. However, what the platform has not proven to be able to share (and is, fundamentally, one of the best uses/features for Google Reader) is a rich site with embedded video, photos, rich text, and links. This blog post that you’re reading for instance? I can’t share this on Google+. All I can share is a text excerpt and an image – that reduces the utility of the service as a reading/sharing/posting platform.
• Google Reader is not just “another circle” for Google+, it’s a different type of online social behavior. I gave Google props earlier this year for thinking through online social behavior when building their Circles and Hangouts features, but it slipped my mind then that my use of Google Reader was yet another way to do online social interaction that Google+ did not capture. What do I mean by that? Well, when you put friends in a circle, it means you have grouped that set of friends into one category and think of them as similar enough to want to receive their updates/shared items together and to send them updates/shared items, together. Now, this feels more natural to me than the original Facebook concept (where every friend is equal) and Twitter concept (where the idea is to just broadcast everything to everybody), but it misses one dynamic: followers may have different levels of interest in different types of sharing. When I share an article on Google Reader, I want to do it publicly (hence the public share page), but only to people who are interested in what I am reading/thinking. If I wanted to share it with all of my friends, I would’ve long ago integrated Google Reader shares into Facebook and Twitter. On the flip side, whether or not I feel socially close to the people I follow on Google Reader is irrelevant: I follow them on Google Reader because I’m interested in their shares/comments. With Google+, this sort of “public, but only for folks who are interested” sharing and reading mode is not present at all – and it strikes me as worrisome because the idea behind the Google Reader change is to replace its social dynamics with Google+

Now, of course, Google could address these concerns by implementing additional features – and if that were the case, that would be great. But, putting my realist hat on and looking at the tone of the Google Reader blog post and the way that Google+ has been developed, I am skeptical. Or, to sum it up, in the words of Austin Frakt at the Incidental Economist (again bolding/underlining is by me)

I will be entering next week with some trepidation. I’m a big fan of Google and its products, in general. (Love the Droid. Love the Gmail. Etc.) However, today, I’ve never been more frightened of the company. I sure hope they don’t blow this one!

If you’ve been following either the cleantech world or politics, you’ll have heard about the recent collapse of Solyndra, the solar company the Obama administration touted as a shining example of cleantech innovation in America. Solyndra, like a few other “lucky” cleantech companies, received loan guarantees from the Department of Energy (like having Uncle Sam co-sign its loans), and is now embroiled in a political controversy over whether or not the administration acted improperly and whether or not the government should be involved in providing such support for cleantech companies.

Given my vantage point from the venture capital space evaluating cleantech companies, I thought I would weigh in with a few thoughts:

• The failure of one solar company is hardly a reason to doubt cleantech as an enterprise. In every entrepreneurial industry where lots of bold, unproven ideas are being tested, you will see high failure rates. And, therein lies one of the beauties of a market economy – what the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” That a large solar company like Solyndra failed is not a failing of the industry – if anything it’s a good thing. It means that one unproven idea/business model (Solyndra’s) was pushed out in favor of something better (in this case, more advanced crystalline silicon technologies and new thin film solar technologies) which means the employees/customers of Solyndra can now move on to more productive pastures (possibly another cleantech company which has a better shot at success).
• The failure of Solyndra is hardly a reason to doubt the importance of government support for the cleantech industry. I believe that a strong “cleantech” industry is a good thing for the world and for the United States. Its good for the world in that it represents new, more efficient methods of harnessing, moving, and using energy and is a non-political (and, so, less controversial to implement) approach to addressing the problems of man-made climate change. Its good for the United States in that it represents a major new driver of market demand that the US is particularly well-suited to addressing because of its leadership in technology & innovation at a time when the US is struggling with job loss/economic decline/competition abroad. Or, to put it in a more economic way, what makes cleantech a worthy sector for government support is its strategic importance in the future growth of the global economy (potentially like a new semiconductor/software industry which drove much of the technology sector over the past two decades), the likelihood that the private sector will underinvest due to not correctly valuing the positive externalities (social good), and the fact that…
• Private sector investors cannot do it all when it comes to supporting cleantech. One of the criticisms I’ve heard following the Solyndra debacle is that the government should not leave the support of industries like cleantech to the private sector. While I’m sympathetic to that argument, my experience in the venture investing world is that many private investors are not well equipped to providing all the levels of support that the industry would need. Private investors, for instance, are very bad at (and tend to shy away from) providing basic sciences R&D support – that’s research which is not directly linked to the bottom line (and so is outside of what a private company is good at managing) and, in fact, should be conducted by academics who collaborate openly across the research community. Venture capital investors are also not that well-suited to supporting cleantech pilots/deployments – those checks are very large and difficult to finance. These are two large examples of areas where private investors are unlikely to be able to provide all the support that the industry will need to advance and areas where there is a strong role for the government to play.
• With all that said, I think there are far better ways for the government to go about supporting its domestic cleantech industry. Knowing a certain industry is strategic and difficult for the private sector to support completely is one thing – effectively supporting it is another. In this case, I have major qualms about how the Department of Energy is choosing to spend its time. The loan guarantee program not only puts taxpayer dollars at risk directly, it also picks winners and losers– something that industrial policy should try very hard not to do. Anytime you have the ability to pick winners and losers, you will create situations where the selection of winners and losers could be motivated by cronyism/favoritism. It also exposes the government to a very real criticism: shouldn’t a private sector investor like a venture capitalist do the picking? Its one thing when these are small prize grants for projects – its another when its large sums of taxpayer dollars at risk. Better, in my humble opinion, to find other ways to support the industry like:
  • Sponsoring basic R&D to help the industry with the research it needs to break past the next hurdles
  • Facilitating more dialogue between research and industry: the government is in a unique position to encourage more collaboration between researchers, between industry, between researchers AND industry, and across borders. Helping to set up more “meetings of the minds” is a great, relatively low-cost way of helping push an industry forward.
  • Issuing H1B visas for smart immigrants who want to stay and create/work for the next cleantech startup: I’ve blogged about this before but I remain flabbergasted that there are countless intelligent individuals who want to do research/work/start companies in the US that we don’t let in.
  • Subsidizing cleantech project/manufacturing line finance: Without necessarily putting money at risk, it may be possible for the government to use tax law or direct subsidies to help companies lower their effective interest payments on financing pilot line/project buildouts. Obviously, doing this would be difficult as we would want to avoid supporting the financing of companies which could fail, but it strikes me that this would be easier to “get right” than putting large swaths of taxpayer money at risk in loan guarantees.
  • Taxing carbon/water/pollution:  If there’s one thing the government can do to drive research and demand for “green products” is to issue a tax which makes the consequences of inefficiency obvious. Economists call this a Pigovian tax and the idea is that there is no better way to get people to save energy/water and embrace cleaner energy than by making them. (Note: for those of you worried about higher taxes, the tax can be balanced out by tax cuts/rebates so as to not raise the total tax burden on the US, only shift that burden towards things like pollution/excess energy consumption)

  This is not a complete list (nor is it intended to be one), but its definitely a set of options which are supportive of the cleantech industry, avoid the pitfall of picking winners and losers in a situation where the market should be doing that, and, except for the last, should not be super-controversial to implement.

Sadly, despite the abundance of interesting ideas and the steady pace of innovation/business model innovation, Solyndra seems to have turned investors and the public more sour towards solar and cleantech more broadly. Hopefully, we get past this rough patch soon and find a way to more effectively channel the government’s energies and funds to bolstering the cleantech industry in its quest for clean energy and greater efficiency.

(Image credit)

• This is a refreshingly bold move by Google. Frankly, I had expected Google to continue its fairly whiny, defensive path on this for some time as they and the rest of the Android ecosystem cobbled together a solution to the horrendous intellectual property situation they found themselves in. After all, while Android was strategically important to Google as a means of preventing another operating system (like Windows or iOS) from weakening their great influence on the mobile internet, one could argue that most of that strategic value came from just making Android available and keeping it updated. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that it would make dollars-and-cents sense for Google to spend a lot of cash fighting battles that, frankly, Samsung, HTC, LG, and the others should have been prepared to fight on their own. That Google did this at all sends a powerful message to the ecosystem that the success of Android is critical to Google and that it will even go so far as to engage in “unnatural acts” (Google getting into the hardware business!?) to make it so.
• It will be interesting to observe Google’s IP strategy going forward. Although its not perfect, Google has taken a fairly pro-open source stance when it comes to intellectual property. Case in point: after spending over $100M on video codec maker On2, Google moved to make On2’s VP8/WebM codec freely available for others to integrate as an alternative to the license-laden H.264 codec. Sadly, because of the importance of building up a patent armory in this business, I doubt Google will do something similar here – instead, Google will likely hold on to its patent arsenal and either use it as a legal deterrent to Microsoft/Apple/Nokia or find a smart way to license them to key partners to help bolster their legal cases. It will be interesting to see how Google changes its intellectual property practices and strategy now that its gone through this. I suspect we will see a shift away from the open-ness that so many of us loved about Google.
• I don’t put much stock into speculation that Motorola’s hardware business will just be spun out again. This is true for a number of reasons:
  1. I’m unaware of any such precedent where a large company acquires another large one, strips it of its valuable intellectual property, and then spins it out. Not only do I think regulators/antitrust guys would not look too kindly on such a deal, but I think Google would have a miserable time trying to convince new investors/buyers that a company stripped of its most valuable assets could stand on its own.
  2. Having the Motorola business gives Google additional tools to build and influence the ecosystem. Other than the Google-designed Nexus devices and requirements Google imposes on its manufacturing partners to support the Android Market, Google actually has fairly little influence over the ecosystem and the specific product decisions that OEMs like Samsung and HTC make. Else, we wouldn’t see so many custom UI layers and bloatware bundled on new Android phones. Having Motorola in-house gives Google valuable hardware chops that it probably did not have before (which will be useful in building out new phones/tablets, new use cases like the Atrix’s (not very successful but still promising) webtop, its accessory development kit strategy, and Android@Home), and lets them always have a “backup option” to release a new service/feature if the other OEMs are not being cooperative.
  3. Motorola’s strong set-top box business is not to be underestimated. Its pretty commonly known that GoogleTV did not go the way that Google had hoped. While it was a bold vision and a true technical feat, I think this is another case of Google not focusing on the product management side of things. Post-acquisition, however, Google might be able leverage Motorola’s expertise in working with cable companies and content providers to create a GoogleTV that is more attuned to the interests/needs of both consumers and the cable/content guys. And, even if that is not in the cards, Motorola may be a powerful ally in helping to bring more internet video content, like the kind found on YouTube, to more TVs and devices.
• There is a huge risk from Google mismanaging the ecosystem with this move. Although some of Google’s biggest partners have been quoted as being supportive of this deal, that could simply be politeness or relief that someone will be able to protect them from Apple/Microsoft that’s talking. Google has intelligently come out publicly to state that they intend to run Motorola as a separate business and don’t plan on making any changes to their Nexus phone strategy. But, while Google may believe that going into this (and I think they do), and while I believe that Android’s success will be in building a true horizontal platform rather than imitating Apple’s vertical model, the reality of the situation is that you can’t really maintain something as an independent business completely free of influence, and that the temptation will always be there to play favorites. My hope is that Google institutes some very real firewalls and processes to maintain that independence. As a “fandroid” and as someone who is a big believer in the big opportunities enabled by Android, I think the real potential lies in going beyond just what one company can do, even if its Google.

Regardless of what happens, we definitely live in interesting times .

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While I’d still bet money that this whole thing eventually resolves itself, I find the fact that I need to reconsider that at all appalling. Let’s review:

• This is not about spending/debt. I am a big believer that the US government needs fundamental tax and spending reform and a big dose of efficiency. But that is not what is at issue here. Don’t let anyone fool you – the money that the Treasury is asking for is not the federal government’s way of trying to spend more money without getting proper permission. The permission has already been given. The spending has already been approved by Congress. This is the logical equivalent of your boss ordering you to buy something but not giving you the company credit card to do it – i.e., so stupid its not worth arguing about. It even begs the question: why, other than petty politics, do we have a debt ceiling?
• The results of not raising the debt ceiling could be catastrophic. Don’t listen to anyone who says that not raising the debt ceiling in time would be minor: the truth is nobody knows what could happen. But here is what we do know: much of global finance/economics is tied to the strength and reliability of the US dollar and the US government’s willingness and ability to pay off its debts. If there is a disruption in that, even if only temporarily, there could be enormous short-term consequences as interest rates and global exchange rates if those assumptions fall apart, and there could be even more disastrous long-term consequences for the US when lenders realize that petty politics can push the US into breaking its promises and require much higher interest rates and much more onerous terms the next time the US needs to borrow money or is looking to do any sort of arrangement.

A country’s debts and promises are a matter of its reputation and trustworthiness and, in my opinion for a democracy, a reflection of the moral character of its citizenry. I am disgusted that there are Republicans who want to lay on conditions for doing what is best for the US’s reputation and for doing what is best to avoid a potential financial catastrophe in the middle of a slow economic recovery. And, I am disappointed that the Obama Administration played along by entering into such negotiations.

We have turned what should have been a quick and obvious decision into another forum for political grandstanding and posturing, and I hope the politicians in Congress hear me when I say, “Raise the Debt Ceiling, Stupid!”

While a lot of what has been written is either focused on specific complaints about the product (XYZ feature doesn’t work! ABC feature looks great!) or overblown discussions on whether or not this will “kill” Facebook, I’m going to try to ground this post in what this says about Google’s evolving strategies and priorities and what this spells for the social media/web service space. Long story short: I think it’s a solid product with strong potential as it shows Google is embracing more of a product marketing approach than it has in the past resulting in one of the first new modes of online social networking interaction I’ve seen since Facebook and Twitter.

My first reaction to Google+ was that Google was finally showing product marketing/management chops and not just pure technical wizardry. I’ve made no secret of my “fandroid” status when it comes to Google. But the more objective businessperson in me sees a serious organizational issue within Google – mainly that the technical geniuses seem to drive product strategy. I’ve written before about how a firm’s culture/values/processes are created by what the company needed in the past and ultimately determine how a company will do as the market changes. In Google’s case, technical wizardry was the key to building the search engine and being early pioneers in web applications (like Gmail), but it has not served them so well in recent years with the very public failures of Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google Health, and Google PowerMeter despite very interesting technology underpinning all of them.

There are probably many reasons each product failed, and, as someone who works in venture capital, I can tell you that plenty of good ideas with good teams and good execution fail to take off for no other reason than “s*** happens”. But, in Google’s case, I believe the emphasis on technical wizardry over core product marketing contributed a fair amount.

Take Google Buzz, for instance. The concept is actually a great one — use the friends you email most to build up a social sharing platform – and the technology was there – updates and integrations were far faster and more reliable than Twitter’s (which suffered in the early years from regular API outages and “fail whale” moments) or Facebook’s (which still does not pull in my blog updates properly) and they had one of the most capable and open APIs in the social media space.

But, people don’t use concepts or technologies, they use products, and what Google failed to prioritize were simple product questions: who would use this and why? What are they looking for out of a new social service that is deeply integrated with their Google address book? And so they overlooked that not everyone that you email regularly is a someone you want to share personally with; they overlooked that over-integration with other services like Twitter and Google Reader would give no particular reason for a user to use this service over the original; and they overlooked the value that a filter approach like Facebook’s News Feed had for users to help them cut through the noise.

I don’t want to pretend that nobody at Google saw these coming: they have a lot of employees who are far smarter than I am, so I’m sure these were all raised. The point is not that I’m smarter than Google, its that the company’s culture did not prioritize those product issues over other concerns, something some of my friends within Google suggest is due to a bias towards technical leadership over non-technical product leadership. This isn’t to say one type of leadership is better than the other – in fact, I think their search and data center teams probably should continue to be run primarily by the technical wizards — but that you need a balance between the two that is dictated by the particular area.

So, where does that leave Google Plus? Its hard to make a final verdict on a product that has existed in beta for roughly a week, but, I see many signs that they’ve given more thought to core product marketing/management than they have in the past:

• New forms of online social interaction. I think Google is still trying to figure this out, but I have to give them recognition for trying to build new features and capabilities which mesh well with how people actually connect online – such that, contrary to XKCD’s recent comic, I think this is more than just another Facebook.
  • The central focus on Circles is very compelling and a radically different approach than Twitter’s or Facebook’s which have traditionally thought of “sharing” as something which is mostly public. Google’s big thesis here is probably that by selectively sharing different things with different people, you will end up sharing more things rather than less. The weakness of this strategy is that its still pretty tough to create these Circles, but we’ll see where the product goes in the coming weeks and months.
  • The Hangouts feature is a fun way to help people move beyond just status messages and web pages by easily building in group video chat in the browser. Google’s big thesis here is probably that by creating an opportunity for spontaneous live video chats, that the interactions will be more personal and that people will have a reason to stay on the site.
• Integration. Google’s lack of product focus in the past has meant numerous integration oddities: case in point, why aren’t likes/shares on Google Buzz connected to the new +1 feature Google is rolling out or likes on the Picasa photo-sharing platform? But, to me, one of the strongest points of Google Plus is that its integrated into the toolbar which shows up over virtually all Google services. As I pointed out on the service, this has made me much more active on Google Plus than I am on Facebook and it makes it relatively painless to share/react when I don’t have to be on the site itself.
• Attention to design: Consumers care about aesthetics. Google’s web application design has traditionally been, at best, function-over-form and, at worse, kind of ugly. And, while too much credit might have gone to former Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld, I think the broad consensus is that the Google Plus web experience (and mobile) are very solid.
• Strong mobile experience. It’s not just Google Plus’s mobile web site which is good, but the mobile app they’ve built for Android has product features demonstrating thoughtfulness about what people might want from a mobile interface to Google Plus. It supports location so you can find friends near you, has integrated a Group Messaging feature called Huddle, and through the Instant Upload feature, has made photo uploading and sharing through the mobile device extremely easy.
• Incentives. As I mentioned before in a post about disruptive innovation, big companies find it hard to innovate in spaces outside of/tangential to their core business because the incentives of the employees are always aligned with prioritizing the core business. Well, Google is experimenting with something which I will be watching very closely: they’ve actually tied Google employee salaries to the success of their social initiatives. Is there any wonder that so many Google employees are seeding the community by sharing actively on the site?

The product certainly isn’t perfect (and there’s a lot on the web about what Google should do to improve it), but it definitely has a lot of the right pieces in place, so I think this is one of the few wannabe “Facebook killers” (why is the media so obsessed with calling something a [popular product]-killer?) that might have a chance of coexisting/displacing Facebook. At the end of the day, however, the killer feature is not Circles or Hangouts or design: its having a large and active user base. Only time will tell, as predicting what will be hot to consumers is about as difficult and chaotic as predicting what movies/songs/books/internet memes will become hits.

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On Wednesday, August 31st, DC Comics will launch a historic renumbering of the entire DC Universe line of comic books with 52 first issues, including the release of JUSTICE LEAGUE by NEW YORK TIMES bestselling writer and DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns and bestselling artist and DC Comics Co-Publisher Jim Lee. The publication of JUSTICE LEAGUE issue 1 will launch day-and-date digital publishing for all these ongoing titles, making DC Comics the first of the two major American publishers to release all of its superhero comic book titles digitally the same day as in print.

While the decision to do this has been met with some controversy amongst the existing comic book fan community, I think this is a great idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not 100% thrilled with all the changes and new titles/redesigns I’m seeing. Moreover, I don’t think I’d have any credibility as a comic book fan if I didn’t say I’m a little worried about what’s going to happen to the rich character history that has been built over the years or didn’t express some cynicism over the industry’s predilection for “ret-cons”.

But, the truth is I think this is the sort of thing which the comic book industry needs to do to stay relevant. For too long, the industry has taken the easy way out:

• Cater to the most hardcore of fans: Its the classic Innovator’s Dilemma problem: its always easier to sell the same customers more and more profitable products than it is to pull in less profitable customers. In the short-term, this is fine – but over the long-term, this can be a disaster as the industry sees its user base dwindle. And, as I’ve mentioned before, as much of a fan as I am, even I’m finding the medium less appealing as this trend plays itself out.
• Recycle old stories to make movies, TV shows, and cartoons: if the traditional comic medium itself is in danger (as I think it is if things keep going the way they are), the comics industry has adapted by pursuing movies, TV shows, and cartoons (case in point: Smallville). Now don’t get me wrong – I love that there are so many comic book-related movies. There is nothing a comic book fan wants more than to have other people interested in the characters and the stories (and, if there are fans out there who are anything like me, they revel in being able to answer questions about the backstories and characters involved). But, the problem with this approach is two things. First, this sort of medium is a classic long tail business: its great if you get a hit, but its really hard to make sure you have a hit – and, as a result, its really hard to bet the future of your business on. Secondly, unless I’m mistaken, the vast majority of the people watching these movies and shows are not becoming comic book/collectibles buyers or comic convention goers.

To me, the way forward for the industry is something that is hard and may even partially alienate the existing hardcore fanbase: but its to disrupt themselves. Yes, its easier to keep the hardcore fans happy and buying, but there’s not only a lot more money to be made by catering to a wider fanbase, if it doesn’t happen, sooner or later, something else will.

And that’s why I think that DC’s announcement is promising, for what I think the big guys need to do is:

• Embrace digital: Yes, your traditional business model is tied to Diamond for distribution. But, digital will change this business the way its changed the music, movie, and newspaper industries – and unless you are quick to embrace it intelligently, you may find yourself in a very poor position.
• Change your publishing schedule: I’ve blogged about this before, but have your stories come out on a weekly basis, not a monthly one. The way to get people engaged (and to spend money) is to have them visit the comic store/website/digital store regularly. A bad 3-part story takes 3 months to finish with today’s monthly publishing schedule: that’s taking a huge risk that a fan will drop the book and forget to come back after 3 months. If the same 3-part story were finished in 3 weeks, then you have a different equation.
• Be smart about product/pricing: Hardcore fans are willing to pay more for more. So, sell them trade paperbacks full of complex, intertwined stories and creator interviews/sketchbooks. Sell them 20-part stories which are full of cameos and references. Sell them special editions. But, for the mainstay storylines that should be accessible? Make them cheaper. After all, they’re the gateway drug to the full-on addiction . Think about new pricing models: how about $20 for “all you can eat” for one month on the digital comic store? Or how about buy a mainstay storyline and get 20% off of a related story? There’s plenty of room here.
• Rationalize movie vs comic: I’m not a fan of twisting comic book storylines to fit movies. But, similarly, I worry about any casual comic book readers who pick up an issue and think to themselves: “what the heck?” It’s not easy, but the industry does need to find a way to bridge the two while staying truthful to both types of media. One idea: a free comic book “guide” (with movie stub) to smooth over the differences between the movie version and the comic version?
• Get back to the character: Too often today, comic book storylines are about packing in every possible way for the world to end into a storyline. While this is something that is cool every so often, doing it too often is overkill and is oftentimes done at the expense of developing the character of the hero, the villain(s), and the supporting characters. Perry White, Aunt May, Alfred Pennyworth, and Jane Foster are not Lex Luthor, the Green Goblin, Joker, or Loki per se, but they are still important and deserve to be more than just the “scenery”.

There’s still more detail to be revealed in DC’s reboot, and its still not clear to me how much they live up to what I’ve outlined. Sadly, the pessimist in me is pretty sure they’ll fall short. But, as a fan of the medium, I hope they don’t.

(Image credit – DC Comics)

Political blogger David Frum did a quick wrap-up of “Weinergate”, the latest political “scandal”:

Did or did not a New York congressman send a photo of a man’s crotch to a Seattle college student?

That’s the question the American political elite has spent the past half-week debating. Silly? Degrading? Check and check.

Frum spends most of the time (in my opinion, going a little overboard) talking about the consequences of “Weinergate” for current partisan politics, but three immediate thoughts jumped to me:

No. 1: How appropriate is it that his last name is “Weiner”? Very appropriate

No. 2: Why do politicians do stupid PR moves? Weiner’s actions are puzzling to me. To quote Frum:

Make no mistake: Weiner’s problems are all of his own making. When the underwear story broke over Memorial Day weekend, he had the option: tell the truth at once, no matter how embarrassing, and put the story behind him. Even in the worst case -yes, he sent the picture -it’s not as if any laws were broken. The woman who received the photo was not offended and has issued no complaint. Anthony Weiner would not be the first boorish and juvenile member of Congress in history, and he won’t be the last. Story closed.

Instead, Weiner issued a fog of evasive and absurd statements in a series of self-damning issues. He himself did the most to enlarge and extend the story.

It may be obvious, but he really needs a new PR consultant.

No. 3: Why is so much attention paid to this sort of thing? I have no idea what happened in Weinergate (although, truth be told, his weird initial statements on the subject were very puzzling). But, frankly, I’ve come to expect this sort of immaturity/dishonesty from politicians so much so that this sort of thing doesn’t even faze me anymore. As a result, almost every expression of “shock and outrage” in the press smacks to me not of real outrage at a real moral wrongdoing, but of political opportunism. In my mind, all this coverage does is distract the the public and the political establishment from far more important things. After all, the coverage teaches us, who cares about having good answers and policy responses to questions like is the US about to default on its national debt, how are we dealing with the ridiculously high rate of US unemployment, how do we handle the degenerating situation in Pakistan/Afghanistan, and will Greece’s sovereign debt crisis spiral out of control, etc., when all that matters is whether or not a politician is squeaky clean or hires the right PR agent to cover up those extramarital affairs/illegitimate children? I may not personally like the guy who cheats on his wife or sends pictures of “himself” over Twitter, but if I had to choose between squeaky clean PR and lower unemployment, its pretty obvious to me which is the lesser of two evils (hint: its the one that gets more people back to work).

A part of me also worries that the press’s attention to such stupid things will really come back and hurt the US longer-term. I’ve blogged before about how new technologies like social media challenge our conventional intuitions on privacy, and I worry that the really smart college kid who has a great idea for how to improve our economy or our foreign policy will not get a chance to become a politician because, in his youth, he foolishly uploaded some dumb pictures/comments on Facebook.

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This particular crisis hits very close to home not only because my employer has a significant presence in Japan, but because of all the people I had the opportunity to meet on my last trip to Japan. There was quite some time where I looked at every IM/Facebook message/email I received as a potential omen– and if my psyche had such a negative outlook, I can only imagine how shaken up and stressed out the people actually living there are.

Thankfully, nobody that I am acquainted with in Japan has been seriously injured and, while I still worry about the nuclear situation, that realization has given me enough calm to try to look at what happened through a more dispassionate lens.

A few thoughts/takeaways:

• It is amazing to me that the situation did not play out significantly worse. That the number of lives lost was not greater in the immediate after-math of the disaster and that Katrina-like mob behavior & chaos did not result is a testament to the high quality of Japanese engineering, the effective training and discipline of the Japanese transit workers, health officials, police, etc., and the investments Japan has made towards preparation. If this doesn’t convince you of the value of investing in disaster preparation/training/prevention, I don’t know what will.
• As smart and resourceful as we humans are, we are still “small fry” relative to massive geological phenomenon. We are reminded of this all the time (especially during hurricane season), but seeing one of the most populous, wealthy, and technologically advanced countries be knocked off its feet in the matter of hours is a striking reminder.
• Make sure your backup/redundant systems are truly independent and de-coupled. the initial earthquakes and subsequent tsunami, one of the main causes of the current nuclear crisis was the incorrect assumption that diesel generation could be a fairly independent redundant system versus relying on the main power grid to power the coolant system. This isn’t to say that I necessarily ascribe moral blame to the engineers/planners – quite the contrary: in the vast majority of circumstances, there is no reason to believe that diesel generators can’t function as a good, independent backup to the electric grid. It should also be pointed out that its easier to be insightful in hindsight, but in practice – its hard to tell with absolute certainty what is too dangerous and what is overkill. Regardless, in this case, the mistake was not recognizing that a massive geological event could knock out both the electric grid and create a big enough tsunami to take out the diesel generators. Its important for all of us to remember that as we plan our own risk mitigation strategies.
• The internet and new social media technologies are amazing. Although phone lines were quickly overwhelmed following the initial earthquake, networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and email kept going. Facebook actually became my primary means of reaching out to the friends I had made in Japan! I can definitely see this as a major turning point for the promise of new web technologies for communication and  potentially even when carriers/consumers start looking at those services more seriously.
• The public needs greater scientific literacy. I can’t pretend to be a nuclear reactor expert, but given the great amount of confusion I hear/read about from both average American and Japanese people about even the most basic things like “what is radiation”, and I think its sad — and almost comical if it weren’t so sad – as it creates a panic where there shouldn’t be and fails to create a stronger urgency where there should be.

I just want to end this post with two thoughts. The first is that despite the tragedy, I hope countries and companies out there will study what happened in Japan and plan appropriately. The second is a sincere hope that the authorities and the IAEA find a way to restore some semblance of normalcy to the nuclear situation as soon as possible.

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Derek Lowe over at In the Pipeline does a great job of rebutting many of the claims in the article, but a few thoughts jump out at me:

• The first is how anyone could have published a study like this which is off from the most recent/best estimate by a factor of 20x and not expect to see clear evidence reflected in the reality of the bio/pharma industry. Among the reasons why I think this estimate is ridiculous:
  • If the estimate were true, we’d see a lot more biotech startups (which tend to raise around that much in advance of Phase II trials) as there’d not only be a lot greater capacity for venture capital investors to fund them but also a greater likelihood that these startups can hit IPO/critical market without being bought out at an earlier stage.
  • If the estimate were true, I’d expect that instead of a “R&D productivity crisis”, we have a glut of new drugs coming out each and every year.
  • If the estimate were true, I’d expect that a company like Pfizer would, instead of boosting dividends and buying back shares, try to funnel more money into R&D – after all, isn’t it super cheap to build up a drug?
• The second is more fundamental – why are people so focused on attacking pharma/biotechs on the purported difficulty/costliness of their R&D? I think folks like Marcia Angell who maintain that all the “real work” happens in government-funded universities and research institutions fail to understand the huge amount of screening, development, testing, and research that goes into turning something that’s only fit for an academic paper into something that’s sufficiently manufacturable, well-tested, and well-characterized to actually be useful in large scales in human beings. But even ignoring that oversight, in my mind this is attacking the wrong facet of the drug industry. From a societal well-being perspective, shouldn’t we want to praise them for their R&D? Maybe its duplicative, maybe it doesn’t even add that much value, maybe its not even as expensive as they say it is – but I think reasonable people will agree that more R&D dollars can be a good thing. To me, what we should focus on is not their R&D, but the games they play with advertising & marketing, with the intellectual property system, with not properly reporting things, etc. There are plenty of worthy things to attack the industry for – lets stop attacking them on something we actually want to see happen.

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While at least one of my good friends is going to be appalled by my opinion here, I actually liked the movie. Does it paint an unrealistically evil/status-obsessed/backstabbing-prone portrayal of Harvard students and hence is kind of an insult to me? Yes. Was it a truthful account that can be used as a historical document one day? Probably not. Was it a action thriller which kept me at the edge of my seat? No. Do I enjoy the weird undertone that implies successful entrepreneurs are all geeks, antisocial, socially awkward, vengeful, jealous, addicted to drugs, paranoid, or some combination of the above? No.

So why did I enjoy it? Two reasons.

The first is purely nostalgia. It takes me back to my Freshman year, when the site had just started. I attended the Bill Gates presentation that was referenced there. I had friends in Kirkland house (where Zuckerberg built FaceMash and Facebook). I’ve looked over the Harvard student code of conduct that the Winklevoss twins tried to use with the Harvard President (who’s office I’ve walked by). Heck, after college, two of my friends went to work for Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who put money into Facebook in the movie. So the story, in its own weird way, is an odd re-telling of a world I inhabited – and so I can’t help but be drawn to it if only for that.

The second reason is that the portrayal of Zuckerberg just felt very natural. I don’t mean that I felt it was accurate – but Jesse Eisenberg delivered a performance of Zuckerberg which seemed human and believable. Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg was arrogant, vulnerable, brilliant, hard-working, misunderstood, misled, and eager – all at once – and that’s something which is hard to write and hard to portray. I personally could’ve done without the excessive stereotyping of geeks and Harvard, but if I view this as a purely fictional piece about the flawed people who put together something bigger than themselves, I think I can call myself a fan.

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A few thoughts:

• I was very pleasantly surprised by Beijing. Now, obvious caveat: I stayed at a fancy hotel, threw a swanky corporate party, and was mostly chauffeured around the city on the fund’s dime – so obviously, I’m getting a semi-biased perspective on Beijing. With that said, there’s just no getting around the fact that China is big and booming. Before this trip, my only exposure to China’s rapid growth was in statistics and business reports. So, it registered on only a superficial, intellectual level. But to see it up-close was a completely different matter. Parts of Beijing are as bustling and well-developed as a New York or San Francisco, with well-dressed businesspeople and shoppers moving about quickly to get to their next destination. The infrastructure quality within the city is significantly better than I had pictured (and, likely far better than many poorly-planned cities in the West) and, aside from the air quality and traffic, the city was far cleaner and better organized than I expected – especially when comparing it to my experiences in India.
• No business can afford to not have a presence in China. Everyone has their favorite China market statistic – mine, given my venture capital/tech leanings, is this: there are more internet users in China (~400 million) than there are people in the US. While, for obvious reasons, I’ll always have a soft spot for Taiwan, you just can’t get around the size and growth of the Chinese market. We’ll all need to know Chinese and Chinese business culture some day in the same way that everyone today needs to know English and US business culture.
• There’s an “energy” around China that you only see in places like Silicon Valley. This is very difficult for me to describe, but in places where there is a lot of entrepreneurial energy, the people have a palpable “hunger” for opportunity that you don’t see elsewhere. You can sense this amongst entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, and you can definitely feel this in China. The entrepreneurs that I met were young and relatively inexperienced, but very eager and very “hungry” for a chance to prove themselves. It’s a great feeling, and I think it bodes very well for China’s future.
• Chinese people apparently don’t dance in clubs. I thought this was very peculiar. Apparently, the purpose of going to a club is to get a table and then hang out at the table, conversing and watching performances. Bizarre, but of course, it meant that my coworkers and I stood out more as we were some of the only people dancing on the platform .
• Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City are massive. For some reason, I had always felt that they weren’t that large. My mistake – and my feet didn’t forgive me for it. It was a gorgeous site, though, and as someone who wrote a report about the two greatest emperors of the Qing Dynasty, a very rare chance for me to see some of the actual history in front of me.
  
• Tokyo is amazing. This is my second visit to Japan, and as a self-admitted Japan-ophile, really, you don’t get much better Japanese anime, art, service, or food anywhere else than Tokyo. The skyline is gorgeous (I got to check out the Tokyo tower skydeck), the electronic store district (Akihabara) is very cool, the karaoke scene is phenomenal, and the food is spectacular. Oh, and I must have a Japanese-style toilet some day. Heated seats. Built-in bidet. Electronic controls (some even with motion sensors so it knows when to lift up the seat). Or, in other words: as close to heaven as you can get while in the bathroom .
• Tokyo is like one, big contiguous shopping mall. Everywhere you go: shops, stores, billboards, and posters. I went to a particularly well-known shopping complex in Tokyo’s fashion district (Harajuku) called LaForet Grand Bazaar (see right), and it was like traveling to a different planet, where the population was 95% obsessive shoppers, 5% shouting store clerks. One store I passed had a very interesting system: each shopper could only browse/shop while a 5 minute song was playing and, after the song finished, had to buy what they kept. Even I couldn’t resist the allure – as I went to a Uniqlo store in the Ginza district and bought a dress shirt.
• Japan needs to change. The Japan-ophile in me wants to see Japan continue to thrive as a major economic force, but speaking to some locals has cemented the conclusions of my own research: I’m concerned for Japan’s future growth prospects. While Japan will maintain its lead in consumer electronics and automobiles for some time, there are definitely signs that this leadership could dwindle. The entrepreneurial spirit that I sensed in China was not as palpable in Japan, where the people place a lot more emphasis on rigid hierarchies and social structures. That translates into less risk-taking, fewer bold strategies, an unwillingness to fire unproductive workers and kill off bad projects, and a business culture which probably places too much emphasis on loyalty and connections rather than results. These are  sweeping generalizations, of course, as exceptions like Japan’s electric vehicle and mobile social networking industries exist which are booming and full of creative spirit. But I do worry that the Japanese economy will continue to experience slow growth or decline if they don’t find a way to make the bold changes that they’ll need.

(Image credit – Beijing skyline) (Image credit – Forbidden City gate) (Image credit – Tokyo skyline) (Image credit – LaForet Grand Bazaar)

On the one hand, I’m a legal immigrant from Taiwan. That means my family and I followed the rules, did the necessary waiting and paying of fees and taxes to come here legally and attain citizenship.  If anybody has the right to be angry about the existence of a system whereby people enter the country without following said rules, its someone like me.

And, believe me, I’m not happy about it. It’s not only unfair to people who followed the rules like my family, but:

• It’s a national security risk. How do you secure your borders from terrorists or hostile foreigners if you don’t know/have no control over who is crossing your borders?
• It’s a potential public health and environmental hazard. Not having control over who is entering your borders means not having control over the spread of contagious and dangerous diseases or pests/hostile species which could negatively impact the ecological balance and agricultural well-being of a country.
• It’s more difficult to maintain quality of living. Due to fear of being too entangled with the authorities, illegal immigrants are less likely to report crimes or partake in social programs which improve the well-being of society overall. This makes crime more difficult to manage and reduces the impact of social programs and initiatives.

So, you would think that I’d be a strong proponent of politicians who seek to clamp down on illegal immigration. But, I’m not. Not only do the policies these politicians propose oftentimes border on insanity (i.e., instituting racial profiling, building an impractical “giant fence” between the US and Mexico, etc), but I believe many are fundamentally motivated by racist/xenophobic fears.

Why do I feel this way? Well, a wide range of studies suggest that illegal immigrants are a positive contributor to the US economy in aggregate, not only by paying more in taxes than they get out in social services, but also by helping to provide low-cost labor helping to lower costs for everyone. If  anti-illegal immigration politicians (and their constituents) were not motivated by racism/xenophobia, then these points would be raised and the plans being discussed would be about how to increase the number of legal immigrants, rather than focusing on campaign messages which paint illegal immigrants as foreigners here to “take our jobs” or be a drain on our economy.

Now, this isn’t to say that we should necessarily provide all illegal immigrants with amnesty. To be perfectly honest, I personally don’t have a solution to the US’s illegal immigration problem. I personally prefer something which provides some sort of path to legal status for the law-abiding, tax-paying illegal immigrants which have integrated into our communities and are clearly contributing, but I leave that judgment to more knowledgeable experts and policymakers.

The point I’m trying to make is that the existence of a serious problem like illegal immigration requires a solution – and maybe even a harsh/drastic solution – but it doesn’t need (or even warrant) racism masquerading as political/economic fears.

(Image credit)

Thankfully, the NPR Marketplace podcast, one of the staple podcasts I listen to now on my drive to work, had a recent opinion piece from New York Times columnist David Leonhardt which lays out exactly what you would need to gauge the seriousness of any politician/party who claims to tackle the deficit:

Let’s face it — a lot of the talk about the deficit ends up being pretty vague. Politicians want to cut spending, but they don’t say which spending. They want fundamental tax reform, but they don’t explain how that will bring down the deficit.

So here’s a little rule: If you want to be taken seriously when you rail against the deficit, you need to support one of the following four policies. Better yet, support more than one.

Ready for the four? One, cuts to Medicare. Two, cuts to Social Security. Three, military cuts. Four, tax increases. Any budget expert will tell you that we simply cannot fix the deficit without doing at least one of those four.

Now, I’m not claiming the Democrats have done well on this regard (in fact, there’s no indication that they could have the ability to do so given their inability to pull together a healthcare plan which actually reduces healthcare costs). But, the Democrats weren’t campaigning on the deficit reduction premise, whereas the Republicans were. So the ball’s in your court, Republicans. Let’s see how you do.

Greatness is part of America’s birthright and lexicon. Its 18th-century founders had no doubt that they were embarking on a daring experiment inspired by the highest ideals of the Enlightenment. In the 19th century came Manifest Destiny, great migrations and the push to the West, civil war and the end of slavery. The 20th brought titanic struggles and famous victories against fascism and communism.

And America has much to be proud of, from its origins as a grand experiment in offering people more freedom and voice in their government to its role in advancing those ideals worldwide, to its cultural, scientific, technologic, and economic achievements.

But, the more Economists I read and the more I look around at what is driving excitement in the venture capital world, the more obvious the signs are that we will soon see a close to America’s era of unquestioned pre-eminence:

• The rise of BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India, and China are rapidly growing economic superpowers. This is something that the private sector is recognizing and rewarding with investment, sales, and outsourcing/relocation.  Venture capitalists are increasingly looking towards overseas innovation for the next wave of venture returns, and companies which have for years driven most sales domestically now view the BRIC countries as markets of equivalent (and sometimes greater) strategic value. With that comes greater political power and greater influence over the global economic sphere – all at the expense of America’s former dominance.
• America’s uncertain financial future – Look around. Not only is the US government (and its European allies) hopelessly in debt with no clear way out, it is struggling with a (as it stands) unsustainable social security system, an unsustainable long-term health care cost trend, and a recent financial system and real-estate market near-collapse which, with the alarming rise in anti-immigration and anti-trade sentiment, reduce the prospects for future growth. There’s even talks that the US is about to face decades of economic stagnation. Not an optimistic outlook for someone hoping for America to remain an unparalleled economic engine.
• Declining importance of Western power – With the rise in the stature and wealth of the BRIC nations and the decline of the West’s, countries which once had to (at least superficially) profess support for Western values and rules have now been able to turn to Brazil, India, China, and the Middle East which are now eager to expand their sphere of influence – but this time, without the Western-centric preconditions which US aid & influence has come to be associated with. Take Sri Lanka – a country that is under constant fighting where both sides routinely commit morally questionable acts against one another. If the US or Europe were to give economic aid to Sri Lanka, they’d insist on peace talks and possibly some sort of checks to insure human rights were being protected – and let’s not even talk about weapons sales. China? Couldn’t care less. In fact, China is continuing to sell the Sri Lankan government weapons leading the Prime Minister to boast “We have understood who is important to us.” How long will the US continue to have disproportionate influence over the world (especially on a moral level) when these new rising stars are eagerly replacing the US economically and politically? And that’s not even talking about China’s rise as a military power capable of rivaling the US’s…

In some ways, these are to be expected (and even welcomed). Some of the unparalleled performance of the US over the last couple of decades was due simply to the US not having to deal with the poverty, poor infrastructure, and bad governance that other countries had to deal with. That the billions living in Brazil, Russia, India, and China are finally able to see significant growth and reform is something that we should all be happy about. Its good on a humanitarian level, and its good on a self-interest level as it has created new markets and new ideas.

But, in other ways, these should be alarming signs for Americans. On a “philosphical” level, it means a potential re-evaluation of the confidence which has pervaded America’s history. On a more practical level, it means declining influence, less deference abroad to American interests and ideals, a harder time attracting new businesses and ideas, and potentially even greater difficulty financing our debt as investors look elsewhere for safety and growth. Taking it further, a decline in optimism could also stymie the idealistic ambitions America has been long associated with: maybe we’ll delay that mission to Mars, or that anti-poverty campaign, or that idea to help bring about world peace.

Now, its important to not be unrealistic in painting this. Even if the US did nothing, America would remain the dominant economic and military superpower in the world for some time. It should also be noted that America has survived previous threats to this position: anybody out there old enough to remember when everybody thought Japan was going to take the title? It’ll also (rightfully) take a lot to deflate America’s confidence in its exceptionalism.

But, more to the point, I do think that the US can do a number of things to not only slow how quickly the BRIC nations can catch up to it:

• Exceptional, not entitled: In terms of mental state, America need to distinguish between “exceptionalism” and “entitlement.” Too often, America’s diplomats and domestic concerns have been built on the notion that America’s greatness gives Americans a divine right to things. That not only breeds bad government (as voters become prone to listening to “too good to be true” promises from politicians), it alienates allies (who have no interest in bending over backwards to satisfy every American whim), and breeds complacency amongst American workers and businesses (oh I don’t need to improve, after all, I deserve this perk/customer/market/ position). In my view, exceptionalism is not a blank check to whatever someone wants – that’s entitlement — it is a challenge to be better and do more, and I think that’s a sentiment that needs to come back.
• Encourage big thinkers and big do-ers:  Psst. The secret to greatness is: think big thoughts and then do them. Seriously, if you want great things, encourage people who think big thoughts and encourage them to turn those into reality. This means building up our education system to help train people for the thinking and the doing. It means reforming our taxes, regulations, and financial systems so that more people can get the funding and support to turn their big ideas into reality. It means embracing globalization and soft power initiatives so that the world’s thinkers and hard workers see America as the place (or at least the best partner) to do what they do best. It means putting one’s full weight behind creative destruction: letting bad ideas (and businesses/systems) die so that better ones can take their place. I think it is unacceptable that so many businesspeople and thinkers see places like Brazil, China, India, and Singapore as better places to do business and research. While there’s no way to win them all, there is definitely much that can be done to change the balance.
• Be good: While the cold and calculating may view moral good as an expensive luxury, I think it’s an obligation. If we truly believe ourselves to be exceptional, then the choice between morals and prosperity should be a false one. This doesn’t mean unrealistically embracing every bleeding-heart cause, but it does mean that we should seize the many opportunities that exist for win-wins. Instead of attempting to fight global povery solely with aid, we should endeavor to cut the tariffs which not only keep emerging economies impoverished but raise domestic food prices. Instead of playing a zero-sum game where the government must choose to inefficiently allocate resources between many worthy causes, we should truly embrace the exceptional and empower people to have a greater impact on the causes they believe in. On the international arena, the US should also strive to take a leadership role when facing problems which require multilateral cooperation like stopping nuclear proliferation, protecting intellectual property, halting global warming, and fighting human trafficking.

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Okay, this is just a weird thought that struck me after I got the news that Smallville had been renewed yet again.

I suddenly realized that there are almost as many hours of Smallville on film as there are of all the other Superman TV adaptations combined.

…

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? What really pulled me up short was the startling notion that for two or three generations of grade-school kids, Smallville is their primary — maybe only — experience of any kind of Superman story at all.

It makes you wonder: is the correct interpretation that comics is dying and being replaced by a lesser art form? Or that it is simply evolving to tell its stories using a new medium? Or maybe a little bit of both?

My take is that the comics industry made a big mistake years ago in investing in creative directions which became impossible for lay-people to follow along. As devoted as I am to the medium, even I find a lot of today’s stories difficult to follow and lacking in the original character work that made them so memorable. Take Superman – when’s the last time a good Perry White story was written? Or a good Jimmy Olson? You probably have to go back over 10 years to find them.

With Smallville, the barrier to entry is not only much lower (although after ten years, even Smallville has started to fall into continuity traps), its brought back the romantic soap-opera and angst-ridden introspection which has done so well for series like the X-Men or Spiderman, and wrapped it up with an impressive array of special effects and modern television-making in a mostly-weekly format.

I hope the industry sees this both in terms of lessons to be learned about how to revitalize the original medium (make it more frequent than monthly, add back the supporting cast, reduce the dependence on excessive continuity, add back real character drama), and in terms of how they can continue to adapt their rich stories for the future.

In the meantime, bask in the glory: SMALLVILLE WILL BE BACK IN LESS THAN TWO WEEKS!

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One of my favorite RSS feeds is Business Insider’s Chart of the Day. This chart came up a few weeks ago and made me think. It’s quite staggering to imagine that college tuition has outpaced inflation as rapidly as it has (~10x vs. ~4x over 30 years). The graph made me think: Has the value of a college education increased 2.5x? If it has, then there isn’t necessarily a bubble. There are three ways to think about the value of a college education to evaluate this question.

1. The most obvious is the average income comparison between an average high school graduate (only) and an average college graduate (only). Using US government statistics, we find that in 1978, a college-educated graduate made ~55% more than an individual with only a high school education. In 2008 (the last year I have data for), a college educated graduate made ~87% more – which amounts to a 60% increase in the gap. Now there are obviously nuances in that figure (which I’ll let the policy experts correct in the comments if they choose), but this 60% figure is a decent order-of-magnitude impact (and even holds true if I adjust for the change in disposable income using the individual, under-65 poverty line as the base level of expenditure), and barely covers the 2.5x increase in tuition costs over inflation.
2. Related to the above are the other effects of college education on lifetime income. It’s been demonstrated that college educated individuals live longer than those who don’t, and its commonly understood that college is a prerequisite for other income-boosting opportunities like graduate school. One’s lifetime income is also much more likely to trend upwards in life with a college education than with only a high school diploma. But there’s an interesting wrinkle here: does college education make you live longer and get promoted, or is it just an indirect way of finding individuals who tend to be wealthier and more intelligent? I unfortunately don’t have the data (or the time — this is a casual blog post after all!) to run all the calculations needed to understand the impact, but I would hazard a guess that it’s probably overly-aggressive to assume that these second-order lifetime income benefits can close the gap between tuition costs and inflation.
3. The last “source of value” for a college education is the subjective value of meeting lifelong friends, having new experiences, and expanding your intellectual horizons. Just because its last and extremely intangible, doesn’t mean there’s not enormous value here. But, the question to ask here is not whether or not college has large intangible value (of course it does), but whether or not you believe that intangible value to have increased significantly (by over 2.5x as we’ve concluded the increase in lifetime income likely isn’t enough to explain the 2.5x increase in tuition cost relative to inflation) since 1978. I personally think that’s being overly aggressive.

I can’t pretend to be the expert on this, but at this point, I’d conclude that whereas the value of a college education has increased dramatically (maybe even by as much as 75-100%), it hasn’t gone up enough to justify a 2.5x increase relative to inflation. If you accept my conclusion then the obvious question is what is causing tuition to increase so much? Two possible explanations jumped out at me:

• Tuitions haven’t caught up with the value of a college education: While my conclusion above was that the value of a college education hasn’t increased 2.5x from 1978 until today, one possible explanation of tuition price is that the value of a college education is still higher than what students pay for it, and, if that were true, we would expect tuitions to continue to increase.
• Tuitions are higher than the value of a college education and are being propped up by a combination of two things:
  1. Tuitions are being boosted by a subsidy cycle: Free money from the government is one of the easiest ways to get price increases. While we often think of the US government’s subsidized loans and tax writeoffs for college tuition as a means to help more people attend college, an equivalent way of thinking about it is that it gives colleges free rein to increase prices without worrying about reducing the number of people who enter. In a “normal” market, this would be the end of it (slightly higher prices, but more people entering college), but because college education has become such a political affair (every family always thinks its “too expensive”, and every politician promises to make it cheaper), we always get more subsidies from more politicians which feeds back into the original problem.
  2. Families have bad expectations around the value of a college education: One explanation, which is making the rounds of the policy wonk blogosphere, is that this is all a big bubble. In the same way that people felt tech stocks in the late 90s and real estate in the 2000s were a good buy, its entirely possible that families have uninformed expectations about the value of a college education and thus believe the higher tuitions are worth it. If this is true, then we could be on a collision course with a generation of families (like in the 80s) suddenly realizing “the emperor (of college tuition) has no clothes!” (which might be precipitated by a long stagnation/decline in the wages of college educated individuals) followed by a potential crash in tuitions.

What should be done? Truthfully, it depends on which of these conclusions is correct. If its just that tuitions haven’t caught up with the value of a college education, then it makes sense that tuitions are increasing, and it may even make sense to increase tuition grants/subsidized loans (as it likely means not enough people are getting a college education because they couldn’t get access to the capital to pay for it). However, if tuitions are over-valued, then it would be advisable to end the college tuition subsidy cycle and implement policies which potentially “soften the blow” of the coming college education value and tuition crash.

But to make the right policy decisions and tradeoffs, its important to first understand which of the two explanations is correct. And that’s a whole ‘nother set of data and analyses…

(Image credit – Chart of the Day)

First, I think the community overreacted. There is a lot to not like about Google’s stance, but I think there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. There are political limits to what strict net neutrality promoters can achieve. Its a fact of life that the telco providers have deep pockets (part of their having government-granted monopoly status) and stand to gain or lose a great deal from the outcome of net neutrality legislation and thus wield enormous influence over broadband legislation. Its also a fact of life that the path towards net neutrality is more easily served by finding common ground which preserves the most important aspects of net neutrality than it is to fight the telco providers kicking and screaming the whole way. What I mean to say is: we should not criticize Google for dealing with a telco or with making compromises on net neutrality. That’s an unreasonable stance typically held by people who don’t have to actually make policy. With that said, we should criticize Google for making the wrong compromises.
2. I don’t think Android was the issue here. Many people may disagree with me here, but I don’t believe Android has much direct impact to Google’s bottom line. From my perspective, Google’s commitment to Android is about two things: (a) preventing Apple from dominating the smartphone market (and potentially the mobile ad market) by empowering a bunch of phone manufacturers to provide devices of comparable (or better) quality and (b) forcing all mobile phone platforms to have decent-enough web surfing/app-running capability (by providing a free alternative which did) so that Google can provide its services effectively on those platforms and serve more ads. If anything, Google’s incentives here are better aligned with net neutrality than most companies: it benefits the most if there are more people using the web, and the best way to push that is to encourage greater content diversity. While Google TV may change Android into a true profit center, it wouldn’t be for several years, and so I think it’d be a stretch to say it is a big enough deal to significantly impact Google’s political policy moves. I can buy the argument that Google pushed a deal with Verizon because they have a closer relationship via Android, but I think suggesting that Google subverted net neutrality as a concession to Verizon on Android is taking it too far.
3. I think Google did a good job of emphasizing transparency. The proposal emphasizes that telcos need to be held to higher standards of transparency, something which is sorely lacking today, and something which we definitely want to and need to see in the future.

With that said, though, there are definitely things to criticize Google’s agreement on:

1. Wireless: I can sympathize with the argument that wireless is different from wired networks and could require more aggressive traffic management. I even went so far as to call that out the last time I talked about this. But, given the importance of wireless broadband in the future, it doesn’t make any sense to exclude explicit protections around neutrality for wireless. The arguments around competition and early development strike me as naive at best and Verizon PR at worst – whatever provisions exist to protect neutrality for wired networks should be applied in the wireless space. Competition and the development of more open gardens make it possible to compromise, but not necessarily throw caution to the wind.
2. Wording weirdness: I’m concerned that the proposal contains phrasings which seem to give avenues for telcos to back out of neutrality like “prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted” without clearly explaining what are reasonable grounds for rebuttal. Even parts of the compromise which I accept as valid (i.e., letting telcos do basic network quality of service management, prioritize government/emergency traffic, fight off malware/piracy, etc.) were framed in terms of what telco’s were permitted to do, but not without clearly laid out restrictions (i.e., network service quality management must be subject to FCC review). For a document meant to safeguard neutrality, it sure seems to go out of its way to stipulate workarounds…
3. “Additional online services”: I understand (and agree with) the intent – carriers may want to provide special services which they want to treat differently to meet their partners’/customers’ needs like a special gaming service or secure money transfer. The language, however, is strange and not imminently clear to me that there aren’t “back doors” for the telcos to use to circumvent neutrality restrictions.

Truthfully, I think most of the document rings true as a practical compromise between the interests and needs of telcos (who would bear the brunt of the costs and should be incentivized to improve network quality and provide meaningful services and integration) and the interests of the public. But, I would ask Google or whatever legislator/FCC member who has a voice on this to do two things:

• Not compromise on content neutrality on any medium. The value of the internet as a medium and as a platform of innovation comes from the ability of people to access all sorts of applications and content without that access being discriminated against by the network operator. Not sticking to that is risking slower innovation and choking off a valuable source of commentary/opinions, especially in a setup where large local players hold enormous market power because of their government-granted monopoly status.
• Create clear (but flexible enough to be future-proof) guidelines for acceptable behavior with clear adjudication and clear punishments. No squirrely word weirdness. No “back door” language. You don’t need to browbeat the telco’s, but you don’t need to coddle them either.