Technology – Page 32 – artdiamondblog.com

“It’s All about Creative Destruction”

“LARRY ELLISON: ‘It’s all about creative destruction.'” Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. R6) In Silicon Valley, a spot known for constant change, Larry Ellison has kept his job atop Oracle Corp. . . . for decades. And that gives him a unique perspective on the industry and where it’s headed.

The Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher spoke with Mr. Ellison about the state of tech innovation, the future of the Internet–and what keeps him inspired.
What follows are edited excerpts of their discussion.
. . .
MS. SWISHER: A lot of people talk about the end of Silicon Valley, the end of innovation. Do you imagine that?
MR. ELLISON: It’s all about creative destruction. Remember Woody Allen’s great line about relationships: “Relationships are like a shark. It either has to move forward, or it dies.”
That’s true of a company. If you don’t keep your technology current, if you’re not monitoring what is possible today that wasn’t possible yesterday, then someone’s going to beat you to the punch. Someone’s going to get ahead of you, and you’re going to lose your customers to some competitor.
We see a lot of companies in Silicon Valley that are under stress now. But there are a lot of other companies that have come along and are doing interesting things.
. . .
MS. SWISHER: What keeps you going?
MR. ELLISON: Red Bull.
I mean, this is going to sound really corny, but life’s a journey of discovery. I’m really fascinated by people, and by what can be done with technology. I also enjoy the competition, the process of learning as we compete, learning as we exploit these technologies to solve customer problems.
The whole thing is just fascinating. I don’t know what I would do if I retired.

For the full interview, see:
Kara Swisher, interviewer. “Silicon Valley, the Long View; Larry Ellison on how much simpler the consumer has it now.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 4, 2012): R6.
(Note: ellipses added; bold and italics in original.)

Revolutionary Entrepreneurs Need “Unbridled Confidence and Arrogance”

(p. B1) Will there be another?
It’s a bit absurd to try to identify “the next Steve Jobs.” Two decades ago, Mr. Jobs himself wouldn’t even have qualified. Exiled from Apple Inc., . . . Mr. Jobs was then hoping to revive his struggling computer maker, NeXT Inc. . . .
But just as Mr. Jobs followed Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, there will some day be another innovator with the vision, drive and disdain of the status quo to spark, and then direct, big changes in how we live.
. . .
“You have to try the unreasonable,” says Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., who, as a longtime venture capitalist, has seen thousands of would-be revolutionaries. Two key characteristics, Mr. Khosla says: “unbridled confidence and arrogance.”

For the full story, see:
SCOTT THURM and STU WOO. “Who Will Be the ‘Next Steve Jobs’?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., October 8, 2011): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Stewart Brand Marvels at Hippie Perfectionist Jobs’ Results

Stewart Brand. Source of photo: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

(p. 3) Stewart Brand is best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture compendium published twice a year between 1968 and 1972 and the only catalog to win the National Book Award. Its credo, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish,” influenced many of the hippie generation, most notably Steve Jobs.
. . .
READING I’m devouring “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. Steve’s life and interests intersected with mine a number of times, so revisiting all that in sequence is like galloping through a version of my own life, plus I get to fill in the parts of his life I wondered about. Take a hippie who is also a driven perfectionist at crafting digital tools, let him become adept at managing corporate power, and marvel at what can result. The book I’m studying line by line, and dog-earing every other page, is Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature.” It chronicles the dramatic decline of violence and cruelty in human affairs in every century. Now that we know that human behavior has been getting constantly gentler and fairer, how do we proceed best with that wind at our backs?

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY, interviewer. “DOWNLOAD; Stewart Brand.” The New York Times, Sunday Review (Sun., Nov. 6, 2011): 3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date November 5, 2011.)

Neural Implants “Restored Their Human Functionality”

Ray Kurzweil. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C12) Inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in artificial intelligence–the principal developer of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first text-to-speech synthesizer, among other breakthroughs. He is also a writer who explores the future of information technology and how it is changing our world.

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Kurzweil and The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray discussed advances in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and what it means to be human. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation:
. . .
MR. MURRAY: What about life expectancy? Is there a limit?
MR. KURZWEIL: No. We’re constantly pushing back life expectancy. Now it’s going to go into high gear because of the inherent exponential progression of information technology. According to my models, within 15 years we’ll be adding more than a year to your remaining life expectancy each year.
MR. MURRAY: So if you play the odds right, you never hit the endpoint.
MR. KURZWEIL: Right. If you can hang in there for another 15 years, we could get to that point.

What Is Human?
MR. MURRAY: What does it mean to be human in a post-2029 world?
MR. KURZWEIL: It’s a slippery slope. But we’ve already gone down that slope. I’ve talked to people who have neural implants in their brain, for Parkinson’s, and I’ve asked them, “Are you still human? Are you less human?”
Generally speaking, they say, “It’s part of me.” And they’re very proud of it, because it restored their human functionality.

For the full interview, see:
Alan Murray, interviewer. “Man or Machine? Ray Kurzweil on how long it will be before computers can do everything the brain can do.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 29, 2012): C12.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)

Larry Page on Tesla, Commerce, and Changing the World

Funding is a key constraint for the innovative project entrepreneur. By “project entrepreneur” I mean the innovator who views money as a means to achieving the project, and not as an end in itself. In this brief clip from Page’s 2007 AAAS talk, he discusses how as a 12 year-old reading Tesla’s autobiography he almost cried at how Tesla’s failure to commercialize his ideas limited his ability to change the world.

The Tesla autobiography is:
Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. SoHo Books, 2012.

“A123 Systems” Battery Company Is Another Example of Failed Industrial Policy

The YouTube video embedded above was from a CBS Evening News broadcast in June 2012. It illustrates the difficulty of the government successfully selecting the technologies, and companies, that will eventually prove successful. (The doctrine that government can and should do such selection is often called “industrial policy.”)

The Obama administration has bet billions of tax dollars on lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles that A123 Systems won $249 million of. But as Sharyl Attkisson reports, expensive recalls and other setbacks have put substantial doubt in the company’s ability to continue.

The text above, and the embedded video clip were published on YouTube on Jun 17, 2012 by CBSNewsOnline at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4Ugklc0rIo

Wise and Wyly Words on Air Conditioning

(p. 42) It was February 1958. I got myself a room, not far from the office, in a little house built in the 1920s owned by a seventy-five-year-old woman named Mrs. Thompson. I lived in her “in-law’s room,” which meant I had my own front door, but I had to share the bathroom with her and, because I did not have a kitchen, I had to eat out. My rent was $10 a week.
I had my car, which meant I could get around, and the training school was air-conditioned, which meant my second summer in Dallas was a lot more pleasant than my first.
Thank you, Willis Haviland Carrier, for inventing air-conditioning. I owe you one. And I’m not the only one. At the height of the dot-com stock market bubble of 1999, Barton Biggs–the wise, graying investments guru at Morgan Stanley–posed this question to seventy-one people: which invention is more important, the Internet or air-conditioning? Barton was on the losing side of the vote, 70-2.
Obviously, he’d found seventy people who’d never spent an August in Texas.

Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.

Asteroid-Mining Start-Up Hopes to Launch First Spacecraft within Two Years

“A computer image shows a rendering of a spacecraft preparing to capture a water-rich, near-Earth asteroid.” Source of caption: print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) SEATTLE–A start-up with high-profile backers on Tuesday unveiled its plan to send robotic spacecraft to remotely mine asteroids, a highly ambitious effort aimed at opening up a new frontier in space exploration.

At an event at the Seattle Museum of Flight, a group that included former National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials unveiled Planetary Resources Inc. and said it is developing a “low-cost” series of spacecraft to prospect and mine “near-Earth” asteroids for water and metals, and thus bring “the natural resources of space within humanity’s economic sphere of influence.”
The solar system is “full of resources, and we can bring that back to humanity,” said Planetary Resources co-founder Peter Diamandis, who helped start the X-Prize competition to spur nongovernmental space flight.
The company said it expects to launch its first spacecraft to low-Earth orbit–between 100 and 1,000 miles above the Earth’s surface–within two years, in what would be a prelude to sending spacecraft to prospect and mine asteroids.
The company, which was founded three years ago but remained secret until last week, said it could take a decade to finish prospecting, or identifying the best candidates for mining.

For the full story, see:
AMIR EFRATI. “Asteroid-Mining Strategy Is Outlined by a Start-Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 25, 2012): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 24, 2012, and has the title “Start-Up Outlines Asteroid-Mining Strategy.”)

Quick Computing If Air Conditioning Worked

(p. 36) Using those IBM 650s was no easy feat. You had to take your turn in line with the other students, write your program, key punch it onto a big stack of cards, do your proofs to make sure it was accurate, and feed it into the computer. If you were lucky and the air-conditioning did not malfunction, you’d get your results back quickly. But there would be errors, which you had to correct, and then you had to repeat the process over and over again until the 650–working on the data with the program that you wrote–came up with the right answers.

Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.

“Birdseye Coaxes Readers to Re-examine Everyday Miracles”

Source of book image: http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2012/05/04/10/50/13z9ot.Em.56.jpg

(p. C7) Birdseye made and lost money, went west to search for the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and hunted fox for furs in Labrador, where he took his wife and infant son to live 250 miles by dogsled from the nearest hospital. He harpooned whales near his home in Gloucester, Mass., and wore a necktie while doing it. And he designed the industrial processes that made it possible to fast-freeze food, thus rendering obsolete much canned, dried, salted and smoked food and the musty basement bins that once held a winter’s diet of turnips, onions and potatoes.

Food had been frozen earlier but more slowly. Crystallization turned it mushy and tasteless. It was poor man’s food. In Labrador, fishing with the Inuit, Birdseye noticed that when a fish was pulled from a hole in the ice and into minus-40-degree air, it froze instantly, staying so fresh that when it was thawed months later, it would sometimes come alive.
He spent years putting together modern mass production with what he had seen in Labrador. By the 1920s, he was fast-freezing food that was far closer to fresh than any competition. “Today’s locavore movement–the movement to shun food from afar and eat what is produced locally . . . would have perplexed him,” Mr. Kurlansky writes. After all, “consumers could go to a supermarket and buy the food of California, France and China for less money.”
. . .
The author makes a telling point about locavores: “We need to grasp that people who are accustomed only to artisanal goods long for the industrial. It is only when the usual product is industrial that the artisanal is longed for. This is why artisanal food, the dream of the food of family farms, caught on so powerfully in California, one of the early strongholds of agribusiness with little tradition of small family farms.”
Birdseye’s heroism has been forgotten, and his frozen food is taken for granted, the way all inventions are taken sooner or later. He sold his business for $23.5 million in 1929 to what would become General Foods. He stayed on as a consultant and also ran his light bulb company, which he would sell too.

For the full review, see:
HENRY ALLEN. “The American Way of Eating; Harlan Sanders and Clarence Birdseye, just like today’s locavores, saw a meal as a way to improve people’s lives.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 5, 2012): C5 & C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated May 4, 2012.)

(p. C6) “Birdseye” is a slight but intriguing book that raises far more questions than it answers. But it indeed coaxes readers to re-examine everyday miracles like frozen food, and to imagine where places with no indigenous produce would be without them. It emphasizes the many steps that went into developing such a simple-seeming process.

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Inventor Who Put Frozen Peas on Our Tables.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 26, 2012): C6.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated April 25, 2012.)

Book reviewed:
Kurlansky, Mark. Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man. New York: Doubleday, 2012.

“Mark Kurlansky.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

A “Boring” and “Excellent” Business Education

(p. 34) Most of what they taught us in those days was functional. This was before they added “entrepreneurship” to business courses. It was all about manufacturing, marketing, and personnel. I found that somewhat boring. I had two favorite courses. The first was Small Business. It was the only course where all the pieces carne together. The other was Computing, which was the first computer course that the Michigan Business School had ever taught. I had a feeling that this was the big new thing. But, more important, it was what IBM did. I had never seen a computer lab before. This was soon after Remington Rand made headlines with its UNIVAC I, the world’s first commercial computer.
. . .
(p. 59) The University of Michigan is an excellent school. I loved being there and I am proud to have earned an MBA. When I was there, I noticed that the fìve-and–ten-cents-store founder, Sebastian S. Kresge–the man who invented the Kmart chain–had given them Kresge Hall. When I could afford to, I figured, why not do the same? I have always been so grateful for what I learned there. In 1997 I gave the school funding for a Sam Wyly Hall. (A few years earlier, Charles and I had helped to build Louisiana Tech’s 16-story Wyly Tower of Learning.) It’s fulfilling to me that today Paton Scholars study at Sam Wyly Hall on the Ann Arbor campus.

Source of both quotes:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis added.)