Canon Prospers By Ignoring the ‘First Mover Advantage’

CanonHV10.jpg  Canon’s new HV10 high definition camcorder.  Source of image:  the NYT article cited below.

 

In the dot-com era, many believed that in each niche, the future belonged to the company that got-in, and got-big, first.  Sometimes this was called the ‘first mover advantage.’  There are many counter-examples.  Here is one more:

(p. C1)  Next month, Canon will release the world’s smallest and least expensive high-definition tape camcorder, a one-handable beauty called the HV10.

. . .

This image-quality business, as it turns out, is the new Canon’s specialty.  Talk about being blown away the first time you play back your recordings — let’s hope you have a sturdy couch.

Several advances are responsible for the brilliant picture quality.  First, Canon has paid extra attention to two of the most important aspects of HD recording:  focus and stability.  Because the high-def picture is so sharp and so wide, moments of blur-(p. C11)riness or hand-held jitters are far more noticeable and disturbing than in regular video.

So the front of the HV10 bears a special external sensor that, when you change your aim, handles the bulk of the refocusing extremely rapidly.  A standard through-the-lens focusing system does the fine tuning after that.  Together, these two mechanisms nearly eliminate the awkward moment of blurry focus-hunting that mars other camcorders’ output.

. . .

. . . , by entering the high-def camcorder market a year and a half after its rivals, Canon has played the same conservative waiting game it once used with digital cameras and camcorders.  Its goal, of course, is to watch and learn as the pioneers get all the arrows in their backs.

If the HV10 is any indication, the company is off to a very good start.

 

For the full review, see:

DAVID POGUE.  "A Head Start On the Future Of High-Def."  The New York Times  (Thurs., August 10, 2006):  C1 & C11.

 

“Financial Incentives Can Change the Way Medicine is Practiced”


        An angioplasty being performed in Eyria, Ohio.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

Medicare patients in Elyria receive angioplasties at a rate nearly four times the national average . . .

. . .

. . . some outside experts say they are concerned that Elyria is an example, albeit an extreme one, of how medical decisions in this country can be influenced by financial incentives and professional training more than by solid evidence of what works best for a particular patient.

“People are rewarded for erring on the side of an aggressive, highly expensive intervention,” said Dr. Elliott S. Fisher, a researcher at Dartmouth Medical School, which analyzed Medicare data and found Elyria to be an outlier.

Medicare pays Elyria’s community hospital, EMH Regional Medical Center, about $11,000 for an angioplasty involving use of a drug-coated stent.

The cardiologist might be paid an additional $800 for the work.  That is well above the fees for seeing patients in the office.  And with the North Ohio doctors performing thousands of angioplasties a year — about 3,400 in 2004, for example — the dollars can quickly add up.

Some medical experts say Elyria’s high rate of angioplasties — three times the rate of Cleveland, just 30 miles away — raises the question of whether some patients may be getting procedures they do not need or whether some could have been treated just as effectively and at lower cost and less risk through heart drugs that may cost only several hundred dollars a year.

. . .

Experts know that changing the financial incentives can change the way medicine is practiced.

For example, Kaiser Permanente, the big health system that employs its own doctors, says its patients in Ohio, including some in Elyria, are slightly less likely than the national average to undergo the type of cardiac procedures the North Ohio Heart Center doctors perform so prolifically.

Kaiser’s cardiologists, who work on salary instead of being paid by the procedure, typically treat patients in that region at the Cleveland Clinic, where they have hospital privileges.  And they follow established protocols about when a patient should undergo an angioplasty, when drugs might suffice and when bypass surgery might be the best resort.

“It’s not just individual doctors making up their minds,” explained Dr. Ronald L. Copeland, the executive medical director for Kaiser’s medical group in Ohio.  With no financial reason to perform expensive procedures, the Kaiser doctors frequently choose to manage the patients’ heart disease with drugs only.  “Our doctors have no disincentive to do that,” Dr. Copeland said.

. . .

For many cardiologists, the natural tendency when they see a patient with heart disease is to perform a procedure to try to clear arterial blockages.  And patients, cardiologists say, tend to rely on their doctors’ judgment.

“It’s sort of like, you go to a barber and ask if you need a haircut,” said Dr. David D. Waters, chief of cardiology at San Francisco General Hospital, who is currently studying the effectiveness of different kinds of treatment for heart disease.  “He’s likely to say you do.”

. . .

Experts say it can be difficult to detect cases in which doctors cross a medical line and are clearly performing unnecessary treatments.

“A lot of decisions are discretionary,” said Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a cardiologist and professor at Yale.

“It’s about where the thermostat is set,” he said, arguing that doctors in a particular geographic area tend to be unaware if the way they are treating their patients is markedly different from the practices of their peers in other areas.

Traditional measures of medical quality are not set up to detect whether patients are being treated too much, he said, unlike the kinds of safeguards that prompt credit card companies to call their customers to discuss unusual spending activity.  “Right now there are no ‘smart’ systems in place,” Dr. Krumholz said.

In the absence of any real monitoring or oversight, doctors in most places, including Elyria, have few incentives not to favor the treatments that provide them the most reimbursement.  Dr. Waters, the San Francisco cardiologist, said that the way physicians are typically paid — more money for more procedures — results in too many decisions to give a patient a stent.

“You can’t be paying people large sums of money to do things without checks and balances,” he said.

 

For the full story, see:

REED ABELSON.  "In Ohio City, a Heart Procedure Is Off the Charts; SIDE EFFECTS; A Stent Epidemic."  The New York Times  (Fri., August 18, 2006):  A1 & C4.

 

Source of graphic:    online version of the NYT article cited above.

French Slow Innovation By Violating Apple’s Intellectual Property Rights

THE French take pride in their revolutions, which are usually hard to miss — mass uprisings, heads rolling and such.  So, with the scent of tear gas in the air this past month from the giant protests against a youth labor law, it was easy to overlook the French National Assembly’s approval of a bill that would require Apple Computer to crack open the software codes of its iTunes music store and let the files work on players other than the iPod.  While seemingly minor, the move is actually rather startling and has left many experts wondering (as ever):  What has possessed the French?

. . .  

If the French gave away the codes, Apple would lose much of its rationale for improving iTunes.  Right now, after the royalty payment to the label (around 65 cents) and the processing fee to the credit card company (as high as 23 cents), not to mention other costs, Apple’s margin on 99-cent music is thin.  Yet it continues to add free features to iTunes because it helps sell iPods.

Opening the codes threatens that link.  Apple would need to pay for iTunes features with profits from iTunes itself.  Prices would rise.  Innovation would slow.

Even worse, sharing the codes could make it easier for hackers to unravel Apple’s FairPlay software.  Without strong copy protection, labels would not supply as much new music.

 

For the full commentary, see:

Austan Goolsbee.  "ECONOMIC SCENE; In iTunes War, France Has Met the Enemy. Perhaps It Is France."  The New York Times  (Thurs., April 27, 2006):  C3.

25% Increase in Oil by 2015

OilPriceGraphic.gif  Source of graphic:  online version of the WSJ article cited below.

 

Despite fears of "running out" of oil, Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ new analysis of oil-industry activity points to a considerable growth in the capacity to produce oil in the years ahead.  Based upon our field-by-field examination of current activity and of 360 new projects that are either underway or very likely, we see capacity growing from its current 89 mbd to 110 mbd by 2015, a 25% increase.  A substantial part of this growth reflects the advance of technology, i.e., the rapid growth in "non-traditional" hydrocarbons, such as from very deep offshore waters, Canadian oil sands, and liquids made from natural gas.  (We are not counting in this increase the additional supplement that will come from ethanol and other fuels made from plants.)

There are important qualifications, however.  First, this is physical capacity to produce, not actual flows, which, as we have seen over the last year, can be disrupted by everything from natural disasters to government decision, to conflict and geopolitical discord.  Second, while prices are going up rapidly, so are costs;  and shortages of equipment and people can slow things down.  Third, greater scale and technical complexity can generate delays.  Still, a 25% increase in physical capacity by 2015 is a reasonable expectation, based upon today’s evidence, and that would go a long way to meeting the growing demand from China, India and other motorizing countries.

Admittedly, it may be hard to conceive of this kind of increase when oil prices are climbing the wall of worry, when each new disruption reverberates around the world, when Iranian politicians threaten $100 or $250 oil in the event of sanctions, and when so many geopolitical trends seem so adverse.  All this underlines the fact that while the challenges below ground are extensive, the looming uncertainties — and risks — remain above ground. 

 

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Yergin.  "Crisis in the Pipeline."  The Wall Street Journal  (Weds., August 9, 2006):  A10.   

U.S. Economy Can Prosper, Even if G.M. Does Not

The fragility of success for large corporations is documented in the early chapters of the Foster and Kaplan book that is mentioned below. 

(p. 1)  THE announcement last week that General Motors would cut 25,000 jobs and close several factories is yet another blow to the Goliath of automakers and its workers.  But only if you work for G.M. is the company’s decline a worry.  For consumers, the decline can be seen as a symbol of healthy competition.

G.M.’s sales, market share and work force have all been falling for a generation, even as the quality of its vehicles has gone up.  Why?  Because its competitors’ products have improved even more.  Today’s auto buyers enjoy an unprecedented array of well-built, well-equipped, reasonably priced vehicles offered by many manufacturers.

. . .

(p. 3)  . . .  even if a new generation is drawn to G.M.’s products, recovery of its former position seems unlikely.  Other brands have improved, too:  J.D. Power estimates that for the auto industry overall, manufacturing defects declined 32 percent since 1998 alone.

There is also great pressure to hold prices down, which is bad for companies like G.M. with vast amounts of overhead.  According to the consumer price index, new cars and light trucks today cost less in real-dollar terms than in 1982, despite having air bags, antilock brakes, CD players, power windows and other features either unavailable or considered luxury options back then.

This means that during the very period that General Motors has declined, American car buyers have become better off.  Competition can have the effect of ”creative destruction,” in the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s famous term, harming workers in some places, while everyone else comes out ahead.

. . .

As it continues to shrink, G.M. may serve as an exemplar of what the world economy will do in many arenas — knock off established leaders, while improving quality and cutting prices.  In their 2001 book ”Creative Destruction,” Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, analysts at McKinsey & Company, documented how even powerhouse companies that are ”built to last” usually succumb to competition.

Competition can be a utilitarian force that brings the greatest good to the greatest number.  Someday when the remaining divisions of General Motors are bought by some start-up company that doesn’t even exist yet, try to keep that in mind.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

GREGG EASTERBROOK.  "What’s Bad for G.M. Is . . ."  The New York Times, Section 4  (Sunday, June 12, 2005):  1 & 3.

(Note:  the ellipsis in the title is in the original title; the ellipses in the article, were added.)

 

The full reference to the Foster and Kaplan book, is:

Foster, Richard and Sarah Kaplan.  Creative Destruction:  Why Companies that Are Built to Last Underperform the Market—and How to Successfully Transform Them.  New York:  Currency Books, 2001.

 

Taking the Red Pill in China

Surfing the Web last fall, a Chinese high-school student who calls himself Zivn noticed something missing.  It was Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that accepts contributions or edits from users, and that he himself had contributed to.

The Chinese government, in October, had added Wikipedia to a list of Web sites and phrases it blocks from Internet users’ access.  For Zivn, trying to surf this and many other Web sites, including the BBC’s Chinese-language news service, brought just an error message.  But the 17-year-old had had a taste of that wealth of information and wanted more.  "There were so many lies among the facts, and I could not find where the truth is," he writes in an instant-message interview.

Then some friends told him where to find Freegate, a tiny software program that thwarts the Chinese government’s vast system to limit what its citizens see.  Freegate — by connecting computers inside of China to servers in the U.S. — allows Zivn and others to keep reading and writing to Wikipedia and countless other sites.

Behind Freegate is a North Carolina-based Chinese hacker named Bill Xia.  He calls it his red pill, a reference to the drug in the "Matrix" movies that vaulted unconscious captives of a totalitarian regime into the real world.  Mr. Xia likes to refer to the villainous Agent Smith from the Matrix films, noting that the digital bad guy in sunglasses "guards the Matrix like China’s Public Security Bureau guards the Internet."

. . .

(p. A9)  . . . , with each new version of Freegate — now on its sixth release — the censors "just keep improving and adding more manpower to monitor what we have been doing," Mr. Xia says.  In turn, he and volunteer programmers keep tweaking Freegate.

At first, the software would automatically change its Internet Protocol address — a sort of phone number for a Web site — faster than China could block it.  That worked until September 2002, when China blocked Freegate’s domain name, not just its number, in the Internet phone book.

More than three years later, Mr. Xia is still amazed by the bold move, calling it a "hijacking."  Ultimately he prevailed, however, through a solution he won’t identify for fear of being shut down for good.

Confident in that solution, Mr. Xia continues to send out his red pill, and users like Zivn continue to take it.  The teen credits his cultural and political perspective to a "generation gap" that has come of having access to more information.  "I am just gradually getting used to the truth about the real world," he writes.

 

For the full story, see: 

Geoffrey A. Fowler.  "Chinese Internet Censors Face ‘Hacktivists’ in U.S."  The Wall Street Journal  (Monday, February 13, 2006):  A1 & A9.

Entrepreneur Found Creative Way to Save Thousands of Babies

(p. 1)  The babies were lined up under heaters and they breathed filtered air.  Few of them weighed more than three pounds.  They shared the Boardwalk there on Coney Island with Violetta the Armless Legless Wonder, Princess WeeWee, Ajax the Sword-Swallower and all the rest.  From 1903 until the early 1940’s, premature infants in incubators were part of the carnival.

It cost a quarter to see the babies, and people came again and again, to coo and to gasp and say look how small, look how small.  There were twins, even, George and Norma Johnson, born the day before Independence Day in 1937.  They had four and a half pounds between them, appearing in the world a month too soon because Dorothy Johnson stepped off a curb wrong and went into labor.

All those quarters bought a big house at Sea Gate for Dr. Martin A. Couney, the man who put the Coney Island babies on display.  He died broken and forgotten in 1950 at 80 years old.  The doctor was shunned as an unseemly showman in his time, even as he was credited with popularizing incubators and saving thousands of babies.  History did not know what to do; he was inspired and single-minded, distasteful and heroic, ultimately confounding.

. . .

(p. 31)  He displayed incubators developed by his mentors at the Berlin Exposition of 1896, and though they caught on in Europe, acceptance was slower in the United States.

Using babies from New York hospitals that lacked the facilities to care for them, Dr. Couney mounted a display at Luna Park, a Coney Island amusement park, in 1903, soon adding another at a second Coney Island park, Dreamland.

. . .

At least 8,000 babies passed through the incubators, and the doctor was credited with saving at least 6,500, according to news reports of the time.  The Johnson twins made it off the Boardwalk and grew up strong and tall. George Johnson found work, and a sense of freedom, driving trains up and down the coast for the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Norma Johnson married a man named Coe.  Between the twins there are nine children, 13 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.  George and Norma attended Dr. Couney’s induction ceremony yesterday.  "My father didn’t have any money, and this doctor says you can use our incubator for free, but you have to put them on display on Coney Island," Mr. Johnson said, sitting next to his sister on the porch at the Sheepshead Bay Yacht Club the other day.  "It was us and a lot of other people, too."

The twins will turn 68 the day before Independence Day, old enough to enjoy the seaside air on an idle weekday morning.

Down the Boardwalk, the beach is open.  Pretty girls and seagulls play their games.  For a few dollars, you can watch a baseball game, shoot paint pellets at a hungry young dude or become a tattooed lady.

The likes of Martin A. Couney nobody has seen in 60 years.

 

For the full story, see: 

MICHAEL BRICK. "And Next to the Bearded Lady, Premature Babies."  The New York Times, Section 1 (Sun., June 12, 2005):  1 & 31.

(Note: ellipses added.)

JohnsonTwins.jpg  The Johnson twins who were displayed, and whose lives were saved, by Dr. Couney.  Source of photo:  online version of NYT article cited above.

 

Life Has Improved; And Can Continue to Improve

 Source of graphic:  online version of the NYT article cited below. 

 

(p. 1)  New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled.  Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

. . .

(p. 19)  . . .  stressful occupations added to the burden on the body.

People would work until they died or were so disabled that they could not continue, Dr. Fogel said. “In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85,” he said. Now the average age is 62.

A century ago, most people were farmers, laborers or artisans who were exposed constantly to dust and fumes, Dr. Costa said. “I think there is just this long-term scarring.”

 

For the full story, see:

Health1860s1994.gif Source of graphic:  online version of the NYT article cited above. 

HealthCivilWarAndNow.gif EscapeFromHungerAndPrematureDeath1700-2100BK.jpg  Source of graphic:  online version of the NYT article cited above.  Source of book image:  http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521808782

 

Fogel’s book is a primary academic source for much of what is interesting in the New York Times article.  Fogel predicts that if we don’t screw things up, half of today’s college students will live to be 100.  He shows that academics in the past have consistently and significantly underestimated the maximum lifespans that would be attainable in the future.

The full reference for the Fogel book is:

Fogel, Robert William. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100, Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

 

Intense Competition in Chip Duopoly

IntelAMDWar.gif

Phil Hester, apparently a chip hotshot, joined A.M.D. ten months ago as its technology chief, to "help lead its battle against Intel."  (Hector Ruis, mentioned below, is the C.E.O. of A.M.D.)

Mr. Hester and other A.M.D. executives say that the technology in its laboratories gives them plenty of reason for optimism, and that in some product categories Intel is just catching up to advances A.M.D. pioneered.  Just next month, for example, A.M.D. is expected to introduce improvements to Opteron, and both companies are designing chips to run cooler and consume less energy.

Much like Intel, A.M.D. is working to increase the number of processors on each chip from two to four, and the company says it will introduce new designs for servers and desktop systems that will be released in mid-2007, followed later in the year by a new design for notebooks.  Many analysts are also expecting the company to counter Intel’s pricing moves with price cuts of its own.  At A.M.D.’s annual conference for analysts last month, Mr. Hester also disclosed an unusual plan to let other manufacturers build chips that work closely with its own chips, indicating an openness and flexibility that has not been seen before in the company’s strategy.

With that effort, referred to as Torrenza, A.M.D. is licensing some of its chip specifications to other technology developers so they can add specialized functions, like advanced graphics and math processing.

“We want to open up our technology and unleash a completely new wave of innovation,” Mr. Ruiz told analysts at the conference.

Advanced Micro has picked up about five percentage points of market share over the past year, nearly all of that from Intel, according to Mercury Research.  Today, A.M.D.’s overall share is about 21 percent, to Intel’s 74 percent, and at the analyst meeting Mr. Ruiz said the goal was to have a 30 percent share by 2008.

Mr. Hester said A.M.D.’s road map for new products had not changed much since his arrival.  Mostly he has focused on improving the way employees manage projects and pushing them to develop multiple designs at one time.  He said he also emphasized cooperation inside development teams, rather than having teams compete for attention.

The competitive situation has helped with this.  “Being the underdog creates a culture of cooperation,” Mr. Hester said.

 

For the full story, see: 

LAURIE J. FLYNN.  "Jumping at the Chance to Fire Away in the Chip War."  The New York Times (Weds., July 19, 2006):  C7. 

 

(Note:  the online version of the article has a different title, viz., "A.M.D. Seeks to Gain in Its Rivalry With Intel.")

Tom Peters: Over-the-Top Schumpeterian


Source of book image:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/078949647X/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/104-2835260-2878345?ie=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155

 

Tom Peters became famous as the co-author of the business classic In Search of Excellence (1982).  His Re-imagine! is exuberant, optimistic, exaggerated, and stylistically over-the-top.  I find it fun, bracing, entertaining, and sometimes edifying.  If you like the prose of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Gilder’s Telecosm, then you may also like Re-imagine!

Here is an early, very brief passage: 


(p. 9)  My overall vision, in brief:  Business is cool. It’s about Creativity and Invention and Growth and Service.  It’s about Adam Smith’s "hidden hand."  And Nobel laureate Frederick Hayek’s "spontaneous discovery process."  And economist Joseph Schumpeter’s "gales of creative destruction."  At its best, it’s about building things that make life less burdensome than it was in medieval times.  About getting us beyond—far, far, far beyond—the quasi-slavery of the Middle Ages, the indentured servitude of the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution, and the cubicle slavery of the last three-quarters of a century. 

Yes, business is cool.

(Or at least it can be.)

 

The citation to the book is:

Peters, Tom. Re-Imagine! London: DK, 2003.

(Note:  the italics in the above passage appears that way in the original.)


Job Hopping May Aid Technological Experimentation

When employees jump from company to company, they take their knowledge with them.  ”The innovation from one firm will tend to bleed over into other firms,” Professor Rebitzer explained.  For a given company, ”it’s hard to capture the returns on your innovation,” he went on.  ”From an economics perspective, that should hamper innovation.”

He found a possible answer to the puzzle in the work of two management scholars, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark.  In their book ”Design Rules:  The Power of Modularity” (MIT Press, 2000), they argued that when there is a lot of technological uncertainty, the fastest way to find the best solution is to permit lots of independent experiments.  That requires modular designs rather than tightly integrated systems.

”By having a lot of modular experimenters, you can take the best, which will be a lot better than the average,” Professor Rebitzer said.  Employee mobility may encourage productive innovation, as people quickly move to whichever company comes up with the best new technology.

. . .

To Professor Rebitzer’s surprise (though not his co-authors’), it turns out that Silicon Valley employees really do move around more often than other people.  The researchers looked at job changes by male college graduates from 1994 to 2001.  During that period, an average of 2.41 percent of respondents changed jobs in any given month.

But, they write, ”living in Silicon Valley increases the rate of employer-to-employer job change by 0.8 percentage point.”

”This effect is both statistically and behaviorally significant — suggesting employer-to-employer mobility rates are 40 percent higher than the sample average.”

 

For the full commentary, see: 

VIRGINIA POSTREL.  "ECONOMIC SCENE; In Silicon Valley, Job Hopping Contributes to Innovation."  The New York Times  (Thursday, December 1, 2005):  C4.

 

A PDF of the paper by Rebitzer and colleagues is downloadable at:    http://www.federalreserve.gov/Pubs/feds/2005/200511/200511abs.html

 

The book Postrel praises, is:

Source of book image:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0262024667/104-2835260-2878345?redirect=true