Won't listen. Won't learn. Won't take responsibility.
I am not writing about George W. Bush. I'm writing about Carly Fiorina.
Fiorina has written a horrible, self-congratulatory, non-revelatory book called Tough Choices that could have come from any Bush Administration flack.
I am not talking here about her politics, but she certainly has the style down.
Naturally she gave an interview about it to Forbes, the "great man" book of business (no one under the Cxx title means squat). Part of it is linked to here, from AlwaysOn.
This is a smarmy, shallow, stupid woman. She still thinks, even today, that the problem H-P faced was that its myth of invention no longer fit the time, and that the opposition she faced was based on her being from outside, or being female, or being a non-engineer.
What a crock!
Fiorina joined a tech company which, while troubled, still had enormous assets and inventiveness. She treated it like a steel outfit. She assumed she was in a consolidating industry, and that merging with a failing competitor -- Compaq -- would solve its problems through the miracle of oligopoly.
One key difference between the Nixon
Thesis of Conflict era that we are leaving and the Open Source Thesis era I'm exploring
here lies in how political change occurs.
Open source is a model for the process change I'm talking about
Open source itself works based
on consensus. If a question becomes closely contested within a
project it forks or dies. The niceties of open source licenses are not nearly as important as the general agreement they
represent. Violations of norms are dealt with from within a social
context. Losing your reputation, having people leave your project, is
effectively a death penalty.
It's a little like a church. We have a general agreement on doctrine. We hash out those differences within the faith. Leaving, or being forced out or (in some cases) being shunned is the penalty. Heresy isn't a crime, except inside the church. (Please don't take the analogy too far in the comments -- it's merely a teaching tool.)
The proprietary software world, on the
other hand, is based on a contract process. Relationships begin at
the time of a purchase, they are defined by a written contract, and
violations are handled by lawyers. Obligations that are not spelled
out simply don't exist.
We have had political eras based on
consensus before. The New Deal Era was held together by consensus. We
needed to deal with the Depression, we needed to deal with Hitler and
the Japs, we needed to confront the Communists. It was when the
consensus broke down that the era ended.
The same was true in the Civil War Era.
The consensus of the North defined what happened to the South, both
during the War and afterward. The imperative of business, of
industrialization, defined what happened in the law, in social
structures, and the economy. The consensus for growth and expansion
continued until farmers and workers were willing to put their lives
on the line in order to object.
Consensus, then conflict (dealt with
through negotiation) have been the pendulum defining the process by
which Americans have gone about their business. The conflict of the
Revolution followed by the consensus of the Constitution. The
conflict of 1800, lasting through the War of 1812, became the
consensus called the Era of Good Feeling. The conflict era of Andrew
Jackson, ending in the Crisis of Civil War, became a consensus for
business and expansion. And so on.
This is not seen today because we have
lived in conflict for a generation. We don't know any other way to think things through except through conflict, a proprietary process in which power is either held or not held.
The whole Nixon Thesis was based
on conflict, on small majorities defining our actions, resulting in
incremental changes that looked much like business contracts. The
reason Ronald Reagan is revered by so many (despite the inherent
contradictions of the 1980s) is because his leadership style was
based on consensus – simple goals simply stated. And when his party
tried to go beyond that consensus, when his successors chose the
Nixon Way, their forward movement slowed and, eventually, stopped.
No matter how he may have voted in the past, there is no doubt that Bill Gates has a liberal impulse.
It's an open secret, however, that his successor, long-time friend Steve Ballmer (left), is a conservative Republican.
This may explain just how badly Ballmer has mis-read the market and, by extension, the changing nature of politics, in his Novell deal.
For those who don't follow the tech business, Ballmer and Microsoft signed a deal with Novell in which the two sides mutually agreed not to sue one another over patent claims. Then he turned around and claimed that, unless companies were running Novell's version of Linux, Microsoft might sue them for violating its patents.
Now witness the market reaction. Novell backed away from Ballmer's claims. Other Linux distros, like Ubuntu, began using the deal in the market against Novell. They are getting a good hearing. The result could be that Novell, which signed with Microsoft because it is a financial laggard, may be destroyed by its own lifeline.
As I wrote on my other blog today, something quite similar is happening regarding attempts by vendors to add "gotchas" in open source licensing contracts. There is a community consensus on what open source means, thus a market consensus on what it means, and anyone who violates this consensus risks the rejection of its market.
This business story is placed here because it has enormous political implications:
Microsoft is acting just like the Bush Administration, employing the law and bullying tactics to get its way.
The market is refusing to go along.
We are talking here about the power of consensus. A commonly-held understanding may have no legal force, and it may have no armed force behind it. Yet it can triumph.
The real price of freedom is that you give it to others, even those who disagree with you.
Most people aren't willing to grant that. Even in America, this has always been controversial.
John Adams signed a Sedition Act, criminalizing political criticism. Abraham Lincoln arrested a Democratic Congressman, Clement Vanlandingham, who called for peace with the South. Germans were harassed in World War I, Japanese in World War II. There were Red Scares in the 1920s, the McCarthyism in the early years of the Cold War.
And so it is today. Once again we are faced with this key question. Will we pay the price of freedom?
Newt Gingrich, who seeks to become President of the United States, says no.
Newt Gingrich will not pay the price of his own liberty. Freedom for me but not for thee. He does not deserve his freedom. Neither does anyone who follows him.
To my eye, they are not Americans. They are just people who live in America.
If there were a national championship in chemistry, Rice would be Ohio State.
Every week, it seems, I see something new from the Rice Chemistry Department. They're hotter than Peyton Manning, Albert Pujols, and LeBron James combined.
Zubarev used the same hydrophobic effect living creatures use to create membranes, which seal our cells from the outside world. Cell membranes are made of fat-based amphiphiles, which have a water-loving side and a water-hating one. Stick the water loving sides together, just like Scotch Tape, and you've got a barrier to water, what scientists call a bilayered
micelle.
In the Rice experiment, Zubarev's team first created V-shaped amphiphiles made of ethylene oxide, then attached gold particles at each focal point. By adding water and inducing micelles to form, they created tightly
packed cylinders of gold nanoparticles measuring 18 nanometers in
diameter (right).
Using a life process to create an obviously inorganic compound means the same process might be used to create other large-scale nanoparticles, from other materials. It's hyberbole to say Zubarev has found a way to create inorganic nano-life, but it is a step in that process.
Secure the safety of our men and women, by withdrawing all in-country troops to secure bases.
Promise to take them all out following a negotiated settlement.
Talk to everyone. EVERYONE. Use the UN, use Iran, use the devil himself if need be. Just get people talking instead of blowing each other up.
Be prepared to pay reparations based on a valid peace agreement, to a designated regime which proves it can control the country. That's the incentive for coming to a settlement.
Follow the agreement, and get our people home safely.
The first priority at this point is keeping our own people alive, minimizing the further damage we do to the cradle of civilization. Forget face-saving. Forget victory. We no longer have a face to save. We lost. You got a problem with that, take it up with the idiot who bungled this war.
I'll admit it. I have been more interested in politics than normal these last several years.
I had the feeling I was in a bus driven by a madman, careening toward a cliff, and there was nothing anyone could do to turn the wheel. Now there are some other hands there.
But even before the votes were counted, the blogosphere and some TV networks began obsessing over the 2008 election.
Here's the thing. The purpose of politics is to create policy. Elections are separated widely in time so that events can have their say. It's not really about the pros - either in Washington or the grassroots. It's about what happens and how we feel about it.
Does anyone doubt that the result of this election would have been different without Katrina? Or the scandals? Or Iraq's steady slide into civil war and chaos? Events decided the result. All the work, and the $2.5 billion, invested in this exercise had impact only on the margins. That can be determinative in close elections, but most elections aren't that close.
So I have a problem with political obsessives, no matter what side of the aisle they live on. If you go from Election Night straight into campaign mode you don't understand the first thing about politics, which is that it's not a football game. It's policy.
I think the idea that you can't, or shouldn't, discuss war policy without having fought is flawed.
But on the other hand, we've got an adolescent foreign policy debate There's a disconnect between our assumption of rights as Americans and the responsibility we accept in exchange for those rights, and there's a lot of important work that is going to have to be tackled, even absent a war, by strong hands and young hearts.
War is all hell, as General Sherman said. People die, people are mangled, women are raped, lives are destroyed. None of it can really be put back together. Someone else rebuilds in time.
Yet our leaders, and their followers, treat war as my 15-year old son treats it, as an academic exercise. My son can be forgiven for this. The leaders of our country cannot be.
They have forgotten or are ignoring the horror of it. They consider themselves immune. Most Americans, as Lawrence O'Donnell has written so memorably, consider themselves immune.
This wasn't the case before. It was not the intent of the Nixon Thesis to make it the case. Nixon himself reinstituted a real draft, with few exemptions, and forced hard choices on a generation, including (perhaps most famously) Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But with the end of that war the draft was ended, the "all-volunteer" army was constituted.
And that worked, for a while. Until the Iraq occupation. Because that occupation required far more human sacrifice than its supporters were ready to give.
So first National Guardsmen were treated as active duty, contravening the enlistment agreements they had signed, and then they were sent again. And those in the regular service were sent several times. Enlistments were arbitrarily extended, creating a "back-door" draft. So-called "contractors" were employed for military work, essentially creating an army of mercenaries exempt from the discipline of regular troops.
In the context of the respect our military men and women deserve, I believe all these actions constitute War Crimes.
I'm doing this mainly because e-mail is a dieing e-business model, and I don't ever want to be yesterday. I'm also spending several hours each week coding and loading each week's issue, time that could be spent writing.
To celebrate this change I will have five essays on the main topics this blog has covered in its decade of e-mail existence, looking mainly at their present and future. First will come e-commerce, the original beat here. Then I will have essays on Moore's Law, on Always-On, and on Political Cycles, before finishing up with a big Internet Future essay.
Enjoy.
E-commerce has become commerce. (Illustration by SercomGroup.)
What began as a separate channel has replaced the back end of the catalog business, while stores have adopted most e-commerce innovations.
The biggest problem merchants face is the cost of scaling, especially the technology scaling needed for a competitive user experience. Most have also found that the final profit margins in selling goods online are minimal, and that as they scale their online operations they need a physical presence.
This may or may not remain the case as gas prices rise. I still insist a business can be made with convenience stores accepting deliveries for local residents, delivering them at the consumer's convenience, and adding special orders based on intimate customer interaction. (Since the name Jeeves is taken, how about calling it Godfrey?)
I do like PR people. They often bring good stories to me.
And sometimes they just make stuff up. (Image from ABC.)
Cyber Monday is something they just made up. (The official site is from a trade group -- hint hint.) The idea is that people hit the malls during the weekend, then hit their desks at work and do their real shopping online.
Won't listen. Won't learn. Won't take responsibility. 
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