commentary

Did anyone really think Apple wants us replace our iPhones or MacBooks? I actually think it hits my sweet spot better than either its bigger or smaller cousins. It won’t replace my other stuff, but I definitely picture this as my primary device. Apart from a couple of hours I spend writing every day, most [...]

Driving Processes

by OpenConceptual on 07-30-2009

in commentary,concepts

You will hear people talking about “latency,” which means the delay between a trading signal being given and the trade being made. Low latency — high speed — is what banks and funds are looking for. Yes, we really are talking about shaving off the milliseconds that it takes light to travel along an optical [...]

The Best Disinfectant

by OpenConceptual on 07-14-2009

in commentary

This morning I realized I was a little unfair to Glen Pearson in my last post at BrianFrank.ca. I excerpted a bit of his blog as a jumping-off point, but the rest of my post didn’t really have much to do with what he wrote. I kind of left it hanging there as if he didn’t [...]

Remixing the Generation M Manifesto

by OpenConceptual on 07-11-2009

in commentary

David Eaves did something awesome. I didn’t clue into this possibility when I blogged about Umair Haque’s Generation M Manifesto. He literally remixed and edited it. I was inspired to start editing it myself but found I wanted to change too much — not that I disagreed with the spirit of the thing (which I agree [...]

Burying the Best and the Brightest

by OpenConceptual on 07-09-2009

in commentary

I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome. The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve: One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, [...]

"Dear Old People Who Run the World"

by OpenConceptual on 07-09-2009

in commentary

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Blogs has written a Generation M Manifesto, which begins: Dear Old People Who Run the World, My generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. [...]

Survival of the Fittest Ideas

by OpenConceptual on 07-07-2009

in commentary

There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter): “Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).” It’s a good following to the last post, about [...]

Fluid Factors of Success

by OpenConceptual on 07-06-2009

in commentary

If you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel yet, you should (full disclosure: I’ve read a lot about it but it’s on my to-read list as well). At the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore lays out the book’s basic premise… The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion [...]

David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complimentary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View: Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all [...]

What is Good Writing?

by OpenConceptual on 07-02-2009

in commentary

A funny thing happened in the course of my last post: I committed the same error I was complaining about: putting readability before rigor. In an earlier version (this is where the problems began, perhaps: fussing over it too much) I had a lengthy excerpt from Seth Godin’s excellent post. In the process of making my post more [...]