Author Archive

PBS – Unfair and imbalanced "journalism" in action

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

Bruce Bartlett vividly illustrates PBS’s "agenda journalism by providing readers with facts regarding the astounding macroeconomic impact of Walmart on the US economy over the last decade. PBS, having been supplied the same facts during its "investigation" of the issue, chose to omit them entirely from its negative presentation about Walmart.

I also pointed out to Smith that Wal-Mart, all by itself, was responsible for a significant amount of the productivity miracle we have seen in this country over the last decade. In a 2001 report, the McKinsey Global Institute, a respected think tank, concluded that Wal-Mart’s managerial innovations had increased overall productivity by more than all the investments in computers and information technology of recent years. Wal-Mart’s innovations include large-scale (big-box) stores, economies of scale in warehouse logistics and purchasing, electronic data interchange, and wireless barcode scanning. These gave Wal-Mart a 48 percent productivity advantage over its competitors, forcing them to innovate as well, thus pushing up their productivity. The McKinsey study found that productivity improvements in wholesale and retail trade alone accounted over half of the increase in national productivity between 1995 and 1999. A new study from the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research found that Wal-Mart has a substantial effect on reducing the rate of inflation. For example, it typically sells food for 15 percent to 25 percent less than competing supermarkets. Interestingly, this effect is not captured in official government data. Fully accounting for it would reduce the published inflation rate by as much as 0.42 percentage points or 15 percent per year.

Ignoring these beneficial macroeconomic effects, Frontline focused almost exclusively on the loss of jobs allegedly caused by Wal-Mart. Acting as what economists call a monopsony, it supposedly forced countless American manufacturers to close their domestic operations and move to Asia in order to get their costs low enough for Wal-Mart to sell their products. It is also said to have caused innumerable local retailers to go out of business, further adding to the job loss. In fact, academic research by economist Emek Basker of the University of Missouri contradicts this last point, finding that Wal-Mart permanently raises local employment.

Firefox (aka Netscape Arises from the Dead!)

Tuesday, November 16th, 2004

When I first tried Firefox about six months ago – out of frustration with IE’s lack of security, I was completely underwhelmed and could not understand why the developer/programmer community was so buzzed about it.  I googled for other browers and found Maxthon, which is an overlay on IE that provides lots of nifty features, the most important of which is tabbed browsing.  While that was supposed to be Firefox’s claim to fame, at that time Maxthon beat it hands down.  Recently Maxthon stopped supporting the Google toolbar, which is the most essential feature for a browser for me (hmmm…wonder if that ever occurred to Google???).  That prompted me to revisit Firefox and upon doing so, I found a much improved tabbed browser and a far wealthier palate of extensions for it.  After a couple of weeks use, I’m hooked, however, I would only recommend it for those who don’t mind the hassles (and benefits) of beta-like software.  Firefox will only get better, but it’s still a little unwieldy for those who lack the curiosity and patience to work with something that is both new and rapidly evolving.  More on Firefox and the open-source software phenomenon later.

Get Firefox!

Business Related, for a Change!

Tuesday, November 9th, 2004

Time to blog about something else besides politics.  EuroTelcoblog opines that Internet and web publishing technologies are evolving in a manner that suggests a new Web-based investment research platform will surface to replace the obviously dysfunctional and outdated one provided by the investment banks.

"the message is pretty clear to me: eventually, and probably sooner than later, someone is going to pull together all these diverse angles on telecom/internet/media/hardware/applications/chips, incorporate some hard financial and technical analysis, and build a cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam.

There is a business model here, and whether it’s the financial media who seize upon it (Reuters and Bloomberg have the infrastructure and a lot of data, but are trapped in a walled garden mentality and put their journalists in the same sector-coverage silos that the brokers do), or the brokers (I’m skeptical, because I think they tend to be dismissive of alternative points of view, risk-averse, organized in sector and region silos, and anyway are focused on trying to kill one another), or a newcomer (CNET or something that doesn’t currently exist), I feel certain that it is going to happen."

Makes sense to me.  Furthermore, if true, it would seem to follow that almost any research-intensive business would be open to similar disruption.  Wonder if Gardener, Forrester, Yankee, et al. have thought of that?

The Bad News

Monday, April 12th, 2004

Belmont Club and USS Clueless document the expertise of Islamic terrorists in using the Western Press as one of its most potent weapons against us.

Gilder @ WTF/Isenberg Conference

Thursday, April 8th, 2004

George Gilder compares Korean broadband deployment in a pro-regulatory environment to the broadband deployment/regulatory mess we have in the US.

"…it’s important to really understand what happened over the last five years. A trip to Korea can give you an understanding. We didn’t have a fundamental bubble that consisted of Ponzi schemes and accounting frauds. That wasn’t the basic thing that happened. The basic thing that happened was that we launched a broadband revolution and didn’t consummate it because of regulatory mistakes. So it moved to Asia. Korea has 40 times the amount of bandwidth that we do. And they accomplished that in three years." Gilder continues, "When you have a true deployment of broadband in a country, including wireless broadband, the whole economy changes. In 2003, there was around $450 billion a year of commercial transactions on the Internet in Korea. A third of their economy was transacted on the Internet."

MP3 Filesharing Disrupts Music Industry Business Model

Saturday, April 3rd, 2004

But, not because music consumers are "stealing" music.  Instead, the Internet and peer-to-peer filesharing disruptively enable musicians to become real business entrepreneurs by creating and maintaining their own distribution channel to their loyal, dedicated and" fanatical" customer base.  Tim Oren explains why this is so.