The coffee wars are upon us. All of a sudden, you have major players betting that they have the formula to ensure long-term success in the marketplace.

This is what is really going on. McDonalds thinks that all consumers care about is price. Tully's thinks that a big enough segment cares about being fair-trade and implementing sustainable business practices. Starbucks thinks that consumers care about better tasting coffee.

Who will win? My guess is that Starbucks is underestimating the power of McDonalds and will lose market share to it. But, if it continues to focus on better coffee and good in-store experience, it will continue to dominate the market.

Great presentation on how to avoid death by PowerPoint.

Siva Vaidyanathan is aiming to write a book about Google collaboratively. More details here.

Hi. Welcome to my new book. Well, it’s not a book yet. In fact, it will not be a real book for a long time.

As you can tell from the title of this blog, the book will be about Google and all they ways that Google is shaking up the world. Google is a transformative and revolutionary company. I hesitate to use terms like that. We live in an era of hyperbole. So I try my best to discount claims of historical transformation or communicative revolutions.

But in the case of Google, I am confident it is both.

Now, I am approaching this book as both a fan and a critic. I am in awe of all that Google has done and all it hopes to do. I am also wary of its ambition and power.

As I use this site to compose the manuscript (an archaic word that I love too much to discard) for the book The Googlization of Everything, I hope to do so with your help.

This is the latest in a series of “open book” experiments hosted and guided by The Institute for the Future of the Book. The Institute has been supportive of my work for years �" long before I became affiliated with it as a fellow and certainly long before we thought up this project together. As with the other projects by Ken Wark and Mitch Stephens, this one will depend on reader criticism and feedback to work right. So this is an appeal for help. If you know something about Google, hip me to it. If you have an observation about how it works or how it affects our lives, write to me about it.

On occasion, I will post an open question on this blog. Please help me answer it.

I have never tried to write a book this way. Few have. Writing has been a lonely, selfish pursuit for me so far. I tend to wall myself off from the world (and my loved ones) for days at a time in fits and spurts when I get into a writing groove. I don’t shave. I order pizza. I grumble. I ignore emails from my mother.

I tend to comb through and revise every sentence five or six times (although I am not sure that actually shows up in the quality of my prose). Only when I am sure that I have not embarrassed myself (or when the editor calls to threaten me with a canceled contract �" whichever comes first) do I show anyone what I have written. Now, this is not an uncommon process. Closed composition is the default among writers. We go to great lengths to develop trusted networks of readers and other writers with whom we can workshop �" or as I prefer to call it because it’s what the jazz musicians do, woodshed our work.

Well, I am going to do my best to woodshed in public. As I compose bits and pieces of work, I will post them here. They might be very brief bits. They might never make it into the manuscript. But they will be up here for you to rip up or smooth over.

That’s the thing. For a number of years now I have made my bones in the intellectual world trumpeting the virtues of openness and the values of connectivity. I was an early proponent of applying “open source” models to scholarship, journalism, and lots of other things.

And, more to the point: One of my key concerns with Google is that it is a black box. Something that means so much to us reveals so little of itself.

So I would be a hypocrite if I wrote this book any other way. This book will not be a black box.

Of course, it could get ugly in here. I could make tremendous mistakes. I could shoot something out there that shuts all doors at Google. I could undermine my ultimate market (but I seriously doubt that I could). I could just write myself into a corner.

In my next post I will share a rough chapter outline. And I will give some sense of the basic questions and major issues that I hope to tackle in this work.

Ok. As Sgt. Phil used to say, “Let’s roll. And let’s be careful out there.”

...

on the art of, ahem, torture.

A new service called Insightory focuses on management insights in presentation form. Think of it as a presentation archive.

The full story is here. Here is the short version-

Modeling Surprise
Combining massive quantities of data, insights into human psychology, and machine learning can help manage surprising events, says Eric Horvitz.

Probabilistic Chips
Krishna Palem thinks a little uncertainty in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.

NanoRadio
Alex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics.

Wireless Power
Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

Atomic Magnetometers
John Kitching's tiny magnetic-field sensors will take MRI where it's never gone before.

Offline Web Applications
Adobe's Kevin Lynch believes that computing applications will become more powerful when they take advantage of the browser and the desktop.

Graphene Transistors
A new form of carbon being pioneered by Walter de Heer of Georgia Tech could lead to speedy, compact computer processors.

Connectomics
Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits.

Reality Mining
Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by cell phones to learn about human behavior.

Cellulolytic Enzymes
Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.

Interesting commercial that pays tribute to the movie "Office Space"-

Very interesting post. There is a much longer discussion here.

How can business schools reprofessionalize management? The responses to this month's column can be characterized in several ways:

1) Business schools, particularly those regarded as being the "elite," by their very nature have contributed to the problem of deprofessionalizing management by building more value in their alumni networks than in their curricula and teaching.

2) Business school curricula, if not always their teaching, reflect the demands of the market. This is or is not appropriate, but not unexpected.

3) How can business schools deprofessionalize something that is not a profession?

Phil Clark's comment characterizes the first line of thought. As he put it, an "elite B-school degree is seen as a ticket to connections to 'take care of (oneself),' not necessarily to provide value to any organization or build new organizations."

The market-driven explanation was offered most provocatively by Tony Wanless, who commented that "B-schools are university cash cows, and the only way to justify their fees is to go where the mass market wants it to go. So they concentrate on what will earn their graduates the largest immediate salaries." As Edward Hare put it, "'Business schools' are a business…. I'd be reluctant to blame the business schools. They … give students tools. But they rarely can teach motives, ethics, and ideals." The phenomenon is not confined to the United States. B.V. Krishnamurthy described the concerns of a hundred e-mail inquiries from prospective students at his business school. All but two inquired primarily about the earnings of previous graduates.

Eric Mueller comments that management will not be a profession until it requires "formal qualification," is governed by a "regulatory body," and establishes an "objective means to assess competence." As a result, business schools provide the business world, in his view, with no more than an "effective, albeit expensive, recruiting service." In citing 7 requirements of a profession, of which management meets only 1 or 2, Roger Manley commented that "the thought that management is being 'deprofessionalized' strikes me as a bit of a stretch." Patrick O'Rourke added, "Let's forget about striving to gain acceptance as a profession in the traditional sense, as we are not comparing like with like. The French term of 'cadre' may best accommodate the reality of business practitioners in a modern world."

Respondents also provided some possible remedies. Osbert Lancaster suggested that what is needed is an injection of "'craftsmanship'�"broadly conceived as doing something well for its own sake," into the thinking of managers and those who train them. Gerald Nanninga comments, "Maybe what we need are fewer professors and more mentors." Karen Dempster suggests that students and faculty with more practical experience, as well as accreditors willing to recognize programs that "tailor learning for students" rather than just meet rigid standards, would help.

Can business schools do much about what may be largely market-driven phenomena in a field that has never qualified as a profession? Or are there ways in which business schools can reprofessionalize management? While looking over responses to this month's column, I noticed a newspaper article describing a growing number of young managers who are making so much money managing, in many cases other people's money, that they have decided to forego an MBA. Does this suggest that, by freeing up classroom spaces for those interested in managing people, that the market may help redress problems described above? What do you think?

10 Reasons Why You Should Get an MBA, by Thomas MacKay, CIO

Here is the short version-

1. It gives you credibility with your business peers.

2. It teaches you to think like a business person.
3. An MBA is your ticket to the inner circle.

4. You will communicate better with your business colleagues.

5. An MBA better prepares you to solve business problems.

6. You'll learn how to read and interpret business statements.

7. An MBA can give you an opportunity to deepen your technical expertise.

8. You can apply business school classwork to your day job.

9. You'll polish your written communication skills.

10. You'll learn standard tools for organizing business activity and managing business processes.

Read this to learn how to make effective presentations.