Small Victory blogger Michele asked readers to explain why they love their states, and Lester Norton of Solonor created a blog, organized by state, to post those responses and solicit more comments on a separate site (via Procrastination). The California comments are, unfortunately, full of political spitball-firing. People who hate the idea of California—like people who hate the idea of Texas—might want to understand why other people love the place before they dismiss it with political labels. The culture of any place, especially one as mythic as these states, is subtler than the stereotypes.
If I have to reduce it to two factors, I love (Southern) California for the amazing sunlight and for a culture that encourages people to strive to do great things. Dallas is full of strivers, but they're mostly striving for success, measured primarily in material wealth. Like power striving in Washington and status striving in New York, that isn't as interesting to me, in part because it doesn't engender such individualistic definitions of success.
On the down side, the government of California is truly dysfunctional. It's a wonder the whole place doesn't collapse. [Posted 3/7.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 07, 2003 • Comments
Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds think Bush looked tired and drained last night. David Frum thinks he looked calm. I'm with David. Last night's performance seemed calculated to counter the "Bush is a blustering cowboy" meme. He was firm and fatherly, not the smirking frat boy or the quick-on-the-trigger Jacksonian American of antiwar stereotypes. I was struck by his seemingly spontaneous "That's a good question" to the reporter who asked how we avoid letting Iraq become another Vietnam. Maybe the response was a calculated performance—who can tell?—but he seemed like he'd really thought about that question. Certainly Colin Powell has. [Posted 3/7.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 07, 2003 • Comments
For those who enjoyed Googlism, Jay Manifold recommends another Google-based site, Google Fight. Here's the TFAIE-based fight. [Posted 3/7.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 07, 2003 • Comments
I devoted much of my college career to studying the Renaissance. I've recently rediscovered that interest, focusing particularly on Galileo and his milieu. And I just came across the Galileo Project, a cool site on just that subject, put together by historians and students at Rice University.
On a side note, Galileo's elder daughter, the subject of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, was originally named Virginia. She took the name Maria Celeste, in honor of her father's cosmological studies, when she entered a convent. [Posted 3/7.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 07, 2003 • Comments
Having always questioned the business savvy of the AOL Time Warner merger, I was particularly amused to read this piece on the Wharton site. It demonstrates the conventional wisdom in the Postrel house: that no one who applied economically informed strategic thinking to that merger would find any reason for it. What could these companies do as a single entity that they couldn't do through business contracts between separate companies?
And yet many experts had doubts about the AOL strategy from the start. In any merger, says [Wharton management and economics professor Daniel A.] Levinthal, the key question is whether it will accomplish something that could not be done more simply in other ways.
For example, in announcing the merger, executives of the two companies said they wanted to provide America Online's Internet subscribers the music and publishing information offered by Time Warner, and to use Time Warner's cable operations to deliver that data online at lightening speed.
Much of this, according to Levinthal, might have been accomplished with licensing agreements and joint ventures, while keeping the companies separate. That would have avoided all the difficulties of blending two very different corporate cultures, and it would have made it easier to abandon joint projects that weren't panning out.
"The fact that there is a potential leveraging doesn't automatically mean there ought to be a merger," he says. "There can be a big gap between the latent economic opportunities and the organizational challenges to making it happen."
The article's best passage is this one:
Gerald R. Faulhaber, professor of business and public policy and management, says that when the merger was announced, he and many other experts assumed the real motive was for AOL to get access to Time Warner's cable systems, even though the companies emphasized their goal of offering Time Warner's content to AOL customers. "Turns out we were wrong and they were telling the truth," Faulhaber says. "They thought it was about content ... I never thought that made any sense whatsoever."
AOL didn't need to pay a fortune for content, he says, since many content providers were eager to be on AOL. Many, in fact, were paying for the privilege. "I think the merger in some sense caused them to focus on the wrong stuff," suggests Faulhaber, who was chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission while it was evaluating the proposed merger. American Online "tried to become a content company. I think it was a huge mistake for them to do that."
[Posted 3/7.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 07, 2003 • Comments
Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek makes an important point about the Internet boom:
While hundreds of Internet startups are dying or selling out after nearly three years of being pummeled by the rotten economy, many of the technologies they created are destined to live on and play important roles in the future—either via acquisitions, in new startups, or through copycatting by the industry's giants. Think of it as a mammoth recycling project. "The company is the most ephemeral institution in the information technology world. The people are perennial, the technologies are repurposed, and the products find new homes in surviving companies," says Geoffrey A. Moore, chairman of tech consulting firm Chasm Group in San Mateo, Calif.
Although the boom is remembered as a time of frivolity and excess, it was also a bountiful gusher of business creativity. Nearly 6,000 tech companies were financed by venture capitalists, and since there was little pressure to achieve profits in the short term, entrepreneurs were given permission to dream—and in some cases, hallucinate.
Sure, plenty of ideas were silly. But the era also produced an abundance of ideas that were mind-bending, even if their inventors didn't survive as independent businesses. Take ICQ, the instant-messaging pioneer, which flourished after its 1998 sale to America Online. In many cases, the challenge facing the new caretakers of these innovations is to take a potentially world-changing idea and give it business legs.
For another take on creative foolishness, see my NYT column on John Nye's theory of "lucky fools." [Posted 3/7.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 07, 2003 • Comments
Alan Kors, who has obviously become a Googlism addict, sends the link to the "ultimate Googlism. [Posted 3/1.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 01, 2003 • Comments
My emailbox is running over with spam. The amount seems to have multiplied several times over in the past couple of weeks. What's worse than the junk is that my email filtering system mixes it together with email from readers whose names aren't in my address book. I try to catch your notes, but sometimes I miss. (And even when I do read them, I may or may not reply, depending—rather randomly—on what else is going on.) If you have recommendations of ways to cut down on the spam without excluding emails from readers I don't know and preferably without changing my email address, please pass them on.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 01, 2003 • Comments
Corante.com, which is a great source of filtered tech news and related blogs, has added a biotech blog to its lineup. Called Living Code, it's written by Richard Gayle, "an industry veteran, medical researcher, writer and rabid info-found who spent more than 15 years as a senior scientist at one the industry's big success stories - Immunex." [Posted 3/1.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 01, 2003 • Comments
Blogger Colby Cosh rightly questions C. David Noziglia's account below. (Thanks to Tom Brennan for the link.) Provincial ignoramus that I am, I didn't realize that Koln is Cologne. The city was bombed by U.S. forces late in WWII, but that's not the (in)famous bombing, which was conducted by the British years before. [Posted 3/1.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 01, 2003 • Comments