Monthly Archives: April 2006

Research Seminar

We’ve spend Friday and Saturday in Maienfeld, a small village in the pitoresque Heidiland, and brainstormed about the “research strategy” of our new chair at the ETH. Although I’ve been working for a couple months already, we were still missing the big picture. It was quite productive, I’m looking forward to the next couple of years at the chair…

Simon Phipps’ sees 6 OS business models

From the SDForum – The Future of Commercial Open Source Think Tank Summary Report
(the report is licensed under a CC license):

  1. Mixed: Using open source as a cocmponent of a larger work (ex. Websphere)
  2. ISP: using open source to provide infrastructure services. Invisible – Customers don’t see it
  3. Core: Open source is your product (RedHat)
  4. For the Glory: companies that write/contribute to open source to generate publicity which can be converted into revvenue streams
  5. Consultation: using community for the purpose of delivering service (ex. Covalent)
  6. Deployment: using open source to provide and extend online services (ex. Amazon, Google, salesforce.com)

Open and Shut?: The Basement Interviews

Open and Shut?: The Basement Interviews

A short tale about the challenges and opportunities facing scribblers in the age of the Internet, and six rules exemplified.

Richard Poynder has conducted interviews with Richard Stallman, Eric Reymond, Lawrence Lessig (and others). While this is a lot to read (each interview is about 35 pages), they are very interesting and reveal a lot about the personalities of the involved. (Links to the single interviews are at the bottom of the article, and the interview transcripts are available as pdf at the bottom of each interview article.

This is good reading stuff, if you, like me, are in bed with 38.6Ã

Bibliothek

Note to myself: Order this book:

TitelLinkMen, machines, and modern times / by Elting E. Morison
ImpressumLinkCambridge, Mass. : M.I.T. Press, 1966

Aldrich, John H., and Forrest D. Nelson. Linear Probability, Logit and Probit Models. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1984.

Agresti, Alan, and Barbara Finlay. Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences. San Francisco: Dellen Publishing, 1986, pp. 292-305. ISBN: 0023011203 .

Dougherty, Deborah. “Building Grounded Theory: Some Principles and Practices.” In The Blackwell Companion to Organizations. Edited by J. A. C. Baum. Blackwell Publishers, 2002, pp. 849-867. ISBN: 0631216944.

Strategy

  • Grameen Phone in Bangladesh by Iqbal Quadir launched in March 1997, today 6m subscribers, countries largest telecoms operator(Grameen Electricity comes next) (through microloans). Better thn foreign aid: “Top down approaches do not work. The botleneck is at the top of the bottle.”
  • Vodaphone sold Japanese unit J-Phone (bought as 3rd largest operator in 2001), expected to sell 45% stake in Verizon Wireless. Failed to exploit economies of scale (due to different technology).
  • Name some expamples of business models that become threatened: Phones, Music labels, software companies, book stores

Letter to the editors: Regarding the German Railway

I am glad that Mr Mehdorn considers Rail traffic still as his core business, but then I wonder how much attention is paid to his peripheral activities. Have you ever sat in a train which unannounced and unexpectedly stopped for an hour due to an inaugeration celebration of that train, where some free sandwiches were distributed to angry passengers, leading to missing your last connection train, forcing you to stay in a hotel overnight? Have you been stopped in a train for an hour, due to a platform fire in the next station? Had you ever had to wait for 2 hours in a train because your locomotive had to pull another train whose locomotive was broken, leaving you without air conditioning in a small box whose windows cannot be opened in the summer heat? Did an employee at the ticket counter ever recommended you to go to McDonalds and buy your train ticket there as they were cheaper there at the moment (German Railway had a one-time offer selling tickets through McDonalds)? Did you ever try to order a German Railway ticket from a foreign country where most of the flexible pricing options are not available to book, leaving you with the most expensive pricing? Did you ever order through a ticket through the Internet online order system where tickets were mailed to “Germany” although “Switzerland” was explicitly chosen as address, having the tickets travel for three weeks by mail and arriving to late at your place? Do you realize that monitors, showing the percentage of punctuality of trains, which had been mounted in stations were silently removed again, as they were often showing embarassingly low percentages? A friend who works at the railway control center is frustrated because turnouts and signals are not maintained anymore. Instead they wait until they actually break and repair them only when needed as this saves money overall (but causes an annoying interruption for passengers each time). I generally like to travel by train, but I do understand why Mr Mehdorn prefers to fly.