Shel Israel's Naked Conversations Blog

Don’t get me wrong. Hell will freeze over before I would ever vote for Newt Gingrich. First, off the man was named for a lizard. Secondly–and more seriously–you can directly track the origins of the current polarization between the two major US political parties on Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker of the House.

And like every candidate in this the most mud-slinging president primary campaign in history, he has been made to look bad in a great many ways. It is hard for me and others to recognize what sometimes happens and that is good ideas come from bad people.

A few weeks back, Gingrich proposed that we build a space colony on the moon and that has been the subject of a great deal of ridicule. Comedians are still having their fun with that one and Tweeters still wonder what Gingrich was smoking.

But wait a minute. Forget who the source is. Think about the idea. We elected the current incumbent because we thought he had a vision for America, because his eloquence fooled us into thinking he could lead better than he has led. And among his early actions was to shut down NASA’s manned space program. Too expensive he said. These are tough times.

So a bunch of our nation’s brightest scientists got laid off and a whole supply chain of human’s got financially hurt in the name of this great frugality.

Years ago, a young visionary president who made great speeches was elected president. In his first, special address to Congress, in his first of three springtimes in office Jack Kennedy said, “Before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

And, as I recall, their was a landslide of comic parody, as well as editorial columns explaining why man could never walk on the moon and besides what would he do once he got there?

The answer, of course, is the reason people should walk on the moon is the same reason why humpback whales jump completely out of the ocean: Because they can.

It seems to me, that what makes us unique from other animals is that our entire history is based on going beyond what we have done. Before we consider the benefits or catastrophes, we simply have to see if we can do it.

Why should man walk on the moon? Because some day, we can build a colony on it? What will we do then? Look around and see what else we can do, where else we can go, we can learn more about the moon, and thus about the earth and our universe and how life got to here and anywhere else that it might exist.

And yes the cost is huge at a time when people are losing their homes. But to me, the cost is an investment, one that will create a great many new jobs that may be more appealing than the manufacturing our current president seems to be focused upon.

What we learn along the way will give the world new technology that is likely to pervade into computing, science, medecine, earth sciences, the classroom and places that we cannot yet imagine.

It seems to me that Newt’s Moon Colony is the only idea I’ve heard from any candidate for president, and what we need more than business managers, speechmakers and ideologues in the White House is someone with vision and leadership capabilities.

No I do not want Newt to be president. But I do think he should be commended–not ridiculed–for this idea which s entirely worthy of consideration and intelligent debate.

Don’t you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yahoo! has announced appointment of a new CEO: Scott Thompson. Who, you might ask? Well he’s a guy who lifted PayPal from a billion-dollar subsidiary of eBay into a multibillion dollar entity. What does he plan to do, you might ask. Well, he doesn’t yet. In a conference call with press and analysts he kept emphasizing that he just got there and he needs time.

That’s precisely what Carol Bartz said for the years during which she was at the helm, watching the Yahoo ship slowly and steadily sink below the sea of change that the company has ignored for more than a decade.

How will Yahoo under Thompson be different from Yahoo under Thompson? He doesn’t know he needs time and thus the once-magnificent Yahoo, once a flagship of online consumerism continues to sink–perhaps just little faster.

Yahoo used to be filled with young, bright, irreverent determined talent. They were part of the culture that moved people’s habits online. It was where we began to talk with each other, shopped, got our news, stored and shared our photos. It is one of the fountainheads from which sprung the ideas and entities that dominate online today.

It’s survival has been in question for a long time and before that it’s direction as well as it’s decision-making. It’s founder declared search to be worthless, which turned out to be a bit short-sighted. His replacement had a vision to Hollywood and Silicon Valley cultures.  That seemed like it would be as daunting as getting sheep and cattle to graze on the same land. It proved to be harder than mating them.

The talent in the company remained for many years at the middle of the company. They did not start leaving the ship when the leaks began. They only started leaving–reluctantly when they realized that the decision-making level was clueless on how to stem the leaks and adjust course.

In short, Yahoo is one big directionless mess, lacking mission, vision, talent and a constituency that includes, early adopters, social strategists and a compelling reason for any adviser to choose them over companies like Google who thought search had some chance of being worthwhile.

Into this steps Scott Thompson. I never heard of him before today, which says nothing about his ability to lead and inspire a foundering and demoralized team. I’ve read a bit about him today and could find not a single quality in his past to make me feel any more confident today than I did yesterday in terms of Yahoo’s future.

What I see is someone who managed PayPal during a period of organic growth. He replaced the innovators and disrupters who started the company and made it valuable, and he made PayPal dull but valuable.  Yahoo is already dull. It loses more value every day.

What had I hoped would happen? Who would I have looked for to replace the acerbic Carol Bartz?

Well, I would have looked for someone very different from Bartz. The only difference I see is that the new captain does not swear like a sailor. Other than that, they are both visionless managers who understand operating margins and SEC regulations and none of the stuff that goes to the soul of a living corporation.

Yahoo needs a visionary leader. Instead, they chose someone who seems to have less vision than Ray Charles, and I doubt he can sing or play the piano with any unique style.

Yahoo needed as Steve Jobs. Instead they got something that is quieter and grayer. They need to find and excite new, younger

customers. Instead they have someone who understands operational efficiencies. They needed a showman of  Nolan Bushnell qualities. Instead they have selected someone with all the charisma of a tax auditor. They need someone who can present a vision to a new generation of users, rather than faire well at a shareholders’ meeting.

Yahoo needs to join the social conversation. Bartz eschewed it completely. She thought that Yahoo’s customers were the advertisers, when in fact they are the people advertisers want to reach and we have left Yahoo in droves over the years. Yahoo’s constituency is now older, slower to adopt new technology, has less disposable income and is likely to live [and spend] for a shorter time than his or her grandchildren in college.

Is it too late for Yahoo? probably. Is there still hope? Of course there is.

But the appointment Thompson gives me less of it, not more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the last day of an odd year and many people are reflecting on life. Some of my friends are using blogs to write about the death of the blog. Others are reviewing the great moments in technology or social media in 2011. But too me, there were very few truly great moments in technology. We have as an industry evolved from a period of great disruption and are now focused on refinement.

This may be good for users and business, but it is pretty boring for writers, or so it seems to me.

So, I thought I would dedicate my last post of the old year to one of my great passions: books. I read a lot–almost entirely nonfiction.  I like action/adventure, biography and history, which dominates this list of my 2011 favorites.

So, in order of my preference, here’s my list

• Unbroken by Laura Hilenbrand. This is my 2011 Shel Book Award winner, perhaps the only great book of the past year. Hilenbrand’s last book was about Seabiscuit, a homely and unwanted horse that turn out to be the world’s fastest. Unbroken is about Louis Zamperini, a juvenile delinquent to emerge into possibly the world’s fastest human. But his competing career was interrupted by World War II where he joined the Air Core. That in turn got interrupted by his plane crashing, where he drifted with others for an epic length of time in shark-infested waters, before the Japanese picked him up. That began a sage of abuse in interment camps.  If you only read one book on this list, choose this.
• The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser. This book examines how Online Companies watch your habits and choose what you get to see in social networks, search, purchasing and even movie rentals. The book opened my eyes to the impact of data personalization practiced by Facebook, Google and virtually all major online businesses. It made personalization my top concern in technology.
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson This is currently Amazon’s top seller. An authorized biography by perhaps the best current biographer, this book gives you an inside view of Jobs and what happened along the way of his piloting the company from start up into the world’s most valuable company. I already knew a fair amount of Jobs in the early years and found Isaacson’s depiction completely accurate. I learned a great deal that I did not know about recent years. While this book is definitely worth a read, I somehow found myself disappointed in a few ways. While it is a balanced look at one of technology’s great genius/assholes, I felt the hard-to-reach soul of Jobs remained out-of-reach to the author and as compensation, he gave a little too much redundant information on Jobs obsessions with control.
• On China, by Henry Kissinger. I am no great lover of Henry Kissinger, but I cannot deny his brilliance. I am not certain he actually wrote this deep and comprehensive work, but whoever did is one Hell of a good writer. Kissinger looks far, far back then brings us into the times where he was a player and then into China today. It is my 7th book on China and in my view the best. There are a few slightly self-serving sections, but Kissinger manages overall, keeps his significant ego under control.
•  Fire on the Horizon by journalist Tom Shroder and oil rig captain John Konrad takes you inside the events leading up to and including the BP Gulf oil rig disaster. It lets you understand–but certainly not condone–how people who were not idiots could have made a string of decisions that led to the worst oil spill disaster in history. Very well written. You get to see the humanity in the players.
• In Spite of the Gods, The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce. In preparation for my first visit to India this year, I read three books, each dealing with modern India [after the death of Gandhi.  In my view this one, written by a Financial Times editor who lived there was clearly the best. It gave me great insights into the experiences I had during my brief visit.
• Rawhide Down by Del Quentin Wilber tells the story of the near assassination of Ronald Reagan by one of the secret service agents who was there. It is a surprisingly candid, human and gripping narrative. Quite well-written.
• Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann. Is a Kindle Single–essentially a long magazine article by a journalist who visited north Japan after it was walloped by a tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster. He paints a bleak picture that educated me far beyond the news accounts I had read. It got me to understand and appreciate the potential for the new Kindle Single publications that Amazon has been pushing.
• David Suskind by Stephen Battaglio. There was a time when television could have stirred a Renaissance of culture, news reporting and shared information. It obviously lost. Susskind, along with NBC’s David Sarnoff was a giant in trying to bring quality to TV when it was still new. I find Suskind’s story–and  the whole issue of what happened to TV to be of great relevance to those of us concerned with the future of social media. A good read.

May the new year bring you joy. If 2011 was a bit odd, I hope 2012 will be more even for you no matter what you do.

 

 

John Naughton, writing in the Guardian has a good piece based on email he received from Mark Zuckerberg, forecasting the death of email. It will be replaced, if Zuck has his way, with Facebook’s new Messenger service. Naughton does a good job of refuting the self-serving prophesy, but I think there are more reason why the imminent death of email is less vision and more hallucination.

Naughhton is wrong on one point. Predicting the death of email is not new. I’ve been hearing such forecasts ever since blogging and social media started gaining momentum. Dr. Danah Boyd, the a professor at UC Berkeley researching the impact of social media on youth, made the prediction at a 2004 conference, and she built her case on the same premise that Zuckerberg uses: Young people are using less and less email.

Seven years have gone by. Many of the youth Boyd studied are now college graduates and in the workplace where I’m betting most of them now have to use email and see the wisdom of that requirement. Dr. Boyd herself is now at Microsoft Research, where I’m betting the company requires her to use email for her confidential business communications.

And that word “confidential” hits a nerve when we discuss Facebook Messenger eclipsing email. I can think of no company to trust less than Facebook with your confidential business information. Facebook has a much-noted and hopefully, long-remembered disdain for user privacy. They seem to think that if you post content there, then they own it, and they just might elect to reuse it in collaboration with advertisers.

There are other reasons that email will endure. For example:

• The archiving is better and more searchable.
• Managing and downloading attachments remain superior to Facebook
• It’s easier to review long threads that take place over lengthy periods of time
• It’s often easier to find a specific conversation in email
• With GMail, it is easier to manage and delete spam than it is in Facebook

Don’t get me wrong. I remain an early and passionate champion of social media in work and life. I could write a book about why I think you should use social media. In fact I did–twice. But I do not think social media will replace email any more than Rock music replaced the symphony. Yes, I probably use less email than I would if social had not come along. But then, I’d probably listen to more symphonies if Rock had not come along.

But at the end of the day, with all the social networking we use, there is a time to communicate online in private. EMail remains an excellent choice in many, many situations, and for me, when Facebook and privacy are mentioned in the same sentence, I find myself becoming immediately uncomfortable.

I tend to avoid predictions, because the neat thing about the future is it always brings surprises when it becomes the present. But I will predict that email will outlive Facebook. Don’t get me wrong. I recognize that Facebook is the great success story of the first decade of this century.

Today the conventional wisdom is that the company is unstoppable in its attempt to transform the Web into one huge walled megalopolis called Facebook.

The tech cemeteries and old age homes are filled with other companies that held similar aspirations and positions in their times, companies that took down giants to become giants then, in turn, got taken down by some disruptive upstart that they had disdained.

Facebook is just a company. Like those before it will flourish, grow fat and old and be replaced. On the other hand email is a generic thing and in one form or another is likely to last a much longer time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wife Paula, dog Brewster & some bearded guy. Photo by Shel

[Note: I first posted this in December 2003 and have reposted it almost every December since. I hope you enjoy it.]

I grew up in the 1950s in New Bedford, Mass., an overwhelmingly Christian city. Christmas was the biggest day of the year.  Schools were closed. Parents enjoyed rare paid days off. Often, snow coated the ground. Churches stood in every neighborhood and their bell towers would chime carols all day long.

I was a Jewish kid and I knew this day was not for me, But, I just couldn’t help feel the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be simultaneously European and Jewish, were ambivalent.  They loved the decorations and the excitement they saw in their younger son, but still, they kept reminding us that we were merely observers of someone else’s special day.

But we were active observers. We could not resist.

Our family would drive to gentile neighborhoods where we admire the lights, decorations and even manger scenes. One year, we  ventured all the way to Boston–in those days a two-hour drive. There we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons. If you looked from one side, you could see the Golden Dome of the Massachusetts, state house, a symbol of our government. If you looked the other way, there was the venerable Park Street Church. Beside our reindeer, was a huge, illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas Day and aunts, uncles and cousins family came for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room. It was just “the Holiday.”

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy.

As a Jewish kid, we celebrated Chanukah. There were gifts, and cholesterol/carb-soaked latkas. We Chanukah songs and played with toy tops called dreydle and it was fun.

But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed to pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere: in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Chanukah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, and my brother and I looked forward to it long in advance.

But grandfather gelt wasn’t the main event.  How could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit toy-making elves, and flying reindeer?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if most were  only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality of day.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow Elementary School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how my Christian friends had awakened Dec. 25 to find living rooms, like Cornucopias, overflowing with great stuff like Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer sleds, red wagons and Erector sets. All they had to do was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before for some strange guy named Santa Claus.

I wondered about Santa. He looked too fat for the chimneys he allegedly used for entry. He never seemed to land on burning embers and his suit never looked sooty. But still, the proof was there that the guy delivered.

 

But beyond the gifts and Santa mystery, there were the miracles. The Christian holiday was about the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” We had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era– latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against Assyrian invaders, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. At a time when the stereotyped Jewish male was a bit of a wimp, Maccabee made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, our Jackie Robinson. He was Jewish, tough and if you didn’t like it, he could kick your butt.

I started remembering all this while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had boasted the highest murder rate in the country–outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and the Sun Microsystems campus [now Oracle].

But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long leather coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.” There wasn’t space I guess, for the tagline, which of course is, “Good will toward men.”

Tomorrow will be my 68th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Assyrian butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants–Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus,  atheists, Confucians and even Republicans. In my travels, I’ve come to know people of many faiths and hues and I always marvel at how very much alike we are when we sit down and try to know each other.

I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come true and I will be grateful to you if your prayers deliver the dream.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening–albeit without ribbons on my head. Monday our home will filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth.”

It’s December and like a great many professionals in the tech industry, I’m trying to determine what events to plan and budget what I do for next year. There are a great many people looking at the same time/place/budget issues, ranging from home office folk like me, to C-elevel global enterprise executives.

It surprises me how incredibly difficult it is to gather what I need. I asked about this on my social networks, and three sites were frequently recommended: Plancast, Upcoming.com and Gary’s Guide. Each of these sites is useful if you want to find a meetup, tweetup or greetup in a specific major city, in the next 30 days or so.

But they are useless in letting you look at the country or the world over the next year and they are even worse at letting you slice by industry segment, rather than geographic megalopolis.

What I did earlier today is exactly what I did last December. I went to various sites to see what dates have been set for Techcrunch Launch SF & NYC, SxSW, Launch, SxSW, MacWorld Expo, PopTech, TED, Gnomedex, Web 2.0, BlogWorld Expo and DEMO. There’s also an international element. I want to know when Les Web is taking place in Paris, when Nasscom Conclave will be held in India and what’s big and promising in China or Japan.

I won’t go to all of these. But knowing when and where they are being held is useful to me in many ways. To make my decision, I don’t want a week-by-week list, I want to see 2012 on a single screen [scrolldown permitted].

If you stop right there, you will make me happy. If you want to start there then continue tp the point where you could make revenue for your effort, I see quite a few cool ways to expand:

• Drill-down by segments for social web, technologists, B2B, etc. indepth
• Offer links to all the sites where we can see details and register.
• Provide space for citizen reviews.
• Hire professionals to give reviews available just on your site.

It surprises me that this does not seem to exist. If I overlooked something please let me know. If you would like to start something like this in your spare time, I will be happy to help you figure out how to build and market it.

I’m convinced it is a mousetrap worth building.