The next big thing - digestion
March 31, 2008
Over the last couple of weeks it seems there has been a dearth of ‘new’ or rather interesting things to comment upon. Perhaps we’re in that period that Jeff Nolan describes as ‘the new incrementalism’ where:
As I survey the landscape of consumer and business focused software and service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment. Something like Twitter is ground breaking in terms of break out adoption, but what about the other 10,000 startups? There are few bold “ah-hah” ideas, lot’s of social this or that, and mostly a bunch of companies hoping to draft on the perceived success of a few gorillas. Will we suffer through yet another “year of the mobile web” or “the semantic web”?
More likely at least some of us are stuck in a Twitterverse where instant conversation means more than considered blog post reading. Jeff’s point is well made but then I think Vinnie Mirchandani is nearer the mark when he adds:
As I have said many times, there is no magic "innovation" IT budget. You have to show the CIO and business executives ways to chisel existing spend to justify budgets for your cool stuff.
The same is true for professionals. In one sense UK buyers are fortunate. We can watch from afar as money is poured into startups in the US and observe as the me-toos pile up against one another in the vain hope that one or other will gather traction while awaiting the inevitable 90%+ fallout.
But while both Jeff and Vinnie’s arguments fit well with the enterprise world I sense we’re in a period of digestion. The arguments around whether saas/on-demand is the next big thing - at least from a professional standpoint - have yet to sink in though I see plenty of signs that we’ve moved beyond the ‘curious interest’ stage to one of at least dabbling.
Jeff talks about FriendFeed but when taken together with that other service du jour Twitter, they merely represent features of a much broader alternative to existing methods of communication and collaboration. They can easily be replicated, extended and taken to a new place where value is obvious rather than implied. Who’s doing that I wonder? I’ve seen signs at places like HiveLive but the technology needs to deliver something meaningful and so far we only have glimpses. Bring on the case studies that all can understand.
I’m with Jeff when he says we live with the curse of Web 2.0 as somehow representing a blurring of the lines between business and consumer. But I’m far from convinced that we have seen what this means for developers building for business.
We may be short of head turning innovations that make us go ‘wow’ but then incremental isn’t bad. Evolution rather than revolution has, after all, seemed more comfortable.
How does FASB 161 help?
March 31, 2008
I see from CFO.com that Charles Mulford, a professor of accounting at Georgia Tech thinks that FASB 161 will help avoid the obfuscation that characterized Enron’s public financial statements. I hope he’s right but I doubt it.
The perennial problem with derivatives is fixing a valuation upon which an auditor can rely. To quote from CFO:
To be sure, the standard changes nothing about the accounting for derivatives. But it does make the often-cloudy reporting of them much more transparent to the users of financial statements, Mulford thinks. "With these tables, derivatives can’t be hidden from view in a way they were on, say, Enron’s balance sheet and income statement," he told CFO.com. "Investors will be better able to assess the contribution of derivatives to earnings and financial risk, and in the process, they’ll be better able to judge earnings sustainability."
I’m not sure how this works. Trying to understand the way in which instruments are supported by counterparty transactions has been a devil of a job for all sorts of reasons.
Each underpinning transaction requires analysis and assessment yet each carries specific risks that are not immediately obvious. How an average investor is supposed to make sense of this is beyond me when in reality, derivatives are little more than a bet placed in a sophisticated casino.
Tags: derivatives, audit
My del.icio.us bookmarks for March 27th through March 29th
March 29, 2008
These are my del.icio.us bookmarks for March 27th through March 29th:
- Business Technology : SAP Sued Over Tech Jargon - SAP could be in for a pounding on this one if ther fraud allegations stick.
- The thing about useful stuff is: Buzzword - an impressive online word processor - Another online wordprocessor. Great it may be but does the world need another one?
- Best Engaging Communities: Making it easier to comment on blogs - Good points about the engagement part of community building
- QIK | Streaming video right from your phone - I sincerely hope this MBA doesn't plan training as a CPA. It was painful to watch
- Main Page - CWiki - Capgemini Wiki
My del.icio.us bookmarks for March 25th through March 27th
March 27, 2008
These are my del.icio.us bookmarks for March 25th through March 27th:
- Time to Start Eating Our Own Dog Food | Know your RSS from your elbow - the bpodr blog - messiahs of connectivity and conversation can often appear lost with their heads buried up to their shoulders in their lower intestines. - what a great quote
- Chinese dissident jailed for five years after human rights petition | World news | The Guardian - Totally off topic but if you care about human right as part of your CSR efforts then this story is well worth contemplating
- 1968’s predictions for 2008 - These seem remarkably close to being right.
- A List Apart: Articles: Sign Up Forms Must Die - How much information does a business need to engage with potential customers/clients? The notion of gradual engagement is a good one.
- Nicholas Bate: Five Potential Productivity Fallacies - If yo'ure into productivity then you need to read this. Especially the bit about counting time
