I came across an article in the “Daily KOS” today regarding AIG and it’s role in the glbal recession. Here’s a short excerpt:
The size of our [editor's note: the US] national economy this year is roughly $15 trillion. The size of the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) market is $64 trillion. The whole world GDP is about $56 trillion. How could the CDS market be larger than the world GDP combined?
More analysis after the break:
A recent IDC report on piracy in Brunei states that for every $1.00 spent on software licenses, an additional $1.25 is also spent in value added services.
Why is this important to us? And why is an OSS friendly guy blogging about software licenses?
Turn the equation around.
More after the break:
I was reading up on the audit profession and I came across a CFO article on “Top 10x ways to cut your audit bill“. Article has some good practical advice on managing the auditors.
More after the break:
In a “zero-sum game“, there is always one loser and one winner. Just like in a game of poker, what one party wins, the other party loses. I’ve been reading a lot about the economic downturn lately and it reminded me of a conversation I had with one of the chaps at the office –> The Chinese character for “Risk” is written as = Crisis + Opportunity.
So – in these times of economic downturn and crisis, who stands to gain? Sun Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogs:
In the midst of this economic downturn, discussions related to free and open source software have substantially heated up - this is no longer a peripheral discussion with CIO's - cost reduction related to open source adoption has become a focal point for decision makers across the world.
I also found this gem of an article about a hedge fund manager who bet big on the eventual credit crunch and failure of large financial services institutions.
This really shows two completely opposite ways to squeeze an opportunity out of these current crisis. Either (1) through leveraging on cost efficiencies and delivering a lower TCO product than the competition and competing on price, or (2) winning through zero-sum games on the way the market is going to go. John Paulson made a filthy amount of return on (2), although at a staggering amount of risk. The jury is still out – whether Sun can pull the fat from the fire and turn around that great company and really make a comeback.
Again through Wired Magazine, I came across some excellent articles from a blog written by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA).
Let me give you a few quotes:
From “Top ten things lawyers should know about internet research #10:”
It is thus in interest of taxpayers for governments to promote and sometimes directly fund universal deployment of network infrastructure. More generally, government needs to prevent monopoly control over essential resources, mandate collection of traffic reports from ISPs to validate their claims, be a better role model for operational security, and coordinate the development of a roadmap for Internet security similar to that of the energy sector (DHS is working on this last one).
from the same post:
We can learn from our mistakes. The false assumption that competing members of a profit-maximizing ecosystem will cooperate toward architectural innovations not in their short-term interest is remarkably consistent across failed attempts to solve major problems of the Internet (e.g., ATM, multicast, routing security, IPv6, DNSSEC, QOS). …
Perhaps this is the best part:
Expecting the private sector to navigate these dimensions (security, scalability, sustainability, and stewardship) while subject to relentless pressure to minimize costs is a recipe for failure; even public-private partnerships are not free of these pressures.
Some analysis of how this can be applied in Brunei’s context after the jump:
Zappos is an online apparel retailer that started out selling shoes but ended up in as a full apparel retailer. Their mission statement is not unique, but I feel what is different about them is how they align themselves to meet that goal objective. They have a great sense of humor and they really are embracing the whole social media thing.
Today I came across this excellent blog post from their CEO, Tony Hsieh, and there are a few bullet points I just want to re-iterate here:
These are excellent ideas. Lets try apply them to Brunei’s ICT industry [report by Dr Yong Chee Tuan and Hj Abdul Rahim Derus].
These two posts by Tony Hsieh and Dr Yong Chee Tuan are such rich sources of material for us to talk about. e.g. the Digital Review of Asia Pacific 2007-2008 report mentions a lot of OSS, and re: Brunei “many of the e-government project proposals that are based on open source applications are not usually lower in cost than those based on proprietary systems. The lower initial cost of open source systems is sometimes offset by the implementation/customization and the long-term maintenance costs.”.
But that’s a story for another blog post … more after the break: