That’s the gist of a piece I wrote for CSO on the future of anti-virus software.
Also see this related post by hellnbak, why not just tell the truth?
Update: Robin Bloor, an analyst mentioned in this article, has posted some comments on it, though they do not seem balanced. For instance, he praises Symantec and Kaspersky and condemns BitDefender, though all three would still seem to be using signatures.
The prolific and provocative Henry Jenkins has plenty to say on new media and old and their impact on culture.
“The difference between someone who’s got 24/7 broadband access at home and on the road compared to someone who got ten minutes of access a day in a school or public library…is going to have real effects on our society, which is why I’m concerned about new media literacy. It also has consequences globally, if Americans are regularly in correspondence with people around the world online, but only hearing from those who have access to these technologies. ”
We also talked about the idea of personalized media and whether it represents the future.
“Personalized media . . .would be any media that I could customize to my own particular needs. I’m increasingly interested not in personalized media but in socialized media, that is in a network society it’s our ability to use these tools in concert with others to mobilize large numbers of people toward a common cause or tackle a problem that the individuals couldn’t solve by themselves.”
He also thinks that media companies have lost control of their brand and content, with ongoing repercussions.
I talked with him for Shukan Daiyamondo in Japan.
Here’s the full text as I submitted it.
Henry Jenkins world voice
My latest New York Times column, Trying to put New Zip Into Moore’s Law, suggests that it can, and looks at the commercial potential for self-assembling nanotechnology.
Over on Big Think I’ve reviewed Silicon Dragon, a book about China’s wave of high-tech entrepreneurs (see Mitt Romney’s Afraid of China. Should You Be?). It’s written by my old colleague Rebecca Fannin, who has spent much of the last decade looking at private equity in the Far East.
There is a “Huns are coming” school of thought about China and India and Asia’s other fast-emerging economies. Reading about China in particular makes one think that the hordes are once again sweeping across the plains and soon will sack our economy (Clyde Prestowitz’s Three Billion Capitalists is a recent example). We seem faced with an amorphous seething mass of ‘them.’
Rebecca’s book Silicon Dragon: How China Is Winning the Tech Race, shows us who ‘them’ are. She takes us inside 11 different Chinese high-tech firms and introduces us to the entrepreneurs in all their brilliance – and bumbling. There’s at least as much bumbling as brilliance amongst the entrepreneurs we meet.
For more on her book and for some links to other views of it, see my review on Big Think.
How bad is the subprime crisis?
This from today’s New York Times, in the wake of the Swiss bank UBS announcing huge write-downs related to subprime mortgage:
Banks worldwide have announced more than $135 billion in credit losses and write-downs since the turmoil in the U.S. housing market started last year, and some analysts estimate that total write-downs could reach $800 billion.
$800 billion? How many subprime loans got made? According to the Center for Responsible Lending, there are $1.3 trillion in subprime loans outstanding. Almost $1 trillion of that came since 2003. Of homes foreclosed on in 2006, 93 percent had subprime mortgages.
At the moment, though, there are only 14.5 percent of subprime mortgage holders in default, according to the Federal Reserve Bank. Since the subprime crisis has been the source of $135 billion in write-downs already, that reflects about 10 percent of the outstanding loans in the subprime market (along with some sloppy regular lending that’s certainly getting lumped in). Getting to $800 billion suggests that the market believes somewhere in the vicinity of 80 percent of subprime loans made in the last four years will go bad, perhaps because a minimum of 89 percent have ‘exploding’ interest rates attached to them.
The real estate market was like a rocket for the last six years. It’s now going boom, in slow motion.
My latest Prototype column looks at speech recognition and its impending arrival in mass markets from cell phones to cars. See The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey.
There’s a thoughtful interview on 1800CEORead with Tom Hodgkinson, who publishes the U.K. journal The Idler, which publishes things in the vein of Hlade’s Law (if you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person; they will figure out an easier way to do it.)
My favorite piece of the exchange:
8cr: What role does technology play in idleness? Technology is supposed to make work and life easier for us. Is this really the case?
TH: I’m afraid not. It seems to create more work. Right from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technology has promised to free us from toil. The steam-powered machines were supposed to do all the work. These days, digital technology is always telling us that it makes our lives easier. But does it? The Blackberry, for example, actually ties us to work 24/7. Ditto mobile phones. Email and computers suck time, and waste it. What happened to dancing, and singing? People have more fun in societies with less technology. Technology actually makes us dependent. When our broadband connection went down last month for a couple of days, I initially felt bereft. Then I read a book and picked up the phone and wrote some letters. That was much better. Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our lives.
From the post Rethinking Work: An Interview with Tom Hodgkinson
On Big Think I’ve been reviewing “Creating A World Without Poverty,” Muhammad Yunus’ visionary book about a new kind of capitalism.
I reviewed it in three parts, as follows:
Muhammad Yunus: Capitalism Is Half-Baked
How Muhammad Yunus Created an Impossible Business
Muhammad Yunus On How to End Poverty
Businesspeople of all persuasions should read this book, or at the least the first two chapters. Interest in social business has grown dramatically, and companies like Google are garnering huge amounts of attention for their efforts to establish operations that aren’t just focused on profits. Yunus is an economist and a CEO, and his vision comes out of his practical experience.
There’s a clever look at leadership in the winter issue of Strategy + Business.
It’s posted as Shall I compare thee to an Andy Grove?
it looks at how business and political leaders seem to be at their best when they create a certain character to present to people. it then looks at how Shakespearean plays are taught in leadership courses, like Henry V and Richard III. The author indulges in the obvious: a trip to acting school in England.
All in all, a good read, and an intriguing argument that the best leaders may also be the best actors.
It reminds me, too, of a conversation I had with MIT researcher Sandy Pentland, in which he asserted that the only thing that can produce real change in a person is by applying the techniques of method acting (that is, ‘becoming’ the character you are playing). Fake it ’til you make it, indeed.
My friend and fellow Fellow Jeremy Manier wrote The New Theology, a nuanced, well-crafted look at the question of design since Darwin. He covers every aspect of the design debate since Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, and he has lots of interesting perspective sprinkled around in it. Plus one startling conversion caused by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band.