It's an age-old problem for large publicly traded companies, regardless of industry.
Two groups want a new toolbox (for example)
They can each build their own to a local specification, or they can agree to build one toolbox:
Option I. Build a toolbox to local specification
Group A: $10
Group B: $10
Group A + B: $20vs.
Option II: Build a toolbox to group specification
Group A: $14 (40% over budget)
Group B: $2 (80% cost reduction)
Group A + B: $16 (20% savings)
Options I works.
Option II saves the company 20%, but the manager of Group A is now unemployed and the manager of Group B is now a VP.
Back in Economics 101 we learned how markets solve this particular problem [1], but most publicly traded companies don't have internal markets [2].
I'm interested in examples of publicly traded companies, in any industry, that have made a go at mitigating this problem. If there are no minimally successful examples that's also important to know.
I'd be most grateful for examples of companies to look at, for comments or feedback, or for references to academic papers. Comments to this post or email to me are equally welcome!
(Brad, any thoughts?)
--
[1] See also: comparative advantage -- aka "I can do it better than you, but I have better things to do.").
[2] Apparently Czechoslovakia was relatively good at this sort of thing before the fall of the Soviet Union.
Update 2/4/08:In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.In a related vein consider Coding Horror's discussion of the costs of software reuse.
Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase's ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors. ...
Jacob Reider, the master of the terse post, apparently likes Microsoft's FeedSync.
Of course, Jacob, you didn't bother to say why you liked it. Or even what it might be good for!
It turns out that FeedSync was originally a Ray (Lotus Notes -> Microsoft CTO) Ozzie project. I don't know what it started out as, but now claims to be an open source specification for enabling data synchronization.
Jacob is presumably interested for two reasons. One is general geekhood, the other healthcare related. First the geek stuff.
As a fellow-geek Jacob, like me, is constantly trying to synchronize data across platforms. Anyone who's been around the block with Outlook, Exchange, Palm, mobile phones, iPhones, Gmail, iSync, etc, etc, will have learned that this is a non-trivial problem even in the relatively trivial domain of synchronizing address books.
We geeks would like, for example, to move our images and metadata readily from Picasa to Flickr and back again. Good luck - even if Google claims they're opposed to Data Lock enabling synchronization between competitors is rather a difficult proposition -- particularly when the services define photo collections differently (include by reference or by copy?).
Heck, we'd like to move our metadata from iPhoto to Aperture -- two desktop apps Apple controls. We can't even do that. (ex: photo book annotations). Forget Aperture to Lightroom!
How hard is this problem? I have long claimed that data synchronization issues between Palm and Outlook/Exchange were one of the top three causes of the collapse of once promising Palm OS ecosystem. OS X geeks know that Apple has a long history of messed up synchronization even within the completely controlled OS X/.Mac environment. IBM has had several initiatives to manage this kind of issue (the last one I tracked was in the OS/2 era) -- all disasters. Anyone remember CORBA transaction standards? Same problem in a different form. The only experience I've had of synchronization working was with the original Palm devices synchronizing to the original Palm Desktop -- where everything was built to make synchronization work. Lotus Notes, of course, was into synchronization in a very big way -- that's how the different Notes repositories communicated with one another (hence Ozzie's interest). I don't know how well that really worked, but I'm told it took an army to make Notes work.
Personally, I think this problem gets fully solved about 10 milliseconds before Skynet takes over. There are too many nasty issues of semantics, of each system knowing what the other means by "place", to achieve perfect results between disparate systems. Even the imperfect results achieved by using language between mere humans requires a semblance of sentience, shared language, and even shared culture.
Reason two for Jacob's interest is, of course, his health care IT background. HL-7. SNOMED terminfo models. HITSP and Continuity of Care Records. Even Google's fuzzy Personal Health Record interchange services. Microsoft's various healthcare IT initiatives. Many HCIT vendor transaction solutions. They're really all about data synchronization on a grand scale -- even if the realities tend to be fairly modest.
Jacob, btw, is fond of those loosely-coupled mashup thingies.
So what's "FeedSync"? (emphases mine)
Windows Live Dev FeedSync Intro
The creation of FeedSync was catalyzed by the observation that RSS and Atom feeds were exploding on the web, and that by harnessing their inherent simplicity we might enable the creation of a “decentralized data bus” among the world’s web sites. Just like RSS and Atom, FeedSync feeds can be synchronized to any device or platform.
Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions, FeedSync was originally designed by Ray Ozzie in 2005 and has been developed by Microsoft with input from the Web community. The initial specification, FeedSync for Atom and RSS, describes how to synchronize data through Atom and RSS feeds.
The FeedSync specification is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.
... FeedSync lays the foundation for a common synchronization infrastructure between any service and any application.
... Everyone has data that they want to share: contact lists, calendar entries, blog postings, and so on. This data must be up-to-date, real-time, across any of the programs, services, or devices you choose to use and share with.
Too often today data is “locked up” in proprietary applications and services or on various devices. As an open extension to RSS and Atom, FeedSync enables you to “unlock” your data—making it easy to synchronize the data you choose to any other authorized FeedSync-enabled service, computer, or mobile device. FeedSync enables many compelling scenarios:
- Collaboration over the web using synchronized feeds
- Roaming data to multiple client devices
- Publishing reference data and updates in an open format that can be synchronized easily
... FeedSync enables multi-master topologies,
... publish a subset of his calendar more broadly using a FeedSync feed. Consumers of the publish-only feed can only see a subset of the calendar, and don’t have permission to make changes. Because of the FeedSync information in the feed, though, they are reliably notified of updates to Steve’s shared calendar. And unlike current feeds, when Steve deletes an item from the calendar, the item is deleted on everyone’s calendar.
... RSS and Atom were designed as notification mechanisms, to alert clients that some new resource is available on a server. This is a great fit for simple applications like blogging.
But those feed formats are not a natural fit for representing collections of resources that change, such as a contact list, or a collection of calendar items. Atom Publishing Protocol is designed for resource collections, but it is a client-server protocol and isn’t suitable (by itself) for multi-master scenarios. FeedSync extends RSS and Atom so that FeedSync-enabled RSS and Atom feeds can be used for reliable, efficient content replication and multi-master data synchronization.
One of the great benefits of FeedSync is that it doesn’t attempt to replace technologies like RSS, Atom, or Atom Publishing Protocol. Instead, FeedSync is a simple set of extensions that enhances the RSS or Atom feeds that people are already using today...
There you go. Nerdvana indeed.
Grumph.
Ok, I won't rain too hard on this parade. I said "perfect results" weren't feasible. We can't do synchronization for anything that's not trivial -- at least not without monstrous effort. The interesting question is whether there's some kind of "good enough" compromise that we can start with that, with a lot of time and evolution, might lead to some sort of emergent solution. Preferably without Skynet. Something that bears the same relationship to the original Palm synchronization that Google does to the original memex/xanadu vision...
I've been thinking the same thing for a while, looking for an opportunity to say it.
FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: How the press played the race card
... I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.
It's the same old game -- getting attention at any cost. The American public never learns ...
Months after he was written off, McCain is the GOP favorite. I assume the Trilateral Commission is at work, otherwise I can't explain this at all.
The GOP now has a choice between Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney and John McCain. Assuming continuation of bizarre trends, there's only a 1/3 chance of Romney winning. If Romney wins, I'm guessing, based on Florida numbers, that there's only a 1/3 chance of his getting the presidency.
So there's about a 90% [1] probability that America's next president will be Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain.
Right wing talk radio hates McCain; it's hard to imagine a better endorsement. I would be disappointed if McCain won, but I would not be thinking about emigrating.
So today we have a 90% probability of a better future for America.
Wow, I didn't expect to be thinking that already.
So how does this change my thoughts my thoughts ahead of Minnesota's primary?
If Florida's Dem delegates had counted, Hilary Clinton would now be planning to wrap-up the primary contests. If Giuliani had won Florida I'd be wearing my Hilary button now.
Today, though, I feel freer.
I think she's still the best option for winning the presidency, but I still don't care for the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynastic progression. I still fear Obama can't win Florida, but if McCain is the nominee that might be a risk to consider.
Or maybe I should go with Edwards, and give him the power to choose both the President and the Vice-President.
Today I'm thinking I want John Edwards to be the kingmaker.
[1] 1 - (1/3*1/3) = 8/9 = 89%
Update: Ok, so much for that.
...top strategist Joe Trippi explained the timing of the decision like this: "It became increasingly clear on Sunday and Monday that we were totally blocked out of the news story. John Edwards didn't want to play politics. He didn't want to stay in the race to be a kingmaker or a spoiler. There was just not a clear shot at the nomination.
One of the most innovative features of the early Macintosh machines were that each file had a unique identifier. The file "name" was a user convenience, the software used the identifier.
Move a file? No problem. The OS knew where it was.
That's been more and more broken in the past few years. I don't know if the move is deliberate, or if it's a sign that Apple's most brilliant developers have all retired.
Alas, Time Machine demonstrates how broken this feature is.
Exploring the sands of Time Machine
...Time Machine doesn't handle the ol' switcheroo very well; renamed files and folders get backed up right alongside their previous iterations. This means that if you have a 2GB folder of images in your Desktop called "Purty Pi'tures" one day, then do nothing but rename the folder to "Rilly Purty Pi'tures" the next day, you just ate up 4GB of space on your Time Machine drive. Going further, Murphy Mac discovered that Time Machine makes some odd (and potentially unfortunate) decisions when throwing out backups. When Time Machine decides to retain a single backup out of the previous day's hourly backups, it chooses the first one of the day (presumably beginning at 12:01am). This means that some files could still be slipping through the sands of time (c'mon, I had to), depending on your computing habits...
It will be a sad day when Vista's file system is clearly better in every way than the Mac's.
Sleep - Brain - Neurons - New York Times:Both autism and schizophrenia have, at various times, been connected with disorders of pruning neuronal networks. (Errors both ways -- too much and too little.)
...So Dr. Tononi and a colleague, Chiara Cirelli, have hypothesized that during sleep, the synapses weaken. The downscaling is across the board, so that the synapses’ relative strength is maintained. Those that have been used (those involved in learning) stay stronger than those that haven’t....
I remember when putting 15 gigabits a second across a fiber optic connection was real research news. Rough Type points to today's NYT article about transmitting putting 15 terabits a second...
Cisco to Sell Faster Switch for Flood of Remote Data...
... the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.
Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., the world’s largest producer of network equipment, offered a range of examples to try to capture the significance of the increase in speed. It said the switch could transfer all 90,000 Netflix movies in 38.4 seconds or send a two-megapixel digital image to every human being on earth in 28 minutes...
... In marketing the new switch, Cisco will emphasize that it will cut the energy costs of large data centers. Changing the design of a data center, made possible by the need for fewer networking interfaces, could reduce a data center’s energy use by 8 percent...
john
If I had the only vote in America, I'd probably vote for John Edwards. Otherwise, If he passed much more study than I've bothered with to date, Barack Obama.
Alas, I don't have the only vote in America. So my "vote" in the oddball Minnesota caucuses next Tuesday will be for whoever is most likely to beat Romney and/or McCain. That means whoever is mostly likely to win Florida, because, yet again, Florida will decide who the next President will be.
So I searched for a reference to guide me, and I found this ...
January 27, 2008 - Florida Primary Preferences
... Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama among men 59% to 25%, with 13% for John Edwards, and she leads Obama 61% to 28% among women, with 6% for John Edwards. Clinton leads Obama among early voters 65% to 19% and she leads Obama among in-person voters 58% to 31%, with 8% for Edwards. Clinton leads among white voters with 64%, with Obama at 21% and Edwards at 11%. Obama leads Clinton among African American voters 71% to 21%. And Clinton leads among Hispanic voters with 71%, with Obama at 22% and Edwards at 1%.
My recollection is that, in Florida, it's the Hispanic voters that decide presidential contests.
So it's Clinton then. My personal preferences don't count.
Update: for a biting and darkly humorous perspective with a similar (implied) conclusion, read Jon Swift.
The New York Times that is.
In a reprise of John Tierney's NYT interview with Nick (we're in a simulation) Bostrum Dennis Overbye writes about a topic featured in some of my favorite physics blogs - Boltzmann's brain ...
Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times
...cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.
CV fills in some more background
... The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology — one in which the low-entropy universe we see is a statistical fluctuation around an equilibrium state of maximal entropy...
In other words, the silliness of the naked flying space brain demonstrates that we don't understand entropy and the arrow of time.
CV uses the same Bayesian logic used by Bostrum to point out that if our current model of entropy were correct then it would be overwhelmingly likely that you are a Boltzmann's Brain and I don't exist...
... In the set of all such fluctuations, some brains would be embedded in universes like ours, but an enormously larger number would be all by themselves. This theory, therefore, predicts that a typical conscious observer is overwhelmingly likely to be such a brain...
CV concludes today's essay with a, to me, tantalizing comment ...
...So what are we to conclude? That our observed universe is not a statistical fluctuation around a thermal equilibrium state. That’s very important to know, but doesn’t pin down the truth. If the universe is eternal, and has a maximum value for its entropy, then we it would (almost always) be in thermal equilibrium. Therefore, either it’s not eternal, or there is no state of maximum entropy. I personally believe the latter, but there’s plenty of work to be done before we have any of this pinned down..
That last link is to an 207 CV article on how it all began.
It's a little secret of national politics that, past the primaries, 99% of the electorate with any significant connection to reality has made up their mind.
So all the advertising, all the spin, all the media manipulation -- none of it is for you or me. We're just in the way.
It's all for the undecided voter and for the intermittent non-voter -- two groups that overlap.
Cosmic Variance has just learned the bad news. Sean is young I think, so no shame in being naive. For obvious reasons this isn't something politicians talk about. They may despise the chore of selling themselves to the arational and illogical, but that's what the game is all about.
There's a bright side. The next time you hear an astoundingly idiotic campaign statement, remember who it's aimed at. Politicians are not as a stupid as they sound, they're just profoundly cynical.
AT&T "Rebate" Case Going Forward - O'Reilly Emerging TelephonyMore on the lawsuit -- so it went forward in 2007. There are a few web references to this topic, but I couldn't find anything new.
...I also clearly remember my dismay at getting a VISA debit card as my “rebate” and the many hoops that I had to jump through to use it simply as a credit on my next Cingular bills...
Gordon's Tech: Nokia 6555b: the pleasant surprise, and its iSync Plug-inI've gone a bit further since doing that, including a visit to the Google BlackBerry mobile page and building a personal Google page for Emily's Blackberry. It all comes together in an interesting way.
...We've turned Emily's Blackberry Pearl into a proto-Android, and it works pretty well that way. So we have a data phone with Google Maps, Google Talk, Google Mail and some other odd Google things....
