Software eats the Government

Andreessen Horowitz are well known for the theory that "software will eat the world." I am a big believer in this. I was recently asked to speak at the Banff Forum, a Canadian think-tank, and talked about this, combined with how "open development" alongside software would challenge everything we do over the next twenty-five to fifty years. It is fairly easy to point to software eating the world with books (Amazon), travel (Expedia and others), trading, etc. It was a little bit harder for me to find great examples about how software will eat government, beyond the standard open.gov data initiatives.

Thus, I was quite intrigued with Clay Shirky's TED talk about how git, the software version control system, could apply to law and the democratic process. In Clay's words, it is a new form of arguing, that is compatible with the democratic process.

(Nice to Mozilla in the top seven links on the site :-) Git's distributed content management is now being used to manage things other than software. Git is distributed, collaborative, but also controlled. Whether git will eat government is yet to be determined, but it is a great example of how this could happen.

Gliese 581g

So...there is probably intelligent life out there. As the old Monty Python saying goes, "I hope so, cause there certainly isn't much here on earth." Case in point. The video for Gliese581g is on MSNBC, and works fine in IE, but crashes in Chrome [ here ].

Acsoi - Land Grab Economics

"Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income" ( Acsoi ), is a measure of what a companies profits would be if they were not spending like crazy to acquire a space: in GroupOn's case, this would be retailers. To me, using Acsoi as a measure is really an admission that a company has no staying power beyond brand awareness. So, they need to grab and own as much mindshare as they can, as quickly as they can, to increase the barrier to entry for competitors. Without intellectual property to help protect them, and with the cost of switching (for a user) being effectively zero, building a global brand, and relying on brand stickiness, is the best way forward. Companies like Amazon that have been effective at this have also built in other "sticky" factors over time: recommendation engines, one-click purchasing, etc. This increases the cost for the user to switch, and allows the company to stop pouring money into marketing and acquisition costs. You also buil...

Schrodinger's Cat is still Alive...and Dead

With Borders scaling back so many of their stores, I have ended up buying more books than I normally would. One I picked up is "What is Life?" by Ed Regis. It is a good short read, although it is now 2 years old, which is a long time given the rate that "artificial life" is moving at. Since the book came out, Craig Ventor claims to have created the first artificial life . One thing I did not know was that Schrodinger wrote a book with the same title in 1944 which predicted the existence of a DNA-like molecule; Crick actually credits Schrodinger with inspiring some of his early work. Ed Regis points out that Schrodinger's book never actually defines what life is; that is left hanging. Interestingly, I felt the same about Regis's book. While he argues that life is defined by having an "embedded metabolism" that argument still seems weak. Carl Sagan pointed out, many years ago, that cars have a metabolism, which is hard to argue against....

Todd G. Simpson

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