Just like last year when my iBook gave up on me one month before LIFT, we lost my Macbook this morning, and reanimation efforts didn’t change the prognosis: hard drive and motherboard failure.

My nomadic lifestyle seems to kill a mac every 11 months. The timing of course couldn’t be worse, and it is a real disapointment to pay 3000CHF for a machine that lasts less than a year. I have apple care but it takes weeks, and I can not postpone a 700 hundred persons event while I wait for a new machine.

My plan is to get a PC, yes, a peecee, and get really really disrespected by a lousy operating system in order to find some energy to enthusiastically buy a mac again (because right now I am really pissed at mister Jobs & co) and wait for the second generation of the new Macbooks.

Yossi Vardi is a legendary Israeli entrepreneur well known for, among other thing, selling ICQ to AOL in 1998. He is part of our events alliance and one of these guys who consistently challenges your seriousness during during meetings as he never stops cracking jokes. This quote from a Business Week interview is particularly brilliant:

BW: When you go to invest in entrepreneurs and new ideas, what do you look for?

Yossi Vardi: let me start by telling you what I don’t look for. I don’t look at business plans. After 38 years I’ve found that 100% of business plans say that their idea is very good. I think they are useless. I found the more I liked the idea the bigger my losses were. I don’t like demonstrations because the young guys showing me are so enthusiastic they think it is the greatest thing in the world—at least in their life, and if you don’t fake an orgasm, they go away very disappointed.

Link (thx Monique for the pointer)

These robes supposed to allow women to escape sexual predators in the streets of Tokyo are what I call serious urban wear. Amazing (and useful?).

Link

I had a recent discussion with a Skype exec who was telling me how bad the integration with eBay was going, as eBay was such a hierarchical and procedural organization. Hierarchical and procedural? Not something you would expect from a young company like eBay right?

But it is not 2000 anymore. Time has passed. Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, these organizations are now mammoth struggling with big companies problems like inertia, internal politics, miscommunication, etc…

This Cory Doctorow article on Amazon’s problems with understanding the logic of the download market further confirmed my intuition that we entered a new era: the bus drivers era.

The internet industry is not driven by young hot mavericks anymore. It is now headed by big time CEOs with shareholders, middle managers and a focus on quarterly reports. Their job is to keep their user base satisfied via incremental innovation, not to change the world anymore. The CEOs of the internet industry are now like the CEOs of any industry : they are bus drivers.

Ebay looks more and more like Microsoft. Yahoo currently seems to be as exciting a company as AT&T or GM. Google is slowly cutting itself from users every day. Growth has a price as it forces you to manage a very different set of non value-adding things.

And the web industry is certainly less fun than it used to be.

I just came back from two great weeks of vacation in the US, the first time I went to the country as a tourist, took time to meet people outside of my professional world, and went outside the cities. A few observations:

• Americans have a very different relation with money than we do here in Europe. Having or loving money does not seem to be shameful. Two examples: a friend was explaining me how, during the Christmas dinner of his company, a young intern started to talk to the boss in front of the whole company, saying in substance “tell me what I can do to make more money and I will do whatever you ask me, I want to make a lot of money”.
  Also, homeless folks appear to be thanking those who don’t give them money with sincerity, as they do not show any jealousy towards those who have money. It seems in America and contrary to what happens in Europe you don’t hate those who made money, you look up to them saying to yourself “it will be my turn one day”.
• Americans have a different relation to their country (not surprising I know, but read the rest). If something goes wrong they do not seem to start by blaming the system or the government like we do here in Europe. I say this after seeing homeless folks going around an American flag on their caddies (they all carry caddies around). This is unthinkable in France. If you are homeless, unemployed, or not making enough money, it is the government responsibility, and you hate your country. Very different mentality.
• Americans are the most productive people on earth which is absolutely amazing when you see how much this country is wasting in not value adding activities. After Iraq, one main area: disclaimers. Buy a camera, it comes with 20 pages of useless legal disclaimers (mine came with “do not put heavy objects on the camera as they may fall and hurt others”…). Everything is secured via stupid legal texts that take hours to both write and read. The worse case is what drives the creation of every process, and I wonder how much time it costs to this society every year. One example: the Dallas Forth Worth airport train. You step into it.
  - alarm stars ringing
  - a voice says “be careful, doors are closing”
  - doors close
  - a voice says “sit down, train will start”
  - train starts
  This process has at least two more steps than the Paris underground. It might look like a detail, but every person in this train loses 10 seconds per stop. Millions of stops and travelers later, it makes a different. And everything is like that in the US.
  
• Americans are micro entrepreneurs. All of them have at least 1-2 side businesses, small activities they have beside their day job. I don’t think they make a huge amount of supplementary money this way, but it shows how entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in their genes.
• Bush is a source of national shame. Again, never forget that more than half this country never voted for him, and it shows in every discussion. California is different from the rest of the country as are most coastal states, still it was a surprise to see the hate level, and how they now admire France who has “a president that can speak of politics one on one”.
• Life is built around cars. To an extent that is quite fascinating. Example: when you go to a restaurant there is a whole ceremony around the valet parking. Cool dudes arrive with they Porsche cayenne, give the key to the valet who parks the car. Then when they come out, the valet screams “a white Porsche cayenne” and the driver, all proud and full of himself, grabs the key in front of the waiting crowd. Cars are your social status, and therefore it is almost all of the time the main element around which social places are organized. Amazing. I don’t even have a car!
  
• The US has solved one issue: tobacco. Nice move. The war started 20 years ago and now the results are here. If you want to find foreigners when you go out it’s easy, look in front of the bar, they are the ones smoking a cigarette outside. Now an even bigger fight is coming: the fight against the food industry. My god, it is hard to make a step in this country without behind tempted by food or sodas. You always, ALWAYS have food in sight, and when it is not your eyes that are tempted it is your nose, with many shops carefully rejecting their ovens’ odors to the street. There is a problem there, a large one, Supersize me is a prophetic documentary.
  
• This country is huge, beautiful, offers a multitude of activities, and is one of the easiest place on earth to move around. Recommended, and I think that they are now conscious that you should not treat visitors as terrorists. Going through the customs was easy and smooth (a friend traveling with us got tons of questions because she had an Algerian stamp on her passport after shooting a movie there, but she went through), unlike the time I went to Washington with a broken leg and ended up with two inspectors checking out my orthopedic cast with rulers (a true story…).

I am taking a few more days away from work/phone/computer etc… and will be back next Monday full speed, with one month to go before the third LIFT conference. Happy new year everybody (and thanks for the messages).

Here in Los Angeles we see a lot of Hummers. Looking for a bit of information about this wheeled aberration, I stumbled on this quote from the Time’s list of the 50 worse cars ever:

“[The Hummer H2] contributed to GM’s emerging image as the Dick Cheney of car companies.”

Link

The “Dick Cheney of car companies”. How does it feel when your name becomes a dirty word?