bucy wrote:

Brick storage, anyone?

I like my Porsche designed 250Gb drive.

But I may have to get these as well.

RE: LaCie - Brick Desktop Hard Drive - Hi-Speed USB 2.0

DMV at MemeStreams has a theory that I find both shocking and believable, that Google borrowed against its tax rate the previous three quarters, leaving us with the whopping tax rate in the final quarter.

To my knowledge, this is the first Memestream citation I've had to a blog that I read. Just a little shocking to see that in the aggregator. I suppose this was a trackback system of some sort.

As for the subject matter: I have not done any of the research needed to make this assertion; or at least, make it stick. I had a long talk with Bucy @ { Memestreams, Google } about this last night, and should restate: this was not necessarily evil. As one of Nathan's readers asserted, Google is still a young company; while they are oozing tech talent, the company lacks structure and discipline. What I mean is that they have enough brains, computational power and coding talent that their financial control could put State Street (several trillion dollars flows through their system every day) to shame. I believe most of Googles revenue comes through their automated systems, and I can't see why their expenses wouldn't be automated as well. Having that level of control -- knowing what their money statements look like at any given instance -- fits with the model people like me carry for how Google could be.

But tying back to the monoculture post of yesterday, they lack the discipline and structure that this would be obvious. If they were IBM -- if IBM's cash flow and operating expenses were so simple -- I would assume they had such a system. But Google may not be hiring and placing people into making their money counting operations as slick as their money makers. They know how to evaluate a PhD in CS for her ability to come up with good algorithms and ideas on improving search, GIS, email, etc. But we're not going to see gAccountant soon.

It still sounds funny to me.

� Did Google Lie About The Tax Rate? � InsideGoogle � part of the Blog News Channel

Harvard Business School Press is doing something a little different from their normal far with The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive The Commerce of Conception. It is part market analysis, part social critique talking about how there is now a price tag on children. With the right amount of cash, anyone can now have a child. And very soon with a little more cash, you can have the exactly the kind of baby you want. That's were things get tricky.

800-CEO-READ Blog: The Baby Business

With Open Search the lack of standard ways to get information is, for the first time, beginning to change. There is now a simple but de-facto standard way to start querying sites for information. That's hugely exciting. The current standard is limited, but a great start. And the web is now rapidly becoming the place for people to collaborate. Wiki's are growing like wildfire. Folksonomies(tagging) are causing people to quickly and in an emergent bottoms up way, come together to build taxonomies that work for them and surprisingly rapidly become stable. Flickr which Yahoo just bought is a great example of this and Del.icio.us by Joshua Schachter pioneered this model and Wikipedia has picked it up. I've always been hugely suspicious of top down taxonomies and restrictive ones (e.g. if you're a book, you're not a newspaper) and confident that normal people would never bother to classify things according to someone else's taxonomy. But I think that tagging has broken through that. It is sufficiently KISS (see my early talks on this for why I think this is good) and rewarding (you get attention if you pick popular tags) to have gained amazing momentum. The clever and audacious Dave Sifry of Technorati claims to have found 5MM tagged posts just in the last 2 and a half months (from del.icio.us and from Flickr and from various blogs). As long as we don't let the ontologists take over and tell us why tags are all wrong, need to be classified into domains, and need to be systematized, this is going to work well albeit, sloppily. What it does is open up ways to find things related to anything interesting you've found and navigate not a web of links but a link of tags. At the same time Wikipedia has shown that a model in which content is contributed not just by a few employees, but by self-forming self-managing communities on the web can be amazingly detailed, complete, and robust. so now people are looking at ways in which the same emergent self-forming self-administering models of tagging and Wiki's and moderation can be used for events (EVDB) and for music and for video and for medical information. It's all very exciting. It is a true renaissance. I haven't seen this much true innovation for quite a while. What I particularly like about all this is how human these innovations are. They are sloppy. To me Tags are sloppy practical de-facto ontologies. Wiki's are sloppy about changes and version editing. It is accepted that we're trying new things and that sometimes messes will occur. In short, it is unabashedly creative and imprecise. I've always believed in the twin values of rationalism and humanism, but humanism has often felt as though it got short shrift in our community. In this world, it's all about people and belonging and working with others.

Fascinating for being March 2005; change is not happening as fast as we feel it. This is a reasonably useful and cited essay musing on more than just folksonomy, and holds up nicely a year later.

Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Tensions on the Web

The Age asks a tough question: If Google knew its fourth-quarter tax rate was going to be almost 70% higher, did it have a responsibility to warn shareholders? Since Google could have seen weeks, if not months, ago that it was going to be hit with a 41.8% tax rate, far higher than the 30% forecast, should it have warned the board, which would have in turn been responsible for warning shareholders?

This is a nice anchor around the "Google miss" issue.

Amr @ Yahoo, etc, called it. But, as noted, so what -- shorts of Google have gone up significantly. And, of course it was going to happen, eventually, because as Google continued to walk on water, expectations would rise until it had to do something Really Phenominal to stay within expectations. As a VC on another blog I read commented, any of his portfolio companies would not be upset with only making 1.9$B this quarter.

But not, this is not the issue. Amr @ Yahoo's post was a bit more specific: it is more than the market raising its expectations of what a Normal Google Quarter should look like (30%). If you study what Google has been doing on the run-up to each quarter, it looks like it is deliberately acting to hit those expectations.

This is what really looks like what happened. If Google doesn't have enough accounting talent to completely understand their tax situation, someone should go to jail. Instead, to hit expectations in previous quarters, they borrowed against their tax rate. They previously reported taxes of 30%. But you only get to do that 3 out of 4 quarters. Then you get a tax rate of almost 42% to compensate.

Whenever the stock drops (as yesterday and today) there are lawsuits. This is generally the case because there are a lot of shady investor groups who find it easier to put off their constituants' wraith by passing the blame, and letting time diffuse their pain. But this idea is interesting -- if, as I said above, they deliberately moved their taxes at the expense of a later tax burden, should they have been explicit about it? A good financial analyst would have known about the tax burden of the quarter; but wouldn't necessarily know whether the company's projections were based on that. Which they were not.

The legal arguments as a whole make me a little queasy. As long as a company puts all the information in their forms, they should be granted some immunity; if analysts were truly independent and as smart as they claim to be, and had the time to do the work right, proper models could be constructed. People with enough effort and education can understand the liabilities and such of underfunded pensions, even off-book entities. But most can't.

The queasiness comes because these companies really have so much more regard for their profits and stock prices than being truly good capital representations. If I know what my tax burden is, spill it. Yes, it hurts in the short term, but on the long term, it works out better. If you make 1.9$B in a quarter, great! I should have a model, built based on assumptions that have been born out over time, and I can come up with reasonable expectations of future results. Periodically update me on what your new numbers are, and I can continue to understand what you may be worth.

We see this with Berkshire. As Buffett has pointed out in previous years, if some small number of the largest corporations paid as much in taxes as Berkshire, there would be no need for individual taxes. And despite that tax burden, Berkshire does pretty dang well. Google borrowed the best sounding ideas from Buffett's thinking, and the best defenses (no splits! no guidance!) and then took as many shortcuts and ego-based options as possible (hello B class! hello hitting numbers at any cost!).

� Did Google Have A Responsibility To Warn Shareholders? � InsideGoogle � part of the Blog News Channel

Tristan Louis takes a look at Google’s situation, compares it to Netscape’s, and determines that ” now is the time for executives at Google to look at history and, hopefully, not repeat it”.

More worrisome, however, is the development of the Google monoculture. Much of what is going on at Google is happening with little involvement and input from the community. This is where Microsoft generally starts striking. Say what you want about the Redmond giant, they know how to listen and how to take brutal feedback and turn it into decent product. Microsoft is not known for great products but it is known for decent ones. Last week, Microsoft organized Search Champs, gathering a bunch of smart people from the industry in a room and having them talk to them. I was there and was surprised by how focused they are on winning this one. It is the kind of focus I have not seen come from them since the browser wars.

Oh, absolutely! Google, perceived (although that is changing) as the more friendly company, doen not reach out to the community in the same ways Microsoft is now. Google is not asking Dave Winer to brainstorm on their RSS strategy. Google is not flying, well, anyone down to the Googleplex to get some outside world perspective on their product development (and trust me, the community has a lot of things to say to Google).

» Tristan Louis On Google’s Monoculture Getting Netscaped � InsideGoogle � part of the Blog News Channel

The Scott McNealy show is still basically.. The Scott McNealy show. It hasn’t changed much. Everyone else is a hairball. IGS is bad. Microsoft is bad. "Its mankind against…"

Sun is apparently a great partnering company - and Scott pointed to EDS, Oracle, Google, NEC and Microsoft as examples.

I am pretty sure the IBM Software Group folks would be more than happy to stack up their ISV ecosystem against Sun's. Partnering works in a lot of different dimensions. Or how about POWER? IBM would probably be pleased to compare the economics of NEC versus the XBOX, Nintendo and Sony volumes.

I only bring up IBM because Scott does... repeatedly.

James Governor's MonkChips: Scott McNealy: Still Comedy

Fed Chair Bernanke (first time I wrote that) has been a prolific economic author. For the economic policy wonks out there, the following can be considered Bernanke's Greatest Hits:

The Big Picture: The Best Writings of Ben S. Bernanke

On Friday, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform Chair Tom Davis (R-Virginia) wrote a top U.S. Patent & Trademark Office official with a plea to modernize the U.S. patent system.

"While litigation and settlement negotiations between (BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion and NTP) are central to the (patent infringement) controversy, " Rep.Davis wrote to USPTO Under Secretary for Intellectual Property Jon Dudas, "the patent-approval and reexamination process at the Patent and Trademark office have been significant factors in whether service continues uninterrupted to BlackBerry customers."

Rep. Davis closed his letter asking Dudas to forward him his assessment of the current state of patent examination and re-examination procedures, what negative impact any shortcomings have for technological innovation, as well as what forms might be needed.

It took a risk to their CrackBerries, but the right people are finally starting to ask the right questions about the Patent Office.

Congressman to Patent Office: level with us - BBHub

A hacker, entrepreneur, and all around mischief maker, Melvin wanted something he could give to peers and prospective clients that spoke of this nature.

A lockpick concept was chosen very early on, and the post production results were excellent. The picks can quite easily be removed from the card and are entirely functional as lockpicks.

Metal business card -- lockpick set