Press Releases We’d Like to See: Iceland Embraces the Bitcoin Economy

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Continuing our series of monetary-themed press releases we’d like to see (but probably won’t):

Iceland Embraces the Bitcoin Economy
Unveils comprehensive program for
21st century financial leadership

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — May 1, 2013 — The Republic of Iceland today announced a comprehensive program to make Iceland the leading nation state in the emerging Bitcoin economy.

“Bitcoin is a math-based, digital currency that provides the foundation for addressing many of the financial challenges afflicting both the real economy and the digital economy today,” said Snorri Thorodinsónssónssónssónssón, Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs for the Republic of Iceland. “With our abundant, low-cost geothermal power and our formative experiences in the recent global financial crisis, no nation is better positioned than Iceland to help develop a new set of digital financial institutions the 21st century so desperately needs.”

Bitcoin’s many benefits – including cryptographically secure transactions, lower transaction costs, fraud mitigation, nearly instantaneous payments across the globe, transparent accounting and reduced dependence on “too big to fail” banks – make it the obvious foundation upon which to build a new financial system. As Iceland develops its digital economy powered by geothermal energy, a Bitcoin-based economy broadly benefits digital businesses hosted in Iceland, creates opportunities for new Bitcoin-based businesses and increases overall economic efficiency.

“Iceland intends to be at the vanguard of the new digital economy,” Thorodinsónssónssónssónssón continued. “While some may put their confidence in the resolve of policymakers, we put our confidence in the cryptographic assurance arising from the second preimage resistance of the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.”

The government’s comprehensive program includes:

  • Bitcoin Payments – Iceland will immediately accept Bitcoin as valid payment for all government transactions including taxes, customs, duties and other fees.
  • Government Finance – Iceland will sell the first Bitcoin-denominated government bonds and offer its citizens the option of Bitcoin-denominated assets in government pension plans.
  • Economic Development – in conjunction with the burgeoning data center industry in Iceland, the government will incentivize new Bitcoin-based businesses, including exchanges, mining operations and a new generation of financial institutions, to locate and grow in Iceland.
  • The Icelandic Bitcoin Furnace – the Icelandic government will sponsor the crowdsourced design of a custom, ASIC-based Bitcoin mining device for the home. The device will offer terahash-class mining performance along with highly efficient heat recirculation for the long Icelandic winters. The government has reserved significant 28nm semiconductor fabrication capacity for production of the final design, which will also be made available as an open source reference design.
  • Advisory Services – Iceland will make its expertise in Bitcoin available to other sovereign nations interested in joining the 21st century financial economy through a range of consultative services. These services will initially be available through Icelandic embassies in Athens, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid, Nicosia, Paris, Singapore and Zurich.

No diacritical marks were harmed in the making of this post.

And if you are a Bitcoin-related (or other cryptocurrency) startup, whether you are in Iceland or not, I want to talk to you. See the About page for information on how to contact me.

Time for Some New Adventures

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Jump by Hamad AL-Mohannna, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License  Image via Flickr

After a great two-and-a-half years at VMware, I am casting off for new adventures.

At VMware, we dramatically changed the platform-as-a-service landscape with Cloud Foundry. You just don’t hear people talking any more about a single language or framework dominating the cloud. And the public cloud/private cloud debate is not question of “or”, but rather “and”. The premises of multi-framework, multi-application service and multi-cloud were heretical at launch, but now even the most diehard and recalcitrant have embraced “and” as a way of life. As a result, Cloud Foundry is winning the ecosystem race.

Developers, particularly in the enterprise, are inexorably moving up the stack in terms of platform abstraction and away from managing underlying plumbing to focus on their applications code (from DevOps to NoOps). Cloud Foundry makes it so much faster and easier to build, deploy and scale applications, while preserving deployment choice and flexibility, both today and into the future.

It was a blast working with a world-class engineering to launch Cloud Foundry as well as building a truly polyglot developer relations team. With the new corporate structure of the Pivotal Initiative, Cloud Foundry is well positioned to become the cloud application platform of choice. I wish the team the best of luck and will be following their progress closely.

While I am very bullish on Cloud Foundry and the Pivotal Initiative, I ultimately decided I have other things I want to do. In particular, I want to get closer to more nascent technologies and earlier stage businesses. My near-term plans are threefold. First, I will do some strategy consulting for a select group of clients under the newly formed aegis of Platformonomics, LLC. Second, I will continue working with my portfolio of startups, primarily in the Seattle area, where I invest, advise, mentor and sit on the odd board. And finally, I have a set of “over the horizon” topics of interest to dig into and will share some of that exploration here. Stay tuned.

Third Time’s a Charm?

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So now Microsoft joins the rumored array of aspiring watchmakers.

TechCrunch mockup of Microsoft Watch

Every story includes an obligatory reference to the Microsoft SPOT watch and its FM sideband broadcast technology:

SPOT watch

Yet there was an even earlier Microsoft watch. Industry history, it turns out, predates the archives of any tech blog, even those that stretch all the way back to the early 21st century. The first Microsoft watch was a mid-1990s collaboration with Timex called the Datalink (check out this retro unboxing video, featuring a 3.5” disk and a CompuServe offer). The watch had an optical sensor on the face. You synced your Outlook calendar data to it by awkwardly holding your arm up in front of your monitor while the screen blinked madly. The technique only worked with CRT monitors, not LCDs, which certainly put a damper on its future prospects. I found mine, which is a little worse for the wear:

Timex DataLink watch

And if you go back to the 1970s, there is another famous industry watch which doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry, despite an industry titan’s efforts to keep it and the lessons it conveyed alive:

The Microma watch

We’ll see if the next wave of smart watches do better than the previous attempts.

A Very Targeted Tax Cut

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Unexplored Territory 

We are in new territory with PC sales in freefall after a new release of Windows and, as some analysts contend, because of Windows 8. Even the Windows Vista “Vistaster” didn’t see PC sales to implode.

Discussions of Microsoft are moving beyond product recriminations to the more fundamental. The time-honored strategy of tying new businesses to the Windows mast is not working, and now the SS Windows is taking on water (if you need some frustration in your life, try Windows 8 on a old-school PC – the tablet-first approach dramatically undermines the traditional keyboard and mouse experience).

Both Goldman Sachs and Nomura’s Rick Sherlund have downgraded the stock today (Goldman to an outright Sell, Nomura to Neutral) and get into more existential questions about the company.

I have argued that Microsoft would be well served to voluntarily break itself up. It would unlock value, deliver a material strategy tax cut to individual businesses and solve the succession question.

Goldman views a breakup as ultimately unlikely but still makes it the first of four “Plan B” strategic options they present (the others are leverage offshore cash/increase debt, massive subsidies for mobile hardware to get into the game or significantly cut costs):

Are the parts worth more than the whole? Our sum of the parts analysis suggests a valuation at the midpoint of about $37.

Their sum of the parts analysis is interesting:

image

Note that Server & Tools will basically catch up to Windows in revenue this year and gets the highest multiple of any Microsoft business. Windows is the median business.

Sherlund, the once and future axe on Microsoft, weighs in on taking the company private (maybe Dell actually is an innovator and trailblazer…):

“I’d like to think you could make something happen, but the enterprise value is $200 billion. That’s a pretty big company.”

But another Sherlund comment really makes the case for breakup:

It’s all about Office. There’s so much they could do to sell Office, but Microsoft is focused on trying to sell the Windows. Office is Microsoft’s anchor. How do you compete with Google‘s (GOOG) Android? The hardware guys can produce commodity tablets in China. The lever for Microsoft is Office. But they should deliver office on alternative platforms as well. You would hurt Windows 8 traction, but where is your better revenue opportunity? There is going to be a point in time where Windows has to stand on its own because we are missing an opportunity for a big annuity revenue stream. People are learning Evernote and Dropbox. Microsoft should be pulling Skype and Yammer sales through Office.

I have always believed the Office business was Microsoft’s to lose, as opposed to some competitor being able to take it from them. But if the rumors of Office for iOS not coming until 2014 are to be believed, they seem determined to lose it. I find it difficult to believe the development hasn’t been done for a while, so it is hard to know whether it is an issue of sitting on it to try to help Windows get a tablet foothold and/or not wanting to share 30% of revenues with Apple (the Office 365 subscription model with free clients being the obvious path out of this, but it hasn’t achieved the necessary volumes to make this work well). Office is the bigger business, but Windows comes first at Microsoft and will continue to as long as they reside under the same roof.

Pushing through the strategy tax cut at Microsoft would solve a lot of problems for SteveB.

(Interesting that though the stock is down over 4% today, it is only back to Monday’s price and is still at a six month high. Makes you wonder if the insider trading game that is Wall Street knows something about next week’s earnings).

IBM: How Much Longer Do the Good Times Last?

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 Dinosaur World by mcdlttx, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  mcdlttx 

I have not written about IBM for a while (or really anything ;-) , but one of my recurring themes is IBM’s wholesale transition from what was once the world’s premier technology company (admittedly this was decades ago, but their relative and inflation-adjusted historical dominance is clear) into a financial engineering company. For students of the technology company lifecycle, they offer a fascinating career option for once-dominant companies.

This recent quote from a “former IBM exec who spoke on the condition of anonymity” prompted revisiting the company and again asking some questions about their business model and future prospects:

“Realizing this, IBM’s become a holding company of sorts, buying assets, integrating them and reselling them as an IBM brand.”

“IBM does not want to fund its own development because past history shows we’re not very good at it.”

Stock Performance

IBM has been a remarkably successful stock in recent years (and is about 12% of the gain propelling the DJIA to record highs since the 2009 low) and Wall Street loves the company as a result. Here are returns over the last five years:

IBM Chart

IBM data by YCharts

Top line growth however looks more like the surf report for a birdbath on a windless day, even as the bottom line is up over 50% in the same period:

IBM Revenue TTM Chart

IBM Revenue TTM data by YCharts

IBM’s strong bottom line growth has come from cost cutting and financial engineering, not growth in the business. The strategy they laid out in 2007 has worked quite well in terms of profit growth. Like most technology companies, IBM has a “roadmap” of what they’re going to do, but uniquely, it is a financial roadmap. Amid the roadmap’s blizzard of numbers, revenue growth only merits some hand-waving platitudes. They skillfully focus on profit growth for each segment, obscuring the lack of overall revenue growth. And the billions of dollars in euphemistically described “enterprise productivity” savings have come from squeezing employees, curbing retirement benefits (e.g. shifting from monthly to annual 401k contributions) and moving offshore aggressively (IBM arguably now stands for Indian Business Model). Cringley has chronicled how IBM has become the poster child for cutting your way to prosperity at the expense of customers and employees.

Now Wall Street views technology companies through a different lens, as seen in this comparison of IBM and Microsoft when IBM eclipsed Microsoft in value as well as a recent explanation of the market premiums by a Wall Street analyst. While not quite as absurd as David Einhorn telling Apple how to run its business, catering to Wall Street has taken IBM to a different place than they’d go as a technology company left to its own devices. It isn’t a coincidence each successive generation of powerhouse technology company is more open in its disdain of Wall Street. So while IBM’s financial engineering strategy has worked brilliantly to date, there are questions about how much longer this strategy will work, much less provide superior returns.

Where is the Innovation?

“IBM does not want to fund its own development because past history shows we’re not very good at it.”

IBM is the perennial leader in terms of patents issued, garnering them a wave of beneficent press every year. But if we define innovation as requiring both invention and market impact, it is hard to point to a single, material innovation IBM has delivered in the 21st century. Things like Watson or the latest nanotechnology transistor advance are duly milked for PR, but they don’t ever seem to turn into world-beater products that move the needle. When specific IBM patents are examined, they tend to be egregious examples of all that is wrong with the patent system and the company often finds itself magnanimously “contributing” what they had touted as great inventions to the public domain in the wake of backlash.

But the biggest innovation challenge for IBM, as we’ll elaborate on below, is their also-ran status in cloud computing. My comments from 2008 still hold today:

Meanwhile, on a more serious note, timesharing is back with a vengeance yet there is no sign IBM has ambitions to be a major player in the cloud computing era. Instead they’re fiddling with avatars while the on-premise business starts a long, slow burn. Where is the “one billion dollar” data center capex announcement that signals their ambition to play with the Amazons, Googles and Microsofts? Perhaps it is harder to make a “billion dollar” commitment when it requires real dollars as opposed to “soft” and/or exaggerated dollars? Or has IBM committed all its free cash flow to financial engineering, forcing them to watch the next generation of computing from the sidelines? Selling servers and consultants by the hour is a far cry from offering (anything)-as-a-service. In the cloud world, if you build it as a vendor, you also have to be willing to operate it at scale. And enterprise-scale is dwarfed by Internet-scale, so enterprise chops are not enough. Outsourcing “your mess for less” isn’t a service. One can only speculate that virtual conference rooms in Second Life are inhibiting IBM’s ability to define their strategy. I am still hoping they do OnDemand 2.0 and kill two birds with one slogan.

What about Cloud?

IBM’s value proposition since Lou Gerstner brought the company back from the brink has basically been “we’ll bring you up to average in IT” with IBM (human) services providing the glue to hold it all together (also known as “your mess for less” though it is intentionally really hard to tell whether the cost savings promised in the IBM sales spreadsheet actually panned out as promised).

We can argue about whether IBM offers IT capabilities at the 50th percentile (or 30th or 60th), but for roughly half of enterprises, IBM offered an improvement on what they could do themselves (and IT is arguably the opposite of Lake Wobegon – a land where everyone is below average ;-) . The challenge for IBM is cloud providers are more like 80th or 90th percentile (or higher) in their capabilities and have far better cost structures through software as opposed to busloads of consultants. The fraction of the market IBM can compete for will shrink due to cloud computing as complexity gets engineered out.

At the same time, the pendulum has swung away from outsourcing and in-sourcing now has cachet (perhaps in no small part to the quality of the outsourcing experience), which reverses the tailwind that has propelled IBM since Gerstner.

IBM has half-heartedly rolled out SmartCloud, which is at best difficult to understand (e.g. IBM’s definition of self-service is very different than the rest of the industry and requires human involvement to process orders and/or conceal their offerings from critical eyes). Tellingly, their top level message around cloud is a vague plea for open standards which is typically the last refuge of scoundrels and the uncompetitive.

The chip guys used to talk about a “poker chip” which was the cost of a single fab. The cost of a poker chip went up with every generation and now runs in the billions. You need cash to play the game. For cloud, the poker chip is the cost of a cloud-scale data center, which can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. At minimum, you need a few of them scattered around the globe. To cater to IBM’s preferred kind of enterprise customer, you probably need more than a few to offer granular jurisdictional compliance. We see the pretty pictures of massive datacenters belonging to Facebook, Google and Microsoft, but where are IBM’s poker chips? If you buy chips to play the cloud poker game, that money is not available for dividends or buybacks (and vice versa). You’d think IBM would be anxious to show the world vast structures stuffed to the gills with mainframes, demonstrating once and for all their claim that mainframes really are the best place to run the most modern workloads. Or maybe they just don’t have them.

Some will argue there will always be room for integration between and on top of software services, but cloud leaders are ruthlessly removing humans from the nuts and bolts of IT operations. IBM lacks meaningful or competitive cloud technology assets and per the IBM executive above, they don’t seem particularly confident in their ability to develop new technology. The other option is to “move up the stack” and offer business consulting, which is certainly the way IBM positions the company. But contrary to the story, IBM remains extremely exposed to menial IT functions that are disappearing in the cloud era. And their intense focus on cost reduction through off-shoring doesn’t add to their business consulting skills. The rise of the cloud brings IBM’s inability to innovate to the fore and poses a real threat to their current business model.

Where is the Thought Leadership?

One thing IBM has historically done pretty well is thought leadership. Particularly for a company of their size, they had remarkable discipline in aligning a sprawling empire (at least from the outside) top-down around a common story supported by strong advertising, marketing and top-down sales relationships. Their embrace of Java and then Linux/OSS felt like technology leadership at the time but in fact it  represented IBM’s outsourcing of technology leadership. They had moved from innovating to endorsing technology and felt comfortable in their ability to remain on top as an integrator of the piece parts. In fact, the more piece parts coming from different centers of gravity, the better for the consultant.

I believe OnDemand was a milestone in IBM’s thought leadership history, It was obviously well before its time and presaged a lot of what we take for granted with cloud computing. My theory is IBM quickly discovered they were ahead of the market, and way, way, way ahead of their typical, lower percentile customers who just weren’t going to be early adopters. So OnDemand quietly disappeared. Nor are there any obvious technology or product artifacts from the effort. I suspect they still have deep scars from the experience that are impacting their ability to wholeheartedly embrace cloud, even if they had the means to do so.

IBM’s most recent storyline has been Smarter Planet and it is a different beast than former campaigns. It unambiguously puts a business value message first, and aims foremost at governments and those selling to governments. This was partly a reflection of the timing (it rolled out in November 2008, in the depths of the financial crisis) and IBM wanted to dine at the trough of government stimulus spending. But it is also also a reflection of the sophistication (or lack thereof) of the typical big IBM customer. Governments are rarely among the most able and discerning of IT customers (yes, there are lots of recent efforts to put a positive spin on their need to do better, but when you look at the lowest percentiles of IT organizations, lets just stipulate that governments are well represented).

Meanwhile, cloud computing has become the high order bit for IT today and IBM is hard to find. They’re not only not shaping the discussion to their advantage, they’re not really in the debate. Cloud leaders don’t use IBM and if you want to seriously play in cloud, IBM is hardly going to make your list of strategic partners or suppliers.

Where is the Customer Success?

IBM does a great job with their advertising and customer case studies, which tends to mask the bigger question: where are the customers with a big IBM technology reliance who are leading their industries through application of technology? What disrupter relies on IBM for their technology and/or consulting services? Who is successfully holding off the disrupters and/or revolutionizing their industry using IBM technology or business consulting? Which of today’s startups undergoing explosive growth have done it on an IBM platform?  [Pause here and wait for the crickets].

With no offense to (Sri) Lanka Bell (“a leading telecommunications service provider” and SmartCloud adopter) or the Memphis Police Department (who did some statistical analysis in SPSS), these are not world-beater customers doing breakthrough things with cutting edge technologies. Those IBM TV ads about Smarter Analytics are really about SPSS, a 45-year old product that IBM had to acquire? How many IBM “big data” case studies are running on good old IMS (which shares a birth year with SPSS)? Granted IBM does a nice job making its late majority adopters look good, but it is hard to find IBM customer examples that live up to the rhetoric.

Broadly, I am seeing much greater enterprise customer awareness of the deficiencies in their in-house and traditional outsourced IT capabilities. As technology moves into broad deployment across all industries, almost every company is now a technology company to a greater degree and has to compete against technology-based startups using 21st century technology. Om Malik makes this point really well by pointing out who is buying technology companies now; it isn’t just other technology companies any more. And these are the companies who are IBM’s traditional bread and butter customers.

As a result, there is a business imperative to “do better” when it comes to IT. Some companies are even asking how to walk away from all their IT investments, not because “IT doesn’t matter”, but because it matters so much and the current platforms are such a drag they see starting from scratch as the only option. It will be interesting to see if anyone pulls this off, or if it remains a material advantage for new entrants.

Critically for IBM, this mindset is taking hold amongst companies who historically lived the idea you couldn’t get fired for buying IBM. They’re actually concluding their IBM dependency might not just get them fired, but it could kill them. I remember visiting one household name a few years ago where they proudly showed me the building full of IBM consultants and the CIO responded to my “you have to get off the mainframe – you’re stuck in the land that Moore’s Law forgot” pitch with a retort that began with a patronizing “Son, there’s something you need to understand…” That company has since seen the light and has decided IBM must play a far less significant role in their future if they want to stay competitive.

And when it comes to creating success for their customers, IBM’s pure enterprise footprint looks like an ever bigger liability. They can talk about selling to Chief Marketing Officers all they want, but the reality is IBM can’t bring hundreds of millions of customers to the discussion the way an Amazon, Apple, Google or Microsoft can who actually touch customers at scale and can bring that understanding and technology to bear for customers. Watson makes for a nice demo and game show contestant, but how does it really compete with Google Now or Siri in terms of reach (make your own WebSphere joke here) or even scale? The consumerization of IT as much as anything is the world moving away from IBM.

The Case Against IBM

That got really long. To summarize, the good times rarely last forever and IBM is unlikely to continue to outperform:

  1. Wall Street may love IBM (which is an indictment unto itself…) but mean reversion looks inexorable. IBM has put itself in thrall to Wall Street and achieved superior earnings growth through non-sustainable cost cutting and financial measures. What is good for Wall Street in this case isn’t good for customers or the long term success of the company. Historically low interest rates have also been part of the IBM story (borrowing at a rate below your dividend rate to buy back stock is cash flow accretive) and that too will mean revert one of these days.
  2. IBM is a technology company that doesn’t really innovate. Cost cutting only takes you so far; eventually it cuts muscle as opposed to fat. Real technology companies do actual (non-financial) engineering, but IBM has committed its cash to growing EPS. IBM doesn’t even bother trying to tell a growth story (they should at least be able to grow with  global GDP). Meanwhile, they have lots of legacy business at risk. In particular, IBM makes the bulk of its revenue from busloads of consultants and the plurality of its profits from the mainframe. And a rats’ nest of a legacy software rollup doesn’t make you a software company, investor relations slides to the contrary (are there any IBM software acquisitions that aren’t in harvest mode and have seen material investment?).
  3. The company is missing the boat on cloud computing. IBM is largely an observer in the biggest trend in IT, which directly undermines the core of IBM’s business model. And the legacy software acquisition model of the last decade will not work as well applied to SaaS applications – software services require on-going innovation, don’t drag consulting to the same degree and the economics are not as accretive given the capex needs.
  4. The big industry trends are against IBM. Not just cloud, but also outsourcing swinging back to in-sourcing and the consumerization of IT. IBM is fighting these trends, not setting an alternative agenda.
  5. IBM’s customers are in crisis. Historical affinities of even the most complacent customers will be put to the test in the face of existential, technology-based business threats. You can only paint laggards as technology leaders for so long and if the IT center of gravity is shifting from the CIO to the CMO, IBM’s lack of consumer assets or DNA hurts them relative to the competition.

Disclosure: ironically, I am long IBM though not by any action on my part, and have been too lazy to do anything about it. This post hopefully will motivate me to rectify that.

Change as a Constant

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This is a nice illustration of just how much can change in twenty years and how quickly fundamental geopolitical assumptions can collapse:

Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital. Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that serious people were claiming that war had become impossible—and if not impossible, would end within weeks of beginning— because global financial markets couldn’t withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed: a peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the world.

Imagine yourself now in the summer of 1920. Europe had been torn apart by an agonizing war. The continent was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires were gone and millions had died in a war that lasted for years. The war ended when an American army of a million men intervened—an army that came and then just as quickly left. Communism dominated Russia, but it was not clear that it could survive. Countries that had been on the periphery of European power, like the United States and Japan, suddenly emerged as great powers. But one thing was certain—the peace treaty that had been imposed on Germany guaranteed that it would not soon reemerge.

Imagine the summer of 1940. Germany had not only reemerged but conquered France and dominated Europe. Communism had survived and the Soviet Union now was allied with Nazi Germany. Great Britain alone stood against Germany, and from the point of view of most reasonable people, the war was over. If there was not to be a thousand- year Reich, then certainly Europe’s fate had been decided for a century. Germany would dominate Europe and inherit its empire.

Imagine now the summer of 1960. Germany had been crushed in the war, defeated less than five years later. Europe was occupied, split down the middle by the United States and the Soviet Union. The European empires were collapsing, and the United States and Soviet Union were competing over who would be their heir. The United States had the Soviet Union surrounded and, with an overwhelming arsenal of nuclear weapons, could annihilate it in hours. The United States had emerged as the global superpower. It dominated all of the world’s oceans, and with its nuclear force could dictate terms to anyone in the world. Stalemate was the best the Soviets could hope for—unless the Soviets invaded Germany and conquered Europe. That was the war everyone was preparing for. And in the back of everyone’s mind, the Maoist Chinese, seen as fanatical, were the other danger.

Now imagine the summer of 1980. The United States had been defeated in a seven- year war—not by the Soviet Union, but by communist North Vietnam. The nation was seen, and saw itself, as being in retreat. Expelled from Vietnam, it was then expelled from Iran as well, where the oil fields, which it no longer controlled, seemed about to fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. To contain the Soviet Union, the United States had formed an alliance with Maoist China—the American president and the Chinese chairman holding an amiable meeting in Beijing. Only this alliance seemed able to contain the powerful Soviet Union, which appeared to be surging.

Imagine now the summer of 2000. The Soviet Union had completely collapsed. China was still communist in name but had become capitalist in practice. NATO had advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former Soviet Union. The world was prosperous and peaceful. Everyone knew that geopolitical considerations had become secondary to economic considerations, and the only problems were regional ones in basket cases like Haiti or Kosovo.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the world turned on its head again. At a certain level, when it comes to the future, the only thing one can be sure of is that common sense will be wrong. There is no magic twenty- year cycle; there is no simplistic force governing this pattern. It is simply that the things that appear to be so permanent and dominant at any given moment in history can change with stunning rapidity. Eras come and go. In international relations, the way the world looks right now is not at all how it will look in twenty years . . . or even less. The fall of the Soviet Union was hard to imagine, and that is exactly the point. Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long- term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

From The Next 100 Years by George Friedman.

The Rise of the Machines – A Reading List

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Cyberdyne Systems

A recurring theme from this summer’s reading:

  • The Fear Index – Robert Harris
    Harris is best known for relatively highbrow historical thrillers spanning ancient Rome to the Second World War but has been inhabiting the present of late. Here he delivers a taut thriller where a quant hedge fund’s black box moves beyond trading the markets to manipulating them, to the consternation of its creators.
  • Kill Decision – Daniel Suarez
    After his incendiary debut with Daemon and its surprisingly disappointing sequel Freedom(tm), Suarez is back in form looking at the impact of autonomous military drones. He is great at extrapolating today’s technology a relatively short distance into the future for a step function impact, and delivers almost cinematic action scenes while raising deeper geopolitical issues. Like Daemon, it ends in media res, so a sequel is coming.
  • Angelmaker – Nick Harkaway
    More focused than his The Gone-Away World, Harkaway restrains his propensity for discursive back-story and existential protagonist issues to deliver a more focused story about a throw-back mechanical doomsday machine threatening the world, with a rotating (and superbly named) cast of clockmakers, super villains, sinister bureaucrats, gangsters, octogenarian superspies, piranhas and others.
  • Ready Player One – Ernest Cline
    The humans ultimately manage to pass down control over the machines, but this is a trailer park Neuromancer paying homage to the music, movies and video games of the 1980s in thoroughly creative fashion. Must read if you spent any of your formative years in that decade. 
  • Race Against the Machine – Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
    Non-fiction from a couple of MIT professors where the subtitle is almost as long as the book itself.  They argue that our economic woes do not stem from the Keynesians’ misplaced aggregate demand or too little innovation (see The Great Stagnation), but rather too much innovation. The median worker is losing out to the exponential growth of computing as it devours more and more human tasks. Structural unemployment ensues as people cannot re-skill fast enough in the face of creative destruction. While the diagnosis is thought provoking, the policy prescriptions are banal as seems par for the course with such books.

Still in my pile:  Avogadro and Robopocalypse.  What else should be there?