What to watch on the web
September 8, 2008
Business television is designed to be wallpaper for trading floors, receptions and offices. It’s not meant to be watched and listened to. That’s why it’s got those annoying tickers running along the sides and bottoms, and you rarely see anything other than a talking head, the cheapest form of programming.
The same is true of the much of the flood of business video content available on the web. Most company results announcements are now available in webcast, CEO interviews by the score, talking heads of every shape and ugliness opining on the direction of interest rates, the oil price, Obama’s impact on the yield curve, you name it.
The problem for web video is that it is stuck between the sit forward, active viewing of computer users, and the sit back and receive viewing mode of television watchers. People who stumble upon online video content often aren’t really expecting anything specific, so when they inevitably don’t get it, they click off quickly.
Its low value, media bulimia stuff, which means that any means of differentiation or way of keeping people coming back should quickly garner value as people get more used to watching and navigating content online, broadband speeds get faster, and mobile devices become more watchable. Read more
Climate change is the Liberal Party’s Europe
September 3, 2008
From the end of the Thatcher years until…well, still, really…the British Conservative party has been tearing itself to bits over Europe.
No doubt, for a conservative, its a knotty problem. Should the country hitch itself to the European wagon, a socialist enterprise for the common good of all, but particularly bureaucrats? or should it march bravely alone into the cold winds of the twenty first century, upper lip stiff, wellingtons on, sinking or swimming according to its own character and judgement?
John Major spent his premiership fending off both the Europhiles and the Europsceptics, until there was nothing left of the party but a squabbling undisciplined rabble, some of whom dressed in women’s undergarments and suffocated themselves with mandarins. Its true, really. Read more
Review: What they teach you at HBS
September 3, 2008
I torpedoed my banking career before it ever got underway by admitting in my second interview that I actually didn’t want to be a banker.
“I want to be a writer,” I told the somewhat startled interviewer, a straight-laced associate at a now defunct merchant bank in London. “But I figure a couple of years inside a bank should give me a good grounding in comedic perception.”
Having shown me the door, he recommended Liar’s Poker, in which Michael Lewis infiltrates Salomon Brothers at the height of its 1980s madness. Lewis describes how the bank turned the mortgage market upside down and caught the change from its pockets. The exact details escape me but it involved helicopters from Wall Street to Atlantic City and the like.
Lewis had beaten me to the punch. Read more
