The Economist writes:

Microsoft has been trying for years to move beyond the PC, and into other devices such as mobile phones, television set-top boxes and games consoles. “The big über-strategy that this falls under relates to what's happening in the home,” says Robbie Bach, Microsoft's “chief Xbox officer” and head of a newly formed business unit that brings together Microsoft's gaming, mobile and TV divisions. “We identified many years ago that the digital revolution was going to have a big impact, and we see a big opportunity there,” he says. As all these other electronic devices increasingly resemble computers, they offer Microsoft new opportunities to sell software. Just as importantly, they offer new avenues for growth: sales of non-PC devices are growing much faster than sales of PCs. “Microsoft wants the next 30 years to be as successful as the last 30 years, so we have to continually find new market opportunities,” says Christine Heckart of Microsoft's TV division.

Umair Haque writes:

The fundamental economic shift taking place in the 21st century is the shift from cheap information to cheap coordination.

In the second half of the 20th century, thing got digitized, and then networked - the cost of information itself dropped discontinuously. This made the dominant strategy hyperspecialization - to leverage this cheap info by building core competences, which are essentially, scale economies in specialization.

Now, new technologies are making coordination discontinuously cheap - it's now increasingly possible to do things with that information, without the need to build the huge coordination mechanisms firms employ; like bosses, managers, meetings, roles, and performance assessments.

At it's heart, this is why Web 2.0 is important - it's about going beyond cheap information; about dropping the costs of coordination. This is the shift to a post-network economy; where what we do with the stuff on the network is more valuable than just being part of the network.

Nick Bradbury writes:

What I propose is that aggregator users and developers have an open discussion about what specific attention data could (and should) be collected by aggregators.

Although there's a lot of attention data that could be stored in OPML, my recommendation is that we keep it simple - otherwise, we risk seeing each aggregator support a different subset of attention data. So rather than come up with a huge list of attributes, I'll start by recommending a single piece of attention data: rank.

We need a way to rank feeds that makes sense across aggregators, so that when you export OPML from one aggregator, the aggregator you import into would know which feeds you're paying the most attention to. This could be used for any number of things - recommending related feeds, giving higher ranked feeds higher priority in feed listings, etc.

Although user interface and workflow differences require each aggregator to have its own algorithm for ranking feeds, we should be able to define a ranking attribute that makes sense to every aggregator. In FeedDemon's case, a simple scale (say, 0-100) would work: feeds you rarely read would get be ranked closer to zero, while feeds you read all the time would be ranked closer to 100. Whether this makes sense outside of FeedDemon remains to be seen, so I'd love to hear from developers of other aggregators about this.

Forbes writes:

Paul Jacobs dismisses the myriad threats. The Nokia complaint in Europe is merely a political attempt to slow Qualcomm down, he says. The Broadcom suit is "without merit," the company says. Intel's Wimax dream is little more than a PowerPoint presentation, he adds. "They're the kind of people who see the world as a nail because they have a hammer."

To keep Qualcomm ahead, he puts his faith in innovation, packing ever more lifestyle features into the cell phone of the future. Picture-taking, music-playing, television, movies, videogames--Qualcomm engineers are integrating as much of this fun stuff as possible into their wireless chips. In three years the company has invested $4 billion in such pursuits as a better call-routing design, push-to-talk calling over the Internet, vivid color screens and ways to beam live, crisp video to handsets.
...
Next year Qualcomm launches its MediaFlo service, offering carriers 15 live TV channels and 40 channels of videoclips; it is spending $800 million to set up the net. It grew out of a random chat Paul had one day in late 2001 with Sanjay Jha, who now runs Qualcomm's chip division. Paul pulled out his new iPod handheld player and rhapsodized, "It is so cool." Soon they were what-iffing:Wouldn't it be great if you could hear a song on the radio and buy it and download it at the press of a button on your phone? "And that is how MediaFlo was born," Jha says.

It's another long shot, but Paul Jacobs is undaunted by skepticism about the huge capital drain. Says he: "I think having people underestimate you is a good thing."

HBS Working Knowledge writes:

Assistant professor Mukti Khaire believes that small companies can grow by developing intangible social resources such as legitimacy, status, and reputation. In an interesting twist, her research on this insight is that these intangible resources may be best acquired by following a road of conformity in how your company is organized and presented to the outside world. Conventional business titles such as Marketing Director are much better than Chief Evangelist. Organizationally, a hierarchical structure will be much better understood and accepted by outsiders than a flat, decentralized decision-making structure.

“These social resources are acquired by mimicking the structures and activities of established firms, and by affiliating with high-status customers respectively,” she wrote in the abstract to her recent paper, Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: Strategies for New Venture Growth.

The Wikipedia entry for Peter Drucker gives a brief profile of his life: “Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was a management theorist who created many phrases common in business today. Drucker, born in Vienna, Austria, fled from the Nazis to the United States in 1937. In 1943, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He wrote thirty nine books, the first in 1939, and from 1975 to 1995 was an editorial columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and was a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review. He continued to act as a consultant to businesses and non-profit organizations when he was in his nineties.”

The Economist wrote:

Mr Drucker was born in 1909 in the Austrian upper middle class—his father was a government official—and educated in Vienna and Germany. He earned a doctorate in international and public law from Frankfurt university in 1931. In normal times this would have led to a distinguished, if predictable, academic career. But those were not normal times—and Mr Drucker was not a man to bow down to the confines of academic disciplines. He spent his 20s trying to avoid Adolf Hitler and drifting among a number of jobs, including banking, consultancy, academic law and journalism (his journalistic career included a spell as the acting editor of a women's page).

Along the way, he became increasingly convinced that the best hope for saving civilisation from barbarism lay in the humdrum science of management. He was too sensitive to the thinness of the crust of civilisation to share the classic liberal faith in the market, but too clear-sighted to embrace the growing fashion for big-government solutions. The man in the grey-flannel suit held out more hope for mankind than either the hidden hand or the gentleman in Whitehall.

He finally found a home in American academia, teaching politics, philosophy and economics.

An Austrian-born exile from Nazi Germany, Drucker made his name as the first modern management guru as a result of a groundbreaking study of the structures and practices of General Motors, which he embarked upon in 1943.
The resulting Concept of the Corporation (1946) looked at a large manufacturing company for the first time as a living social organism; and although GM tried to ban its executives from reading it, the book became an international bestseller.

It argued for treating workers as valued team members, rather than as mere assembly-line fodder, and developed the idea of management as a specialised skill, the aim of which is to make people capable of joint performance, like players in an orchestra under the baton of a conductor, but each responsible for his or her own instrumental part. This was the core of Drucker's life's work.