Ad blocking, like piracy, is a market phenomenon

A French ISP has started blocking ads at the router level for its customers, enabled by default. Advertisers are, not surprisingly, upset. ..

Labor costs make way for Maslow

That Apple, and other companies, are deciding to move manufacturing back to the United States is evidence of the diminishing importance of labor costs in decision-making. This implies several things. ..

A political approach to hiring creatives

This article offers a lot of sound advice on hiring a designer. As techies, we’re often out of our depth in knowing what a good designer is — often, we hire a decorator instead (or as the article calls it, a stylist). ..

Microsoft’s political privacy game

I’ve suggested many times that Microsoft should disable third-party cookies by default in IE10 (and Safari does currently). This would be strategic for them: it devalues Google’s main income source and allows Microsoft to trumpet a commitment to privacy. ..

The good might be the enemy of the perfect with software patents

I have a few concerns, relating to unintended consequences, with a proposed loser-pays bill on software patents. ..

The quaintness of “content” vs “infrastructure”

Here’s a really informative article on the economics of Google’s fiber offer. One of the key takeaways is that Google’s ownership of high-bandwidth content (YouTube) gives them leverage in peering arrangements. ..

Two, billion-dollar UI mistakes in Windows 8

I am very interested in Windows 8 both as a user and as a tech industry watcher. Big bet, big changes. ..

Resolution vs “real estate”

The new Retina Macbook looks quite beautiful, but from a productivity standpoint I am a bit disappointed. While they have quadrupled the pixel count (to 2880 x 1800), they have not increased real estate, per se. ..

Fluency

At my ripe old age one might expect me to give up programming and focus more on management. Which I do, if informally. But I have never seen the need to put aside programming in order to manage. ..

This way madness lies (thankfully)

Tim Lee offers two views of the economic case for innovation. I am certainly more Hayekian — I think expertise and information is inherently dispersed and the Hayekian view is more granular, if you will. It’s more likely to discover and serve niches and inefficiencies. ..