muhamm

This article says that since 1965 the return on assets for US corporations has dropped by 75% while the biggest additions to the asset base over the same period have been hardware and software. The first question this seems to raise is what are we actually measuring when we look at return on assets - does it take into account the fact that your customers view your brand more positively because your IT has made your company more responsive to the customer? Because that change could actually reduce your advertising costs and not end up in any metric. And the second question is whether most companies are just investing in technology to automate existing processes or are really reorganizing the way they do business around their IT so that they can fully leverage all of the potential benefits of their IT. Of course that takes a degree of understanding of IT that many older executives simply do not have.

Shirky is a ridiculously good speaker. Thanks for posting this.

-> "A good developer would never put the end of the digestive system right next to the start of the reproduction system - not even if that would require fewer lines of code (which it undoubtedly did)."

Whatever point he's trying to make in this post - and I'm not going to take the time to try to figure it out - I'm sure there's a simpler way of saying it.

I doubt whether there is any conclusive empirical data on this question. Feel free to guess.

Not sure what you mean.

I really like Derek Sivers' blog but I have an issue about affiliate linking. Maybe it's just my issue but when I see Amazon affiliate links for all of the books on this list, it makes me hesitant to click them. Call me crazy perhaps.

Doesn't the company have a contractual obligation to pay you your wages even if it has to go into debt to do so? I don't see how they could get away with that.