The Secret of Bill Gates' Success

Nice homage from the BBC. And by all means also check Fortune, as well as the Reuters coverage of the moment supreme of Bill actually saying goodbye on Friday, Jun 27, 2008. Plus the hilarious official "leaving" video featuring Bono, Clooney, Hillary, Obama and others.

Less jobs & surging fuel prices . . .

. . . they may just be the beginning of bigger problems for the US and global economy.

Rising oil prices combined with falling wages will force governments and citizens to tighten their belts. If inflation strikes, governments and citizens will have little choice but adapt by purchasing smaller cars or bicycling, adjusting eating habits and pursuing a simpler lifestyle.

Whole story here.

New Oil Price Shock

Energy ministers are meeting in Japan a day after a record one-day jump in the crude oil price, to $139 a barrel.

Under pressure from the US, Japan, China, India and South Korea have agreed on the need to end fuel subsidies, blamed for boosting demand.

US energy secretary Samuel Bodman said the price surge was a "shock" but not a crisis, amid fears the oil price spike could help tip some of the world's economies into recession.

Some suggest crude oil could reach $150 a barrel by July.

The Mutually Reinforcing Housing and Oil Shock

The twin shocks from housing and oil have become mutually reinforcing, potentially turning what may be a mild recession into something more threatening. Even those economists who think the U.S. might dodge a recession are concerned.

Crazy prices at the pump are pushing even the survivors over the edge. "They're asking, 'Do I put gas in my car or do I pay this utility bill or do I pay the mortgage?'

Read this BusinessWeek article.

Microsoft's Innovation Engine

"Ultimately the goal of Microsoft Research is to make sure Microsoft is still here in 10 years," says Rick Rashid, charged with overseeing research worldwide. Rashid made the comments as Microsoft offered a glimpse at some of the projects aimed at ensuring the company goes from strength-to-strength, including:
= Programming for kids
= Botnet detection
= LaserTouch
= E-Science in the cloud
= Tablet PC
= Privacy Integrated Queries
= WorldWide Telescope
= Bilingual Built-ins that Break Language Barriers
. . . and more

Shell Energy Scenarios to 2050

In 2100 the world’s energy system will be drastically different from today’s. Renewable and nuclear energy will be more widely used and humans will have found ways of dealing with air pollution and greenhouse gasses. Doesn’t sound too bad does it? But of course much depends on how we get there. Shell have outlined two possible routes in their new Scenarios to 2050: Scramble and Blueprints.

In the first route, Scramble, nations rush to secure energy resources for themselves, fearing that energy security is a zero-sum game, with clear winners and losers. Policymakers pay little attention to curbing energy consumption, supplies run short and greenhouse gas emissions are not addressed until major shocks trigger political reactions. Too little too late? You bet.

The second scenario however, Blueprints, is more positive. Coalitions emerge to take on the challenges of economic development, energy security, and environmental pollution through cross-border cooperation. National governments introduce efficiency standards, taxes, and other policy instruments to improve the environmental performance of buildings, vehicles, and transport fuels.

Services:
= Download the PPT
= Watch our video about the two scenarios, Scramble and Blueprints, with Jeremy Bentham, VP, Global Business Environment
= Download the PDF of the Shell Energy Scenarios 2050
= Download the video transcript
= More

From Anti-Americanism to Post-Americanism

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

It's true China is booming, Russia is growing more assertive, terrorism is a threat. But if America is losing the ability to dictate to this new world, it has not lost the ability to lead.

Read Fareed Zakaria's The Rise of the Rest.

The Cognitive Age

Hillary Clinton summarized the narrative this week: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

The globalization paradigm has turned out to be very convenient for politicians. It allows them to blame foreigners for economic woes. It allows them to pretend that by rewriting trade deals, they can assuage economic anxiety. It allows them to treat economic and social change as a great mercantilist competition, with various teams competing for global supremacy, and with politicians starring as the commanding generals.

But there's a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn't really explain most of what is happening in the world.

We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

Read it all here.

Luminaries look to future web at its 15th anniversary

Tim Berners-Lee, W3C
Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton
Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
David Belanger, AT&T
Kai-Fu Lee, Google China
Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
Mark Bernstein, Parc
Robert Cailliau, Cern
Robert Scoble, blogger
Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 inventor

Read it all here.

Climate Change: A Shameful Lack of Urgency

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Read it all here in The New York Times.

Mega Regions Rule

"When people talk about economic competitiveness, the focus tends to be on nation states, but this focus is off the mark. The real driving force of the world economy is a new and incredibly powerful economic unit: the mega-region.

While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world's population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation.

The world's largest mega is Greater Tokyo, with 55 million people and $2.5 trillion in economic activity. Next is the 500-mile Boston-Washington corridor, with some 54 million people and $2.2 trillion in output. Also in the top 10 are mega-regions that run from Chicago to Pittsburgh, Atlanta to Charlotte, Miami to Tampa, and L.A. to San Diego. Outside of the U.S., you can find megas around Amsterdam, London, Osaka and Nagoya, Milan, Rome and Turin, and Frankfurt and Stuttgart."

All this is certainly not new, but still: interesting findings from Richard Florida.

America 2050 is here.

Brand New Global Warming Solutions Unavoidable

Jeffrey D. Sachs is economist and the head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. In a recent article in Scientific American he states:

“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”