Tales of Innovation I: Xerox

As part of a business case analysis on Competitive Strategy I had the opportunity to read “Fumbling the Future”, the story of Xerox (NYSE:XRX) Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and how a team of R&D directed by Alan Kay invented the first personal computer known, including the laser printer, mouse, Ethernet and the “what you see is what you get” windows-like environment. ALTO was released in 1979 with a price tag of $32,000. Later in 1980, a more advanced computer named Star was created but without commercial success. Steve Jobs from Apple Computer took these ideas and created LISA the Macintosh predecessor with a price of $9,995; the rest is history. Nowadays, with a $400 million effort Xerox is unveiling new document technologies based on more than 300 patents. Will Xerox repeat the story?

Me ...Karl Barth?

"It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is."

You are Karl Barth! You like your freedom, and are pretty stubborn against authority! You don't care much for other people's opinions either. You can come up with your own fun, and often enough you have too much fun. You are pretty popular because you let people have their way, even when you have things figured out better than them.

What theologian are you?

A creation of Henderson

Happy Valentine’s Day with Diamonds in the Sky…

The biggest diamond ever known was found by a team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Indeed, the diamond is the core of a crystallized WD (White-Dwarf type) star called BPM 37093 that is located 50 light-years from Earth in Centaurus constellation. The core is about 2500 miles wide and can make a diamond with 10 billion trillion trillion carats. For some time scientists have believed that cooling WD stars should have a crystallized cores. In the case of BPM 37093 that is also a pulsating star, it is possible to calculate the core size by measuring the space between radial overtone modes. The size of the diamond core is in turn the lead to determine the age of the star and somehow the age of the galaxy. Coordinates are R.A. (J2000) = 12 38 50.3, Dec. (J2000) = -49 48 00, mv = 13.5, mb=14.1. Anyone interested?

Excerpt from Dante’s Vita Nuova

So long has Love held power over me
and accustomed me to his lordship,
that as he seemed harsh to me at first,
so now he seems sweet in my heart.
And so when he takes away my courage,
and my spirits seem to fly away,
then I feel throughout my soul
such sweetness that my face pales,
and then Love holds such power over me,
that he makes my spirits go speaking,
and always calling on
my lady to grant me greater welcome.
That happens to me whenever I see her,
and is so humbling, no one can understand.

Vita Nuova, XXVII, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

MARS: “Holy Grail for Geologists”

Spiegel has posted an interesting project with panoramic views of Mars from Viking 1 (1982) to Opportunity (2004). Mars day is called “sol” and is only 39 minutes and 35.2 seconds longer than terrestrial, mars solar year is around 668.52 sols or 1.881 Earth years.

ERP-conomics

Oracle Corp (NASDAQ:ORCL) made its third bid in less than a year, a $9.4 billion offer to acquire PeopleSoft (NASDAQ:PSFT) in an attempt to polarize the ERP market by incorporating Peoplesoft customer base to Oracle’s market share. If this happens sometime soon then we will see ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution prices soar as market for large scale companies will be shared mainly with SAP Aktiengesellschaft (NYSE: SAP). PeopleSoft has rejected the offer claiming the bid does not reflect the current company value (Market Cap around 8.13B, EPS 0.25) and Oracle is using this momentum to create confusion and erode relationships with customers. Question: Now, would you buy any of the following products or services?