My interest in remote working dates from the early 2000s, when I got my first broadband connection at home, or rather at what was my “home“ at the time, Imperial College London’s postgraduate accommodation at Clayponds Village located next to Gunnersbury Park in west London. Clayponds was a very interesting place, with a great atmosphere […]
A few days ago, the European Union decided to hit Google with a €4.3bn fine. The reasons put forward by the European Commission focus on the company’s MADA or Mobile Application Distribution Agreement, that all device manufacturers that want to license Google’s apps and include the Google Play Store with their devices are forced to […]
If we want to be able to respond to the challenges that face human life on this planet, then we need to research and teach about as many different forms of organising as we are able to collectively imagine. For us to assume that global capitalism can continue as it is means to assume a path to destruction. So if we are going to move away from business as usual, then we also need to radically reimagine the business school as usual. And this means more than pious murmurings about corporate social responsibility. It means doing away with what we have, and starting again.
Ever since the 1980s, a vicious cycle of software and hardware requirements and updates has ‘plagued’ users and maintained high and constant rents to the vendors who systematically collude to render their previous offerings obsolete, while forcing (not enticing) their customers to upgrade to the latest incarnation of their products. The justification for this form […]
Ένα από τα μεγάλα προβλήματα στο ελληνικό επιχειρείν είναι αυτό της αξιοπιστίας. Συχνά, κατηγορούμαστε, ως λαός, πως αποφεύγουμε το ρίσκο, πως είμαστε καχύποπτοι και συντηρητικοί στις ενέργειες, τα πλάνα, την γενικότερη δραστηριότητά μας. Και σε έναν μεγάλο βαθμό είναι αλήθεια. Υπάρχουν όμως και αρκετοί λόγοι που συμβαίνει αυτό: η ελληνική πραγματικότητα είναι γεμάτη από περιπτώσεις […]
I think what really happened was that in the early days of personal computing, decisions were made to give the user an enormous amount of freedom, to communicate without barriers and to share files. And consumers started to use those to, you know, trade information, outside of the boundaries of the law. Since about 2007 or 2008 though we've seen a complete shift in this paradigm. Since that time the technologists and the rights holders have really been working together to disempower the user and to turn them more into a customer. So the goal is no longer to empower the computing user, it's to extract value from them. And I think if you look at your smartphone you'll see that: it's a lot more closed than a PC used to be. You almost always have to go through a corporate intermediary. And that was not the case in the early days of computing. There was a period there where the average user had an extraordinary amount of power to do, basically, what they saw fit.This is a quote by Stephen Witt, author of 'How Music Got Free', as mentioned in The Pop Star and the Prophet (around the 20 minute mark), a BBC podcast published back in September --- if you're a music lover in addition to a technology enthusiast, you should listen to the podcast and, perhaps, read the book. And while his book is probably only tangentially interesting to anyone interested in the history of technology, but without an interest in music, the quote couldn't possibly be more accurate or well-put.