Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend of ours is living in Shanghai and has learned Mandarin, to read Chinese, and to manage young Chinese computer science graduates.  A bunch of us were kicking around ideas for starting businesses that would exploit this resource.  One of my suggestions was a tutoring service that would enable yuppie parents in the U.S. to hire a Chinese tutor/coach to work with their children via video conference, helping with math and keeping track of homework goals, etc.  A Silicon Valley friend, let’s call him UberNerd, heaped scorn on this idea.  “Where’s your intellectual property protection?  If you don’t have a patent you can’t make any money.”

Having flown out to California on JetBlue, which is profitable despite not being able to patent “being nice” and “free wireless Internet at the gates in JFK and Long Beach” (not in Logan, presumably thanks to Massport’s having handed out a monopoly to Comcast), and driving around in a car from Hertz, which is profitable despite not being able to patent “cars that aren’t decrepit”, my gut feeling was that he was wrong.  There were at least some companies that were profitable without extracting rents from intellectual property.  After more consideration I’m beginning to think that intellectual property is actually bad for long-term profitability.

Checking the top 10 out of the Fortune 500 companies, for example, we find Walmart right on top, followed by Exxon Mobil.  Except for IBM none of the companies feels like one based on intellectual property and even IBM these days gets most of its revenue from service.  Certainly it is tough to see how an insurance company such as AIG (#10) and a bank such as Citigroup (#8) are living large from patents.

Perhaps intellectual property for a corporation is like oil for a Third World nation.  The government of an Arab or African country need not worry about being efficient nor about the education of its subjects as long as it can just dig a hole and money comes out of the ground.  By analogy the management of a company such as Disney can rest assured that quite a bit of revenue will continue to flow from movies and characters developed many decades ago.  Disney’s management can concentrate on transferring money into their personal checking accounts while Walmart’s management has to worry every day about beating Target, Kmart, and Sears.

Drug companies would seem to be an exception.  Most of their profits indeed comes from a handful of blockbuster patented drugs. Yet perhaps they are not exceptional if we remember that the proposition includes “long-term profitability” and if we adjust for investment and risk.  Walmart has crawled to the top of the Fortune 500 without ever taking the kinds of risk that hit-or-miss businesses take.  And except for Walmart all of the Top 10 companies were very successful 70 or more years ago whereas drug companies tend to rise and fall.

Which gets us back to the question of… what kind of business should one start given that one already has a person on the ground in Shanghai?

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Out here with my cousins in the Bay Area the question of how to print some of those Thanksgiving photos arises.  Are there any Internet printing services that let you upload camera RAW format images and print from those?  That would be the best quality, presumably.  Please add any recommendations of good printing services for high-res files in the comments section.  Thanks!

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Photos from my small airplane trip down the East Coast for Thanksgiving are available at http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200411-thanksgiving-trip/ (also 100+ unedited (bleah) pix of some young cousins at http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200411-frankel-girls/ ).  All of these were taken with a Canon EOS 20D and 16-35/2.8L or 70-200/2.8L IS lenses, recently purchased from Adorama.

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Photos from the April/May 2004 trip to Ecuador/Peru are finally available in JPEG format at http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200404-ecuador-peru/ . I am going to make a further selection of my favorites soon but for those with plenty of patience the index files might be of interest.  http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200404-ecuador-peru/200405-machu-picchu/photographing-llama-3.tcl is my personal favorite photo so far.

[It took all of this time because the photos were in Olympus RAW format from an Olympus E1 camera and I needed to script Adobe Photoshop to add black borders, copyright info, convert to JPEG, save in four different sizes, etc.  Plus I needed a Perl script to make the index files (thanks, Jin!) and some AOLserver Tcl code to deliver the larger images after someone clicks on a thumbnail.  Then I had to do at least a first pass editing the 1500 photos.]

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Driving by Harvard’s latest B-school dorm visitors often observe “That’s one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen; was it built in the 1960s?”  Actually the dorm is almost new and it has been featured in http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200407.html

(Other interesting articles from the same site:  http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200405.html (the new MIT CS building referred to as “a theme park on angel dust”), http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200408.html (another Frank Gehry design)

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A huge twin-engine turboprop (jet-powered propeller) Convair 340 cargo plane with a max take-off weight of 47,000 lbs. ditched in a Florida lake.  The pilots swam away unharmed.  The photos of the incident are interesting because they show “Re-elect George W. Bush” painted across the entire length of the fuselage.  Supposedly this was caused when one engine failed and the pilots were unable to hold altitude so decided to land in the lake rather than on top of some houses.  If true, this is consistent with the old pilot adage about twin-engine planes that “the second engine carries you to the scene of the accident”.

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Morgan Stanley economist, Stephen Roach, has an interesting article on America’s housing price bubble dated December 1, 2004.  Right underneath this piece is something about how investors believe that the risk of high inflation is growing.  I’ve been poking at buying a larger/more open place to live here in Cambridge and Roach’s theory seems about right.  Central Square is a place with pretty high crime rates (the city owns much of the housing in the area and fills it up with people they deem to be jobless and hopeless).  The public schools are so bad in the city that almost every family with children who cares about education moves to Brookline, Newton, Lincoln, etc.  I looked at a place for sale at 33 Bigelow St. the other week.  It is just half of a house.  All of the floors and stairs are sloped and creaking due to settling over the years.  I went over with an architect friend and he took me down to the basement:  “See this framework of steel bars and 2x4s that has been slapped together underneath the beams?  That’s what is keeping the whole place from collapsing.  I would be very worried about you buying this house.”  Asking price?  $1.25 million.

Of course, if there is enough inflation it will turn out to be a good deal because $1.25 million will be a normal annual salary…

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One of the airports where Alex and I stopped on our way back up the East Coast was Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  Came in just after sunset to this peaceful country fair-weather airport, 3100′ runway and no instrument approaches.  Came back the next morning to find the plane covered in grass and five enormous Blackhawk helicopters parked just behind it.  The helicopters were painted black and with almost no identifying markings.  Some friendly Army folks from Fort Belvoir out for a training/sightseeing excursion to the Gettysburg battlefield.  Here’s a photo of my airplane back-taxiing down the runway with the Blackhawks behind, courtesy of Robert Shick, CW3.

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Last summer I switched to lingo.com, an IP phone service that proved to be cheap but unreliable.  Starting last week Lingo failed altogether and their tech support folks (available only by phone, which is kind of irksome) failed to call back, so I ordered Vonage, which is the same $25/month but does not include Western Europe in its unlimited calling region and has higher international rates.

Here’s how Vonage has worked…

• Vonage sends you a brand-new Linksys broadband router with included IP phone jacks and three Ethernet jacks; if you were relying on your old router for 802.11b or to use as an 8-port hub you may have to buy some new networking gear
  
• the customer service Web site is very slow and about 25% of the time page requests produce an error page with a “try again later” instruction
  
• tech support is available through a form on their Web site; this form asks for your name, phone number, account number, etc., even though you’ve already logged in and it should have all of his info as part of your account profile
  
• tech support via phone results in a “we’re experiencing an unsually high volume of calls; try again later”; customer service (billing, etc.) can be reached after a 15-minute wait in queue
  
• they say that they never received my FAXed letter of authorization to transfer my old number from Lingo and want it refaxed
  
• when set to simultaneously ring my cell phone Vonage does ring the cell but I can’t hear callers (they can hear me though)

They say that it will take two months for them to transfer the phone number from Lingo, so I’ll have to pay $25/month to Lingo for forwarding until that happens.

[Update:  I believe that I unfairly maligned Vonage in regards to not being able to hear callers on calls simultaneously rung to my cell phone.  It turns out that it is my PalmOne Treo flaking out on the very day that I installed Vonage!  This makes Treo #10 that has failed, I think.  It lasted about two months, just like the others.  Anyone have a suggestion for a GSM phone that will do a calendar and contacts sync with Microsoft Outlook?]

[Dec 3 Update:  When voicemail is pending, the Vonage system fails to change the dial tone.  A second try to reach technical support (at 1:30 pm Eastern time) resulted in the same “we’re too busy to talk to anyone” recording.  The voice quality of calls is somewhat low, with some constant static.]

[Dec 19 update:  I took the advice of various folks and ordered a Motorola MPx220 phone with genuine Windows inside.  I ordered it on Dec 7 from Amazon.com but, although they said that it was in stock they have yet to ship it.]

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… after reading this article on hazards within the home.

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