.. any movement that seeks answers to new challenges “in the Quran, in the Bible.” Such seeking, he argues, led to dead ends in the 19th century, when religious irruptions from the Middle East to China failed to “solve the problems of industrialization.” It was only when people “came up with new ideas, not from the Shariah, and not from the Bible, and not from some vision,” but from studying science and technology, that answers to the industrial age’s dislocations emerged.
.. In the Middle East, too, it’s a good bet that any successful answer to the Islamic State will also be Islamic.
.. But the assumption, deeply ingrained in our intelligentsia, that everything depends on finding the most modern and “scientific” alternative to older verities has been tested repeatedly — with mostly dire results.
Lyndon: Bubble Boy with Artificial Robot
Amazing stories from real people battling a digital future.
Slashdot: Successful Companies Acquire
The only companies left standing after 20 years are those that use acquisitions to make up for the fact that successful innovation involves a lot of luck. Google, Microsoft, and Apple all use strategic acquisitions to enhance themselves. Do you think Google created Android, YouTube, and Google Maps/Earth? Do you think Microsoft created MS-DOS, Powerpoint, and Skype? Do you think Apple created iOS, OSX, and Final Cut Pro? All of those are final products that evolved from acquisitions. They are not home grown, yet they define massive parts of their corporate identities.
Marissa Meyer: Interview on Yahoo’s 20th Anniversary
Bartz quickly made a deal that haunts Yahoo to this day, outsourcing Yahoo’s search technology to Microsoft for ten years. “I was not a fan of giving up control over something so critical to the business,” says David Filo, who has kept his post as Chief Yahoo (concentrating on technology) since its founding. His worry was that the move would send a signal to top technical talent that Yahoo was no longer interested in cutting-edge computer science. “It probably played out even worse than I thought it would,” he now says.
.. But Mayer was zeroing in on a potentially fatal flaw in Yahoo’s move to mobile: most of its apps were being written using a web technology called HTML 5 that ran on multiple platforms, but performed much worse than a “native” app written specifically for either iPhone or Android. Mark Zuckerberg has said that the worst mistake he ever made—in the entire history of Facebook—was originally using HTML 5 for mobile apps. In an instant Mayer prevented Yahoo from proceeding further down that dead-end path.
.. (One former Yahoo News employee describes this massive audience, at least in the US, as “not on the coasts.”) Yahoo says that its magazines, five of which are number one in their categories, are growing at a 39 percent quarter-to-quarter rate. “My column routinely gets five, ten times the readership that I got at the Times,” says Pogue.
.. “She actually can put her head and her mind and her behavior into a consumer’s.” Savitt uses as an example of a time when engineers were stepping up security for Yahoo Mail by forcing users into an awkward process to come up with a new password. Mayer demanded that the executive staff themselves be locked out of their accounts so they could see from a user’s point of view how the process affected people.