Category: Uncategorized

A great personal reflection from Gary Loveman, chief executive of Harrah’s Entertainment.

A defining thing for me was going to Bobby Knight’s basketball camp at Indiana University when I was about 14. Two things I learned: I wasn’t nearly a good-enough basketball player to keep playing with any consequence. All the kids on my team made the all-star team except me. And Bobby Knight said something that stuck in my mind: Don’t play against the competition. Play against yourself – as well as you’re capable of doing.

Linda Dillman:

“Knowing that someone believes in you is a great motivator.“

Amen!

Don Park comments on content snatching — hijacking a web site’s content with the hijacker then using the ripped off content to make money without putting any work into creating any content herself.

A good friend of mine had her site hijacked a couple of years ago — they made a subtle change to the domain name and changed all of the associates’ ID’s, etc.

What’s missing here? Some way to have the content provider authenticate that the site is actually their site. Feels like a digital signature application – but obviously very difficult to police, etc.

This morning I’m attending the Amazon Web Services Workshop at Software Development 2004 in Santa Clara. Some notes from the workshop will follow.

It’s that time of year again — Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet has just posted his review of 2003. Good stuff.

Ever listen to how some of us talk? So, …

Take a look at this transcript — and count the number of times a paragraph begins with “So…”

It’s the new “you know”…

John Robb points to an article in the Air Force Association magazine on the history of the F-16, a pretty amazing airplane.

The F-16 has an official name—Fighting Falcon—that nobody uses. To those who fly, arm, or maintain it, it is “the Viper.” It has been the most popular fighter of its time, with some 4,100 F-16s delivered to more than 20 countries. It has flown more than 200,000 combat sorties. Its air combat record: 71-to-zero.

But they’re just not LOUD enough — something that I’m sure serves them well in combat but not in aeronautic demonstration routines. I remember seeing the Air Force Thunderbirds flying F-16’s at Travis Air Force Base a couple of years ago. Great show and all — but without that earth-shaking noise that the Blue Angels F-18’s (with two engines per aircraft) put out! My fondest memory of a very loud aerial demonstration team performance was one I saw by the Thunderbirds back in the early 1970’s over Lake Tahoe — flying twin-engined F-4 Phantoms.

Of course, the real beauty of the F-16 is how well it performs its mission — on just that single engine. Amazingly, the aircraft has been in service since 1978 — twenty-five years!

Some great commentary from Legg Mason’s Bill Miller is available on the website from their recent investor conference.

The thing that is interesting about companies like Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay, and Interactive (all of which we own) is that they are free from the practical constraints that operate on real world companies.

If WalMart is going to expand its physical footprint by 8-9% a year, it must spend $12B a year to build a store, build distribution centers, make sure it has ways to move goods from one place to another, etc.

All of that capital runs into institutional constraints. For example in Germany, you can only be open a certain number of hours. In Tokyo, you can’t get land. In California, they’re mad at you because you hire illegal workers. Each part of the world has different issues.

These are limitations that have significant impact on the appropriate potential value of the business. So far it seems to be the case that these constraints do not exist for Amazon, Yahoo and the others. From a purely theoretical standpoint, their theoretical value could be far higher than any business we have seen before.

An article by Kate Murphy in today’s New York Times on scrapbooking, the fastest growing segment of the hobby business, concludes with the comment:

“I’ve dabbled in other hobbies but this feels productive while you’re being creative,” she said. “Who needs another potholder?”

Apparently folks are spending something like $2 billion each year on scrapbook supplies and that figure is growing at over 40 per cent each year. A big business.

I’ve seen weblogs as a lot like the physical scrapbooks that many maintain. For those of us who either don’t like stacks of paper or (for similar reasons) can’t ever find things again, having our some of our important memories in electronic form makes a lot more sense.

The LA Times has begun a six part series examining the Columbia shuttle disaster.