17th
March
2008
This video clip says it all.
Earlier today I was listening on the radio to them talk about how 30% of the Bear Stearns stock was held by employees and many of them mostly had the company stock in their retirement accounts- hadn’t they ever heard of Enron?
Of course this is actually very common in the financial industry- I’ve heard of some of the top firms (I won’t name names) that do all their 401k match in company stock. Folks in the financial industry really should know better. I usually like to avoid government regulation, but it does seem like the sort of thing someone should investigate / question.
posted in Business |
17th
March
2008
I’ve been involved in various standards efforts since 1993 and seen many sides of the coin. I’ve had the privilege of being involved in some things that worked out very well and have been widely adopted, and I’ve also got a few standards efforts that I put a lot of time into that didn’t work out so well.
When interacting with folks in the Standards community, developers who use those standards, and end-users that use these products. Typically they all really don’t “get” the world that the other folks live in. I’ve often had to explain to people that the standards process is kind of like making sausage- most people really don’t want to see in detail what goes into it…
Joel has written a really good explanation of the most fundamental conflicts involved in this whole space, the stress between the idealists and pragmatists with regards to interoperability and compatibility. Its a long read but worth every bit of it and I’m probably going to point lots of folks towards it so they can at least understand some of the difficult decisions involved in building new versions of something like a web browser.
posted in Technology, Standards |