I haven't even had the chance to digest everything I was thinking about Randall Rothenberg's piece in the LA Times, when the Times came through and published two other pieces that both address the same point, but from different perspectives:

First, as part of a Current section special on the changes in Las Vegas, Hal Rothman headlined with a piece about Las Vegas, The Chameleon City. In it he outlines a simple explanation for the continuing allure of Las Vegas: "Las Vegas has grown into the most malleable tourist destination on the planet. It makes the visitor, however ordinary, the center of the story, holding up a figurative mirror and asking: "What do you want to be, and what will you pay to be it?" Who you were or what you were yesterday makes little difference."

Vegas, in short, has become "YOUcity." The willingness to change, often from day to day, and to allow the customers to define the experience is what makes it successful. And the huge corporate interests that run the place not only deal with it, but they encourage it. A recent visit demonstrated just how malleable the place is. We went up for 24 hours, primarily to see Don Rickles' last show at the Stardust, which is set to close on Wednesday. It turns out that we were also there on Mexican Independence Day weekend.

Every hotel on the strip had the red white and green motif going. In the casino at the Hilton, a wandering mariachi band played. Towards the end of the night, they ended up in the lounge area of a faux-Japanese oriental village where we shared Coronas and Margaritas with a few of the thousands of Mexican holiday-weekend visitors. (And why shouldn't they be there? Mexico city is closer than Washington, after all...)

Of course, it wasn't your stereotypical bunch of impoverished mariachis. It was led by a husband and wife team who were as fluent in English as they were in Spanish. They were well dressed and everything from their jewelery to their designer eyeglasses said "urban professional." More than likely, they were accountants, dentists, or maybe even casino managers in their day jobs, who enjoyed playing mariachi music on the weekends. And for that one day of the year, they became part of the process of converting Las Vegas into a Mexican Independence celebration to rival anything in Mexico.

Today, also in the LA Times, there's a piece about how Vegas is vying for the Chinese tourist trade. Different week, different "YOU," different "YOUcity."

The CEOs Rothenberg cites in his article should learn from Vegas. The businesses at the core of that city's economy understand this better than any large capital-intensive businesses anywhere.

Max Boot has a more sobering view of YOUplanet. In his view, all great powers have eventually fallen when their militaries failed to adapt to a changing world. His take on where we stand right now is that the US Military needs to adapt its industrial-age military, which is based on size and advanced technology to a YOUplanet reality.

He points out that: We have an insurmountable advantage in high-end military hardware. No other state is building nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, stealth fighters or unmanned aerial vehicles. In fact, we spend more on the development and testing of new weapons — $71 billion this year — than any other country spends on its entire defense. But all that spending produces weapons systems that aren't much good for pacifying Baghdad or Kandahar.

Sort of reminds me of the first Star Wars movie, in which the rebel general points out the secret to their potential victory. "The Empire doesn't consider a small one-man fighter to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station."

That, as Boot sees it, is our defense posture today. Capable of wiping out entire cities, but too big, bureaucratic and procedure-driven to deal with small, well-trained and motivated teams or individuals who get the YOUplanet reality. In the same manner that Rosenberg questions the ability of most corporations to adapt to this reality, he questions whether the US military -- that most conservative of institutions -- can change fast enough.

Boot concludes: It may sound melodramatic, but the future of U.S. power rests on our ability to remake a government still structured for Industrial Age warfare to do battle with decentralized adversaries in the Information Age. After all, aren't we the mightiest, richest nation in history? How could our hegemony possibly be endangered? That's what previous superpowers thought too. But their dominance lasted only until they missed a revolutionary turn in military technology and tactics.

And, I checked. Nobody's trademarked "YOUplanet." I'm already working on my application.

-btc

Hey Steve Jobs,

I love my new iPod nano.

I love the 8GB and 24 hour battery that it came with.

I love the user interface and I love iTunes.

You know what I hate?

I hate the fact that even though the only color it isn't available in is white, you still insist on making all the accessories white.

I'm industrious, so I've fixed it. The docking station that's hooked up to my stereo is now gloss black, to match most of the other pieces.

The little insert that lets me put it into my black "iMode" travel alarm is also now gloss black, to match the iPod itself and the device it fits into.

But many people are not as handy with plastic modeling paint as I am.

So here's a hint: White doesn't really go well with anything except white. It doesn't match any of my computers, it doesn't match my stereo, it doesn't match my car. You've come to your senses and now offer the device itself in other colors, so let's see the parts and accessories change to match. Basic black probably works pretty well for most applications, so would grey, silver or any other neutral color.

Just give us something besides white. Please.

-btc

Randall Rothenberg, senior director of intellectual capital at Booz Allen Hamilton published a rather astounding piece in the LA Times today. It's astounding in that it so succinctly sums up much of what I have beleived for some time, while simultaneously asking some really hard questions, to which the answers are unknown. While these are ideas I've knocked around with some of my friends in recent years, I've rarely seen them begun to be asked in mainstream publications.

The crux of his opinion is expressed simply: "Whether by kings or capitalists, economic development since the dawn of homo economicus has depended on mobilizing resources on an increasingly mass scale, with all others (entrepreneurs and small businesses in particular) denied access. In scarcity and limits lay profits. The Web, the ultimate tool with unlimited access, has overturned such economics."

He completes the article by pointing out where this is logically going: "If economists were to turn this into an equation, it might be P2 + AT = C2. Translation: Power to the people + access to tools = the consumer is in control." Then asks the key question: "But can giant, resource-intensive businesses adapt to this radically decentralized economic principle? Not easily. As Lafley put it: 'We need to learn how to let go.' Or, in '60s terminology, let it all hang out, go with the flow, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream — just about the hardest thing for any CEO to do."

There is another truth buried in his discussion and arguments. That truth is the one that is less comfortable for many to face. The truth is that in a world where individual creativity -- not labor, capital or government -- is the driving factor behind wealth, what happens to the great majority of people who are not particularly creative? The late-capitalist "deal" was one of large blocks of resources -- labor, capital, government -- sharing large pools of resources. The difference between governmental systems was largely in how they split up the rewards and how well the system as a whole worked. The new state of affairs breaks up that deal and calls into question what a YouTube society looks like. Saying, as he does, that YouTube and its ilk are as likely to subvert business as to support its reinvention is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. It's not just the business of the future, but the world of the future that is in question.

I disagree with Rothenberg's statement that the YouTube World is a victory of the radical left. Certainly, it evokes a lot of the ideas expressed by those who in the past described themselves as leftist (but were more accurately anarchist) just as it evokes many ideas expressed by liberterians (who share little with what is commonly refered to as the "radical right").

What's interesting here is that the change is not about re-dividing the pie, which is mostly what you hear politicians and other pundits talking about, but rather it's about changing the recipie completely. That's something that's got to be uncomfortable to all the cooks in the kitchen, regardless of what school of cooking they came from.

I'll have a lot more to say about the implications of this in the days ahead.

-btc

In a recent piece on his own blog, Jeff Matthews points out the folly of paying too much attention to various white papers by supposedly neutral IT analysts working for companies like Gartner Inc. (NYSE:IT). I responded based on my own experience, but thought it was worth repeating the discussion here, with a bit of extra material, since it's relevant to the focus of this blog:

I am in the position of having been on both sides of Gartner. As a product manager in the software biz, I was a customer of the consulting services they offer to vendors. As IT management on the "buy side," I am and have been a customer of the consulting, advisory and research services they offer to the business customers of the very same vendors. At present I'm involved in at least one project in which a Gartner consultant is engaged.

My experience with Gartner, Delphi (who they purchased), Forrester, IDC and the others suggests that none of these companies is impartial, and that any "white papers," speeches at conferences or other materials provided by their analysts must be taken with a huge grain of salt.

The thing that you have to keep in mind about all these companies -- and which many IT managers either forget or never really understood in the first place -- is that they sell services to both sides of every IT transaction and do so in a self-serving manner. The vendors who spend the most on "consulting fees" to Gartner and the others tend to be the ones whose products are most often mentioned and recommended in white papers, speeches, articles and other public information generated by those firms. As a result, you see Gartner analysts go against the interests of their top vendor-clients about as often as you see Wall Street's Finest put "sell" ratings on their companies' investment banking clients.

Had I seen this kind of thing only once or twice, I'd be content to write it off as an abberation, but I've seen it consistently, both as a "buy-side" and a "sell-side" guy in IT.

My tuxedo-wearing girl is typically a pretty active cat. But sometimes she can be the most serene creature I know:

Photography has been my interest, and at times my unparallelled passion, since I got my first camera back in junior high school. I won a bunch of prizes as a teen, did a lot more with it in college, then pursued it very seriously later, doing both 35mm and large format (4x5") work, mostly in black and white.

I fell out of photography again in the mid-90s, because the lack of a darkroom really made it impossible to do the kind of work that I enjoy, which tends to be very printing-intesive. I got back into it a few years ago, still working on film, but often moving to digital for my post-processing work.

Still, it's only recently that I've moved away from film entirely. For one thing, reasonable quality printing of digital photos is finally good enough to satisfy my needs. For another, the papers have come a ong way. Photoshop has also come a long, long way and now allows me to do just about everything that I ever wanted to when working in chemicals. Until very recently I still kept one film camera -- there were still a few things I liked to do, and certain effects I liked that were tough to accomplish with a digital camera and Photoshop. 10+ megapixel cameras and better familiarity with the application have solved those problems for me. My photos don't look the same as they do in silver medium, but they are a look that I like and it's a medium that I've become conversant enough in to abandon its predecessor.

I've slowly sold off my 4x5 camera equipment, then some of my 35mm film cameras, and now finally the last one. My last roll of film, started last winter, will be processed unfinished, because I can't think of any reason I'll ever finish it.

But, I've got to be a contrarian here. Digital works fine for me, but I still think film has a future, and that people like my former instructor John Sexton, are perhaps being a bit too concerned about the disappearance of silver-based potography as an art form.

Make no mistake about it, digital will rule the consumer and commercial worlds in the years to come. But just as there are those who still work in platinum, palladium, daguerreotype and other commercially obsolete technologies, there will also be artists who continue to work in silver for the unique look it makes possible.

In fact, I suspect that the opportunities for those who want to work in silver will actually expand in the coming years, particularly for those who are working in black and white. The reason is that the tyrrany imposed by Kodak and others whose manufacturing methods and scale demanded that they produce only large runs of similar product will be over. As with other purely artistic mediums, silver photography will come to be dominated by smaller firms, selling highly differentiated products, working in small batches and tailoring their products to small niches. There is already evidence of this happenning, as small manufacturers around the world (many in eastern Europe) have sprung up as the big players have abandoned the niche.

Though I have moved my own work to digital, I hope to continue decorating my walls with the works of those who continue to work in other media as well. And I suspect that they'll probably have a far greater set of choices and creative options than I did when I worked with silver and chemistry a decade ago.

-btc

If you've logged in during the past few days, you've seen the site design change pretty radically, and sometimes catastrophically. A few things have been going on behind the scenes.

First, I upgraded to MovableType version 3.33 from my old 3.1 version. This one comes with a lot of neat administration features that will make it a lot easier for me to maintain things and make more regular entries.

At the same time, I decided to upgrade and change my old template which had been tweaked so many times that many elements just weren't hanging together well anymore and comment entries in particular were pretty confusing. While the current layout is still perhaps a bit busy, I think you'll find it's a lot easier to navigate.

Finally, I've gotten the search functionality to work well. I hope that in the coming months, there'll be enough content here to make it really necessary.

There are still a few little tweaks and one or two pages that are inconsistent or broken, but these should not detract from your enjoyment and should be fixed by the weekend.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

-btc

It's October, and perfectly on cue, the big black furball has decided he needs to go outside.

Yes, in a neighborhood with a bunch of BB-gun and paintball-armed juvenile delinquents, on Friday the 13th, two weeks before Halloween, who else but Mister "Look at me I'm a big black cat!" would decided that he needs to explore?

Usually I can leave the garage door open all day and he won't move more than a foot past the edge. He won't even cross the driveway on most days.

But on Friday the 13th, he decided to try to make his own bad luck. And I ended up late for a meeting after chasing him down for half an hour.

Fortunately, he is usually quite happy to sit on my upstairs railing looking down on us lowly creatures in the living room. Unlike me, he prefers to be up above the crowd:

HE WHO MUST BE OBEYED!

It's been a while. In June I started a new consulting business, which has taken most of my time since. As I've also been settling in with my first really large client, I also felt it was best to lay low and not risk spoiling a relationship by perhaps saying a bit too much or revealing who I was working for.

Now, I'm pretty well settled, and there's much to write about. For those who've bothered to notice, I've also upgraded to the latest version of MoveableType, and will be making some other small changes to the graphics and layout of the site to keep things more readable. I hope that the few of you who are still checking in will find that I have more interesting things to say in the coming days and months.

It's good to be back.

-btc