Reporting Company Results

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on 2 July, 2009 – 11:05 am

I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not (which in my case usually means it is), but Rowan Simpson gives a concise lesson detailing the three ways companies report their results, and how misleading each can be.

  • Size “We made a net profit of $15 million.”
  • Growth “Revenues increased by 9%.”
  • Acceleration “We added 100,000 new customers in the last year, 70,000 of these in the last two months.”

To further illustrate this point, Rowan looks at other ways to interpret Skype’s Q1 2008 results than GigaOm’s acceleration-based interpretation of “Skype’s growth starts to slow“.

  • Size “Skype reports record revenue of $145m.”
  • Growth “Skype increases revenue by 26% compared to the same period last year.”

via @zambonini

Iconic Logo Designers

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on 2 July, 2009 – 9:04 am

Last year logo designer David Airey launched Iconic Logo Designers. As he describes it from his post announcing the launch:

On the iconic logo designers website, you’ll find biographical info and resources on more than 35 of the world’s most outstanding creatives.

Seeing this I was reminded of how much I love the elegant simplicity of the V&A logo (created by Alan Fletcher in 1989 for the Victoria & Albert Museum).

Airey’s other logo design site, Logo Design Love, is also worthy of your perusal.

The Declining and Thriving News Magazines

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on 1 July, 2009 – 11:22 am

While Time and Newsweek saw double digit falls in revenue last year, The Economist saw similar sized gains—despite increasing subscription rates (previously).

The Atlantic discusses this phenomenon, looking in detail at why The Economist is thriving in a market seemingly in decline.

The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures—meaning, after it transcends its current status as a free-fire zone and settles into a more comprehensive system of gathering and presenting information. As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.

True, The Economist virtually never gets scoops, and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling. But now that information is infinitely replicable and pervasive, original reporting will never again receive its due. The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing—and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.

It’s worth noting that The Atlantic is being quite modest with this piece—it too has reinvented itself recently, no doubt increasing its readership greatly.

The article’s not perfect, though; it states that “almost no one links to The Economist” and that “it sits primly apart from the orgy of link love elsewhere on the Web” while “[remaining] primarily a print product”. I disagree on all these points.

I did, however, like this insight:

Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity.

I’m asking myself, could the success of The Economist be attributed to its evolution from newspaper counterprogramming to counterprogramming for the “undigested, undigestible information online”?

Microsoft, Google and Startups Compared

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on 1 July, 2009 – 8:39 am

After visiting both the Microsoft and Google campuses to discuss Stack Overflow (Google Tech Talk: Learning from StackOverflow.com), Joel Spolsky discusses the similarities and differences between the two corporations and his own small company.

What I’ll probably remember most about the trip is what I learned about company culture and how it’s affected by scale. Giant corporations such as Google and Microsoft are like cities full of relatively anonymous people: You don’t actually expect to see anyone you know as you walk around. Going to lunch on either campus is like going to the cafeteria at a huge university. The other 2,000 students seem nice, but you don’t know most of them well enough to sit with them. Meanwhile, a typical lunchtime at my company is like Thanksgiving dinner: There’s a big meal you get to share with a bunch of people you know and like.

I particularly liked Spolsky’s reaction to his discovery that while Microsoft’s campus-wide Wi-Fi network is closed-access and requires registration, Google’s was free and open: “I had to wonder: What might we be doing at our company that is similarly a waste of time?”.

It made me think: What might I be doing that is similarly a waste of time?

The Most Important Century

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on 30 June, 2009 – 11:11 am

The next 50 years will bring technological, social and geopolitical change greater than we can imagine, says Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, but the emerging problems of population growth and climate change make this century arguably the most important in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, even from the perspective of an astronomer.

It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that astronomers, contemplating timespans measured in billions, must be serenely unconcerned about next year, next week and tomorrow. But a “cosmic perspective” actually strengthens my own concerns about the here and now.

Ever since Darwin, we’ve been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.

Our sun formed 4.5bn years ago, but it’s got 6bn more before the fuel runs out. And the expanding universe will continue – perhaps for ever – becoming ever colder, ever emptier. As Woody Allen said, “Eternity is very long, especially towards the end”. Any creatures who witness the sun’s demise, here on Earth or far beyond, won’t be human. They will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug.

But even in this “concertinaed” timeline – extending millions of centuries into the future, as well as into the past – this century is special. It’s the first in our planet’s history where one species – ours – has Earth’s future in its hands, and could jeopardise not only itself, but life’s immense potential.

As Richard says (via), the article “seems to be a truncated version of his book Our Final Century“.