My goal is to write one 'Pattern Recognition' a week. Just the top 3-4 stories that stayed under my skin. Here's what stuck this week:
- That Was Then, This is Now: Reading about Morgan Stanley's role in screwing retail investors in the Facebook IPO, and JP Morgan's hedge fund safely nestled in a too big too fail mega-bank (with an implicit US government guarantee), I am reminded that Wall Street wasn't always an amoral, scumbucket octopus. Back in the mid-70's, New York City was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Dark days, to be sure. Then, Walt Wriston, the visionary CEO of Citibank (now Citigroup), stepped in, and quite literally, helped save the city. Talk about a juxtaposition. Today's Citigroup not only had to be rescued by TARP, but its CEO was recently rebuffed by angry investors over his excessive pay package. All of which leads me to conclude that if the circumstances of a major municipality going bust were to repeat itself in America today, couldn't Wall Street be "trusted" to find a way to profit from the bust vs. acting socially responsible? How times have changed.
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Losing My (Institutional) Religion: A few weeks back, I saw an intuitive, yet troubling, chart on how Americans are losing faith in our greatest instituitions (e.g., Congress, Banks, Schools, the Presidency, the Supreme Court). Then, I read Apple's legal response today to the Department of Justice's E-Book Case. The specific way that Apple frames it (it's worth a read), put a bow around how fucked up so many of our intitutional processes are. This point was lain especially clear in a conversation I had with a friend of mine in the real estate industry. Regardless of whether you consider yourself pro-businesss, anti-business, liberal or conservative, his point was illuminating. He told the story of how everyone in his industry is worried about the capricious way that the government has gone about changing the rules for banks about lending, from reserve requirements to constraints on where they can make loans. His point was less that the government shouldn't be coming up with policies for these things, and more that the government bodies typically step in with broadstroke policies that are completey disconnected from the outcomes they want to encourage or discourage. As a result, we end up with policies that by virtue of their superficiality, just institute random risk, which is obviously not a good thing if you want business investing in growth. To me, this speaks to a false dichotomy that we find ourselves in with respect to the role of government. Today, it feels like a choice between: A) laissez faire policy/enforcement (which led to an SEC completely asleep at the wheel, culminating in the 2008 economic crisis); and B) broadstroke governance, which results in policy that's akin to the "successful" surgery where the patient dies. It's why the health care reform sucked so bad for the very people it was supposed to help most, at a time when they needed it most. The net effect of this false dichotomy is that it only serves to perpetuate the gridlock in Washington.
- Go Native (Mobile): It's the nature of technological waves, that the first stage of a new wave always looks derivative of the old wave. But, the new wave doesn't lead to lasting, transformational change until 'native' applications are born that could only exist within the new medium. The silent film gave rise to the talkie, and while it took a while for the new medium took find its footing, our concept of what a motion picture could be was never the same again. The first TV shows were basically redux versions of their radio show parentage, but ultimately the medium became something entirely unique. So, too, the PC and then, the Web, completely transformed what came before it. Now, we are sitting at the precipice of 1 billion post-pc devices, on our way to 10 billion devices globally. Respected VC and Blogger Fred Wilson suggests that this confluence is due to give rise to legions of Mobile Native Services. In other words, apps and services that are not simply 'children of the Web,' but rather, new DNA entirely, powered my untethered mobility, GPS-locative attributes, perpetual connectivity, unparalleled scale, social fabrics, big data graphs and application platforms that are part hardware, software, service and tool. Metaphorically speaking, we are at the moment in the 1950's when everyone thought that TV was simply 'radio with pictures.' But very soon, that will change, and what rises on the other side is destined to be the Golden Age.
