due to lack of vision, it’s not magic

Patrick Rhone on how amazing Microsoft’s Kinect is and how they don’t know know how to use it in any capacity except as a toy:

It is really is an amazing and magical technology. Think about it. You are using natural real-world movement to mimic an action and it is happening in real time on a screen in front of you. No special gloves, wands, cables. Nothing. Just you. You pretend. It makes it real.

The problem is that Microsoft does not, can not, see it that way (and perhaps never will). They invented a device from the future yet could not untether themselves from the past and present. They could not see the potential to change the world with this device because they are too wedded to the idea that it had to work with the present. So, instead, it is just a toy, nothing more.

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Innovation

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The Opulence Bubble

Over at Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque talks about the opulence bubble we’re in:

To illustrate why I ask, consider this set of questions: How’s your house price doing? Where would your 401K be, if central banks withdrew life support for banks? How steep is a college education this year (hint: on average, 10-15% more than last year)? How are weekly grocery and gas prices doing? Where are commodity prices — not to mention gold — headed? Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble: these days, it seems, everywhere you look, there’s a bubble inflating — or popping.

I believe the mini-bubbles above are different ripples in what might call the surface of a superbubble: an opulence bubble. Here’s what I mean by opulence bubble: our conception of the good life, as I’ve discussed with you, has been centered on what I call hedonic opulence — having more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now. But we might be finding out, the hard way, that the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator industrial age stuff might have been steeply overvalued, in terms of its social, human, and financial value. And now, it’s coming back down to earth.

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Finance

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