Tag: Nokia

All by ourselves

In the 70’s, the Me decade, we heard “All by myself” a lot on the radio.

Now, it’s the age of collaboration. All by ourselves.

Whiteboarding, synergy and M&A.

Nokia, Sony and Dell. All are taking the back seat.

Players we did not see coming are now in the field: Haier, Acer and Lenovo.

Users we did not know, can now afford buying our products e.g. I-phone 5s in Vietnam.

Dictators we thought couldn’t stand a chance, now sit in defiance of UN inspectors (Syria).

All by ourselves: APEC and TPP. NATO and UN Security Council.

Multi-polar world. Multi-tasking organization and multi-party lock jam.

It’s not that we can’t find good leaders. We weren’t prepared and planned for today’s contingencies.

Obama, once an Editor of Harvard Law Journal, just wanted to consult Congress on the War Powers Act.

In doing so, he exhibits the best of Constitutional compliance, yet entangled in “what if” scenarios, and  missed out a chance to be a great world leader.

All by himself.

Now people are speculating about Gates returning to Microsoft.

Must be hard the second time around (it would be the equivalent of Tom Hanks in Big, asking his x girl friend to go back and do it again).

He can be a figure-head, presiding over a round table of talents snatched up from competitors since the year of 2000.

Bill Gates is not needed for his prescient. After all, he missed seeing the Internet the first time around.

He can however humbly play the collaborator and coordinator role.

All by ourselves.

Or he can shut the door, and sing his heart out, like Bridget Jones, “All by myself”, all the while, envying Steve Jobs, in life as in death. Can you imagine a book and a movie on Gates? I’d rather read and see one about his partner in Idea Man – the one and only Paul Allen, rehearsing with the Stones in his private world-class yacht. The Stones don’t do “All by myself”.

 

Rain-bow start

It’s not an optical illusion. It’s real.  Has always been there and it’s called light. But somehow, this afternoon, at the start of my run around the park, I saw a rainbow. Nature conspires to create a rainbow for Southern California. Breath-taking is its beauty.

People paused and took pics from their I-phones. It’s a rare sight indeed, consider there wasn’t even a drop of rain.

It’s always been there.  Just another way to show itself, light that is.

We need sunlight and its photosynthesis effect.

The cycle of dawn to dusk.

We keep hearing “life is too short”. And then, we hear that in places like Alaska, the days are long.

Which is true? People must be talking about Kairos vs Chronos.

Timeliness vs the conventional 24-hour cycle.

(BTW, it’s news cycle now. So we all know what happened with Isaac upgrade to Hurricane category 1, or  GOP kicks off their meeting in Tampa,  etc…).

We are inundated with trivia. News that trigger curiosity but trivia still.

Then we learn to tune out the top and the side bars (advertising).

Then we grow desensitized and disengaged. If world citizens are “compassion-fatigue”, not so much because they wore themselves out from doing good, but because they threw the baby out with the bathwater i.e. news, as presented to us in current forms-  that they might miss out an opportunity to engage or be warned.

I got a good laugh today, when my roommate showing off his once-$600 film camera. Who would sell him films and develop them nowadays?

Change comes that quickly.

And might you, the guy is still young. Not your grandfather with his black-and-white momento.

So, we get on, with RIM down, Nokia down, Sony struggles and Amazon rules (the Cloud).

That quickly.

But nothing is new. All that happened before. Just like the rainbow I saw today.

Just another way for nature , which has always been there, to be in our face, with a new spin on an old story line. Inviting and daring discoverers to go where no one has ever set foot before.

RIP Neil Armstrong. You got to see that picture of them in an isolated trailer, with President Nixon looking in from the outside.

It could have been their coffins, given the 60’s P.O.V.  In fact, there had been a prepared speech,  just in case they didn’t make it.

Now, with giants’ shoulders as platform, let’s stand tall, be confident and grateful that we have less fear of the irrational. And best of all, a majority of us will have long to live, love and  learn more than those before us, who I am sure had seen an occasional rainbow as I did today, and perhaps had also wondered: is it an act of God? Is this lucky or what? To have such a symmetry painted on the sky, for free and for all.

The flow

We woke to all sorts of noise, among them the flow of traffic.

Resting by the lake after my few-mile run in the heat, I noticed all sorts of creatures: squirrels, rabbits and ducks.

As peaceful as could be, yet we don’t often say “I’ve got peace like a lake”. We say, “I ‘ve got peace like a river”.

River flows. Water moves. Ocean and  tide. Moon and Mars. Can’t stay still. Thought flow, money flow from hand to hand.

New games got invented everyday. Skin rejuvenation, sex drive rejuvenation and self-reinvention. Press “reset”. Be kind and rewind.

Get to be old hats.

One birthday piles up on top of another.

Summer time.

Vacation time.

Sabbatical.

Just lay low. Under the radar. Poor man’s vacation. But vacation nonetheless.

Dollar Stores are still doing well. Costco is expanding. And any kind of drinks is still sold for a buck at McDonald’s.

Money is changing hands, but not a lot .

Us, playing and making a living by being in the middle, got less, by the percentage.

Nokia shut down its offices at home. Industries see a lot of volatility and fluctuation.

Brands however endure especially in uncertain times: Ford, Coke and Costco. Sweet and more sweet as we got sweated.

Got to reward ourselves. Got to have that Gatorade, under the scorching sun. Can only stand in opportunities’ way that long. Not without taking a break . Jackson Brown says, ” opportunity likes to dance with those who were already on the dancing floor”. So swing and sway, but stay the course. Go with the flow of music. The tempo will change. It always does, even in the worst of times. Even now, things don’t stay static. It flows even when we are asleep.

two-step back

A laid-off Coca Cola delivery man gave a bank teller a note, demanding one dollar so he could go to jail and get healthcare.

A Florida retiree robbed a bank to pay his mortgage.

New York sex workers told investigative reporters they went on-call to pay back college tuition.

Something is not right with our time: those who are entitled don’t get entitlement, and those who aren’t do. Government grew in size, while big businesses shrunk or off-shorred. One could wait for ever in voice-mail jail hearing occasional “someone will be right with you” (yesterday’s prospect is today’s customer, hence, a lower priority).

What happened to Moore’s law (speed of processing double every 18 months)?

We can’t see the forest for the tree because we did not step back far enough.

Years of instant noodle, fast food drive-in, personalized search and pizza on delivery have lulled our sense and slow down our reaction.

Wind came from the Southwest, but we keep looking into our GPS (which might fail us).

First, the elephant (IBM) can’t walk. Then, it’s voted most innovative company, on the same Dean list with Apple, which had been rejected by investors just a decade ago.

Nokia and Motorola fell behind while RIM couldn’t keept its field advantage.  Google, who got tired of Search and Social, also got into phone, glasses and unmanned vehicles

We now need the Audacity of Austerity, not of Hope.

And please, don’t blame technology for London burning .

(It’s like blaming the Rodney King riot in LA on black and white video footage ).

This blog is my first from a children’s library. I am surrounded by school children playing games. Will they grow up learning how to connect the dots in this vast data-driven world?

Will they be able to step back to see the bubbles coming their ways?

Or many will fall through the cracks, with  few options such as bank robbery and escort service.

These are rhetorical questions which seek solutions to inflationary measures not inspirational messages. We all can see for ourselves, which is the tree, and which is a forest. We have stepped back at least two-steps in the last four years. Now it’s decision makers’ turn to see the forest for themselves.

Buddha was purported to do just that, with his first walk among the commoners. It’s called reality check. It’s called enlightenment.