In the August 4th Financial Times article
href="http://news.ft.com/cms/s/33af94ce-e5b3-11d8-bfd2-00000e2511c8.html">How
to run ahead of the pack (also available in the Aug. 5th National
Post); Richard Waters and Simon London quote Mark Mahaney an analyst at
American Technology Research:
what (Google) wants to do. They're hiring PhDs aggressively -- and
they're not doing it just to tweak a search engine."
Now read this:
href="http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/010642.shtml">Why
I wouldn't bid on Google IPO by Dan Gillmor. Read past the article
to the comments. There's a great comment from "Anonymous Troll" who
states:
aren't selling well and there's about a bazillion and
one folks who make free tool bars that do nifty things. Coding contests
don't really guarantee success and there are plenty of companies with a
large precentage of PhDs that have failed (fact of the matter is that
PhDs are high maintenance)."
I spent 10 years in the teflon halls of academia -- okay it was a
community college but we had PhDs there -- and, while I wouldn't rule
out the ability of your typical academic to be entrepreneurial, the
odds are really long that they will succeed in a business where more
than 3 of them have to work together. While PhDs often collaborate for
the purposes of research, their work is largely solitary, unstructured
and unfocused. Academic projects often run for decades. This is not a
criticism. We need unstructured pure research; that's what PhDs do. In
this regard, instead of spending some of your money on Google stock why
don't you donate it to a worthwhile university research project? I
think the potential returns will be higher.
Now in an unrelated event, here's something new: "Brad's Featured
Blog". Let's start with a blog by a PhD student.
href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/">apohenia: making connections
where none previously existed is a blog by dana boyd who seems not
particularly interested in capitalization. She describes herself as:
people manage social contexts and adjust their
presentation of self accordingly; i'm particularly fascinated by the
tension between the social and technology that supports it. This blog
is my attempt to collapse a lot of my contexts in a public way."
I think that is academicspeak for "blogging's cool"; do I stand
corrected? Check out the fascinating post on
href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/08/04/flickr_autoblogging.html#004320">Flickr
autoblogging -- now there is a use for cameras in cell phones.
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