Facebook’s ‘Next Billion’: A Q&A With Mark Zuckerberg

So for the next five or 10 years the question isn’t going to be, does Facebook get to 2 billion or 3 billion? I mean, that’s obviously one question. But the bigger question is, what services can get built now that every company can assume they can get access to knowing who everyone’s friends are. I think that’s going to be really transformative. We’ve already seen some of that in games and media, music, TV, video, that type of stuff. But I think there’s about to be a big push in commerce.

In The End of the Public Library (As We Knew It)?, Eli Neiburger of the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan talks about an approach they are taking to the licensing of electronic books for their users.

Their general approach is to license the content for a given amount of time at a fixed price. The content is available to library users from the library’s servers for the time agreed. At renewal time, the library can choose to pay again or remove the books from their servers. They stipulate no DRM and no limits during the licensed period.

There’s a lot of angst over whether Apple can continue to lead the pack after Steve Job’s death. There’s something strange about all this: many people outside Apple are worried on Apple’s behalf. They’re rooting for Apple as if they themselves somehow depend on Apple.

Thing is, outside Apple’s walls, what happens to Apple doesn’t matter. Arguably, Apple will stop being successful when someone else starts to out-perform them. As a consumer, this is just awesome: someone has come along producing better products! Better things produced through competition.

Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that companies with at least one women on the board perform better than those without. Reasons for this are often framed in terms of “increased diversity”. This implies female directors bring along with them some mysterious female quality which is based on the belief that being a woman provides one with a different built-in set of traits than being a man.

This article stems from my alternative hypothesis which doesn’t require such assumptions: companies with more even distributions of women and men on their boards do better because their institutional culture does not encourage discarding a portion of their talent based on factors such as gender.

As with many things in computer science, the answer is: it depends.

Back in the depths of time, computing as we know it was invented by scientists who didn’t think so much about the unlikely possibility that our the lives of people the world over would become inexorably twined with our computing devices. Computers were mostly thought to be useful as glorified calculating machines, and so representing text wasn’t thought to be so important. Therefore we ended up stuck with the letters which would fit into just under a byte comfortably — 128 different characters. As much of this work was done in the US, this was fine because the Latin alphabet contains few characters. And so we ended up with a laughably bad way of representing characters for most of the world.