Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Only a minority of talented computer programmers are also talented corporate strategists, a potentially ongoing series
Bloomberg News reports:
Times Co.’s effort to turn online readers into paying subscribers is being watched by other newspaper companies struggling with a decline in traditional print advertising. The New York-based company is spending $40 million to $50 million on the project and has said it plans to debut it by March.
Picked up and quoted as:
my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on? A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles? They should already have been tracking some of that for ad targeting. In any case, a rack of database servers shouldn’t cost $40 million.
"The project" is unlikely to equal "writing the code", even on a very expansive definition of "writing the code" to include all the project spec and design work. I would very strongly guess that a significant part of that $40m (if it's a hard figure; as far as I can tell the other sources are consistent because they're quoting Bloomberg, which doesn't attribute the number), was market research.
Market research can be very, very expensive, although as with education it's not so expensive when you compare it to the alternative of remaining ignorant. The lion's share of that budget would most likely have been spent on answering the question "Should we have a paywall?". Then "What kind of paywall?". I am not sure I agree with the answer they came up with, but for a largeish company making an unbelievably important decision about its flagship product, large spends on research would seem appropriate.
I am still having a hard time getting to $40m though. A very, very big market research project would be one with a budget of $5m; this would be an account that the entire industry competed for. You could then probably spend quite a bit more on strategy consulting - it's not difficult to run up a bill of $1m a month with McKinsey, and if we say they did twice that for six months, round the whole lot up ... I can see $20m for groundwork. Another c$5-10m for internal cost allocation of senior management time still leaves the actual coding to cost $10m, which is still about an order of magnitude more than it could reasonably cost to do the job. Update Alex thinks could indeed cost that order of magnitude to do the job, making the good point that Greenspun's cheep'n'cheerful paywall for MIT didn't exactly have to handle the volume of the New York Times (and nor did Google back in the days when it was doing things on a budget of $25m, which these days of course it is not). Tying in to the nuclear post above, making things bigger often makes them more complicated too.Labels: "occasional series" with only one post in them, dilbert is not a documentary
this item posted by the management 3/31/2011 06:13:00 AM
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Money talks and bullshit walks, an occasional series
This week in MTBW, Michael Gove:
I am delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum.
What, precisely, has Professor Simon Schama agreed to do?
I am delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum.
No, sorry, that's not actually very precise at all. It sounds as if Professor Schama has agreed to write a national curriculum or possibly to direct the assembly of source and classroom materials for one. But that would be a very large administrative project, of a scale which would surely be incompatible with his existing teaching, writing and broadcasting commitments if he were to have more than token involvement with producing it. Or perhaps he has agreed to put aside those other commitments to concentrate on this, a self-sacrificing act of public service of the sort that should surely be rewarded with a peerage or knighthood. But it doesn't actually say what level of involvement Prof. Schama has committed to. What is the deliverable, when is the due date for Prof. Schama's contribution and, if I may be so vulgar, what sort of fee arrangement has been agreed?
I am delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum.
"Money talks and bullshit walks".Labels: "occasional series" with only one post in them, mtbwotw, occasional series which now apparently have two posts in them
this item posted by the management 10/12/2010 01:25:00 AM
Friday, May 14, 2010
Money talks and bullshit walks, an occasional series
Hoisted from Matthew's comments, this idea of voting yourself an extra 32 seats really is a disaster, isn't it?
Raising the threshold to 55% for confidence votes is all very well, but what about budget votes? A government which can't pass its budget surely has to be considered to have fallen. And I don't think anyone has got the brass balls to propose a similar reform suggesting that a Finance Bill can be deemed to have passed if it has 45% support. So what this proposal achieves is to give the Opposition an incentive to make explicit use of the previously implicit fact that every budget is a de facto confidence vote. Doesn't that just scream "stability and viability" to you?Labels: "occasional series" with only one post in them
this item posted by the management 5/14/2010 01:03:00 AM
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Humiliating questions which I really ought to know the answer to, am 99% sure that I do know the answer, but which bug me out of all proportion, an occasional series
Is there really a Laboratoires Garnier? Like could you do a PhD there?Labels: "occasional series" with only one post in them
this item posted by the management 10/22/2008 04:08:00 PM
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