#david cord

[unhonestlymirror]

Very strong Gojo Satoru vibes:

[stairwaypress]

Why we can’t look away from car crashes by David J. Cord

People have a strange fascination with disasters. Tragedies get more critical success than comedies. A hurricane or tsunami always leads the evening news. And if we see a car crash, it is very hard not to look. 

There are psychological reasons behind our interest. For one, there is the element of danger and excitement without ourselves being actually at risk. Our concept of fairness also comes into play: if someone speeds and slides off a slick road, we think with some grim satisfaction it was their own fault.

But I believe disasters can be instructive as well. Seeing what went wrong can help us avoid the same mistake. But most importantly, I think it can be inspiring to see people deal with failure in noble ways. Maybe that’s why I keep writing about tragedies.

My first book, Mohamed 2.0, is about the failed attempt to build Muxlim, an online social network for Muslims. The grand motive behind this was not fame or profit, but to build a bridge between Muslims and the West. This was a noble aim after 9-11, and it is a noble aim today. It is a shame that the attempt didn’t succeed, but it is inspiring to read about young people like Mohamed El-Fatatry who wanted to change the world for the better.

Dead Romans is my second book. It takes place during the height of the Roman Empire, but the Emperor is only a side character. Instead, I follow ordinary people in extraordinary situations. One character fails in his marriage and fails in his relationship with a vulnerable youth, but he learns from his mistakes and tries to make things right.

The Decline and Fall of Nokia is my most recent book, which examines the collapse of what used to be the world’s greatest mobile phone maker. The best lesson from the fall of Nokia is how they got up, dusted themselves off, and went back to work. I am somewhat pleased with myself in having predicted in the book Nokia would return to the high-tech consumer market, and that is exactly what they are doing. Go check out the N1 tablet if you haven’t done so already.

True inspiration doesn’t come from stories of unmitigated success. I believe it comes from stories like these, where the heart is in the right place and you get up and try again. Everybody fails. But not everybody tries again.

About David:

David J. Cord spent fifteen years in the investment industry, as salesman, administrator and hedge fund manager. He has been a contributor to the Helsinki Times newspaper since its foundation, reporting on business and authoring its most popular column, which includes an eclectic mix of investment tips, angry policy recommendations and laconic observations about the economy. He has also written for publishers as diverse as European CEO and the Finnish Foreign Ministry.

An American by birth, David married a Finn and moved to Finland in 2005. He lives in Helsinki with his beautiful wife Niina.

David is the author of 3 books: Mohamed 2.0: Disruption Manifesto, Dead Romans, and The Decline and Fall of Nokia 

[giterdonenews]

A noo artikle has dunben rote ahn WWW.GITERDONENEWS.COM

thar's a noo artikle ha dunben wrote uhn www.giterdonenews.com calt

VA Official Who Tried to Cover Up the Legionnaires’ Outbreak in Pittsburgh Is Getting a Promotion

T' Department o'Veterans Affairs un Tuesdee promotid un ofishul who wurked ta cov'r up t'outbreek o'Legyunnaires’ diseese at t'Pittsburgh VA Heelthcare System. T' VA namet David Cord as t'nex dierektor o't' Erie VA Medicull Cant'r. Cord has bee t'deputee dierektor o't' Pittsburgh System, whar 16 ...

[giterdonenews]

A noo artikle has dunben rote ahn WWW.GITERDONENEWS.COM

thar's a noo artikle ha dunben wrote uhn www.giterdonenews.com calt

VA Official Who Tried to Cover Up the Legionnaires’ Outbreak in Pittsburgh Is Getting a Promotion

T' Department o'Veterans Affairs un Tuesdee promotid un ofishul who wurked ta cov'r up t'outbreek o'Legyunnaires’ diseese at t'Pittsburgh VA Heelthcare System. T' VA namet David Cord as t'nex dierektor o't' Erie VA Medicull Cant'r. Cord has bee t'deputee dierektor o't' Pittsburgh System, whar 16 ...

[stairwaypress]

The Decline and Fall of Apple

by David J. Cord

When the ancient Roman general Scipio sacked the city of Carthage, he is said to have wept in the realisation that at some point in time the same thing would happen to his beloved city of Rome. He was right, of course, although he had to wait several centuries before it happened.

I kept this idea in my mind as I was writing my book The Decline and Fall of Nokia. It is a history of the collapse of the once-dominant mobile phone behemoth Nokia. History can be interesting simply because it is entertaining, but history also has applicability. Past events can help us better understand what is happening right now and what will happen in the future.

So what will happen in the future of mobile technology? Apple will decline, collapse and fall. I guarantee it. The iPhone does not make it immune to the cyclical process of rise and fall. However, to be clear I have no idea exactly how or when Apple will collapse. It might be next year, or it might be next century. I would bet, though, that Apple’s demise will be closer to next year than the year 2101.

Technology changes extremely rapidly, and companies which dominated one era are replaced by companies which master the next technology. The telegraph fundamentally revolutionised how we communicate. Cooke and Wheatstone, the Atlantic Telegraph Company and Western Union were the Apple, Google and Microsoft of their day. Where are they now? The technology of the telegraph has been superseded, and the companies are long gone. Western Union is the only survivor, but it completely left the communication business and moved to money transfers. Now the exact same process is happening to it again in a new industry, but the new challengers are Bitcoin and Paypal.

The process of technological change is accelerating. The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph system lasted almost a century while Nokia was the largest mobile device maker for about a decade. Something will disrupt the current duopoly of Google and Apple, and that something will probably happen soon. It might already be happening but we haven’t recognised it yet. A good bet for a smartphone killer might be connected wearables. Google Glass, Samsung Galaxy Gear and the mysterious Apple iWatch all have the potential to bring a revolution to mobile technology.

Personally, I doubt any of these companies will be the ones to start the disruption. It will be an upstart, a surprise player. The great change will come out of some unexpected direction. The reason I think this is because this is what happened in the past. Apple was a computer manufacturer for hipsters and Google was a search engine when Nokia was at their peak. In 2005 no prudent person would have suspected these two companies would destroy the cellular phone market.

The same thing holds true for the fall of Rome. When Scipio sacked Carthage the main competitors his countrymen worried about were other established Mediterranean city-states. The people who captured Rome were the Visigoths, nomads who swept out of the steppes around the Black Sea. The fall of Apple will also almost certainly come from an unexpected direction.

At the heart of it, this is why I believe my book The Decline and Fall of Nokia is relevant to the coming collapse of Apple. The details will change, but the broad zeitgeist of decline and fall remains the same. If you want to have an idea of how it will happen, I think you should read my book.

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David J. Cord spent fifteen years in the investment industry, as salesman, administrator and hedge fund manager. He has been a contributor to the Helsinki Times newspaper since its foundation, reporting on business and authoring its most popular column, which includes an eclectic mix of investment tips, angry policy recommendations and laconic observations about the economy. He has also written for publishers as diverse as European CEO and the Finnish Foreign Ministry.

An American by birth, David married a Finn and moved to Finland in 2005. He lives in Helsinki with his beautiful wife Niina and his globe-trotting dog Orion.

David is the author of 3 books: Mohamed 2.0: Disruption Manifesto, Dead Romans, and The Decline and Fall of Nokia

[stairwaypress]

David J. Cord talks at Aalto University about his book The Decline and Fall of Nokia

[stairwaypress]

Who will go against the wall when the revolution comes?

by David J. Cord

As the saying goes, when the established elites lose their power they also lose their lives. Yet this applies not only to political revolutions, but also to economic ones.

My new book, The Decline and Fall of Nokia, documents one of these revolutions and how Nokia was sent to the wall. I think the story is fascinating in and of itself, but it is also useful to guess what will happen next.

A glance at the mobile device industry could lead one to conclude the battle for dominance has ended with the Google and Apple ecosystems on top. Other players like Microsoft have been relegated to minor roles. This is the case at the moment, but it is not a permanent situation. It will only remain this way until the next revolution.

This most recent revolution is the subject of my book: the advent of mobile computers as part of an ecosystem. Nokia knew where the industry was going. They understood that the internet would become mobile and the ecosystem would become all-important. Regardless of their foresight they could not adapt. They had to protect their existing business lines and were overtaken by events. In the end, they were sent against the wall just like in every other revolution.

Tellingly, each previous revolution began when a new generation of communication standards held a sizable minority of the market. Based upon this we can predict the next disruption. The next generation of mobile technology is 4G, and it has already been commercialised. So far it is not very widespread, but momentum is behind it. If the past is any guide to the future, expect the next revolution to happen within three or four years. Soon, I suspect, Apple and Google will discover it is their turn to go against the wall.

But what will this revolution in mobile technology be? There is a good chance it will be wearable devices. The first thing that may come to mind is Google Glass, but almost certainly this will not be the catalyst for change. By definition disruption comes from a new player. It could be an established company in another sector which enters the industry or it could be a new start-up. Google Glass is based upon Google’s existing business, particularly location-based services, search and social networking. This is not a revolution; it is an incremental innovation. Fundamentally Google Glass is only a really cool smartphone hanging on your nose.

When I set out to write the Nokia story I didn’t realise their decline and fall fit into this pattern. It was only after voluminous research into the history of mobile devices that I saw Nokia’s fate was inevitable based upon existing situation, as well as their actions and inactions. There is a lesson to be learned here, as well as a great story to tell.

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David J. Cord spent fifteen years in the investment industry, as salesman, administrator and hedge fund manager. He has been a contributor to the Helsinki Times newspaper since its foundation, reporting on business and authoring its most popular column, which includes an eclectic mix of investment tips, angry policy recommendations and laconic observations about the economy. He has also written for publishers as diverse as European CEO and the Finnish Foreign Ministry.

An American by birth, David married a Finn and moved to Finland in 2005. He lives in Helsinki with his beautiful wife Niina and his globe-trotting dog Orion.

Click here to learn more about David's new book- The Decline and Fall of Nokia

[stairwaypress]

What freedom of speech?

by David J. Cord

I hoped my book would be banned. I thought it would be wonderful if some self-righteous politician convinced a court it was a danger to society. I imagined crowds gathering as copies of my book were tossed on big, public bonfires like in 1930s Germany. That would have been great.

I was joking, of course. Well, sort of. My first book, Mohamed 2.0, was almost complete. It was a biography of Mohamed El-Fatatry, a Muslim immigrant to little homogenous Finland. People in the West get quite worked up about anything to do with Islam, so I knew we could have some controversy. Mohamed wanted a famous politician to write the Foreword to the book, and we ended up getting government minister and presidential candidate Eva Biaudet to do it. I joked to Mohamed that we should ask her to ban it instead of endorse it, because nothing helps sales better than censorship. He didn’t think it was funny.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover had the support of its publisher, though. Sometimes a publisher will forget their high-minded morals and agree to censorship. The publisher Penguin recently decided to destroy all copies of the academic book The Hindus by Wendy Doniger because some Indians didn’t like how it portrayed their religion.

Free speech is often curtailed on religious grounds, and not just in the world’s largest democracy India. Harry Potter was famously challenged in American libraries by Christian fundamentalists because it supposedly promoted witchcraft. I never saw the danger Harry Potter posed to the world, but that might just be me.

Free speech is certainly under threat in America. Reporters Without Borders recently ranked good-old freedom-loving USA number 46 in the world for press freedom, behind countries like Belize, Botswana and Suriname. The American government is quite upset that we have found out they are spying on their own citizens, so they are arresting people who try to leak information and hacking the Associated Press.

America seems to be trying to shed its “land of the free” title, but there must be some places in the world where freedom of speech and the press is still respected. I happen to live in Finland, which was ranked the best in the world for press freedom. This sounds nice, but if we are number one then the world is in bad shape.

A couple of years ago a Finnish politician was convicted of “breaching the sanctity of religion” for a blog post. Jussi Halla-aho had made a careful statement in the “if-then” tradition of Aristotelian logic, comparing the Prophet Muhammad’s nine-year old wife and modern age of consent laws. This was deemed offensive and forbidden speech. It was offensive, certainly, but I don’t agree that being a jerk should be forbidden by law. I know other countries take a similar line. People in Great Britain have been arrested for being offensive on Twitter.

Finland also has a tradition of corporate censorship, when powerful companies exert their influence to stop critical journalism. The mobile phone company Nokia was rather infamous for this in years past. When I started writing my new book, The Decline and Fall of Nokia, the possibility they could try to stop us came up a time or two during meetings. Luckily Nokia seems to be mellowing, though, and they don’t seem to be too upset. The book is set for publication in April, so it looks like I will miss the censorship bullet with this one, too.

My novel Dead Romans hasn’t drawn the attention of any corporations, politicians or religious groups yet. It gives a rather frank depiction of paganism and abuse in the ancient Roman Empire. One homeschooling Mom flipped out about it, though. She wrote a review stating “I’m quite aware that this type of thing probably happened, but I don’t think it’s necessary to tell us about it.” I was hoping she would start a campaign to ban it. That would have been great.