Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

So I needed some quick kills, just to get the number of potential investments down to a minimum. I started from the bottom. With Level 3 already out, Gen Probe was next, but after looking arround a bit on Yahoo! Finance I cancelled that idea too. For one, Insider Transactions for Gen Probe were mostly sales and especially the CEO seems to be selling. Institutions hold 90% of the float, meaning that an investment can’t get an upkick from institutions suddenly finding the stock. Without a dividend, which they don’t pay, stock price movements would be the only thing to bank on and based on Analyst estimates the growth won’t be too amazing. Adding to that, that I don’t really know their business, I move on.

Infosys Technologies, the IT outsourcing people, have declining revenue and on top of that, their money is on allowing others to pay less for more. They do better if they can pay people less. Just not something I want to be in.

Monsanto seems to have little growth in them from the analyst estimates, already high institutional investors and negative cash flow. And I don’t fully understand their business. So that one is out too.

That leaves: Genentech, eBay, Vodafone, Flextronics and Interactivecorp. Interactivecorp likely is too puzzeling. I held off with Flextronics for a long time but might have to stop doing that. They just have amazing lock in once they build all this stuff for you. I already do have Vodafone shares and I still do believe in the wireless future. eBay might have a too high P/E for my liking and Genentech looks very promising. We will see.

Today’s birthday greetings go to Jeremy C. Wright from Ensight. Have a great day and a wonderful and successful future! While I am at it, a small plug for The Bloggist, a project Jeremy has initiated for a blogging magazine! I personally need to find some time to contribute because this thing can be really nice. Check it out.

Here we start at culture, in which national values do have a large effect. These are underpinned by four dimensions (Hofstede): Power-distance, Uncertainty-avoidance, Individualism/collection, Masculinity/feminity. This needs to be kept in mind when going to work in different countries, as these differences can break apart an executive when they want to work like they did in their local country.
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Apple had a lot of announcements today and there is some wonderful stuff coming out of the company as usual. I also still love my iBook. But I have to agree with Russell’s post. This one is about the fact that Apple has seemingly copied Konfabulator. They already did it with Watson (called Sherlock in Apple) too. And the thing is that the Konfabulator copy isn’t really something you’d need in OS X, but it will still push the Konfabulator people out of business. This is not good. They could have bought them if they wanted to. Russell suggests that the developers walk out at tomorrow’s WWDC, which might be a good idea.

I am torn here. I do love that there is so much stuff readily available in OS X, but if I imagine that MS would boundle all this stuff with Windows, they would be right back in court.

Update: Thijs pointed me to this post shedding a little different light on the issue. It’s very well written and gives a good idea on the history of things like widgets, differences in coding between them and a few other interesting insights on other “rip-offs” by Apple.

I do get the point, and I should probably not get as pissed as I did when I started this post. The problem really runs a lot deeper. With development of applications getting easier, development environments improving, the move from idea to finished product gets easier, and it gets easier to rip-off if you want. The question is if you should, especially in the case where it’s a wise decision, for which ever reason. Is it more important to add something like they did now, or is it more important to provide technology to allow others to do that. Then again, that’s really what they did. They made available a system that allows you to build little applications. It’s a good idea really.

Our personality characteristics also influence the team roles which we are most comfortable iwth. Belbin argued that best working groups are those that have a range of people that can and will fulfil a variety of roles. His inventory, while not formally developed, has proved to useful especially due to validity and understandability of the roles Belbin put forward. But even Belbin recognized that this inventory was never designed as a full test, but more as a guideline
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