The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Mr. Campbell, a technology veteran who has coached Silicon Valley CEOs such as Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, had been called in by Zynga investor and venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to advise Mr. Pincus as the social games company's stock plunged and some of its online games lost traction. Some Kleiner Perkins partners warned Mr. Campbell that he might not make much progress. .......... Pincus was open to advice. Mr. Pincus "was discouraged" ...... He "felt terrible about what was happening; he felt the turmoil." ...... The 46-year-old CEO has remained outwardly positive while Zynga's troubles have played out publicly over the past few months. ..... He was grappling with internal strife, including executive defections and confrontations with employees. ....... the CEO, who owns 50.2% of Zynga's voting control and has previously worked with outside consultants to improve his management skills, is trying to remake himself as its leader by ceding more control to deputies and improving communications. ...... "rapid change in player habits and social technologies have dictated fundamental changes at Zynga. And when businesses change, it's inevitable that some people will choose to leave." ...... Mr. Gordon said Zynga had failed to prioritize mobile development and found that its online games didn't easily translate to smartphones' smaller screens. "Mobile turned out to be more different than anyone expected, in terms of monetization and also user experience" ........ In May, at an off-site meeting in Monterey, Calif., with 100 senior employees, one group led by product director Jonathan Liu confronted Mr. Pincus over morale. Mr. Liu said he told Mr. Pincus that Zynga needed a clear strategic vision. ...... Mr. Liu, who added that he was "almost yelling" at Mr. Pincus at the meeting. .... and reorganized the mobile division so that it was integrated into every gaming studio and not a stand-alone unit. He also pushed harder into new businesses, like real-money gambling. ..... also filled his calendar with product meetings ..... switched his main phone from a BlackBerry to iPhone ..... Employee departures became rote ...... When Zynga notified employees of their extra equity, many received just several hundred options spread across a multiyear vesting schedule, while others got a larger amount. Some employees asked if they could refuse the grant, which they viewed as an insult and a pittance ...... Pincus has focused on improving his communication skills ........ "Project Whistle," a program to connect top executives with Zynga employees. The group has run more than 30 meetings over the last two months where executives discuss Zynga's strategy and answer questions from the crowd. ..... delegation skills. Mr. Pincus has been known for dominating discussions and focusing on details such as the font choice or color scheme of gamesZynga's CEO Almost Broke Down In Tears Over Company's Downfall
employees berating him about the company's lack of a strategic vision and poorly thought-out schemes to boost moraleNow David Ko Is Essentially Running Zynga
David Ko, an executive who has championed Zynga's push into mobile and transformation of its Facebook-oriented franchises like FarmVille and Mafia Wars into multiplatform gaming experiences that cross both Web and mobile, has gotten another promotion in the process...... the troubled maker of social games shuffles management every few months, as it tries to adapt the company to a rapidly changing world where mobile rules..... Ko's been a key part of that transformation, pushing Zynga to buy Newtoy, the maker of Words With Friends, and OMGPOP, the maker of Draw Something...... Ko now oversees Zynga's strategic planning, international expansion, and infrastructure........ Ko also has oversight for all of Zynga's game development, with Zynga's top game-development executive, Steve Chiang, reporting to him. Chiang and Ko had previously shared oversight for Zynga's studios, with both reporting to Pincus. ..... Steve Chiang is now Zynga's president of games, overseeing all studios and reporting to Ko
RIM took a long, hard look at migrating to Android before deciding to plow forward with BlackBerry 10. .... “We took the conscious decision not to go Android,” Heins told the Telegraph. ”If you look at other suppliers’ ability to differentiate, there’s very little wiggle room. We looked at it seriously — but if you understand what the promise of BlackBerry is to its user base it’s all about getting stuff done. Games, media, we have to be good at it but we have to support those guys who are ahead of the game. Very little time to consume and enjoy content — if you stay true to that purpose you have to build on that basis. And if we want to serve that segment we can’t do it on a me-too approach.”
Redmond. Cupertino. Mountain View. ... Microsoft, Apple, Google .... Waterloo, Ontario, is another city stamped by the accomplishments of a tech giant. Research in Motion began there in 1984, and with its era-defining success came an influx of talent and a growing community. But RIM has stumbled ...... Coming from Detroit, the route to Waterloo is flat and grassy, a gently undulating expanse of land much like Ohio but with less obvious signs of industrialization. ..... Waterloo, population just shy of 100,000 ..... The University of Waterloo, alma mater of RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis .... RIM itself lies just off the UW campus — indeed, there’s no real physical boundary between the two. .... About half of RIM’s workforce is located here, some 8,000 or so people ..... Their new CEO has been on a PR offensive, telling the press that the company’s not “in a death spiral.” RIM stock sits mired in the single digits, having lost 90 per cent of its value in the last three years. ..... the “worst corporate culture in the world.” After RIM lost a long and brutal patent battle with NTP in early 2006, he says, lawyers came to dominate the culture. The company’s earlier rapid growth had meant hiring a layer of lifelong managers, many of them risk-averse. Fiefdoms were carved out and protected; a degree of complacency settled in. After NTP, that complacency — especially about creating new products — was joined by an obsession with secrecy and legalistic wrangling. The environment inhibited new ideas; instead of daring to be bold, he says, employees worked in fear because, “if something goes wrong, someone has to get fired.” ....... the BlackBerry sips data compared to its competitors, it’s secure and reliable, it conveys a professional image (all of those belt holsters), and it has a physical keyboard. He thinks the layoffs could be good for the company; having grown too big too fast ........ The local tech industry has matured: Silicon Valley companies (including Intel, Google, and Facebook) have opened local offices and there’s a flourishing startup community. If RIM goes, he says, it’ll free up talent for other companies. ....... OpenText, the content management provider and Canada’s largest software company, for example, was spun out of the university in 1991, allowing several faculty members to found a company. The university values entrepreneurship. Mike Lazaridis, for one, received early encouragement to found RIM from a UW economics professor. He dropped out to start Research in Motion. ...... Iain Klugman .. “The American dream is to make it big, to build a big company, to become a rock star,” he says. “I think for many years the Canadian dream was to win the lottery.” ...... Waterloo and the surrounding area has the right combination of ingredients to enable tech entrepreneurs: strong academic brands, including UW and several other schools; a culture that accepts deviance (risking your future by going into business for yourself rather than someone else), and a network of capital comfortable with risk. He’s long been working to build on that foundation, and where the area had maybe 50 tech companies 15 years ago, today there are 1000 by his count. He says on average one local startup is founded every day. ........ I come from Kitchener-Waterloo, and yes, RIM has made it known on the world’s radar.” RIM is like a family member that’s done well ...... Co-founder Mike Lazaridis has donated $250 million to create the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, while Jim Balsillie spent $30 million to found the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Both men have donated generously to the University of Waterloo, with Lazaridis and his wife contributing over $100 million to the school’s affiliated research center, the Institute for Quantum Computing ...... “As much as I’m rooting for RIM, I have an iPhone.”What are RIM's options?
Image via WikipediaRIM is in trouble. Their flagship BlackBerry is in serious trouble. The iOS assault is total. 
Image via CrunchBaseMy Web DiagramNew York Times: Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.: I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship. ..... or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger ..... our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer. ...... the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. ....... the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn. ..... e the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. ......... liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. ...... a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable. ....... If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. ...... You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting). ...... Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. ....... We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors. ...... a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love ....... “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. ...... trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. ....... Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me? ............. There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. ...... But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie. ....... Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self. ....... The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking. ....... To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. ...... then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher ........... and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love. ...... And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin. ..... When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.I came to this article thinking this was about group dynamics. It is about face time alright, but not the large scale group dynamics I had in mind.
