mathoda.com

In my prior post (http://www.mathoda.com/archives/160), I stated that the most impressive web company today is Facebook. They have created a clean, elegant interface, populated it with an ecosystem of other companies, and have an incredible core value proposition they call the social graph, which lets you easily see what your friends and acquaintances are up to in their lives.

Rupert Murdoch is a very savvy businessman, and he’s often credited for moving fast to snap up MySpace at what seemed like a foolhardy price, until it wasn’t. However, one reason he is a good businessman is because he doesn’t fool himself when it comes to business matters.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (a company he’s trying to buy) (http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118115049815626635.html), here’s what he said about Facebook:

WSJ: The Tribune company was shopped around for quite a while.

Mr. Murdoch: Yeah, but there weren’t any buyers.

WSJ: There was one in the end.

Mr. Murdoch: For $90 million. Risk. That’s in the figures …

WSJ: Why didn’t you do it?

Mr. Murdoch: Don’t want to spend the rest of my life going through that, getting rid of people, ugly. I think they’re in decline, they can fire a few hundred people everywhere, save a couple of hundred million dollars … I guess they will have a billion a year to pay down the debt, that’s what it sounds like. No, a bit less. I would have thought that, although the decline in readership will probably go on.

WSJ: They’re all going to MySpace.

Mr. Murdoch: I wish they were. They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.

And here’s what he said about Google and Microsoft:

WSJ: Then what’s the opportunity for you? Digital?

Mr. Murdoch: I think it’s in the digital area, digital and TV. And I think we’ve got to pour some money into digital. We’ve got to do a lot of things there… There’s so much going on on the Internet. We’ve got to find new ways and new business models to get revenues. Or else the world is going to be owned by Google. I was asked at this investment thing I had to go to, what competitors I see I would have in five years time. Globally. I said I’m sure they’ll be a lot of them. I know one is Google. It’s just getting so strong, so powerful. And I know the guys, and like them. They’re friends of mine. But it is a big fact of life. They sort of just hit the mother lode of search advertising and they’re just destroying Microsoft search, hurting Yahoo’s and making others irrelevant. I don’t understand the technologies but whatever their technology is, it seems to be producing a much higher margin of profit. What are they going to do next? I saw in the New York Times today they’re devising certain, a lot of computer applications which would directly challenge Microsoft, which they’ll give away. So it’s going to be very interesting. Four or five years ago we were all convinced Microsoft was going to take over the world. Now we’re all convinced it’s Google. But that’s another subject.

We live in interesting times, where mega-billion dollar market cap companies arise in very short time frames and fall from relevance even before their cash flow drops. I wonder how long it will take people to catch on to how fleeting competitive advantage can be on the Internet, even for what seem today to be the titans. It’s something to think about the next time someone bemoans corporate power or monopoly status of a company in the software industry.

Update, June 25, 2007: My friend Danah (danah.org) points out that MySpace and Facebook have different levels of popularity in different social classes: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

This is the funniest news item I’ve read in years:

Shortly before landing, Bob Hayden and a flight attendant had agreed on a signal: When she waved the plastic handcuffs, he would discreetly leave his seat and restrain an unruly passenger who had frightened some of the 150 people on board a Minneapolis-to-Boston flight Saturday night with erratic behavior….

“I had looked around the plane for help, and all the younger guys had averted their eyes. When I asked the guy next to me if he was up to it, all he said was, ‘Retired captain. USMC.’ I said, ‘You’ll do,’ ” Hayden recalled. “So, basically, a couple of grandfathers took care of the situation.”

…

Hayden’s wife of 42 years, Katie, who was also on the flight, was less impressed. Even as her husband struggled with the agitated passenger, she barely looked up from “The Richest Man in Babylon,” the book she was reading.

“The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading,” Katie Hayden said. “Bob’s been shot at. He’s been stabbed. He’s taken knives away. He knows how to handle those situations. I figured he would go up there and step on somebody’s neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn’t know how the book would end.”

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/06/05/graying_duo_keep_passenger_in_check/

Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University has created a new technique that by inserting four genes into a mouse skin cell reprograms it so it appears to be an embryonic stem cell. This technique has already been verified by other teams of scientists.

This is huge news.

This means that rather than have a controversy over extracting stem cells from fetuses, and rather than have issues over the scarcity of organs for transplantation, it’s likely a matter of time before you will be able to grow a replacement body part from your own skin cells.

As the NY Times reports:

If the technique can be adapted to human cells, it would let scientists use a patient’s skin cell to generate new heart, liver or kidney cells that might be transplantable and would not be rejected by the patient’s immune system.  …

The technique is much easier to apply than nuclear transfer, does not involve the expensive and controversial use of human eggs, and should avoid all or almost all of the ethical criticism directed at the use of embryonic stem cells.  …

It raises no serious moral problem, because it creates embryonic-like stem cells without creating, harming or destroying human lives at any stage, said Richard Doerflinger, a spokesman on stem cell issues for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.  …

Ever since the creation of Dolly, the first cloned mammal, scientists have sought to lay hands on the mysterious chemicals with which an egg will reprogram a mature cell nucleus injected into it and set the cell on the same path of embryonic development as when egg and sperm combine.  …

Last year Dr. Yamanaka and his colleague Kazutoshi Takahashi, both at Kyoto University, published a remarkable report relating how they had guessed at 24 genes that seemed responsible for maintaining
pluripotency in mouse embryonic stem cells.  …

When they inserted all 24 genes into mouse skin cells, the cells showed signs of pluripotency. The Kyoto team then subtracted genes one by one until they had a set of four genes that were essential. The genes are inserted into viruses that infect the cell and become active as the virus replicates. The skin cell’s own copies of these genes are repressed since they would interfere with its function. “We were very surprised that just four genes are sufficient to reprogram the skin cells,” Dr. Yamanaka said.  …

Dr. Yamanaka’s report riveted the attention of biologists elsewhere. Two teams set out to repeat and extend his findings, one led by Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute and the other by Kathrin Plath of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Konrad Hochedlinger of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Yamanaka, too, set about refining his work.

In articles being published in Nature and a new journal, Cell-Stem Cell, the three teams show that injection of the four genes identified by Dr. Yamanaka can make mouse cells revert to cells that are indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells.  …

An immediate issue is whether the technique can be reinvented for human cells. One problem is that the mice have to be interbred. Another is that the cells must be infected with the gene-carrying virus, which is not ideal for cells to be used in therapy. A third issue is that two of the genes in the recipe can cause cancer. Indeed 20 percent of Dr. Yamanaka’s mice died of the disease. Nonetheless, several biologists expressed confidence that all these difficulties will be sidestepped somehow.  …

Repairing the body with its own cells should in principle be a superior form of medicine to the surgeon’s knife and the oncologists’ poisons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/science/06cnd-cell.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Medicine will likely never be the same.