commentary Sara on 06 May 2009 04:38 am
Data nerdery
I was catching up on my reading and came across this excellent, albeit long, post on the Google blog. From the height of this place by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP of Product Management at Google.
Some particularly nice passages:
Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it at the start of his first term, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
and
Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.
Tobias Tweets
on 15 May 2009 at 10:47 pm 1.Michael E. Driscoll said …
Transparency is wonderful, but it’s not a panacea. Publishing content is hard, and publishing data — that is, documenting it, removing artifacts, and putting it in a usable form — is even harder. The costs of publishing data have got to be recouped, and there have go to be market incentives that push this process. Google’s vision of the world giving freely publishing its data is good for Google, but bad for providers.