June 26, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (0) |

The sad death of the world’s most famous, not to mention enigmatic, musical artist yesterday is clearly bad news for locations such as the O2 building which was due to host one of Michael Jackson’s live concerts. But one company could rake in the bucks.

You may recall, when Freddie Mercury died, Bohemian Rhapsody went straight back to number one. Imagine seemed to become more famous and popular after the death of John Lennon.

You may also recall, one of the reasons why Michael Jackson was planning to go back on the live concert circuit was because he had sold the rights to his back catalogue of music, and he needed money.

The company which owns the rights to the Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous and History albums is Sony.

Howard Stringer, Sony Chief Executive Officer, said in a statement: “Michael Jackson was a brilliant troubadour for his generation, a genius whose music reflected the passion and creativity of an era… We have been profoundly affected by his originality, creativity and amazing body of work. The entire Sony family extends our deepest condolences to his family and to his millions of fans.”

No doubt the statement was meant too, but in a year’s time Sony’s shareholders may be counting rather a lot of money.

June 17, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (0) |

And so there’s going to be a tax on copper telephone line usage to fund broadband, and some of the BBC licence fee is going towards its rivals, including Channel 4 and local news services.

It is quite interesting to note the reaction of the media. On one hand they love it, on the other they hate it.

You see, many of the more traditional journalists, writing for paper newspapers, don’t really like the Internet. They see it as undermining the business model that pays their wages.

On the other hand, they dislike the BBC’s online activities even less. So anything that bashes the BEEB goes down well, even if it is bashed in the wrong way.

In one respect they are wrong; in another way … well, read on.

One of the ideas put forward by the Digital Britain report is to put a 50p a month tax on all users of copper telephone lines, with the proceeds used to try and deliver broadband for all.

Writing in The Telegraph, Amanda Andrews, the newspaper’s media editor, was not impressed. “This is not money going into the health service or education. Instead it’s a tax to enable more young people to play video games, and download films on their computers.”

She was taking sides with her grandmother in the debate. She doesn’t use the Internet, and yet she is being forced to fund those who do.

And yet, there is another point of view that is being missed. For right or wrong, it has long been considered sacrosanct in this country that people living in out of the way places are still entitled to basic services. So, roads lead to hamlets, even though the car tax paid by local residents will never be enough to cover the cost of the road. Post is delivered, even though the income from stamps will never justify the cost of sending a postman so far out of his or her way. Train services connect small towns with cities, even though the services are run at a loss – at least that always used to be the philosophy.

So, in providing broadband to areas where it wouldn’t normally be available, the government is being wholly consistent with 60 years of policies.

Others ridicule the fact that the government is trying to guarantee just 2 megabits of broadband, a tiny amount, dwarfed by broadband availability in other parts of the world. But this misses the point, too. The government is merely trying to ensure that as many people as possible can receive a certain minimum standard of service. It is not saying this minimum standard will be the bee’s knees, merely that it is better than nothing.

But the key point is that broadband is not just about giving teenagers access to computer games. The Internet is far more important than that. Far more.

It has helped bring down inflation, it has helped facilitate communication between scientists and researchers across the world, it has helped underpin globalization and is also intrinsically tied in with one of the new buzzwords which is supposed to be the great driver of economic growth this century – cooperation.

Sometimes, something can be of benefit which exceeds what people are willing to pay for it. Take the airline industry. This is a business which is notorious for failing to make money. And yet, the growth of air travel has been essential in underpinning economic growth. Take as a similar example, subsidies that budget airlines were being offered to fly to certain towns in Europe. The EU Commission didn’t like the subsidies, but that is neither here not there.  It was felt by the local council that the benefit to their town of having easyJet or Ryanair fly in, was far greater than was reflected in the cost of the air tickets.

The Internet is like that, too. We may only pay £10 a month or so for our broadband, but what it is worth to the global economy is far more than £10 a month times the population of Internet users.

As for the other key part of the Digital Britain report, it seems the BBC may have to give up part of its licence fee. Channel 4 and regional news services will be the winners.

The BBC is a tough one for fans of free markets. It surely provides a superb service, probably scoring over TV services provided by the market. It seems most of us benefit. Most of us feel the TV licence is good value. And yet, it flies in the face of market economics.

But that does not mean some of the money should not be spread about a bit. It would be a tragedy if Channel 4 failed, or worse than that, had to resort to buying in more US imports, and making more editions of Hollyoaks just to survive. So, letting it get its hands on some of the money formerly set aside to fund the digital switchover is no bad thing.

As for regional news. For most of us regional news is a bit of a joke. Most TV regions are so big that the majority of reports on local news programmes apply to a town which most of the viewers never visit. If the money to be handed out means regional TV news will apply to smaller areas, this would be a good thing.

Of course, many of the media say the Digital Britain report missed the key issue: that the real scandal is the BBC’s Internet presence. That it is unfair on competitive websites, they say.

But it seems their real gripe is that the BBC’s online presence has helped promote free news on the Net. But surely, the gainers have been the end users.

The media might not like the BBC online presence, but it is far from clear the public are worse off as a result, and that is what matters.

May 29, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (0) |

At last we may be seeing some serious competition for Google.

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled its latest attempt to start clawing back market share from the seemingly unbeatable Google. This time it’s a new search engine, and this time Microsoft seems to think it has found something special.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information,” said Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer magnanimously. But he added: “they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find.”

The answer, Microsoft hopes, is that in the future we won’t Google things, we will Bing them instead. For Bing is the name of its new product.

It seems Bing’s big advantage is that supposedly it learns as it goes. So after a while, it works out what kind of information you are really after, and delivers the results accordingly.

“When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the web,” said Ballmer.

In the US, Google has 64.2 per cent of all search engine enquiries, Yahoo is in second place, and Microsoft a lowly third. In the UK, Google’s share is much higher. Do you know anyone who doesn’t use Google?

So why the name Bing? Well, it appears it has nothing to do with dreaming of white Christmases. Instead, Ballmer said: “The name is short, it’s easy to say, it works globally. It’s been proved that being able to ‘verb up’ can be helpful.”

Not all are convinced. The Times quoted Andy Mihalop of the i-level online media agency, who said: “It’s going to be very difficult for them to break the Google habit, because Google is such a familiar brand.” But then again, if Google has shown us anything, it is that in the Internet world, a brand’s monopoly can be broken quite quickly.

Poor old Yahoo. Ballmer still talked about working closely with the company, and recently, Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz said talks between the two companies had continued “a little bit”.

But it seems Microsoft has gone cold on the idea of merging with Yahoo. The smaller company may have missed its big chance last year when a handsome offer was on the table.

It does seem that in the Internet world, barriers to entry are incredibly low. New technologies can catapult companies to the forefront in no time.

But this new Microsoft idea is not like that. This was a deliberate in-house attempt to create something that can take on Google. Moving forward, this is Microsoft’s weakness.

Microsoft relies on its in-house expertise or in buying companies once they have a proven product. But the competition is almost anarchic. There’s Linux with its legions of programmers working for little more than the thrill of being a part of something bigger.

The likes of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have shown how new businesses can come from nowhere, and very soon command a price which even the likes of Microsoft baulk at paying.

Nothing lasts for ever. At the beginning of the last century, the economist Alfred Marshall drew up a list of the top 100 companies. So large and powerful were the companies on Marshall’s list, he argued that they would probably survive indefinitely. He referred to them as the Californian Redwoods – trees that can live for so long that to us humans, with our short lifespan, they practically appear immortal. Redwoods have in fact been known to live for over 2,000 years.

But in 1999, the economist Richard L Hannah revisited the Marshall list, and discovered that of the 100 largest firms in 1912, 29 had, by the time of the study, gone bankrupt; 48 had disappeared; and just 19 of them were still in the US top 100.

Presumably the credit crunch has seen more victims, and Marshall’s Redwoods have diminished even further.

The Internet will surely accelerate the inevitability of this destruction, and Microsoft is being forced to fight a rearguard action. How it fares over the next few years will be truly fascinating.

May 20, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (0) |

When the author of this article was a little boy he once asked his father what number came after a trillion. Don’t be silly, came the reply, you will never need to know that.

Well, it seems Dad was wrong.

We have become used to big numbers these days, the scale of banking losses, the size of banking bail outs, the scale of the pension deficit, but here is a number to dwarf even those.

It is three sextillion, 892 quintillion, 179 quadrillion, 868 trillion, 480 billion, 350 million. Or you can also list it like this: 3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000.

And what is that number? It is the number of bits added to the digital universe in 2008, or so analysts at IDC have calculated And here is another number, this time seemingly modest: Five. But it is not so modest if you multiply the first number above by five. And if you do that, you get the number of bits it is estimated will be added to the digital universe in 2012.

You won’t read about this in economics. Some may ask: “What has this got to do with the economy?” Well, the answer is, just about everything.

If you were to print out all these bits onto paper, you would be able to wrap the earth in it eight times (enough to make a kind of pass the parcel game for gods). The paper would also stretch from here to Pluto and back ten times – (at least it would from where this is being written, not sure where you are reading this).

As for the rate of growth, it seems that this paper chain from here to Pluto is growing at a rate which is 20 times faster than the fastest rocket ever made. At the current growth rate it would take just three weeks to reach Pluto.

There’s a catch, of course. This growing universe needs money spent on it. In all, around $12 trillion – that’s the total annual cost of storage, computers, networks, IT, telecommunications etcetera. And don’t forget the electricity it uses up.

But in this credit crunch era we find ourselves in, expenditure on IT is falling.

This huge volume of data generates a vast amount of heat, and requires electricity for it to cool down. Moving forward, the IT world’s equivalent of rocket scientists need to find more efficient ways of storing data, compressing it for example. There there’s the issue of policing it and of protecting the universe from viruses.

All those digital photos and videos eat up data. We are moving to a situation in which word processors and spreadsheets will be stored online, and more and more of us will take up the mantle of so-called ‘cloud computing’ – where all the processing is done on another computer (as it were, in a digital galaxy far, far away).

But think of the potential. IDC reckons that by 2012, 850 million people will be buying and selling things on the Internet. It also estimates that by the same year, Internet commerce will be worth £13 trillion.

It often seems that people underestimate the importance of the Internet as a means of promoting wealth.

Here are two reasons why this medium represents what is quite possibly the most important means since the printing press for advancing the cause of mankind.

Economists have understood that specialisation is the key to maximizing the creation of goods and services. The more we specialise in what we are good at, the more the world sees economic wealth expand. This is why globalisation is such an engine for wealth creation. By promoting trade, the Internet has suddenly made it much easier to find the people and companies that are best able to provide specific goods and services. If £13 trillion will be spent on commerce over the Net in 2012, then you can be sure the result of this will be more effective specialisation.

Secondly, the Internet will, and is promoting innovation. Innovation builds on ideas, and the more ideas that flow from people and companies, the more we innovate. Take this example. They say Darwin was a prolific letter writer, corresponding with over 2,000 people. He wrote literally thousands of letters, often around eight a day. This was the means by which he drew in ideas from around the world and was able to advance his own theories. Think how much faster this process would have been if he had rattled off emails instead, and got responses within hours.

The digital universe is expanding at this incredible rate. It seems unlikely that wealth creation thanks to innovation or greater specialisation will match this rate of acceleration. But even so, it will accelerate, and it will accelerate fast.

April 15, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (0) |

The world of technology has seen two important developments over the last 24 hours.

First off is a sign that the recession in computer chips is near an end. That has to be encouraging, because presumably this could herald the end of a wider recession.

Secondly, one of the great experiments of the post dotcom crash world, the purchase of Skype by eBay and the integration of the two services, seems to be over.

The good news on chip sales came cleverly disguised as a 55 per cent drop in profits.

In its latest quarter, Intel made a $649 million profit, compared to a $1.44 billion profit a year ago. Now, at the risk of sounding pedantic, a dramatic fall in profits like that does not sound like a reason to celebrate, but analysts celebrated all the same.

The thing you need to bear in mind is that in the previous quarter, profits were down 90 per cent. Intel said that was horrendous, but ever since then, it seems sales have been a tad better.

Chief executive Paul Otellini said: “Desktop computer sales hit bottom and have followed a more normal pattern since February.” He added, “We’re still in a fragile economic environment, but the past three months have improved our ability to look at the market now…It’s given us the confidence to say we’ve seen the bottom.”

As for eBay, the company is planning to spin off its Skype subsidiary through an initial public offering next year.

You may recall, when the online auction company bought the Internet telephony firm, a number of analysts scratched their heads. “Why?” they asked.

It seems the answer was that at some point, users of eBay may actually have been able to ring the people they were selling to or buying from, over their Skype phone. Umm, sounds a bit iffy, doesn’t it?

eBay bought Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion. Back then, the Internet phone company had 53 million users, but was barely able to turn a dime. It had lots of users, not much turnover.

Last year, it turned over $551 million from 405 million users. eBay reckons the company will break the billion dollar turnover mark in 2011.

The question is, how much will it be valued at when the IPO takes place? Watch this space.

April 9, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (0) |

Newspapers bosses had their noses rubbed in it earlier this week.

It ain’t easy running a newspaper these days. There’s this thing called the Internet. We want our content for free, and it seems that with every passing year, the allure of the Net over traditional publishing becomes ever more powerful.

Presumably it is only a matter of time before these new book readers, that are starting to be seen around these days, merge with mobile phone technology and then we will start reading our news content on electronic readers.

It is rather bad news if your business model involves making money by getting people to pay for their content.

But on Wednesday, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt gave the keynote speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention. It was a bit like inviting a cat to a pigeon party, and Mr Schmidt didn’t disappoint.

The Google boss launched into an analogy with TV. “There’s free television,” he said, “over-the-air television, there’s cable television and there’s pay television. And they have smaller markets as you go from free to more highly paid. And that structure looks to us like roughly the structure of all of these businesses.

“Today there are very effective subscription based models, but there are not very good micropayment systems, micropayment meaning one cent, three cent kinds of systems. They clearly need to be developed by the industry. I think from your perspective you should assume that there’s a category of information you all produce that you’ll want to distribute freely. There’s a category you’ll want to have a per click basis. And there’s some that you’ll want subscription for. The reality in this model is the vast majority of people will only want the free model, so you’ll be forced, whether we like it or not, to have a significant advertising component as well as a micropayment and a traditional payment system.”

Or to put it another way, the future is free, and it’s advertising based.

March 4, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (1) |

Here’s a theory for you. A number of people have suggested the Internet has accelerated the pace of this economic crisis. It seems they are probably right. Information that may have trundled its way across the world over a few hours during the previous downturn, can now permeate even the deepest recesses and crevices in the global economy within seconds.

But, if the Internet is the reason why the noughties bubble has unwound at such an astonishing pace, is it not possible to you that it could also provide the means for an accelerated recovery?

These days, information really is the most valuable of commodities. And the Internet is the means by which this information grows, and changes.

While the problems that lie behind this crisis are complex, it seems that the process of globalisation, the fact that the global economy is now a vast, interconnected network of hubs and spokes, has made the understanding of crisis even more elusive. When things go badly, the Net can exaggerate the trend. When they go well, it works to enhance the positive.

This could, of course, mean that bubbles are more likely to develop. There was a time when bubbles occurred only rarely. Take the first three bubbles we tend to talk about. The Tulip bubble in Holland occurred in the 1630s. It is true that the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles both occurred during the early years of the 18th century, within a few years of each other,  but they were largely phenomena of different countries – France and Britain.

Contrast this with the modern era. No sooner did the global dot com crash come to an end, than we saw a global boom in property prices, a boom in bank lending and debt. In China, the stock market portrayed all the hallmarks of a bubble, until it too burst. It seems bubbles are everywhere. It was as if the world had secretly and en masse become supporters of West Ham, and felt the need to be forever blowing bubbles.

Surely the Internet has had something to do with this. Bubbles occur, it seems, when there is a kind of collective madness. A network of individuals reinforces the prevailing view.

Yet, see it from the other point of view. The Internet is a simply incredibly means for allowing scientists to swap ideas: for researchers to share a collective pool of knowledge. We are seeing this already with the emergence of Linux, which will surely evolve eventually to be the dominant system for the way we operate computers.

But, expect the emergence of other Linux-type networks in other sectors, too; in pharmaceuticals, for example.

Anyway, that little rant out of the way, some pretty heavy stuff is occurring with the Internet at the moment.

BT, for example, is investing £1.5bn into upgrading its broadband network. The regulator seems to have sided with the telecommunications company and has agreed it can set the prices it charges for rivals such as BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse to access its network.

“This is an important step and will allow the market to develop the next generation of the UK’s broadband infrastructure, which is so critical to the UK’s future as a knowledge-based economy,” said the company’s boss Ian Livingstone.

The plan is for BT to run fibre optic cables to roadside cabinets, and direct to some businesses. Talk is about data speeds of 40 megabits, even 100 megabits per second.

It only seems like five minutes ago when logging on to the Internet involved listening to our modem sing to us in a somewhat dull symphony of ones and zeros. It took an age to log on, then we had to suffer that awful wail while it happened, then we had to wait for graphics to appear on our page at a speed that made the movement of a snail seem closer to Lewis Hamilton on a road track, by comparison.

And now they are talking about 100 megabits per second.

You have no doubt heard of Moore’s Law, but have you heard of Butters’ Law of Photonics? This was defined by Gerald Butters, the former head of Lucent’s Optical Networking Group, and predicts a doubling in the amount of data coming out of an optical fibre every nine months.

Change is no longer changing at a faster rate. Rather, the rate of acceleration itself is accelerating.

And that means that amongst the digital signals that cross the global network, there are plenty more that spell bubble. But plenty more that spell prosperity too.

February 5, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (1) |

It’s funny sometimes, how we don’t always spot what is happening under our noses.

For years there was always this vague promise that, one day, the Internet would change the way we watch TV. Well, it is happening, now, and it barely gets commented upon.

You will no doubt have heard of Moore’s Law, which predicts a doubling in processing speed every 18 months or so. Less well known is Butters Law, named after Gerry Butters, the former head of Lucent’s Optical Networking Group at Bell’s Labs. This law predicts a doubling in the amount of data coming out of fibre optic wires every nine months.

Of late, the BBC has been coming in for criticism from ISPs over the way it clogs up bandwidth via its BBC iPlayer, but this will become less of an issue as bandwidth speeds increase.

More and more of us are downloading TV and radio shows we miss, from the Internet. TV on demand is becoming reality. The trend can only go one way.

And with that comes opportunity. The battle is now on for a new portal, the place to go on the Net to access your TV. The BBCi site, Four on Demand and the ITV service are too disparate. ITV and BBC may show programmes that appeal to similar audiences, but accessing those programmes over the Net is a pain – you need to go the BBC site, navigate it, then on to the ITV site and navigate that.

So you can see why the hunt is on for a portal. Google is in the battle. In fact, it is waging its war on two fronts – there’s the Google search function, and YouTube.

You can be sure that other competitors will enter the market.

But among the players, a British consortium emerged as a real contender. The BBC, ITV and Channel Four had their plan for a common portal. What a great idea – it would have been good news for us consumers, and maybe good news for Britain, too, as we use one of our strengths, media creativity, to produce a portal that could have true world-wide significance.

Alas, the dream has been quashed. The Competition Commission has said no.

You can understand their logic. The commission felt the ITV, BBC and Channel Four project, called Kangaroo, would have been too much of a threat to other potential products. In other words, if Kangaroo got established, then other products would not have been able to compete.

The commission looked at ways around this, but in the end decided the triumvirate of the companies would have a disincentive to provide appropriate information to third parties.

It does sometimes feel, however, that the Competition Commission is over zealous.

Take Microsoft, as an example. Sometimes the idea of having an operating system that has come pre-loaded with all the products we need, web browser, word processor, spreadsheet, for examples, is rather convenient, but when Microsoft supplies that product it gets fined to the hilt.

The economist, Joseph Schumpeter, argued in favour of monopoly, saying only the prospect of creating a monopoly can encourage a company to invest sufficiently in innovation. Furthermore, argued Schumpeter, monopolies don’t last. Via a process he called creative destruction, all monopolies have to face competition in the longer term.

So, despite its monopoly, Microsoft is under threat. Google and Linux both pose a challenge to the software giant that could yet prove its undoing. Even without anti trust, it would have faced real competition after all.

In fact, the same would apply to Kangaroo. It faces plenty of competition, and it will continue to face plenty of competition.

The market place is global now. In the age that is dawning, you will be able to get your TV from a myriad of sources across the world. The traditional method of distributing TV via the big TV channels is destined to die. Instead, search engines will take us direct to the programmes of our choice.

Kangaroo had the chance of being a legitimate British contender in a market dominated by US companies. By taking this action, the commission has not protected consumers from the emergence of a monopoly. Rather, it has left the door open for another monopoly to emerge instead.

January 22, 2009 | posted by Michael Baxter in New Media | comments (0) |

Profits at Apple soared again in the quarter ending 21 January. At a time when all around there is dismay, Apple enjoyed its best quarter ever, making net quarterly profits of $1.61 billion. To put these figures in context, in the corresponding quarter three years ago, profits were barely more than a third of that level, and yet, at the time, eulogy was heaped upon Apple for its startling performance.

It shows that companies with the right products can still rake in the bucks. Then again, the company is an exception. Among the ranks of companies that have enjoyed meteoric growth this decade, only Google can rival the maker of iPods.

And yet, as you probably know, the company’s CEO, not to mention largest shareholder in Disney, and full time miracle worker, Steve Jobs, is off until June of this year, while he recovers from illness.

Shares in the company have dived in recent months over fears of the top man’s health. And now, in what seems to be a somewhat heartless criticism, shareholders are up in arms over the way the company has revealed information on its leader’s illness. The rumour mill is even saying that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the matter.

It’s cruel, but then the Apple story is cruel.

It is time now for a short digression, to recall what is perhaps the most fascinating of all business stories.

Oh, how the mighty fall. There was a time when Steve Jobs was the bitter, angry ex-Apple man, kicked out, out on the streets, with his Apple dream in tatters. For years, the Steve Jobs story was a tale with a salutary warning.

It seems that Jobs’ error was to believe his own hype. He had pulled off a master stroke, recruiting the former Pepsi vice president John Sculley, after he famously appealed to Sculley’s sense of adventure, asking: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

For a while, it seems Sculley and Jobs were the best of friends. At meetings they were known to finish each other’s sentences. But Apple messed up. It overestimated sales, produced far too many computers, and was left with a massive over supply of stock.

According to one account of the story, Jobs blamed everyone for the crisis except himself. “He just did not see that the ‘problem was with him.’”

Eventually, the relationship between Jobs and Sculley deteriorated, until Sculley, with backing from other senior members of the management team, ousted Jobs from his position within the company. Jobs was left without a senior management position in the company. He was left depressed, and eventually quit the company altogether, selling all his shares.

For years it was the textbook case of how your job isn’t safe, even if it was you who founded the company.

Sculley, on the other hand, reigned supreme.

And yet, the circle rotated, and then it was the turn of Sculley to feel the pattern of the fates. Sure, Sculley was able to cement the Mac position as a desktop publishing system, but the company was relegated to the also-rans in the pantheon of hardware companies.

In 1987, Sculley famously predicted that the Soviet Union would land a man on Mars within 20 years.

By 1993, Sculley himself was out. Three years later, Jobs was back.

Jobs didn’t weave his magic straight away. The company was hit hard by the dotcom crash, and as recently as 2003 was still posting losses.

The real master stroke was the iPod. The iPod seemed to create what was known as a halo effect; people were so chuffed with their iPods that they went out and bought themselves a Mac.

But the story seems to say that things change. Jobs was seen as brilliant and innovative, then he was seen as a loose cannon, and then brilliant and innovative again. Sculley was seen as the safe pair of hands (he was the man behind the Pepsi Challenge TV advertising campaign, by the way – do you remember that), and yet he couldn’t maintain it.

Maybe it all boils down to that famous thing Napoleon once said about a new general. When asked to review a list of candidates to be a new general in his army, he was asked do you want a courageous or a brilliant general? “Neither,” Bonaparte is supposed to have said, “give me a lucky general.”

But you can never rely on luck. If you occupy the top position for a while, and everyone celebrates your cleverness, then no doubt you were indeed clever, but you will have had a lot of luck too. But it is very rare for anyone to stay at the top for very long, without seeing that luck desert them. Gordon Brown is a good example. So, too, are all those banking bosses who for years were feted for their skill. The ones who were lucky enough to retire earlier in the decade now look on, of course, and say it would have been different if they had stayed on. But then, they would say that wouldn’t they.

But now, Jobs is ill. Earlier in January, Apple suggested his illness was not that serious and he required “relatively simple” treatment for hormone imbalance. Then, a few days ago, it was revealed his illness was more serious, and he wouldn’t be back until June.

Shareholders were up in arms. An enquiry may well be launched. But it all seems to be terribly cruel. Is it not human nature to understate the nature of an illness you become inflicted with? Is it not human nature to say: “I am all right?” Well, if nothing else, Jobs is the type of person to try and struggle on.

Maybe the company should be given a bit of slack.

It just goes to show, luck comes, and it goes.