Hey! ETC!

Idea 2: Disruption is the wrong mind-set. Today's mantra of disrupting industries focuses startups on existing competitive markets. Competitive markets reduce profits to zero. Most disruptive companies are better, faster, and cheaper versions of incumbents' products. Without a fundamental cost advantage, a cheaper product is a less profitable product. Consequently, the disruptive company offering the product is less valuable. Instead of disrupting, founders should be focused on creating new markets and technologies where none exist. (p. 56-57)

Put simply, the finance function, and generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), must adapt in order to help organizations measure and manage these new sources value (communities of common interest, self-esteem, self mastery and self-actualization). Accounting practices have not kept pace with the changing asset base of business as well as many key intangible assets. In fact, many higher-order needs of individuals are either mis-measured (lumped into the Goodwill grab bag), or ignored altogether. Human capital, such as employees, is classified as an expense. So are employee training, education and health care. Worse, customers and their relationships are not measured at all. This situation does not serve business leaders well, particularly leaders of large, established companies that are trying to find the right way to develop and use more scalable and capital-efficient intangible resources together with today’s technologies to drive performance and shareholder value. This mismatch provides a large opportunity for accounting firms to help leaders understand these different sources of value and thereby change the landscape for how business is done and governments are run globally.

How did Microsoft Research pull off such a feat? The key to DeLorean is the “speculative” descriptor. Video games generally can’t be buffered like a video from YouTube or Netflix because player actions affect what happens on screen — if I shoot my gun in Titanfall and the game showed me jumping, I’d be annoyed. But by looking at previous player input and sampling the most likely player actions, Microsoft found a way to predict the few actions you’re probably going to take and sends the video of each of them over ahead of time, letting it show players the most accurate guess as the game catches up.

Yesterday, Microsoft Research published a report that signals that the company is looking for ways that it could use its cloud expertise to create a unique cloud gaming platform at some point in the future. It discusses DeLorean, a “speculative execution engine” that makes it possible to delivery seemingly lag-free gameplay from the cloud despite the myriad sources of network latency between Microsoft’s Azure servers and a player’s device.

Shuhei Yoshida: Well, yeah. I don't know. As soon as we see a great sales number, our instinct tells us we should be concerned about future sales, right? Are we exhausting all the core gamers? If we sell this number of units, there are no more consumers we can sell to. That's a really terrifying prospect. So we want to understand who are these consumers who we do not necessarily consider core gamers, who are purchasing PS4 and why they are doing it and what they are doing with PS4, so we can create a bit more of a positive future, rather than saying, wow, we have sold to every single core gamer. So that's what we are doing.

The researchers suggest that "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does".