Microsoft's Ray Ozzie has a long and storied history of technological innovation, with accomplishments that include creating Lotus Notes and founding Groove Networks. But Ozzie may now be facing the most daunting challenge of his career: coordinating the work of Microsoft's various product groups to keep the world's largest software company agile enough to address the challenge of the next generation of Internet-enabled software. Knowledge@Wharton recently met with Ozzie to talk about his vision for the future of networked computing.

In Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose (Wharton School Publishing), authors Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth and David Wolfe suggest that the best firms in today's marketplace are those that deliver emotional, experiential and social value to all their stakeholders, from customers and partners to investors and society. By emphasizing such principles as authenticity and empathy, the authors contend, companies gain "share of heart," not just share of wallet, and, in the long run, are able to gain competitive advantage over firms that are focused only on profits. Below, Knowledge@Wharton offers an excerpt from Chapter Six, "Investors -- Reaping What FoEs Sow."

Investors have been dumping technology stocks because earnings estimates from some of the industry leaders have been coming in lower than expected. Yet the fundamentals of the business are still positive.

Amazon.com is selling the computing resources originally developed to handle its own business. CEO Jeff Bezos explained why, after his keynote at the Emerging Technologies Conference yesterday.

How to make digital photography more trustworthy

The recent resignation of Scott McNealy as CEO of Sun Microsystems, the company he founded 22 years ago, is another milestone in the succession process of a large technology company. But tech companies often pose unique succession issues, in part because of their unusually fast growth and young founders, according to Wharton faculty and technology experts. The challenges are especially critical when the entrepreneurs are celebrities, and when the company has grown large enough that broad-based management skills become as crucial as entrepreneurial passion.

Evidence that evolutionary change is not always a smooth process

In 2004, governments, corporations and venture capitalists will spend more than $8.6 billion worldwide on nanotech research and development, Lux Research reports, with national and local governments investing more than $4.6 billion of that total and established corporations spending

Researchers are continuing to make giant strides toward realizing the exceptional potential of nanotechnology. Their efforts have resulted in the advent of stronger, lighter, and improved nanomaterials currently finding extensive use in several high-performance applications. “Nanotechnology is well poised to become an accepted technology in years to come and many future applications are likely to have some form of nanotechnology embedded in them,” says Technical Insights Analyst Hrishikesh Bidwe.

In an effort to put more science into the largely trial and error building of nanostructures, physicists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology have demonstrated new methods for placing what are typically unruly individual atoms at precise locations on a crystal surface. Reported in the Sept. 9, 2004, online version of the journal Science, the advance enables scientists to observe and control, for the first time, the movement of a single atom back and forth between neighboring locations on a crystal and should make it easier to efficiently build nanoscale devices "from the bottom up," atom by atom.

Nanotechnology promises to revolutionize modern life. From energy-efficient lighting that lasts for 50 years, to greater data storage capacity, to stronger metals and ceramics, the improvements attributed to the development of nanostructures seem limitless. So far, the greatest impediment to developing these advances has been creating usable nanostructures that self-assemble. Engineers at North Carolina State University recently received a patent for two processes that help break that barrier

Is Steven Spielberg right to fear technological change in the movie business?

Simplification - using fewer suppliers and fewer packages to cut overall costs - is rapidly becoming an issue that unites all CIOs.

A Harvard economist finds that Internet’s impact on the workplace is substantial…and mostly for the better.

In every era, communications devices reflect the limitations of their underlying network.

Big venture capital is knocked flat, but the little guys are still spurring innovation.

George Gilder listened to the technology, and became guru of the telecosm. The markets listened to his newsletter, and followed him into the Global Crossing abyss. yet he's never stopped believing.

More businesses are studying biology to solve complex management and computing problems.

There will be 10 billion people on Earth by 2100-and all of them can live comfortably if advances in energy-saving technology continue.

Companies that were the tech-stock world's biggest have fallen so far that a handful are at risk of being the first ever booted from the Nasdaq 100 index.

This piece brings out several technical, cultural and ethical issues relating to genomics. Genomics has the potential of curing several of man's illnesses but at the same time raises a lot of concerns. Several useful links are provided in the article.

Nathan Myhrvold, one of the brains behind Microsoft's success as its chief technology officer, has quit it after 14 years to set up a venture capital firm for investing in biotech. In this, the first of three interviews he gave to Red Herring, he tells us why he made such a lateral move, and why he feels he is not late for the party.

By, Bill Mann at Fool.com The new economy companies, which in aggregate earned $66 billion in profits last year, must earn in 2009 just shy of $1 trillion to provide an after-tax return to investors of 15% per year. That's profit growth of 31% per year, something that certainly can be done, but is by no means guaranteed. Bogle quotes Professor Jeremy Siegel of Wharton School of Business and author of Stocks for the Long Run, as pointing out that no stock that sold above a price-to-earnings ratio of 50 has ever matched the S&P 500 over the next quarter century. Bogle so ably points out that those who are confident of the superiority of their positions in big cap tech companies are clearly on the wrong side of history. This is OK, says the author, as long as we are going into these investment positions with eyes wide open to the outsized level of risk we are taking. Great argument, although we differ with the conclusion.

Iron Man 3 has passed the $1bn mark at the global box office, less than four weeks after it first hit cinemas.

What's the most difficult job in marketing? Change. And J.C. Penney is the latest example of how hard that is. In the year since now-departed Ron Johnson introduced his new strategy for the brand, sales were down 25%, the stock was down 66% and the company has lost $985 million.

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker warned of the risks of an asset bubble forming given the incredible amount of liquidity the Bernanke Fed has injected into the market, even though he said banks are substantially stronger than before the crisis on Wednesday. Volcker also indicated that in the U.S. government makes up about 35% of GDP and that the financing of the residential mortgage market by the state has led to a dysfunctional financial system.

The brouhaha over Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s article “Growth in a Time of Debt” may be the most conspicuous and incendiary scholarly controversy since 1974, when two earlier economists, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, published a notorious book, Time on the Cross, defending the efficiency of American plantation slavery.

If we want to understand what drove the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to terrorism, the answer almost certainly does not lie in Dagestan, where the brothers lived before moving to the United States, or in the two wars fought in Chechnya in the last 20 years. Instead, a key to the Tsarnaevs’ behavior may perhaps be found in developments in England 500 years ago.

“Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare,” Roth said in 1987.

“Building a new and livable world will necessitate thousands of little changes.”

“Imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time.”

The pre-societal, animal model of conflict resolution is simple, brutal, and effective. Leaving aside political gambles, moral considerations, and the like, the strong are more willing to fight for their self-interest, while the weak find it more advantageous not to assert themselves. Extrapolated to a fairly simple conflict of interest — wealth redistribution — do modern humans operate under the same logic?

Central Park almost didn’t exist. When it was first proposed, no comparable urban green space could be found in the whole of the United States—and it seemed unlikely that one would arise on land that could be put to other, more profitable use – especially with New York real estate values on a steady rise. But on May 5, 1851, Mayor Ambrose Kingsland proposed that a large public park might be just the thing for the growing city. Not only could it have a salutary impact, but it would allow Europeans to see that Americans could, too, be cultured and refined. Their Hyde Parks and Tuileries Gardens had nothing on us.

There seems to be only one kind of loan that bankers want to make—SBA loans. SBA stands for Small Business Administration, a federal agency that guarantees certain loans made by banks that operate within its guidelines.

Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio are two of the most well-known, successful investors in the world. And The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig says they have at least one key trait in common: They are open to criticism and self-doubt.

While not written specifically for investment managers, the subject matter of this McKinsey Quarterly article – building an effective organizational risk “culture” – is nonetheless quite relevant to them.

President Obama said the conduct involving the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny was "inexcusable" and that acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller is out

Raico grew up in the Bronx, but in contrast with the leftist views common in his family’s apartment building and neighborhood, he acquired from an early age a sympathetic grasp of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. In high school, he joined Youth for Taft, where he encountered George Reisman. While still in high school, Raico and Reisman became interested in Mises, and Raico describes their hilarious attempt to meet Mises, in the guise of door-to-door salesmen for The Freeman.

Today, roughly one-quarter of the world’s population lives in conflict-affected and fragile states. Despite vast sums of money spent aiding such states over the last 50 years, armed conflict and violence continue to blight the lives of millions of people around the world. International and national partners must radically change the way they engage such states.

The Bank of England has upgraded its economic growth forecast. BBC reports. The perennially gloomy Sir Mervyn King says the Bank now expects GDP growth of 0.5% during the current quarter. This flies in the face of the current vogue for seeing the UK economy as a basket case, limping from one lacklustre economic quarter to the next as Cherry Reynard reports

“Maybe you have to believe in the value of everything to believe in the value of anything.”

“I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.”

In any conversation, organizational or otherwise, people tend to overuse one particular rhetorical tool at the expense of all the others. People’s default mode of communication tends to be advocacy— argumentation in favor or their own conclusions and theories, statements about the truth of their own point of view. To create the kind of strategy dialogue we wanted at P&G, people had to shift from that approach to a very different one.

Since before the tech bust, we’ve been suggesting that while Americans “think” they’re getting richer... they’re actually heading in the other direction. They’re getting poorer.

On Tuesday a group of scientists published a protocol, a set of instructions for running an experiment, which represents the culmination of a year’s discussion on the problems inherent in academic publishing. The protocol is the first in the Registered Replication Reports project. The scheme, led by Alex Holcombe, Bobbie Spellman and Daniel Simons, is far reaching, and requires putting aside egos and working together across universities and research groups to raise the standard of research.

What is science revealing about the nature of the criminal mind? Adrian Raine, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is an expert in the expanding field of “neurocriminology.” He has written The Anatomy of Violence, a sweeping account of crime’s biological roots, including genetics, neuro-anatomy and environmental toxins like lead. He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Almost fifteen years ago, in a book called “Chance, Development, and Aging,” the gerontologists Caleb Finch and Thomas Kirkwood described a truly elegant study of biology: a batch of roundworms, all genetically identical, raised on identical diets of agar. Despite having identical genetics and near-identical environments, some worms lived far longer than others. The lesson? The classical equation of “life = nature + nurture” had left out chance.

I now know why I gained more than 30 pounds in my early 20s: I was lonely. I had left my beloved alma mater upstate for graduate school and a job in the Upper Midwest. I knew no one and felt like a fish out of water.

When we asked Bill Gates to curate a list of his favorite talks, his first response was, “There are too many to pick, really.” Here, he's whittled it down to 13 essentials.

It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.

Microsoft aims to upgrade the software more frequently, about once a year, rather than every two or three years as it’s done in the past, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the product plans are private. The company plans to unveil the first of these updates in 2013, one of the people said.

For the first time, scientists have confirmed that the planet Mercury holds at least 100 billion tons of water ice as well as organic material in permanently shadowed craters at its north pole.

Ed Boyden, an engineer turned neuroscientist, makes tools for brain hackers. In his lab at MIT, he's built a robot that can capture individual neurons and uses light potentially to control major diseases -- all in his quest to 'solve the brain'.

In 1870, German chemist Erich von Wolf analyzed the iron content of green vegetables and accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook.

The United Nations Environment Program warns that global emissions of greenhouse gases are opening up a widening gap between reality and climate change goals

Thanks to gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies, the light emitted by a small galaxy 13.3 billion years ago has reached Earth. John Matson reports

In energy matters, what goes around, comes around—but perhaps should go away

An ambitious plan to provide 15% of Europe's power needs from solar plants in North Africa has run into trouble. The Desertec initiative hoped to deliver electricity from a network of renewable energy sources to Europe via cables under the sea.

Bill Gates in His Own Words readers get a glimpse of the visionary Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist's philosophy on business, technology and life via some of his most memorable quotes

A pioneering European space telescope that discovered the first rocky extrasolar planet is on its last legs, Nature has learned.

A cascade of misfolded proteins may trigger Alzheimer's By Carrie Arnold Researchers have untangled some of the neurological events that may ultimately lead to Alzheimer's disease. Two new studies show that a protein implicated in this form of dementia can infect other neurons to spread disease across the brain. These problematic proteins clump together, which can lead to cognitive problems.

A species of giant tortoises from the Galapagos Islands could be brought back from extinction despite the death earlier this year of the famed "Lonesome George," a tourist magnet and conservation icon who was the last of his kind.

On the heels of a Russian drilling effort that reached Lake Vostok, British and American teams also aim to penetrate ancient subglacial lakes By Quirin Schiermeier and Nature magazine

The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil recently scooped up and placed in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.

The system uses a NeuroSky MindWave Mobile EEG headset to record brainwave data, which is then sent to software on either a tablet/smartphone or on a specially designed pyramid-shaped base. The software converts the brainwave data to flight commands, which control the flight of the spherical helicopter,

In a rare direct photo of a world beyond Earth, astronomers have spotted a planet 13 times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our own solar system.

Human Shares ove 90 % of their DNA with their primate cousins. The expression or activity patterns of genes differ across species in ways that help explain each species' distinct biolgy and behavior.

The random motion of a hydrogen molecule can drive the oscillation of a much larger structure By John Matson

Halloween is a time for sharing ghost stories and watching spooky movies. But have you ever thought about the science behind some of these uncanny experiences? Haunted houses, for example, take advantage of the way your brain uses sensory information.

Rising seas and severe storms are the most talked-about threats of climate change. But here's another: no more coffee. Because rising temperatures may cripple wild populations of Arabica coffee—the most cultivated species in the world.

The notoriously brittle building material may yet stretch instead of breaking

A specialized parasite fungus can control ants' behavior. But that fungus also faces its own deadly, specialized parasites

For every one unit of energy that is converted into electricity in power plants today, two units of energy are thrown away. This wasted energy is primarily in the form of heat – or thermal energy – and, there is technology available today that can turn this waste into a usable energy stream.

This is the first study to examine what factors are associated with an increased follower-count on Twitter over an extended period of time. Hutto et al. (2013) studied 507 Twitter users over 15 months and half-a-million tweets

“Stay glad. Keep hoping machine running. Love everybody. Make up your mind.”

Under Ravi Venkatesan's leadership from 2004 to 2011, Microsoft India's revenues grew fivefold and the country became one of the fastest growing geographies for the software firm.

Ties between the two men go way back. In May 1939, Churchill reviewed Drucker's first major book, The End of Economic Man, for The Times Literary Supplement, praising him as "one of those writers to whom almost anything can be forgiven because he not only has a mind of his own, but has a gift of starting other minds along a stimulating line of thought."

Most people know Peter Drucker through his books and articles. But Drucker was also a great speaker, especially in the classroom, where his students would sit rapt, listening as he pulled facts from his encyclopedic mind and shared insights on countless subjects. This side of the "father of modern management" is captured in The Drucker Lectures, (McGraw-Hill, 2010). Edited by Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute and a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Drucker Lectures features 33 of his most important talks. The earliest was delivered in 1943. The latest were given at Claremont Graduate University in 2003, two years before Drucker died. The excerpt below, on "The Future of the Corporation," comes from one of those final lectures.

It's a good time to be a corporate gadfly.

So many of the problems we face today result from poor decision-making by private corporations. Prominent examples include the Gulf oil spill and the seriously weakened financial sector, which is imperiling the rest of our economy. However, so many who describe themselves as liberals or progressives seek to address such problems with more government regulation and programs instead of by preventing the bad decisions at the source, which is likely to be more efficient from a resource utilization perspective.

This letter to Occidental Petroleum’s board of directors from Ralph Whitworth of Relational Investors (VII, September 30, 2009) and Anne Sheehan of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System outlines why the activist investors are seeking to replace at least four board members: “[T]he board, as currently composed, suffers from entrenchment and ossification, which renders each of its members incapable of functioning as vigorous and independent shareholder representatives.”

Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.

Power in modern society is progressively being diffused, moving away from central government to interest groups, even to single individuals. Society and the body politic in democratic societies are becoming pluralist in new ways. This phenomenon was analysed by management guru and social science professor Peter Drucker in his book The New Age. A clear understanding of this development would help political and social leaders to cope with changing electoral aspirations.

The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management was recognized as an “Excellent Business School” by EDUNIVERSAL, an organization that helps students choose the best business schools worldwide. The Drucker school was honored to be among the 1,000 selected business schools in the world because of its strength in the US and international influence.

Peter Senge (born 1947) studied aerospace engineering at Stanford University before moving into the field of organisational behaviour and becoming director of the Centre for Organisational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is credited with developing the idea of the learning organisation, based on his study of social systems and the relationship of the whole to its constituent parts. A learning organisation, he once said, “is continually expanding its capacity to create its future”.

We live in a world of euphemism. Undertakers have become "morticians," press agents are now "public relations counsellors" and janitors have all been transformed into "superintendents." In every walk of life, plain facts have been wrapped in cloudy camouflage.

The influence the CEO has on people--individually and collectively.

I've read about shamrock organisations, horizontal organisations and federal organisations. I've read about intelligent enterprises and spider-web organisations. The most-quoted management guru Peter Drucker said that managing an information-based organisation is more like conducting a symphony orchestra than running a business on traditional lines. Others have compared it to running a jazz combo, and then there are those who say it's like running a sports team.

The bestselling author answers our readers' questions about business, leadership - and mountain climbing.

Think of them as the "walking dead," a type of customer who currently maintains service with a particular company, but whose next action will most likely be to discontinue that relationship, according to a new study that examines how the customers of a telecommunications firm acquire and discard services over time. The paper -- "Modeling the Evolution of Customers' Service Portfolios," by Wharton marketing professors Peter Fader and Eric Bradlow and a former Wharton PhD student -- focuses in part on whether it is possible to predict future purchasing patterns by looking at past buying behavior.

How CEO George Buckley is managing the yin and yang of discipline and imagination

Some shoppers just can't help themselves and buy mostly on impulse without regard to price. Others are die-hard bargain hunters, who only open their wallets for a discount. Then there are the strategic consumers, who are willing to buy full-price sometimes, but at other times they will wait for a bargain. According to new research by Gérard P. Cachon, professor of operations and information management at Wharton, and doctoral student Robert Swinney, it's these customers that retailers need to focus on in order to reap the full benefits of lean retail inventory management and variable pricing.

Few have had as great an impact on the business world as Peter Drucker. So, it is more than fitting to have his work amplified on Branding Strategy Insider during this years Marketers For Charity effort.

Robert Bruner still remembers the first book he read as a manager. It was 1988, and Bruner, now the dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, was an up-and-coming professor, respected for his work in finance. But he'd never managed people before. And when he was charged with overseeing the first year of the school's M.B.A. program, Bruner began to struggle.Under fire, Bruner scrambled for guidance. He found it in Peter Drucker'sThe Effective Executive. In the book, published two decades earlier, the dean of management thinkers—known for his study of GM under Alfred Sloan—offered advice to managers burdened with exactly Bruner's problems.

If you own stock in a company that is ripe for takeover, you should hope the company is not acquired by a private equity firm.

Most people assume that good corporate governance benefits shareholders, and that corruption in a banking system should be rooted out. But just how much benefit does a company really get when it improves its accounting and puts a few outsiders on its board of directors? And when does an anti-corruption crusade start to backfire, causing a chilling effect that denies loans to credit-worthy borrowers? India offers a chance to study both questions, which were the subject of papers presented at a global conference on India's Financial System held in April at Wharton. The conference was organized by Wharton's Financial Institutions Center with the Centre for Analytical Finance at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and the Stockholm-based Swedish Institute for Financial Research.

While a number of Indian IT companies are expanding globally, several major U.S. IT firms are increasing their presence in India. Among them is Adobe Systems, which views India as an important development center and a growing market for its products. In the second of a two-part interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Adobe president and chief operating officer Shantanu Narayen discusses the company's strategy regarding India and global expansion. In the first part of the interview, published in Knowledge@Wharton, he talks about Adobe's product strategy for the emerging trend of rich Internet applications.

A key element of what has been called "web 2.0" -- along with ideas such as user-generated content and social networks -- is the concept of "rich Internet applications," which use the web as a platform for innovative types of online experiences. A new generation of Internet-connected applications is beginning to emerge led by such companies as Adobe Systems. Knowledge@Wharton recently interviewed Adobe president and COO Shantanu Narayen about the company's latest product introductions. In the second part of this interview, published in India Knowledge@Wharton, Narayen talks about the key role that India will play in the company's global growth strategy.

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The website of James O’ Loughlin, author of "The Real Warren Buffett".

The General Center for Internet Services Inc. ( GCIS ) is one of Canada's oldest and largest Internet services provider and e-commerce application developer. Originators of the famous Pagina+ (tm) Search Engine Optimization service, GCIS is in business since 1996.