Subway Proselyte

I've found more time for general reading since I started taking the subway about a year ago. Before that I had to drive to work, since I found myself at different locations, in different cities, during the week. The subway rides to and from work have afforded me the luxury of reading some magazines almost from cover to cover -- which gives me quite the value from the BusinessWeek subscription.

Why Asia Will Eat Our Lunch -- this review of Clyde Prestowitz's Three Billion New Capitalists has me curious about the book. Curious enough to maybe purchase it at the right price. The book is a warning to American complacency on the global competitive and economic front, and warns that there is a shift of money and power to Asia -- unless America does something to keep up, it may be left behind. Already America lags behind in education, savings rate, conservation and investment in training, research and infrastructure.

Boeing's Plastic Dream Machine -- Boeing's upcoming 787 Dreamliner is made almost entirely in carbon fibre-reinforced plastic. An accomplishment that makes the plane stronger, lighter and cheaper to make and maintain. The strength of the new airframe will also allow cabin pressurization to be higher -- providing increased comfort. Sounds like a great plane -- now all Boeing has to do is get it off the ground.

Tougher Days, Bolder Apple -- it's already old news that Apple is leaving IBM for Intel. This short article provides a bit of analysis on what the future bodes for Apple with this switch. Already, iPod and iMac sales are set to slow. Will Apple become just another software company at the mercy of Intel's product roadmap?

Central America Is Holding Its Breath -- this article is a good introduction to the CAFTA-DR agreement that Bush is trying to pull off. There is a lot at stake for Central American's looking for an in to the all important American market -- but American businesses, especially the powerful sugar farmers, are looking to derail any progress.

The Power of Us -- BusinessWeek's cover article takes a look at the future of technology -- specifically, how the mass collaboration, enabled by the Internet, is disrupting the business world. "The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical." It's blogs, the open source movement, virtual supercomputers and collective knowledge and opinions -- what Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School calls "peer production" -- and the force of it's coming will impact every industry. What the vast network of the internet has done is democratize commerce.