The Unbounded Greed and Decline of Capitalism

The death march of mighty financial institutions in US continues sending shockwaves throughout the world and the loud murmur of socialism saving the ass of capitalism gaining momentum. Lehman Brothers may be dead for good, Merrill Lynch is swallowed for the price of breakfast by BofA, Morgan Stanley is struggling and nearing collapse and the likes of Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae, Fraddie Mac and AIG saved from demise through a socialist move of nationalizing them. And who will pay the cost of the act of nationalizing the fall guys? Of course the American tax payers – they have half a trillion dollar more debt to pay for the unbounded greed for some of the fellow brethren! How come people who run multi-billion dollar investment banks became so naive to forget the basics of banking? The reason is simple – greed under the garb of optimism took over the common sense (usually happens when you get to risk other people’s money for your personal high rewards – the new definition of high risk/high reward) and this phenomena today pushed back America at least 10 yrs behind on economic growth curve and rest of the interdependent world at least 3 yrs.

The collapse of these institutions is a déjà vu of the demise of companies like Worldcom and Enron at the start of this century and looks like we have not learnt many lessons from history. The external cause of the phenomena may look different but the philosophical reason is the same – human greed gone wild! Any Sarbanes Oxlay like reactionary legislation cannot bound the greed nor do events like imprisonment of errant office bearers. The greed is like inflation – economic lubricant if within bounds and a massive retardant if goes beyond. And all these failed institutions are victim of people running the forgetting basics of banking economics for fast buck and thousands of people who are loosing their livelihood will pay for their willful ignorance (I am sure all the top executives of these failed institutions are millionaires multiple times over and have nothing personal to loose and they know they will be back again playing the same games within a few yrs.)

This interesting interplay between greed and fear seems like a natural phenomenon with no permanent escape – whatever goes up goes down and vice versa. We can learn few lessons from it and move forward with some more wisdom. Is that wisdom enough to keep the lure of unbounded greed away? Probably not because that’s how the natural dynamics of human inner world works and rise and fall of enterprises is a mere reflection of that. The world economy will rebound – no doubts about that. When will it rebound might be a moot question for economists to answer.

The Philosophers

India has been the birth place of Philosophy and some of the greatest philosophers of all times. Philosophy is the rational investigation of questions about existence, knowledge and ethics and the learning’s are applicable in all fields equally (including mathematics, computer science, particle physics and so on – hope the Large Hadron Collider experiment currently underway at CERN will throw more light on the philosophy of the universe!)

Off all the great philosophers whose body of work I have been able to touch upon, three stand out for their original thinking. The first is Lord Krishna – his work Bhaghwad Gita is arguably the most influential and impactful philosophical work ever written so far. For centuries philosophers of all ilks have tried to interpret it completely but everyone had only partial success. The second person is Swami Vivekananda, whose body of work is quite extensive and had an influence far and wide. The third person in the list is Osho Rajanish, who is one of the great original and one of the most controversial thinkers of our times. I am yet to find a person who has read his work and has come out in-impressed. However, I have found a lot of people who hate him without even read a single book written by him. Though I do not agree with all that he has written but the originality and relevance of perspective is great (in fact, had I agreed with him, I would have failed him as his core teaching is ‘think for yourself’!) Apart from these three, I have read at least a dozen more philosophers but all of them lacked originality though some of them were brilliant in their explanations.

Browser War 2.0

Microsoft destroyed Netscape less than a decade ago to emerge winner in the browser war 1.0. Since than there had been no big competitor for the mighty Redmond till Firefox came on the scene a few years ago and started nibbling at Microsoft’s share. Being an open source product, Firefox lacked the might and muscle of a big corporation, so despite being a much superior product, it is still number two in the browser world. But this can change with Google Chrome, which was announced yesterday. Based on the information provided in the Chrome comic strip, the product claims to address a lot of issues with today’s browsers and comes with higher security, multi-processor support, JavaScript VM, a new look UI, etc. and plays out to Google’s strengths (yes, it is designed to make search very pervasive to the whole browsing/web application usage.) This can play out browser war 1.0 in reverse with Microsoft playing the role of Netscape and Google raiding the Redmond from multiple corners.

But is it really all about browser per se? Though having a great next generation browser that can run current and future web applications much better that IE and Firefox is a nice goal but is that all about what Chrome can do? I think it can hurt Microsoft where it pains most – in its OS business. Look at what applications most of the people use on the PCs/Laptops today – office productivity tools (aka MS Office), Mail Client (aka MS Outlook) and a wide array of applications that run inside the browser (MS IE) and all this runs on top of a MS provided OS. The role of OS (aka Windows) here is to make sure these applications run efficiently and that’s where the Redmond behemoth makes most of it’s money by arm twisting every PC manufacturer to preinstall Windows on most of the PCs they sell. So each PC sold is money for Microsoft. Now let’s apply some new rules – you have a MS Office replacement in Google Documents, which all run inside the browser unlike MS software, you can use any browser based mail client (Yahoo! Mail or Google GMail or Thunderbird) to access your mail and you can have Google Chrome running all your web based applications much better, secure and faster than IE. Now why do you need Windows? Why not install a free OS like Linux and run all these applications on it and don’t pay even a penny to Microsoft? This can be the new world order. And Google is playing a clever game to control the medium for application execution, just like what Microsoft did two decades ago to monopolize the software industry. Of course, the economic engines for the two are different but who cares as long as the mint keeps running.