Well, the title is a bit pompous and takes too much for granted.
That said, I respect Mr. Marchioni, especially for his last quote in the article. I feel the same way, even though I'm not able to create a Google-level search engine :-)
Interesting article. It says that he gets a salary of $3,000. This comes out to be about 2100 EUR. I am not familiar with the cost of living in Italy but it doesn't sound much?
I think if Italy got a few things worked out a bit better (the justice system, for one), that it'd be a good place to get good developers on the cheap. I know just as many bright people here in Padova as I did in San Francisco, and they work for a hell of a lot cheaper.
For a university professor is about the standard here, some are far less lucky.
And yes, we have low salaries here, a bit better in the private market but still professors and computer scientists are very low paid compared to what you can find in the rest of EU top countries.
> After the speech, Marchiori returned home in the hopes of realizing his ambitious design. "When I came back to Italy, I asked the university for 20,000 euros to develop a search engine, but instead, they financed a project about the history of copper metallurgy in Italy," he says. Meanwhile, Page got his first $100,000 check from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. A spokeswoman for Google in Milan declined to comment.
i can say he was a good professor for me during my university years, and i am in some way proud of reading about him here. he is really a nice person with all his students, he doesnt care about grades or other things
"Volunia", the search engine he worked on a couple years ago, was... peculiar. The marketing point was that whenever you browsed you were able to chat with other people viewing the same site. How did they achieve that? Clicking a link in Volunia would open the desired site in a fullscreen iframe.
The result was that
1) you would end up on white pages for any site that blocked iframe access
2) you would loose the navigation bar, since the domain was stuck to Volunia.com
3) they were able to see your whole navigation history since you were browsing inside their iframe.
In a second iteration they proposed a Firefox extension to avoid the above problems but... who would install an extension to use a search engine? How could you explain it to non savvy users?
A positive thing was the SimCity like interface (you could see a site like a building linked by roads to other buildings). That was funny at first, yet I can't remember what they wanted to achieve with that.
The execution was frankly abhorrent to say the least; and I personally couldn't care less about all that gimmicky 'social' cruft; but, having just watched a demo of the thing [1], I must say I'm having a slight mini Xerox Parc-ish feeling about the map navigation stuff, which is after all a key part of Marchiori's original vision [2].
Paraphrasing an earlier reviewer [3], I feel this guy is definitely onto something here...
The gist of it was that the "value" of a scholarly article could be measured by the number of citations, weighted by the number of citations each of the articles that cited it got, and so on.
Basically PageRank (though without the actual mathematics that to calculate the number).
Does anyone else think the tone of the article is strongly implying Marchiori is owed honor, fame, money etc while his quote contradicts the implication? "Munchausen by Proxy" is a recognized syndrome but I've read several articles lately that sound like "Sour Grapes by Proxy".
I've found it's extremely common even for business writers to regularly buy into the notion that ideas are the critical element in success. That spark point is endlessly romanticized, whether we're talking about Newton's apple or Pierre's pez. There is something a bit romantic about that moment of clarity, but it's such an insignificant fraction of the work, luck and timing that goes into success as to be absurd to grant much value to it.
I couldn't agree more. I'm looking for some pithy name for this fallacy so I can more easily point it out when I see it. It's exactly this sort of thing that leads people to believe that e.g. the patent system is a good idea.
Author George R. R. Martin says this in interviews. “Ideas are cheap, it's all about the execution”; I'd say he comes through by experience and hard work himself. (From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnBvf5rFPkw )
I don't think so. It would be hard to write an article about him without hinting at the importance of being in the right environment to grow an idea into a company (see his university's shortsighted decision).
28 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 75.2 ms ] threadThat said, I respect Mr. Marchioni, especially for his last quote in the article. I feel the same way, even though I'm not able to create a Google-level search engine :-)
Sergio Marchionne is the head of Fiat/Chrysler.
ps. I'm only half Italian though.
http://www.italymagazine.com/italy/business/wages-italy-amon...
The result was that
1) you would end up on white pages for any site that blocked iframe access
2) you would loose the navigation bar, since the domain was stuck to Volunia.com
3) they were able to see your whole navigation history since you were browsing inside their iframe.
In a second iteration they proposed a Firefox extension to avoid the above problems but... who would install an extension to use a search engine? How could you explain it to non savvy users?
A positive thing was the SimCity like interface (you could see a site like a building linked by roads to other buildings). That was funny at first, yet I can't remember what they wanted to achieve with that.
Paraphrasing an earlier reviewer [3], I feel this guy is definitely onto something here...
[1] Starts at 0:51: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Mxlb-Gqhs&t=0m51s
[2] http://www.math.unipd.it/~massimo/2012/left-volunia
[3] http://searchengineland.com/volunia-a-social-search-engine-s...
So true, so simple, and yet at times so hard to obtain.
http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-Classification...
The gist of it was that the "value" of a scholarly article could be measured by the number of citations, weighted by the number of citations each of the articles that cited it got, and so on.
Basically PageRank (though without the actual mathematics that to calculate the number).
I've found it's extremely common even for business writers to regularly buy into the notion that ideas are the critical element in success. That spark point is endlessly romanticized, whether we're talking about Newton's apple or Pierre's pez. There is something a bit romantic about that moment of clarity, but it's such an insignificant fraction of the work, luck and timing that goes into success as to be absurd to grant much value to it.
[0] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2858v3.pdf (pdf)
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2858 (arxiv)
[2] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cites=11605628719410021... (citation network, 60 citations)
[3] Massimo Marchiori's 1997 paper for comparison http://www.w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/
*Edited