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Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light- Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection In each case, the firm’s customers have played a big part in designing the product.
How does innovation happen The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.
This is not all new. Researchers have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of MIT. "User innovation has always been around," he says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening."
Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr. Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate. GE’s healthcare division calls them "luminaries". They tend to be well-published doctors and research scientists from leading medical institutions, says GE, which brings up to 25 luminaries together at regular medical advisory board sessions to discuss the evolution of GE’s technology. GE’s products then emerge from collaboration with these groups.
At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr. Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money It’s not that different from how other software companies make money.
You’d think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, companies don’t sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter.
But what’s the value of a license to a customer A license doesn’t deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn’t lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft- ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel mom, a smart tech buyer won’t focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement.
Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft’s money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft’s subscription program, known as Soft- ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up- grade to Microsoft’s next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don’t switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade
Chief information officers hate this kind of *’assurance", since they’re often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft’s attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That’s why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don’t have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write

Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever’s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year.
It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets’ own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ( $ 4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.7% for the second quarter of this year.
Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com- moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers’ own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers’ own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli’s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%.
Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy.

Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light- Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection In each case, the firm’s customers have played a big part in designing the product.
How does innovation happen The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.
This is not all new. Researchers have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of MIT. "User innovation has always been around," he says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening."
Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr. Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate. GE’s healthcare division calls them "luminaries". They tend to be well-published doctors and research scientists from leading medical institutions, says GE, which brings up to 25 luminaries together at regular medical advisory board sessions to discuss the evolution of GE’s technology. GE’s products then emerge from collaboration with these groups.
At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr. Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever’s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year.
It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets’ own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ( $ 4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.7% for the second quarter of this year.
Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com- moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers’ own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers’ own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli’s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%.
Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy.

If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money It’s not that different from how other software companies make money.
You’d think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, companies don’t sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter.
But what’s the value of a license to a customer A license doesn’t deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn’t lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft- ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel mom, a smart tech buyer won’t focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement.
Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft’s money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft’s subscription program, known as Soft- ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up- grade to Microsoft’s next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don’t switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade
Chief information officers hate this kind of *’assurance", since they’re often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft’s attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That’s why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don’t have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write

Naturalism is the view that the "natural" universe, the universe of matter and energy, is all that there really is. By ruling out a spiritual part of the human person which might survive death and a God who might resurrect the body, naturalism also rules out survival after death. In addition, naturalism denies human freedom on the grounds that every event must be explainable by deterministic natural laws. It denies any absolute values because it can find no grounds for such values in a world made up only of matter and energy. And finally, naturalism denies that the universe has any meaning or purpose because there is no God to give it a meaning or purpose, and nothing else which can give it a meaning or purpose.
Anyone who accepts the first three denials, of God, spiritual beings, and immortality, might be called a naturalist in the broad sense, and anyone who adds to these the denial of freedom, values, and purpose might be labeled a naturalist in the strict sense, or a strict naturalist. Some opponents of naturalism would argue that naturalists in the broad sense are at least somewhat inconsistent and that naturalism in the broad sense leads logically to strict naturalism. Many strict naturalists would agree with this.
Those who reject naturalism in both the strict and broad sense do so for a variety of masons. They may have positive arguments for the existence of .some of what naturalists deny, or they may have what seem to be decisive refutations of some or all of the arguments for naturalism. But, in addition to particular arguments against naturalist tenets or their grounds of belief, some opponents of naturalism believe that there is a general argument which holds against any form of naturalism. These opponents hold that naturalism has a "fatal flaw" or, to put it more strongly, that naturalism is self-destroying. If naturalism is true, then human reason must be the result of natural forces.
These natural forces are not, on the naturalistic view, rational themselves, nor can they be the result of a rational cause. So human reason would be the result of nonrational causes. This, it can be argued, gives us a strong reason to distrust human reach, especially in its less practical and more theoretical exercises. But the theory of naturalism is itself such an exercise of theoretical reason. If naturalism is true, we would have strong reasons to distrust theoretical reasoning. If we distrust theoretical reasoning, we distrust particular applications of it, such as the theory of naturalism. Thus, if naturalism is true, we have strong reasons to distrust naturalism

Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light- Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection In each case, the firm’s customers have played a big part in designing the product.
How does innovation happen The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.
This is not all new. Researchers have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of MIT. "User innovation has always been around," he says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening."
Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr. Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate. GE’s healthcare division calls them "luminaries". They tend to be well-published doctors and research scientists from leading medical institutions, says GE, which brings up to 25 luminaries together at regular medical advisory board sessions to discuss the evolution of GE’s technology. GE’s products then emerge from collaboration with these groups.
At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr. Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money It’s not that different from how other software companies make money.
You’d think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, companies don’t sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter.
But what’s the value of a license to a customer A license doesn’t deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn’t lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft- ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel mom, a smart tech buyer won’t focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement.
Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft’s money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft’s subscription program, known as Soft- ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up- grade to Microsoft’s next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don’t switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade
Chief information officers hate this kind of *’assurance", since they’re often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft’s attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That’s why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don’t have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write

Naturalism is the view that the "natural" universe, the universe of matter and energy, is all that there really is. By ruling out a spiritual part of the human person which might survive death and a God who might resurrect the body, naturalism also rules out survival after death. In addition, naturalism denies human freedom on the grounds that every event must be explainable by deterministic natural laws. It denies any absolute values because it can find no grounds for such values in a world made up only of matter and energy. And finally, naturalism denies that the universe has any meaning or purpose because there is no God to give it a meaning or purpose, and nothing else which can give it a meaning or purpose.
Anyone who accepts the first three denials, of God, spiritual beings, and immortality, might be called a naturalist in the broad sense, and anyone who adds to these the denial of freedom, values, and purpose might be labeled a naturalist in the strict sense, or a strict naturalist. Some opponents of naturalism would argue that naturalists in the broad sense are at least somewhat inconsistent and that naturalism in the broad sense leads logically to strict naturalism. Many strict naturalists would agree with this.
Those who reject naturalism in both the strict and broad sense do so for a variety of masons. They may have positive arguments for the existence of .some of what naturalists deny, or they may have what seem to be decisive refutations of some or all of the arguments for naturalism. But, in addition to particular arguments against naturalist tenets or their grounds of belief, some opponents of naturalism believe that there is a general argument which holds against any form of naturalism. These opponents hold that naturalism has a "fatal flaw" or, to put it more strongly, that naturalism is self-destroying. If naturalism is true, then human reason must be the result of natural forces.
These natural forces are not, on the naturalistic view, rational themselves, nor can they be the result of a rational cause. So human reason would be the result of nonrational causes. This, it can be argued, gives us a strong reason to distrust human reach, especially in its less practical and more theoretical exercises. But the theory of naturalism is itself such an exercise of theoretical reason. If naturalism is true, we would have strong reasons to distrust theoretical reasoning. If we distrust theoretical reasoning, we distrust particular applications of it, such as the theory of naturalism. Thus, if naturalism is true, we have strong reasons to distrust naturalism

Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever’s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year.
It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets’ own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ( $ 4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.7% for the second quarter of this year.
Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com- moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers’ own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers’ own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli’s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%.
Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy.

Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light- Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection In each case, the firm’s customers have played a big part in designing the product.
How does innovation happen The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.
This is not all new. Researchers have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of MIT. "User innovation has always been around," he says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening."
Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr. Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate. GE’s healthcare division calls them "luminaries". They tend to be well-published doctors and research scientists from leading medical institutions, says GE, which brings up to 25 luminaries together at regular medical advisory board sessions to discuss the evolution of GE’s technology. GE’s products then emerge from collaboration with these groups.
At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr. Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

Naturalism is the view that the "natural" universe, the universe of matter and energy, is all that there really is. By ruling out a spiritual part of the human person which might survive death and a God who might resurrect the body, naturalism also rules out survival after death. In addition, naturalism denies human freedom on the grounds that every event must be explainable by deterministic natural laws. It denies any absolute values because it can find no grounds for such values in a world made up only of matter and energy. And finally, naturalism denies that the universe has any meaning or purpose because there is no God to give it a meaning or purpose, and nothing else which can give it a meaning or purpose.
Anyone who accepts the first three denials, of God, spiritual beings, and immortality, might be called a naturalist in the broad sense, and anyone who adds to these the denial of freedom, values, and purpose might be labeled a naturalist in the strict sense, or a strict naturalist. Some opponents of naturalism would argue that naturalists in the broad sense are at least somewhat inconsistent and that naturalism in the broad sense leads logically to strict naturalism. Many strict naturalists would agree with this.
Those who reject naturalism in both the strict and broad sense do so for a variety of masons. They may have positive arguments for the existence of .some of what naturalists deny, or they may have what seem to be decisive refutations of some or all of the arguments for naturalism. But, in addition to particular arguments against naturalist tenets or their grounds of belief, some opponents of naturalism believe that there is a general argument which holds against any form of naturalism. These opponents hold that naturalism has a "fatal flaw" or, to put it more strongly, that naturalism is self-destroying. If naturalism is true, then human reason must be the result of natural forces.
These natural forces are not, on the naturalistic view, rational themselves, nor can they be the result of a rational cause. So human reason would be the result of nonrational causes. This, it can be argued, gives us a strong reason to distrust human reach, especially in its less practical and more theoretical exercises. But the theory of naturalism is itself such an exercise of theoretical reason. If naturalism is true, we would have strong reasons to distrust theoretical reasoning. If we distrust theoretical reasoning, we distrust particular applications of it, such as the theory of naturalism. Thus, if naturalism is true, we have strong reasons to distrust naturalism

Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever’s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year.
It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets’ own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ( $ 4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.7% for the second quarter of this year.
Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com- moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers’ own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers’ own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli’s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%.
Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy.

If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money It’s not that different from how other software companies make money.
You’d think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, companies don’t sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter.
But what’s the value of a license to a customer A license doesn’t deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn’t lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft- ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel mom, a smart tech buyer won’t focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement.
Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft’s money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft’s subscription program, known as Soft- ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up- grade to Microsoft’s next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don’t switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade
Chief information officers hate this kind of *’assurance", since they’re often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft’s attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That’s why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don’t have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write

Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light- Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection In each case, the firm’s customers have played a big part in designing the product.
How does innovation happen The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.
This is not all new. Researchers have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of MIT. "User innovation has always been around," he says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening."
Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr. Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate. GE’s healthcare division calls them "luminaries". They tend to be well-published doctors and research scientists from leading medical institutions, says GE, which brings up to 25 luminaries together at regular medical advisory board sessions to discuss the evolution of GE’s technology. GE’s products then emerge from collaboration with these groups.
At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr. Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever’s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year.
It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets’ own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ( $ 4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.7% for the second quarter of this year.
Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com- moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers’ own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers’ own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli’s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%.
Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy.

Naturalism is the view that the "natural" universe, the universe of matter and energy, is all that there really is. By ruling out a spiritual part of the human person which might survive death and a God who might resurrect the body, naturalism also rules out survival after death. In addition, naturalism denies human freedom on the grounds that every event must be explainable by deterministic natural laws. It denies any absolute values because it can find no grounds for such values in a world made up only of matter and energy. And finally, naturalism denies that the universe has any meaning or purpose because there is no God to give it a meaning or purpose, and nothing else which can give it a meaning or purpose.
Anyone who accepts the first three denials, of God, spiritual beings, and immortality, might be called a naturalist in the broad sense, and anyone who adds to these the denial of freedom, values, and purpose might be labeled a naturalist in the strict sense, or a strict naturalist. Some opponents of naturalism would argue that naturalists in the broad sense are at least somewhat inconsistent and that naturalism in the broad sense leads logically to strict naturalism. Many strict naturalists would agree with this.
Those who reject naturalism in both the strict and broad sense do so for a variety of masons. They may have positive arguments for the existence of .some of what naturalists deny, or they may have what seem to be decisive refutations of some or all of the arguments for naturalism. But, in addition to particular arguments against naturalist tenets or their grounds of belief, some opponents of naturalism believe that there is a general argument which holds against any form of naturalism. These opponents hold that naturalism has a "fatal flaw" or, to put it more strongly, that naturalism is self-destroying. If naturalism is true, then human reason must be the result of natural forces.
These natural forces are not, on the naturalistic view, rational themselves, nor can they be the result of a rational cause. So human reason would be the result of nonrational causes. This, it can be argued, gives us a strong reason to distrust human reach, especially in its less practical and more theoretical exercises. But the theory of naturalism is itself such an exercise of theoretical reason. If naturalism is true, we would have strong reasons to distrust theoretical reasoning. If we distrust theoretical reasoning, we distrust particular applications of it, such as the theory of naturalism. Thus, if naturalism is true, we have strong reasons to distrust naturalism

If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money It’s not that different from how other software companies make money.
You’d think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, companies don’t sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter.
But what’s the value of a license to a customer A license doesn’t deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn’t lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft- ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel mom, a smart tech buyer won’t focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement.
Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft’s money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft’s subscription program, known as Soft- ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up- grade to Microsoft’s next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don’t switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade
Chief information officers hate this kind of *’assurance", since they’re often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft’s attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That’s why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don’t have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write

Naturalism is the view that the "natural" universe, the universe of matter and energy, is all that there really is. By ruling out a spiritual part of the human person which might survive death and a God who might resurrect the body, naturalism also rules out survival after death. In addition, naturalism denies human freedom on the grounds that every event must be explainable by deterministic natural laws. It denies any absolute values because it can find no grounds for such values in a world made up only of matter and energy. And finally, naturalism denies that the universe has any meaning or purpose because there is no God to give it a meaning or purpose, and nothing else which can give it a meaning or purpose.
Anyone who accepts the first three denials, of God, spiritual beings, and immortality, might be called a naturalist in the broad sense, and anyone who adds to these the denial of freedom, values, and purpose might be labeled a naturalist in the strict sense, or a strict naturalist. Some opponents of naturalism would argue that naturalists in the broad sense are at least somewhat inconsistent and that naturalism in the broad sense leads logically to strict naturalism. Many strict naturalists would agree with this.
Those who reject naturalism in both the strict and broad sense do so for a variety of masons. They may have positive arguments for the existence of .some of what naturalists deny, or they may have what seem to be decisive refutations of some or all of the arguments for naturalism. But, in addition to particular arguments against naturalist tenets or their grounds of belief, some opponents of naturalism believe that there is a general argument which holds against any form of naturalism. These opponents hold that naturalism has a "fatal flaw" or, to put it more strongly, that naturalism is self-destroying. If naturalism is true, then human reason must be the result of natural forces.
These natural forces are not, on the naturalistic view, rational themselves, nor can they be the result of a rational cause. So human reason would be the result of nonrational causes. This, it can be argued, gives us a strong reason to distrust human reach, especially in its less practical and more theoretical exercises. But the theory of naturalism is itself such an exercise of theoretical reason. If naturalism is true, we would have strong reasons to distrust theoretical reasoning. If we distrust theoretical reasoning, we distrust particular applications of it, such as the theory of naturalism. Thus, if naturalism is true, we have strong reasons to distrust naturalism