Andy Kessler has one of his standard thought-provoking opinion pieces discussing the economy of the past decade, suggesting that the real lesson learned from the past decade is the dangers of bad gov't policies leading to misallocated capital. Starting with bad telco regulations in the 90s that drove a bubble in unnecessary and misguided investment in infrastructure, some of which overflowed into a ridiculous dot com gold rush: The late '90s Internet love fest was crazy enough, driven by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt's misguided telecom reform that had the effect of keeping data rates artificially high. This created a gold rush to install fiber and build applications that didn't make economic sense (though electronic commerce, online banking, as well as wireless and broadband deployment would eventually prove productive over the next decade). Bad policy meant capital got overallocated and too quickly, as momentum mutual funds (momos) and day traders furiously drove up stock prices of every company with dot-com in its name for no fundamental reasons. Wall Street trading was broken. But, he notes, there was a core of a good idea in there. What made the investment in the internet and new technologies make sense was that it actually did drive productivity. The proper use of such tools increased productivity, decreased costs and opened up new markets. But with the flood of misallocated money, a lot of that got obscured in chasing sock puppets selling pet food.

Following this, there was a combination of bad policy decisions -- Greenspan flooding the system with money out of fear of a Y2K problem, combined with Enron freaking people out and leading to Sarbanes Oxley -- and a new mess was created: Instead of finishing what the dot-com era started to deliver--a productive, wealth-producing economy--capital was seduced into the financial lair of private equity and real-estate mortgages. Trillions were pumped into unneeded housing stock. Fannie and Freddie fanned the flames, and then fizzled and failed. And leveraged buyouts reigned. Even in 2007, one Blackstone private equity fund raised almost as much money as all of the venture capital industry. The key point here is that venture capital tends to (though, certainly not always...) invest in real innovation, nurturing concepts from idea to market and beyond. Private equity, however, is more about just moving money around and looking for quick hit opportunities to get increasing returns. One grows the economy. The other does not. But, by punishing the capital markets that fund real innovation and company growth via Sarbanes Oxley, money that used to go to venture investment went towards the east coast private equity world, where it was shuffled around, rather than invested productively. And, tragically, it doesn't look like anything the government is doing is designed to fix this: Today, we are still left with almost no initial public offerings. While private equity fund-raising was down 68% in 2009 to $96 billion, venture capital barely raised $13 billion.

Capital gains taxes are set to return to 20% on Jan. 1, 2011. And worse, investing is as uncertain as ever. No one wants to fund health care, medical devices or even much biotech if they can't figure out how they are going to be paid via reimbursements from ObamaCare. Energy investing is also a mess. And while "green" investing is booming, with few exceptions that is about efficiency rather than productivity. There's a big difference: You can make the Post Office more efficient while email makes us more productive and wealthier.

Big regulated oligopolists control our communications infrastructure. Startups are nowhere to be found. Few are willing to take the risk of true venture investing.

It's been 10 long years since the economy has created real wealth, as opposed to easy-credit induced real-estate or paper wealth. Amidst all the current confusion over health care and tax rates and energy and banking reforms, maybe it's time that the market transitions back to investments that drive productivity and increase living standards rather than just paper profits. Reaching back to our economic parables, it's a question of whether or not our government has been making a giant broken window fallacy. It's not working on plans that fund actual productivity and economic growth. The government is focused, instead, on getting money moving around again, and all that means is it will move into another unproductive bubble, until we align the incentives properly again.

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Seif Lotfy posted excitedly about Ian Cylkowski's in-depth Nautilus redesign mockup.

I found it very nice and refreshing, too. However, I noticed one strange thing: the menu bar just up and vanished. Ian`s incentive intrigued me:
Hidden Menubar: I’m not going to take sides here on whether we should still be having a menubar in applications or not; it’s another minefield of opinions and flaming. I’m personally fine with a menubar inside the application, but I also happily use applications that tuck away the menubar under a single icon (think Google Chrome). But I do think that we should have the option here. In my mockup, all the menubar settings can be brought up with the settings icon (first icon after the pathbar). But if you would like to see the menubar permanently then this, too, should be an option.
Being one of those people who considers the slightest growth of an options dialog a crushing defeat, I just have to debate that. Hopefully this won't cause the flame-war Ian predicts. That would be a bad start for my first aggregated blog post. (Hi, Planet Ubuntu!)

What I would like to do is go over why Chromium's menus are great, and why they absolutely are not just “tucked away under a single icon” but intentionally designed that way and inseparable from that particular approach. It's about simplifying the menu so it relates to the two distinct subjects the user interacts with: the application and the current page.

There are millions of things I dislike about menu bars, but that would take all year to discuss. (And I have different things to fix). I'll just vent about two problems which relate closely to each other:

• They traditionally consume 100% width. A small menu bar looks wimpy. Half of that menu bar will inevitably be wasted space no matter how hard the developers try to cram stuff into there.
• There is a strange urge to duplicate everyone else's menus for consistency and have as many of these as possible. For some reason the uniqueness of an application is expected to vanish at the menu bar, which becomes an abstract world with words like “File” referring to web pages, photos, applications and video clips alike. Menu bars are popular things for accessibility, so I wonder if this abstraction helps in that regard or hinders.

Having said that, GNOME applications deserve some credit for usually replacing the title of the File menu with Music or Photos. Yet, the generic top-left-most menu is still there in spirit.

As we can see from the gnome-terminal screenshot, though, the File menu's spirit is weak. Challenge of the day: name one file related thing there, then explain why adding and editing profiles should be in different places.

So, Chromium is interesting because it is one of few applications to finally take a bold step against the '90s fashion in menu bars. First of all, the distinct lack of a menu bar clears up the interface considerably. Then they accept that, to an end user, the browser is not interacting with “files” but with web pages. So, the File menu becomes a Page menu. Completely. They also throw away all the baggage that the File menu used to have.
...and that is where the magic happens. Now the menu has a far more powerful, meaningful context. Actual useful functions can be put there that are of importance to people and relevant to what they are doing. Things like zooming, printing, copying and pasting inside pages.

The remaining stuff happens in the context of the Application menu (the wrench). Quitting, opening windows, changing preferences, dealing with bookmarks; anything that is related to the application as a whole, not the current page. Since Chromium was designed with a logical scope, that is everything else it does except extensions.

I think we can do a lot better then the traditional menu bar. Just yanking it out, though, won't do us much good.