Research Nation: A Visit to Finland, Part2 RevitDesk versus AutoRevit LaiserinLetterLetters™ Laiserin's Lemma™Galileo's Dialogue Today's Top-Level Take-Away: Words of Wisdom > "If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." (Ludwig Wittgenstein) > "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it." (Max Frisch) > "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." (John von Neumann) Research Nation: A Visit to Finland, Part2 Finland, perhaps more so than any other country on the planet, has taken to heart sociologist Manuel Castell's "world of flows" thesis regarding the information society (brilliantly expounded in his 1996-1998 trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society,and Culture). If intellectual capital, social capital and financial capital can flow freely around the globe in search of maximal returns, how does a country of just five million souls create and sustain competitive advantage? Finland has chosen a course of carefully targeted and highly leveraged research, development and commercialization in select economic clusters—especially the "real estate cluster" (including design, construction, facility management, and asset/property management). The real estate cluster accounts for 70% of Finland's national (capital) assets and 20% of the country's employment. However, through projects such as Healthy Building, REMbrand, ProBuild and Vera, Finland is setting its sights on design and construction opportunities far beyond its own borders. More... RevitDesk versus AutoRevit Although the folks at Autodesk now insist that their strategic intentions in the Revit acquisition earlier this year were always clear, they do concede that such intentions were not always communicated with sufficient clarity to those outside the company. Well, those intentions are unclear no longer. The company now says "Autodesk Revit is Autodesk’s strategic authoring application and platform going forward for building information modeling and the building industry." Just in case you didn't get the hint, the company recommends, with minor exceptions, "...that design firms and other businesses in the building industry begin using Autodesk Revit now for design and production work..." So, while it still may not be clear how to get there, it is clear where Autodesk is telling their customers to go. More... LaiserinLetterLetters™ An occasional sampling of reader electron-mail, or "keep those waves and particles pouring in, folks!" More... Laiserin's Lemma™Galileo's Dialogue Notwithstanding the August cover date of this much-delayed issue, I am writing this after attending the October 1 New York premiere of Phillip Glass' latest opera, Galileo Galilei. The libretto deals with Galileo's 1633 trial by the Inquisition for publishing Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which fictitious characters debated the relative merits of the then-heretical Copernican or heliocentric system (the earth revolves around the sun) versus the then-accepted dogma of the Ptolemaic or geocentric system (the earth is the center of the universe, and all else revolves around it). Serendipitously, the day after attending this opera I sat in on an Autodesk luncheon briefing for large accounts in which the company positioned Revit at the center of the AEC universe, with all else REVolving around IT—which, in turn, inspired me to embark on a new Dialogue. More...