A hundred million mistakes: Microsoft’s Bing search engine - Good Experience

Everything Microsoft has tried recently hasn’t worked. They tried the “I’m a PC” ads, a knockoff of the Mac ads - didn’t work. Tried the Zune, a knockoff of the iPod - didn’t work. Tried redoing MSN Search again and again, as a knockoff of Google - didn’t work. What’s the world coming to, when Microsoft can’t build a monopoly around a knockoff?

It’s those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience.

June 7, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, E-business, Future, Marketing

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Google develops algorithm to stem talent loss

Google, concerned by the recent departures of several top executives, has developed an algorithm to try to identify which employees are likely to quit, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

I guess the first version is just a keyword analysis tool applied to performance reviews, looking for particular keywords (”demotivated”, “concern”) and statistical analysis tools looking at data like last date of promotion, ongoing training, denied requests for raises, etc…
It is not particularly difficult to do, companies don’t have to be Google to do the same thing!

May 20, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, E-business, Interesting tidbits, Society

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City development, key to economic prosperity

jacobs.html

But even better are the less read The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), twin volumes which do nothing less than demolish and rebuild macroeconomics. Economics went wrong, she explains, with the work her titles allude to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Nations aren’t the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are.

Jacobs arrives at this conclusion by considering the stagflation of the 1970s– simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation, something that was not supposed to be possible under either left-wing (Keynesian) or right-wing (monetarist) economics. They were supposed to trade off. She points out that this condition– high prices and not enough work– is normal for backward regions; Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith’s time on as a permanent condition.

March 28, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, Culture, Interesting tidbits, Society

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About the wage productivity gap

t r u t h o u t | Dr. Ravi Batra: New Thinking on the Economy

The wage-productivity gap is the gap between the real wage and labor productivity. The real wage is the purchasing power of the average salary. If productivity rises fast and the real wage rises slowly, then a wage-productivity gap develops and grows.

March 28, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, Society

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Expertise is overrated

Op-Ed Columnist - Learning How to Think - NYTimes.com

One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise. There’s evidence that what matters in making a sound forecast or decision isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment — or, to be more precise, the way a person’s mind works.

March 27, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, Interesting tidbits

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AIG and how the US got here

The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).

March 20, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, Interesting tidbits

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Money is debt documentary

March 5, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, Interesting tidbits, Society

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Working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch - The Irish Times

Controversial but interesting viewpoint:

Working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch - The Irish Times - Wed, Feb 25, 2009

NEWTON’S OPTIC: THE ANSWER to all our problems is staring us in the face. It may even be quite literally staring at you, right now, across the breakfast table.

So put the paper down, stare back and ask yourself a selfless question.

Does the woman in your life really need a job?

March 3, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Society

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Spain: who is responsible for the property bubble? - Credit Writedowns

As recession takes hold, European citizens are starting to ask questions about how they were led into this, the deepest downturn in three-quarters of a century. The leading Spanish daily El Pais published a very thoughtful article today asking how things had unravelled so quickly and so spectacularly in Spain, previously one of the fastest growing economies in Europe.