Friday, March 04, 2005

Fun parody of Apple's 1984 ad. Fun Apple 1984 parody is up on the Royal We. I first saw this on Rocketboom, a cool videoblog. Christopher Coulter just reminded me of it. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 7:56:57 PM    comment [] Cancer Links Lead to Suspension of Gene Therapy Trials. The FDA has suspended several U.S. gene therapy experiments after learning that a third child who underwent treatment in France for a severe immune disorder has developed cancer as a result. Of the other two children who were diagnosed with cancer after receiving gene therapy, one has now died. [NPR Programs: All Things Considered] 7:52:14 PM    comment [] Gartner: Customer service outsourcing often fails. Companies that outsource customer service functions to reduce costs may risk reducing their client list as well, Gartner warned Friday. [InfoWorld: Top News] To make outsourcing work, companies should map their customer-facing processes from end-to-end and dedicate sufficient management to the project, Gartner said. Companies are also advised to develop innovative contracts that tie service levels with compensation, according to the researcher. Thank you Gartner - - we sure couldn't figure thato ne out be ourselves!! 3:49:47 PM    comment [] This one reminds me the differing mindsets of executives and policy makers. I was lucky enough to learn strategy from Mike Porter as he was writing Competitive Strategy. His course was the hottest course at the Harvard Business School. Several years later, I went back to Harvard to get my doctorate at the Business School. As part of that process I took the basic course in Industrial Economics from Richard Caves who was Porter's thesis advisor and learned that Porter was possibly even more clever than I already thought. Porter's fundamental insight was to take the academic research field of Industrial Economics and invert it. Industrial Economics studies the question of market failures. What conditions lead to markets that don't conform to the economic ideal of perfect competition? What conditions make monopolies and oligopolies likely? The economists study this area with an eye toward what public policies are useful and necessary to maintaining competition in its close to ideal form. Porter's genius was to see that an economists' market failure was a CEO's wet dream. Competitive strategy could be viewed as an effort to create market failures. This is what executives are trained to do and rewarded for. Absent the appropriate policy checks and balances, you end up with the world that the RIAA and MPAA hope to preserve. 3:33:12 PM    comment [] Don't Max Out Your 401(k): Redux. Maybe stuffing your employer-sponsored retirement plan isn't your best bet. [The Motley Fool] 8:20:09 AM    comment [] Reservists, Guard Troops Find Military Benefits Lacking. Complaints about the medical care and benefits provided to wounded reservists and National Guard members have been flooding into congressional offices over the past year, and testimony Thursday on Capitol Hill indicates the problems persist. [NPR Programs: All Things Considered] 8:17:46 AM    comment [] A Meditation on Forgiveness. Is it possible to forgive someone if they don't apologize or express remorse for their actions? Commentator Mubarak Dahir has been wrestling with that question recently. [NPR Programs: All Things Considered] 8:17:09 AM    comment [] Irate readers deploy plasma weapon. Letters Torture? You're having a laugh [The Register] 7:56:04 AM    comment [] Rebecca MacKinnon: "Whether mainstream media will survive, or whether it should survive, or in what form, or how, is irrelevant. I don't care." [Scripting News] Links to some other pretty interesting sites. 7:45:12 AM    comment [] Contrabandwidth - Kate Palmer, Foreign Policy. People can get almost anything on the black market—drugs, passports, even human organs. Now add Web sites to the list. Inside many authoritarian regimes that closely monitor and censor the Internet, access to blocked Web sites has become a black market co [Techno-News Blog] 7:32:07 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Judy Smith. Last update: 4/22/2005; 5:17:28 PM.