Daily Archives: January 25, 2006
Google in China
So it has happened. Google has caved in. It has agreed to actively censor a new Chinese-language search service that will be housed on computer servers inside the PRC.
Obviously this contradicts its stated desire to make information freely available to everybody on the planet, and it contradicts its mission statement: "don’t be evil." As Mike Langberg at the San Jose Mercury News puts it: their revised motto should now read "don’t be evil more than necessary."
Best Law Money Can Buy: Sensenbrenner & Conyers
Ed Felten writes about his attempt to find out about the VEIL content protect technology specified in the Sensenbrenner/Conyers bill that would mandate that electronic devices plug the “analog hole.” (The analog hole is the fact that analog playback can be converted into digits. E.g., point a digital camcorder at a movie screen. Or, play a DRM’ed mp3 on your computer and use digital recording software to intercept the analog signal on its way to your speakers.
Obviously, these matters are vital to Wisconsin and Michigan constituents.
The World’s Oldest CEO?
Jack Weil, founder and CEO of Denver-based Rockmount Ranch Wear, turns up for work every morning just as he has done since 1946. At 104 years old, he’s not planning to go anywhere else because “what else am I supposed to do all day?”.
Ford’s New Way
I sat there listening to the Ford Motor Company press conference Monday morning – as first Bill Ford, Jim Padilla and then Mark Fields outlined the “Way Forward,” confirming the elimination of up to 30,000 jobs and the closings of 14 manufacturing facilities over the next several years, while basically admitting that the company was culturally bankrupt, bureaucratically paralyzed, and woefully and relentlessly clueless about how to function in the modern automotive world – and the first thought that came to my mind is that it’s a flat-out miracle this iconic American company has managed to survive this long.
Monday morning’s presentation, designed to take us under the tent with Ford executives thinking and talking out loud for the assembled media, financial analysts and a worldwide Ford company audience, was a lurid combination of multiple mea culpas and a blatant pep rally – and the net-net of it was that it exposed Ford to be a company so far out of touch and so far removed from being a competitive force in the U.S. market that I was literally stunned at what I was hearing.
I have to agree with Peter. Reading the blowback from Ford’s Monday announcements, I, too wondered where the company is heading, and, if indeed it has been so rudderless, how has it survived?