These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Memo to Google: Don’t “Grow Up” | Jeff Matthews — “We have never seen a company—particularly a supposed high-growth enterprise such as Google—that has successfully propped up its stock in any other way than by continuing to grow its business in a rational, sustainable manner.
And that includes especially the kind of “cash-clearing” follies that helped bring Office Depot from $37 a share to less than $3 in a few short years, and paralyzed hundreds of other companies that might otherwise have taken advantage of cheap prices in the current liquidity squeeze, while forcing the least healthy to seek shotgun mergers or worse.
If a lesson is to be learned from the last three months, it is that cash is not ‘trash,’ as the saying goes: it is a valuable strategic asset that gives a company an enormous leg up when its competitors have had their legs cut out from underneath them.”
- If They’re Too Big To Fail, They’re Too Big Period | Robert Reich — “Pardon me for asking, but if a company is too big to fail, maybe – just maybe – it’s too big, period.
We used to have public policies to prevent companies from getting too big. Does anyone remember antitrust laws? Somewhere along the line policymakers decided that antitrust would only be used where there was evidence a company had so much market power it could keep prices higher than otherwise.”
- Who sparked the global cooling myth? | New Scientist — “Sceptics like to say that climate scientists who support the consensus of man-made global warming are like the boy who cried wolf. They say that in the 1970s climate scientists claimed that we were headed for a mini ice-age. They then point out that this never happened, and so question the strength of current predictions that the globe will be between 2°C and 5°C warmer by 2100.
Fair enough. But was there ever a consensus over global cooling in the 1970s?
A few climate scientists have now scanned through the research literature of the time. For 1965–1979, they found 7 articles that predicted cooling, 44 that predicted warming and 20 that were neutral.”
- RSS Adoption at 11% and it May Be Peaking, Forrester Says | Micro Persuasion — “Lord knows, as someone who spends three hours a day in Google Reader, I am a giant evangelist for RSS. But I am also a realist. Feeds are way way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve. So I think RSS has peaked.”
- Blogger gets off ground with 787 | chicagotribune.com — “Blogger Jon Ostrower started out with little more than a battered Dell laptop and a goal of detailing the creation of a groundbreaking airplane, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.
Ostrower had neither aerospace nor journalism training. But in little more than 18 months, the 24-year-old has significantly altered how aerospace is covered, a world in which work is cloaked in secrecy.”
- Ofcom turns up heat on BBC | FT.com — “We don’t want to do anything that would damage the core services and programmes of the BBC,” Mr Richards said.
“Of course there are some good arguments against using the switchover surplus, as there are with the other options, but we must not be scared to have this debate.
“A number of people seem to be scared to have this debate.”
