26th March 2011
Search and Destroy
“Since Google, at least by one measure, is the fastest-growing corporation in history, Vaidhyanathan has his task cut out for him. “Google,” he writes, “has deftly capitalized on a thirty-year tradition of ‘public failure’”—i.e., the dismantling of services best handled by the state so that they might be taken over and exploited by big business. He places Google’s success in the context of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s (think Thatcher and Reagan) and the decline of civil society throughout the twentieth century (think fraternal societies like the Masons and the Elks); the Marxist geographer David Harvey and the Frankfurt School political philosopher Jürgen Habermas make appearances in the footnotes. Where companies like Enron profited from the deregulation of formerly public utilities, Google has benefited from the hands-off attitude of many governments toward the new industry of the Internet. Vaidhyanathan’s favorite example is the Google Books project: Rather than insist that the world’s knowledge might be too important to be left to a single company and agreeing to fund an international consortium of libraries and universities—what Vaidhyanathan calls a Human Knowledge Project, citing the precedent of the publicly funded Human Genome Project—we have instead left our cultural patrimony to be digitized and effectively privatized by a corporation.
25th March 2011
How I Did It: Blockbuster's Former CEO on Sparring with an Activist Shareholder
“Blockbuster’s biggest problem stemmed from its business model. Movie studios sold VHS cassettes to rental companies for about $65 apiece, so a store had to rent out each tape about 30 times to make back the money. That’s a big up-front investment for a product that most people want just during the few weeks after it first comes out. The whole industry was hurt by stores’ never having enough copies of new releases.
We asked the movie studios to shift to a revenue-sharing system. We proposed that instead of buying the cassettes for $65 each, we would pay $1 a copy up front but give the studios 40% of rental revenues on their titles. Eventually they agreed. That allowed us to stock many more copies of hot titles and to advertise their availability. We rolled out an ad campaign about guaranteed availability that featured animated Blockbuster boxes singing the classic tune “I’ll Be There.” Comp store sales and market share grew strongly.
7th March 2011
How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner
“First they had to save a company in crisis: at the beginning of 2009, Rovio was close to bankruptcy. Then they had to create the perfect game, do every other little thing exactly right, and keep on doing it. The Heds had developed 51 titles before Angry Birds. Some of them had sold in the millions for third parties such as Namco and EA, so they decided to create their own, original intellectual property. “We thought we would need to do ten to 15 titles until we got the right one,” says 30-year-old Niklas. One afternoon in late March, in their offices overlooking a courtyard in downtown Helsinki, Jaakko Iisalo, a games designer who had been at Rovio since 2006, showed them a screenshot. He had pitched hundreds in the two months before. This one showed a cartoon flock of round birds, trudging along the ground, moving towards a pile of colourful blocks. They looked cross. “People saw this picture and it was just magical,” says Niklas. Eight months and thousands of changes later, after nearly abandoning the project, Niklas watched his mother burn a Christmas turkey, distracted by playing the finished game. “She doesn’t play any games. I realised: this is it.”
17th February 2011
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
“Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
Business Is Booming
“The role that even the most widely admired American companies, such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and General Electric, have played in offshoring American jobs has long been a subject of controversy. Their zeal for offshoring has lowered the prices of the goods Americans buy while increasing our trade deficit, shrinking our manufacturing sector, and flattening our wages. But to look at the employment numbers at Foxconn, Apple, Dell, or IBM — whose total worldwide workforce expanded from 329,000 employees in 2005 to almost 400,000 in 2009, while its U.S. workforce shrank from 134,000 employees to 105,000 — is to come away with an even more disquieting thought: With each passing year, and even more so during the recession, America’s leading corporations grow more and more decoupled from the American economy. Their interests grow increasingly detached from those of our workers, our consumers — and our economic future.
14th February 2011
Where Did the Korean Greengrocers Go?
“There are two stories behind the Korean greengrocers’ disappearance. One involves a changing New York economy over the last 20 years. The other, a particularly Korean saga, is a story of how immigration can work in America—a testament to how far these new Americans have come in a single generation.
31st January 2011
How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis
“Julius Fromm saw a market he could tap into and founded his company in 1914, opening a small workshop in the Bötzow area in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. With World War I and the liberalisation of sexual values in the Weimar Republic, the demand for condoms exploded and Fromm’s business quickly expanded, and he established factories near the Spree River in Berlin-Mitte.
The Final Countdown
“Within two months of the last touchdown, almost all of Florida’s 9,000 space workers will have lost their jobs. The layoffs have already begun. By the end of last year over 2,000 had been made redundant. Another cull began in January, with between 1,000 to 3,000 jobs at risk. A similar number of jobs will go in another round of cuts planned for the spring. […] In all, 19 per cent of jobs in Brevard County, which has a population of half a million people, will disappear.
25th January 2011
‘The stock market is for suckers’
“No wonder American companies like Facebook are avoiding the hoi polloi of traditional stock markets in favour of raising capital from private, rich investors. “The idea of the stock market was to help businesses raise capital, and to provide people, individuals, with a chance to invest their savings and participate in that growth and have enough money to retire,” says Peter Cohan, president of Peter S. Cohan and Associates, a venture capital and management consulting firm in Marlborough, Mass. “But in the last decade the whole thing seems to have fallen apart.” Where the market once helped investors and companies, now it’s failing both.
30th November 2010
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets
“Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
