Tag Archives: business

Two Sides To Every Page

“Anyone who cares about the financial viability of the book business should read Author’s Guild President Scott Turow’s open letter on the implications of the government’s threatened anti-trust suit against major publishers and Apple over alleged collusion in e-book pricing.” {From: The Millions : Letter from Scott Turow.}

Well yes, of course. But if you do read it, you should probably also read Tim Cushing’s rebuttal over at Techdirt before you make your mind up about this whole thing. After reading both, I don’t know quite what to make of the situation, but you will.

Scavengers Of Human Misery

Streaming rights to the Whitney Houston movie The Bodyguard were revoked at Netflix after her death. According to a Netflix rep quoted by Dan McDermott, the production company Warner Bros., per IMDB ‘saw an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies.’ {From: Whitney Houston movie yanked from Netflix streaming – Boing Boing}

Ghoulish? Maybe. Disrespectful? Probably. Capitalism? Definitely!

The Problems Of The Small Business Owner

“A man named Chen woke up recently to find a scorpion crawling over his body. Snapping on the bedroom light, he found his bedroom to be full of scorpions. He gathered his family and worked to capture several hundred of the arachnids. When they left the apartment, they found their neighbors had been battling the poison-tipped beasts, and their landlord, who wants them out to make way for a construction project, is suspected of letting them loose.” {From The Consumerist}

You know, if we (or China, in this case) are just going to punish entrepreneurs every time they come up with new, innovative approaches to  business problems, we might as well just not get into business in the first place. Also, BC’s Scorpion Emporium is officially announcing its going-out-of-business sale. Totally unrelated.

Sprint Wants To Be Your Boyfriend

When it comes to relationships, one of the cardinal mistakes is to be all clingy and weird, which is something that most of us learn in junior high, or high school. Sprint, apparently, never got this message–which makes sense, because companies aren’t people. But they are run by people, and it’s hard to imagine how nobody over there figured out that it would be kind of creepy to tell their customers that they love them.

What A Staggering Coincidence!

“Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the FCC Commissioners, is leaving the FCC to become a lobbyist for Comcast-NBC, just four months after approving their merger deal.” {From: FCC Commissioner Leaves To Become Lobbyist – Slashdot}

When reached for comment*, Baker said, “It went down like this. First, I approved the merger of Comcast and NBC. Then, four months later I was like, at the supermarket and bumped into Comcast over by that one part of the store where they have the Mike’s Hard Lemonade display, and we got to talking. And they were like, ‘Hey how are you?’ And I was like, ‘Awesome, but bored with my job!’ So then, they’re like, ‘Hey, you want a job with us?’ And I was like, ‘Yeaaaaaaaahh!’ And then someone else said, ‘Hey lady, didn’t you just approve a merger between Comcast and NBC?’ And THEN me and Comcast were like, ‘No WAAAAAY!” OMG, we both totally forgot about that! Conflict of interest? I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about banking.”

She then used both hands to flip off the assembled journalists and screamed, “Try and stop me, motherfuckers!”

*I am obviously making all this up.

UPDATE: Congresswoman Maxine Waters has introduced a bill outlawing FCC commissioners from taking jobs at companies whose mergers they approved. I suspect this won’t go far, but we’ll see.

How Green Was My Bullshit

“[T]here are some PR pitches that make our heads explode. Earth Day As Excuse to Announce Anything Green, for starters. Look How Green We Are, Even Though We’re Not Being Very Specific, for another.

And please, please: Don’t get us started on the opener, ‘Just in time for Earth Day …’” {From GreenBiz.com | Via: boingboing}

Green is the official color of environmental responsibility. It is also the color of (American) money. Coincidence? Or is it a CRAZY WOO-WOO CONSPIRACY!!!? No, wait–it’s the first thing I said. Sorry I flipped out there for a second. Happy Earth Day, Earth.

Too Soon

“3D TV sales continue to disappoint.” Look, television manufacturers and electronics retailers: I know that you loved all that sweet, sweet moolah you raked in back when we were all forced to convert to digital broadcasting, and a lot of folks ended up buying your new, digital televisions. But you have to understand that prior to the switch-over, TV’s were dirt-cheap commodity items for, what, 25 years? (Hell, in 2000 I picked up a 27-inch TV for less than a hundred bucks.)

Here’s the thing: Just because television prices are starting to come down, it doesn’t mean that there won’t eventually be some new, probably government-mandated technology that we’ll be forced to adopt, thus allowing you all to jack up those TV prices again. But have patience! Stop trying to cram the next big thing into our fucking eyeballs!