A Businessman's View

Can we get some consistency please? This past week, a Federal Judge in New York granted Google's request for a summary judgment against Viacom based on the "Safe Harbor" act. Viacom had filed suit (and does plan to appeal this ruling) stating that YouTube is a "den of thieves" since many copyrighted works are uploaded every day to the site. Since some of these legal thingumyjigs may be foreign to you, I'll break it down a bit. First, a summary judgment is requested at the outset of the case by one of the sides. Essentially, either the plaintiff or the defendant are telling the presiding judge, "look, your honor, this is a huge waste of time; the other side has no chance in hell of winning this case so can we please cut to the chase? Judge Judy comes on in 15 minutes." While this is requested in a relatively frequent manner, it is rarely granted because judges are generally predisposed to give everyone their day in court. The fact that this ...

This may seem obvious, but business isn't about who can do the neatest thing - it's about expectations and delivery . In other words, your customer has an expectation that you'll meet their needs; and you have to deliver on your statement that you can meet that need. This doesn't have to be a retail business. In fact, any business transaction falls under that statement. But sometimes business professionals just don't get this aspect of their jobs, careers, or their business (if they own one). As a result, they get mired in the past while their peers leap ahead of them because they are willing to embrace the future or at least the present. Consider, as an example, the publishing business. With the ever growing (and I'll claim that it still is growing) use of the Internet as a source of information, publications find themselves in an interesting position: do they continue the part of their business that is the printed publication? I asked Gary Paris , publi...

Ah, the Holy Grail of marketing: a brand that is so well established that the sales team has no purpose other than to print out contracts and collect commission checks. This is a win-win because the salespeople would rather stay at home sipping a glass of Chianti (with fava beans no doubt, eh Sir. Hopkins?); the business has a greater degree of confidence that the product(s) associated with the brand will make money; and the marketing people / advertising agency gets to come to work for another week. Take for example one of the most vile things ever to be consumed by the American public: The Jersey Shore . Personally, I think that the glamorization of the cast with their obvious lack of social mores ( see this article ); no sense of etiquette; and monstrous egos is a crime against America. (Note to BP: when you figure out how to contain the Gulf Oil spill, can you apply the same technique to The Situation ? Thanks.) In spite of my misgivings and no lack of desire to vilify them...

This week will be a momentous week. Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 10,000 , and it didn't close above that mark on Friday. Worse, it didn't break 10,000 even during intraday trading on Friday, and that's a bad sign. I never really understood the true psychology behind ceilings and floors on the stock market. What I mean is that I understand the statement that investors cling to numbers that fall on nice, definable boundaries. Furthermore, I understand that once those boundaries are crossed, it's not easy to cross them again in the near future and in the opposite direction. Still, I don't know why this happens. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that the DJIA is in dangerous territory this week. Last week's jobs report ( CNN Money had a nice write-up ) had a very important detail buried in it: in spite of the fact that 431,000 jobs were added in May, 411,000 of those jobs were for US Census based work, which is ver...

(Personal note: given that I'm a self-professed conservative, I would have never though that I would rely so much on the New York Times, since it is generally recognized as having liberal leanings. But one can't deny the quality of the writing nor the timeliness of the topics there.) There are oodles of documented cases where, during the years when the housing market was flying off of the handle, many parties took advantage of the situation to assume more risk than they should have. - Financial institutions created new and "interesting" (better than some words I could use) ways to loan money to people who could not understand how they were getting in over their heads. - People who really shouldn't be allowed to borrow money used "no income verification" package to by a house using a mortgage they couldn't afford. - People who thought they could make a quick buck flipping a house by slapping a fresh coat or paint on the interior and exterior. I'...