Dave posted photos from Saturday’s Mets / Brewers game (8-2 Brewers).
Monthly Archives: April 2006
Quarterly Google Earnings – Blodget
Okay, Google gamblers. This one’s going to be interesting.
On the one hand, Google’s modest deceleration last quarter suggests that the company is going to once again deliver (relatively) ho-hum results and disappoint investors conditioned to expect the astounding. It takes a long time for a supertanker to change speeds or course, and, last quarter, anyway, it did seem that the Google supertanker was finally beginning to slow down. This diagnosis seemed confirmed by possible canary-in-the-coalmine announcements from advertisers who were cutting back on search spending because prices had gotten out of hand. And then there was CFO George Reyes’ lucid mid-quarter explanation of why growth had slowed in Q4–because previous growth had been accelerated by a monetization program that had now run its course. This convincing explanation kneecapped the stock for the eight hours it took for the company to issue a press release that said, effectively, George was wrong.
The AMT Shell Game: Why Bush’s Tax “Cuts” Aren’t
Over at Slate, Daniel Gross is explaining, once more, the role the Alternative Minimum Tax continues to play in the Bush administration’s deceptive tax policies.
The AMT is a bizarre parallel-universe of taxation with its own set of complex rules that differ from the normal IRS system. It was passed decades ago as an effort to prevent gazillionaires from using elaborate tax shelters to reduce their tax bills to zero. For many years it was easily ignored by the vast majority of Americans, and as recently as a few years ago the only non-super-rich people who worried about it were tech-industry types who’d hit the stock-option jackpot but played their cards wrong.
But the AMT was designed with its very own time-bomb: It was never indexed for inflation, and so each year the rising tide of inflation — even the slow, relatively benign inflation the U.S. has experienced in the last decade — lifts more and more middle-class Americans into its maw. The obvious answer is to fix it, either by repeal or by indexing it for inflation so it continues to apply only to the gazillionaires who were its original target. Shouldn’t be so hard, right?
AT&T Seeks to Hide Spy Docs
AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the telecom giant helped the government set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.
In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn’t be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.
The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.
Sears Chairman Works on Selling Skills
For 90 minutes on Wednesday, the investor, Edward S. Lampert, the normally reclusive chairman of Sears Holding, spoke expansively about the need to change attitudes and work habits at the merged company.
One effort is already under way: assembling the company’s top 500 managers here for marathon training sessions, where a film clip from “Miracle on Ice,” about the United States hockey team that won the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics, is used to promote team work and improve customer service.
“In the past, we had a situation where people worked here but could not get results,” Mr. Lampert said during the first shareholder meeting for the newly formed retailer. “We need to invest in those people.”
Sears owns nearby Lands End
IRS Examines Paypals Records to Uncover Tax Fraud
Interesting article this afternoon on Bloomberg: IRS Reviews PayPal Purchase Records to Find Offshore Accounts, by Ryan J. Donmoyer: The IRS is examining some electronic-payment transactions processed by EBay’s PayPal unit to find U.S. taxpayers who keep unreported income…
More B-Schools Add Sales Courses
A company’s sales force is its lifeblood. But you’d never know it by looking at the typical M.B.A. curriculum.
Because they’re lighter on theory and research than other academic subjects, sales courses are surprisingly scarce in M.B.A. programs. “It’s sad that something as important to the economy as sales shows up as a footnote in the principles of marketing course at most graduate business schools,” says Andy Zoltners, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which has long offered a sales-force management class.
But the sales function seems to be slowly gaining more respect as a few other major schools, including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina, create M.B.A.-level sales courses. Harvard Business School has taught sales management for many years, but lately it has been focusing more on the selling process itself, with lessons on making sales presentations to corporate customers, influencing people and closing the deal.
“Many people view selling as tactical and haven’t taken the broader view that you will need sales skills even if you aren’t managing a sales force,” says David Godes, an associate professor at Harvard. “If you’re going into banking or consulting, how do you get clients and how do you raise money?”
It’s about time. Superior salespeople are always in short supply. They succeed based on solid, long term relationships.
Pens as Style Statements
Virginia Postrel, writing in Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine [pdf].
Whitepaper on Telco Promises
Here’s a very well-written report of the Bell’s trail of Rate Relief and Broken Promises. It is funded by Broadband Everywhere, a consortium that’s openly funded by small cablecos and the NCTA, who are fighting back against the Bell-flavored franchise reform law moving through Congress. It relies heavily on the work of Bruce Kushnick, but it also cites many relevant local press stories from, e.g., Enid OK (where a promise of 500 jobs led to rate relief and a net loss of jobs), Austin TX (where a new Texas law that assumed “competition” would lead to lower prices and granted rate relief actually led to rate caps), etc., etc., etc.
Really good stuff on a bad story that demands more attention! Mainstream reporters, attention please!
The Great Quake – 1906 to 2006
San Francisco, the ‘Paris of America,’ was booming with industry and culture — a Gold Rush city built in an instant. It was also a calamity waiting to happen.
This is the first of a 10-part retelling of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake — and its aftermath.
Samuel Dickson was 17 years old, almost a man, that April night in San Francisco 100 years ago. He and a friend had gotten standing-room tickets for the opera and heard the great Caruso sing.
The night was clear and beautiful, so after the opera they went to the top of Telegraph Hill to look at the city — the lights of the Barbary Coast, the steeple of Old St. Mary’s Church on California Street, the rounded domes of Temple Emanu-El on Sutter, the alleys of Chinatown and the distant gilded dome of City Hall.
Somewhat related: I wrote about my Loma Prieta (The “Pretty Big One”) experience here.