Quote of the day

The [Rover] story is one of an unviable company, a gullible workforce and a spineless government taken for a ride by entrepreneurs who succeeded only in enriching themselves… Phoenix [the company with bought Rover] failed, but not before its directors enriched themselves as efficiently as any private equity investor. BMW’s £427 million could have funded a £50,000-plus payoff for each departing employee. Now they will get a fraction of this in statutory redundancy payments. They, like BMW and the government, must feel like mugs… The four Phoenix partners were able to award themselves a £10 million loan note, gain personal control of a lucrative financing business and fund a £16.5 million directors pension pot. They also transferred valuable assets from Rover to the parent Phoenix. This is capitalism at its ugliest.

Financial Times editorial, “A Tale of Greed and Gullibility”, Saturday, April 9, 2005

Rover’s ‘management’

Yesterday, Tony Blair, during his panic-stricken visit to Rover, refused to answer questions about the quality of the management that burned its way through £500 million and took the company to the verge of liquidation. When John Towers and three colleagues took on Rover five years ago, they were regarded by the company’s employees as “white knights”. Hmmm… An interesting piece in this morning’s Financial Times suggests that these gents are looking, well, tarnished.

Taking on Rover presented them with some risks, but nothing like as big as they were prone to make out. Each put up about £65,000 to convince BMW and the government of their good intentions. But the incentives were substantial: a token to buy the company and a dowry of more than £500m, mostly in the form of a loan BMW never really expected to be repaid, to run it.

Also, since buying Rover, the four have granted themselves £10m through a loan note and set up a £16.5m pension scheme, in addition to their pay. They have also made millions of pounds from a side venture in leased Rover cars.

Everything you need to know about the Vatican

As someone who saw the repressiveness of the Catholic church at close quarters as a lad, I am less than impressed by the unctuous posturing on display in Rome today. This little report in The New York Times nicely conveys the institutional hypocrisy of the regime presided over by JP II.

Cardinal Bernard Law, who was forced to resign in disgrace as archbishop of Boston two years ago for protecting sexually abusive priests, was named by the Vatican today as one of nine prelates who will have the honor of presiding over funeral Masses for Pope John Paul II.

And how nice to see that not everyone in Britain is going overboard on the premature canonisation of a pope whose medieval stance on Aids, among other things, has contributed to the death of millions. Lovely Op-Ed piece by Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian. Excerpt:

The millions pouring into Rome (pray there is no Mecca-style disaster) herald no resurgence of Catholicism. The devout are there, but this is essentially a Diana moment, a Queen Mother’s catafalque. People queue to join great public spectacles, hoping it’s a tell-my-grandchildren event. Communing with public emotion is easy now travel is cheap. These things are driven by rolling, unctuous television telling people a great event is unfolding, focusing on the few hysterics in tears and not the many who come to feel their pain.

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the Toynbee link.

“Events, dear boy, events…”

… was Harold Macmillan’s celebrated answer to a journalist’s question about what can most easily steer a government off course. The extraordinary events of this evening concerning the fate of Rover, the last British-owned volume car manufacturer, provide a vivid illustration of Mac’s adage. First, Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, announces at a press conference that the company is going into receivership. This is immediately denied by the Board, which says that they have merely asked their accountants to advise them. But even if the company wasn’t going to the wall before Hewitt’s statement, it certainly didn’t seem to have much of a future afterwards! Would you buy a used (or even a new) car from such an outfit?

What’s funny about this (and what reminded me of Macmillan) was that this came on the day after the damaging internal feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed to have been settled. It looked as though this last lingering credibility problem for Labour had been laid to rest. And then along comes Rover (which has always been an economic basket-case) and upsets the apple-cart.

Those grammar-checking tools…

… are, well, useless. Sandeep Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington has been doing some testing of Microsoft Word’s grammar checking abilities. He ran this text past it…

Marketing Bad

Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image is bad for processes in one company and many companies.

McDonalds is good brand. McDonald’s is good brand. McDonald’s are good brand. McDonalds’ are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola is good brand. MCDONALD’S AND COCA COLA IS GOOD BRAND.

Finance good for marketing. Show me money!

4P’s are marketing mix. Four P’s is marketing mix. 4Ps is marketing mix. Manager use marketing mixes for good marketing. You Know What I Mean? Internets do good job in company name Amazon. Internets help marketing big company like Boeing. Internets make good brand best like Coca Cola.

Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft. Gates do good marketing jobs out Microsoft. Gates build the big brand in Microsoft. The Gates is leader of big company in Washington. Warren buffet do awesome job in marketing. Buffets eat buffets in city and town in country.

… and found that Word passed it without comment. To be fair, other programs fare little better. Still, Krishnamurthy’s verdict is harsh:

My conclusion is that the “Spelling and Grammar Check” feature on Microsoft Word is extraordinarily bad (especially the Grammar check part).  It is so bad that I am surprised that it is even being offered and I question the ethics of including a feature that is this bad on a product that is so widely used.

I ran the text past MS Word for Mac. The only thing it objected to was the sentence “4P’s are marketing mix”.

Microsoft’s subliminal message: an exegesis

Such a helpful page from Redmond giving “Six Tips for Buying an MP3 Player with Flash Memory”. In the interests of objectivity, the Apple Turns Blog has provided an even more helpful crib, to which I am happy to add. Let’s take the six ‘tips’ in turn, shall we?

1. Understand the basics.

For the active person, a player that uses flash memory to store music has distinct advantages over a player that uses a hard disk. Simply put, flash memory players have no moving parts, meaning that you can take them jogging and your music won’t skip.

Translation: Don’t buy an iPod, which has a nasty hard drive for storing thousands of songs, compared with the measly hundreds you can fit on a flash player.

2. Make sure you’re getting all the goodies.

Many portable music players can do more than just play music. Some players have a built-in voice recorder, FM recorder, or stopwatch. And some come with extra accessories like high-quality headphones, a belt clip, or an armband. Because most of these features are included at no additional cost, make sure the device you choose is filled with these fun extras.

Translation: you just won’t be happy unless your player can record FM radio and includes, for some reason, a stopwatch. And it just so happens that iPods don’t do any of these things.

3. You’ll want a display.

When you have hundreds of songs on your player, you really need an easy way to select your music by artist, album, or genre. This is critical if you want to find that one song or artist you really want to hear. A display also comes in handy when you’re looking for your favorite radio station.

Translation: don’t buy a nasty iPod shuffle, even if it doesn’t have a hard drive (see 1 above) because it doesn’t have a display.

4. Let a professional make your next playlist.

Having an FM radio lets you put your player on autopilot as you mountain bike, cycle, or rollerblade. And when you’re sweating it out on the stationary bike at your health club, you can listen to the program airing on the club’s TV. You want to have something that is fun, lightweight, and flexible. And FM radio is a key feature that many players offer at no extra cost, even for less than $100.

Translation: why listen to your own music when you can listen to nonstop commercials and obnoxious local DJs on FM radio? And record them digitally, so you can share that great beer jingle with your friends and loved ones?

5. Pick the right size for you.

The price of a player will depend on its storage capacity—the more megabytes (MB) of storage it has, the more music it can hold and the more it will cost. If you’re ripping your own CDs, using a player with Windows Media Audio (WMA) support as well as MP3 support gives you the most music per megabyte.

Translation: Windows Media is great, and we just wanted to harp on that for a minute. Have we mentioned that Windows Media is great? And it’s much better than that nasty compression stuff used by Apple.

6. Don’t get locked into one online store.

Have you ever been on the hunt for a particular song? Some obscure indie rock tune or rare jazz performance you heard on the radio? You might have to shop at more than one store before you find the song you’re looking for. Having the flexibility to choose from over 1 million tracks of music from multiple online music stores such as MSN Music, Napster, MusicMatch, and Wal-Mart can be the key to getting the music you want. Several stores even offer subscription services so you can download all the songs you want for about the cost of a CD each month. If you buy a device that has the PlaysForSure logo, you’ll know that you can use it with your choice of PlaysForSure music stores.

Translation: it is, however, just fine to get locked into one proprietary data format and DRM scheme– as long as it’s ours. And be sure to avoid that nasty iTunes store.

Summary:

1. Don’t buy an iPod, iPod mini, or iPod photo.

2. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.

3. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.

4. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.

5. Pick the right size for you (as long as you don’t buy an iPod shuffle).

6. Don’t buy an iPod of any kind whatsoever. And don’t buy songs from Apple.

Moral blackmail

Here’s something strangely repulsive. Quentin pointed me towards a site run by a man who claims to have found an injured, young rabbit under a porch one day, and then nursed it back to health. He then named the rabbit Toby. This individual swears that he will have Toby butchered and served for dinner on June 30, 2005, unless he is able to raise $50,000 in donations or merchandise sales. If he is able to raise the money, he promises that Toby will have the life of Riley until he dies a natural death. The site provides the story of the bunny’s rescue, photos (one of which shows Toby sitting in a cooking pot), possible recipes and answers to questions (some dealing with the legality of the website and the underlying idea). Rob Parsons has written an interesting commentary on this ingenious attempt to part animal lovers from their cash. Apparently he’s raised $18,000 already. But PayPal have cancelled his account after protests from a rabbit sanctuary,