Daily Archives: October 13, 2006

uTube’s woes

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From Good Morning SIlicon Valley…

If there’s any company even less happy with YouTube than the entertainment outfits, it’s Universal Tube and Rollerform Equipment Corp. near Toledo, Ohio, which has the misfortune of doing business on the Web at utube.com, its site since 1994. Since the video-sharing site took off, Universal Tube has had trouble keeping its site up under the load of misguided searchers (68 million page views in August alone). “It’s killing us,” said Ralph Girkins, president and owner, told CNNMoney. “All my worldwide reps use our Web site. Customers all over the world use it to bring up photos of the machinery, descriptions and specifications there. … And a customer who can’t find my $3-$400,000 machine online will just keep searching the Web until they find it elsewhere.” Also troublesome — do a Google search for “utube,” and links to YouTube come up first (one at the moment titled “lazyboy – underwear goes inside the pants”), which tends to put off potential customers. Girkins hasn’t been able to find anyone at YouTube or Google to ask for help, and I don’t think they owe him any, unless as a goodwill gesture. But then again, he may want to follow the lead of the entertainment companies and try threat-of-litigation negotiation.

Iraqi deconstruction

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This tasteful image shows part of the police station in Mosul as rebuilt by Iraqi contractors. Note the tree which, according to the NYT report, “was allowed to remain standing, and its trunk was cemented into the building’s structure”. It brings to mind T.E. Lawrence’s famous dictum:

“It is better that they do it imperfectly than that you do it perfectly. For it is their war and their country and your time here is limited.”

China drafts law to empower trade unions and reduce sweatshops

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From today’s New York Times…

SHANGHAI, Oct. 12 — China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

But guess what?

Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany. The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China…