Larry Page's running start: but is he running in the right direction?

A few months ago I wrote a column giving advice to Larry Page when it was announced that he would be taking-over once again as CEO of Google. Not that Google is especially in trouble, but it is a big job getting 50,000 feet marching in the same direction. In order to make that happen I urged Larry to create startups within Google. And sure enough, as he took over the top job last week and started announcing changes, one of the most radical was something very similar to the “five guys in a rented apartment” scheme I had proposed. Who knows, maybe Larry reads this rag, but probably not.

While I say Google […]

Purgatory at 37 degrees

At the heart of the current U. S. mortgage crisis are a variety of players that include circa 2006 home buyers with houses they couldn’t really afford, mortgage brokers who sold mortgages to people they knew couldn’t afford them, banks who turned those mortgages into securities that were bound to (in some cases designed to) fail, all held together with bureaucratic glue made almost entirely of testosterone and bullshit, and decorated with robo-signers and lost documents by the millions. Old news, right? But who would have thought we’d see many of the same behaviors emerge around one crappy refrigerator from Home Depot?

My friend Ralph owns that crappy fridge, an LG model based on a Whirlpool […]

The Epsilon Syndrome

Like a lot of you, this week I received several messages telling me my e-mail address had been stolen from a company called Epsilon that provides mass e-mail services to many giant corporations. At the end of this post you’ll find what I believe is the latest list of companies affected. I have heard from four of these companies so far — Best Buy, Chase, Hilton, and Ritz-Carlton, which is interesting because I don’t recall having even stayed at a Ritz-Carlton. From a look at the master list below I’m surprised I haven’t yet heard from Verizon, where I am also a customer. The point of this post isn’t just to print a list of […]

Geeks like me: What's Engadget really worth?

Thorstein Veblen was a cranky Norwegian-American economist best known for his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class where he coined the term conspicuous consumption, which meant that if former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski bought a $9000 shower curtain with company money he should probably go to prison… and did. Veblen instantly came to mind this morning when I read about how nine of the top editors were leaving Engadget for a new gig no longer associated with AOL. There’s a lot to think about in this move, which Veblen (who died in Palo Alto in 1929) would have appreciated.

Veblen, you see, was a socialist of sorts but really he was more a dour Norwegian who respected hard work and the accumulation of […]