“Microsoft’s main pitch [for their tablet OS] is that they’ll be IT department-friendly …”, according to Gizmodo today.
How much longer they can continue to rely on the best sales force they never had to pay is open to question. One would think that IT departments would catch on that the priorities Microsoft has educated them to care about entail significant hidden costs. And if IT doesn’t get it on their own, one would think that their increasingly tech-savvy CEO’s would find someone who does.
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How a broker spent $520m in a drunken stupor and moved the global oil price.
Ouch. Not only did this traders’ drunken black-out purchase lose $9.7m and lead to a $7.6m loss for the year for his firm, it also moved the global price of oil $1.50 overnight.
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Longest match in tennis history, still ongoing as of this writing. Isner and Mahut are on serve, with Isner leading 59–58. That’s games, not points. Fifth set, not for the match.
The match has now past nine hours. The fifth set is longer than any other match played at Wimbledon this year. They’re in danger of being stopped for darkness for the second day in a row.
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I was reminded last night how little it takes sometimes to create a positive customer experience. I made a small impulse buy on eBay, paid, and thought nothing of it.
This morning, this email was in my inbox:
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For further proof that Japan is, in John Maudlin’s inimitable words, “a bug in search of a windshield,” look no further than the advertising campaign the Finance Ministry launched today.
The Finance Ministry is trying to bolster native demand for Japanese bonds. How would they do this? By targeting “the untapped market”, men of marrying age and convincing them that buying bonds will make them, wait for it, more attractive.
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For your daily dose of cultural diversity, here’s 16 things Walmart only sells in China.
Checking in at the airport today for my Delta flight, I was pleasantly surprised at how efficient and courteous the service was. I know. “Efficient” and “courteous” aren’t the first words that come to mind when you think “airport check-in”. Even if you’re flying Southwest.
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It turns out that exporting our way out of this recession may not be as easy as we’d like to believe. The Obama administration announced three months ago their goal to double US exports to the rest of the world in the next five years.
No doubt one of the reasons they chose that goal and that timeframe was due to the trend in that direction supported by a weakening dollar and economies in Asia that are growing consumption faster than we are. There’s historical precedent too for this goal being achievable.
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Staffers in the British Foreign Office learned the hard way one of the commandments of the digital age: “Write not what you would not like on the front page of this morning’s newspaper.”
In preparation for the Pope’s September visit, staffers wrote a memo proposing activities his Holiness might like to do while in Country. The top ideas?
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