All politics is not local
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I write about ESRI in this blog on occasion - most recently, in March 2016.
And ESRI just made the news again - not a local news outlet, and not a geo
news...
By day, I perform strategic marketing duties for...well, as of August 2020, for nobody. By night, I manage the Empoprises blogging empire, as well as various portals in Ingress and other games. Formerly known as Ontario Emperor (Ontario California, not Ontario Canada). LCMS Lutheran. Former member of Radio Shack Battery Club. Motorola Yellow Badge recipient. Top 10% of LinkedIn users.
I was curious about the age of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
According to several sources, it's pretty old.
eNotes states that the exchange started on "May 17, 1792, when local brokers met under a designated tree to buy and sell securities." Don't know what they did when it rained or snowed.
eNotes states that the...um, "modern" version of the exchange began on Wall Street in 1825. However, nndb lists the founding date as 1817.
Twenty-four prominent brokers and merchants gather on Wall Street to sign the Buttonwood Agreement, agreeing to trade securities on a commission basis. The New York Stock Exchange traces its beginnings to this historic pact.
The NYSE website states that the organization moved to 40 Wall Street in 1817, and established a constitution at that time.
As for 1825:
1825 Erie Canal Opens
The opening of the Erie Canal makes New York City the seaboard gateway for the Great Lakes region. New York State bonds, issued to finance the canal, are traded actively on the Exchange.
Presumably investors refrained from stating that their investments were "underwater."
Back in January, InformationWeek ran an article that talked about the criticisms, and praise, on the software maintenance model used by companies such as Oracle and SAP. Mary Hayes Weier quoted from several people, including Rusty Gaston, CIO of Santa Fe Natural Tobacco (who has ceased Oracle maintenance and is going with a third party maintenance service from Rimini Street), Oracle's Charles Phillips ("people keep coming back to the licensing model that's simple and has worked"), and others.
Toward the end of the article, InformationWeek added one of those cool box thingies for people who don't have time to read the whole article. But the box on page 4 quickly presented some alternatives to the current model - and their drawbacks.
5 Fast Fixes ALTERNATIVES TO THE STATUS QUO
1. Open Source You still pay an annual support fee, but lower up-front cost.Will you get new features and fixes fast enough?
2. Software As A Service Again, still an annual payment and lower up-front cost. Customization, integration, data control can all be problems.
3. Third-Party Support Cheaper, but usually a smaller company with less access to expertise, and you miss out on updates.
4. Negotiate New Terms Tricky, since some vendors won't budge. But changing support levels and length of term may create flexibility.
5. Drop Support Gulp. Can your inhouse team really handle any problems?
That’s what the genius Jack in the Box marketing gurus will have us thinking after today’s Super Bowl. In a brilliant move, the San Diego-based burger chain kicked off the first of a series of commercials that question the fate of the beloved and hilarious Jack Box.
But some people don't share Nancy's (and my) high opinion of the ad. Damien Newton of Streetsblog wrote a post entitled Ad Nauseum: What Is Jack in the Box Thinking?. The posts starts as follows:
You know what's really funny? Pedestrians getting hit by a bus in the crosswalk.
At least that's what the marketing department at Jack in the Box apparently decided before putting together their "Hang in There Jack" campaign which kicked off with a bizarre commercial during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. I can only imagine what friends and family of Gwendolyn Coleman thought if they were unfortunate enough to be watching the Super Bowl and paying attention to the commercials.
If you want a fast food chain with non-threatening advertising, avoid Jack in the Box at all costs. You may or may not recall that the original jack-in-the-box signs were blown up in 1980 as the restaurant repositioned itself away from kiddie, and that the "Jack" character himself was introduced in 1995 by blowing up the same people who blew him up in 1980. So compared to previous outings with Jack, getting hit by a bus is relatively tame. While I respect your sensitivity to pedestrian accidents, I looked at this as the equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon.
Mine is just one of several comments, both pro and con, at Newton's post.
Opinion elsewhere is equally divided, with QSRWeb (QSR stands for Quick Service Restaurant) declaring that the Jack ad was one of the ads that "hit their mark," while Jason Roestel of the Chicago Examiner has a different take:
I don't want to think of what Jack in the Box spent on that stupid Jack getting hit by a bus advertisement. The public cry of the initialism WTF? should have set a united spoken phrase record once that little experiment in empathetic hamburger branding concluded. The only other words that came into my head about that commercial were: DIE JACK.
If you watched the Super Bowl and lived in certain markets, you saw a commerical in which Jack from Jack in the Box got hit by a bus.
It's time to put this into historical perspective, because some people might not know that Jack in the Box has already been killed once.
There is a history of Jack in the Box that provides some of the particulars. The restaurant itself was founded in 1951 by Robert O. Peterson, and passed through several corporate owners over the next couple of decades. Originally the mascot of the chain was, literally, a jack-in-the-box that was displayed outside of every restaurant. Well, that mascot began to get past its expiration date:
Longtime customers will remember Jack as a clown who formerly served atop the company's family-friendly drive-thru speaker box. Then in 1980, he was blown up in a television commercial that signaled a shift toward more adult fare.
But Jack the well-dressed CEO was not just a numbers cruncher; Jack, like Harlan Sanders and Jim Koch before him, was insanely devoted to the quality of "his" product. The ad series was successful, and has gone on for years and years.
But has "Jack Box" gone past its expiration date? Probably not, but it was time for a bit of action.
I believe I first heard about this on the radio on Friday morning, but I didn't read about it until I saw Ben Popken's item in the Consumerist entitled "Whoop di doo: 1549 Passengers Get Elite Frequent Flier Status, For A Limited Time." After Popken noted that the US Airways Flight 1549 passengers would only get "Chairman's Preferred status" until March 2010, Popken quoted from one of the passengers:
Passenger Antonio Sales from the flight told the New York Post, "That's more of an 'OK, you're not dead, I'll give you something to hold on to.' It's not enough at all."
Popken linked to the New York Post article, which included a number of similar complaints from several passengers. For example, here's something else that Sales said:
"You're going to crash me into the water, and you're going to tell me all I get is an upgrade?"
Only one minor problem - US Airways didn't crash the plane into the water.
ACT OF GOD - A natural event, not preventable by any human agency, such as flood, storms, or lightning. Forces of nature that no one has control over, and therefore cannot be held accountable.
Does the flight of the geese into US Airways Flight 1549 constitute an "act of God"? I consulted the noted legal authority sodahead.com, in which most people argued that this was an "act of God" for which US Airways was not liable. Here are a couple of examples:
Well, I'm not a lawyer either, but until they put automatic shotguns on the wings of airplanes, I suspect that geese flying into airplanes will be a problem for some time to come.
Last year, I kicked off a twitter game that let folks rate superbowl ads....
We found that many enjoyed making the game interactive, by watching and critiquing the ads (more fun that just consuming) and many non-football fans were able to get into the spirit of it, (some were dragged to the superbowl parties).
But this year, Owyang won't participate himself:
I’ll be on a plane flying from Maui to SF during the superbowl (not really a loss for me) so I won’t be there to enjoy the festivities....
However, the event will still go on, with other people (such as Brian Solis) running the show.
I participated in the tweet-a-thon last year (although it was conducted differently), and plan to do so again this year.
Frankly, this will be an interesting year to watch how people react to the Super Bowl ads. Because of the downturn in the economy, NBC has had a difficult time selling ads in the last few months. (Silicon Alley Insider wrote about this in November.) Will the companies who did buy the ads feel that it was worth it? Will the companies that didn't buy the ads (e.g. the Big Three automakers) feel like they missed out?
[FEBRUARY 1 7:55 PM - I COLLECTED MY SUPER BOWL TWEETS HERE.]
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result.
The first thing that Google did? It apologized.
This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
This apology, incidentally, was posted at 9:02 a.m. Some could argue that Google should have posted something more quickly, but on the other hand it's possible that they could have responded much more slowly, especially on a weekend. I'm not going to quibble over a 97 minute response time.
The second thing that Google did is explain what happened. Here's part of the explanation:
What happened? Very simply, human error....We maintain a list of [bad] sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs.
Mayer then explained how Google detected and fixed the problem, and apologized again.
The third thing that Google did was...well, this:
We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.
The fourth thing that Google did was to update the post as more information became available.
Update at 10:29 am PST: This post was revised as more precise information became available....
The quotes above are from the updated version of the post, and it's possible that additional updates could occur after I post my own post, so it's probably best to check the original post.
Incidentally, if you follow Google's link to the StopBadware post, you find out why Google had to update its original information. Times in the StopBadware post are Eastern time, definitely not Pacific time.
[Update 12:31] Google has posted an update on their official blog that erroneously states that Google gets its list of URLs from us. This is not accurate. Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google’s search listings. We are attempting to work with Google to clarify their statement....
[Update 1:36] Google updated its statement to reflect that StopBadware does not provide Google’s badware data.
[Update 2:35] Hopefully this will be the last update, as Google has acknowledged the error, apologized to its customers, and fixed the problem. As many know, we have a strong relationship with Google, which is a sponsor and partner of StopBadware.org. The mistake in Google’s initial statement, indicating that we supply them with badware data, is a common misperception. We appreciate their follow up efforts in clarifying the relationship on their blog and with the media. Despite today’s glitch, we continue to support Google’s effort to proactively warn users of badware sites, and our experience is that they are committed to doing so as accurately and as fairly as possible.
You can see why StopBadware was irritated. How would you feel if you were a small organization and a huge company blamed you for a problem?
So perhaps Google should have apologized to StopBadware.org. For all I know, they may have done so.
One of the new cost cutting moves announced was the elimination of ready-brewed decaf coffee after noon.
BusinessWeek also noted one of Starbucks' previous cost-cutting measures:
Last year, Starbucks cut back on the number of rotating daily coffees it offered, choosing instead to make Pike Place its daily house brand always available.
Now I can understand if Starbucks wants to cut out the Paul McCartney CDs or whatever. But last I checked, the official name of the company is still Starbucks Coffee Company, and its mission statement is still "To inspire and nurture the human spirit— one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time." Somehow it doesn't seem all that inspiring when you cut back on your main product line. Nokia did it, but it had mobile phones to replace its paper products.
No offense to Howard Schultz, but I suspect that Starbucks needs to be run by an insane person.
Let me give two examples.
Perhaps you've heard of Harlan Sanders, better known as Colonel Sanders. He opened a cafe in 1929, created his special fried chicken recipe in 1939, and was considered synonymous with his fried chicken recipe until his death in 1980. Actually, even afterwards, but the post-1980 cartoon character can't compare with the real thing.
The good colonel would do anything to promote his chicken.
Another insane person is Jim Koch. I had never heard of the guy, nor of the Boston Beer Company, until I began hearing these radio commercials for Samuel Adams beer. And he didn't talk about return on investment...he talked about beer. And not just on the radio:
[I]n the mid eighties Jim Koch literally went door to door in the Boston area to convince tavern owners to carry his beer.
Just as Jim Koch is about to paste a sticker for Samuel Adams beer on the cooler of a Manhattan supermarket, the red-faced manager appears. "Don't you dare put anything on my shelves without my permission," he fumes. The brewer musters his most disarming smile and extends his hand. "Hi," he says in the voice made familiar by 15 years of cheeky radio commercials. "I'm Jim Koch, of Samuel Adams beer." The manager is unimpressed: "It's a little late for that," he says curtly. "Please leave my store immediately.
So you have Jim Koch running around in an insane manner in grocery stores, and you had Harlan Sanders running around in an insane manner all over North America (even criticizing Hueblin, who owned Kentucky Fried Chicken, at one point).
[A] marketer of kitchen goods and housewares...had an epiphany when he first visited the original Starbucks stores in Seattle in the early 1980s. Used to the ‘swill’ of American filter coffee, he fell in love with the real thing, and knew instantly he wanted to work for this offbeat and passionate company....
In 1982, to the dismay of his parents, he left his position and joined Starbucks, having persuaded the founders to hire him as its marketing director. Security had been replaced by passion.
In his first few months he was sent to a coffee trade fair in Milan. He loved Italy’s crowded, atmospheric cafes, seemingly on every corner, and suddenly realized that the key to Starbucks’ future was not just roasting and selling coffee, but serving it. On this trip he had his first café latte, a mixture of espresso and warm, frothy milk that at the time was almost unheard of in America.
However, this person left Starbucks and started his own cafe, Il Giornale. The rest is history, because this person who got so excited about Starbucks coffee that he left Starbucks was...Howard Schultz.
You see, Odiogo doesn't like to enable itself on blogs with very short posts. So it didn't like my firsttwo posts, and even the third post (which was longer) didn't really help matters. So let's try one more time.
We can drift along as though there were still a cold war, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons that will never be used, ignoring the problems of people in this country and around the world, being one of the worst environmental violators on earth, standing against any sort of viable programs to protect the world's forests or to cut down on acid rain or the global warming or ozone depletion. We can ignore human rights violations in other countries, or we can take these things on as true leaders ought to and accept the inspiring challenge of America for the future.
There’s no denying that a collapse in stock prices today would pose serious macroeconomic challenges for the United States. Consumer spending would slow, and the U.S. economy would become less of a magnet for foreign investors. Economic growth, which in any case has recently been at unsustainable levels, would decline somewhat. History proves, however, that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.
