August 28, 2013
MBAs say values matter more than money
Eighty-five percent of respondents said learning about social and environmental business is a priority for them in their graduate school program, and 91 percent said that social and environmental issues are essential or very important to a business’s long-term success.
I am glad to see that so many new MBAs desire more than purely cold hard cash. Environmental, health care and social improvement are fields that these energetic and ambitious individuals need to contribute to. Richard Branson famously said “Have fun, do good, money [and success] will come.”
Marissa Mayer has “many enemies”
Mayer is an executive outsider not only as a woman but also as a techie. Her background is not in business or marketing, but in the actual guts of product development and management. This makes her far more of an outsider to business culture than women like Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Creative, technically oriented outsiders are founders, not corporate ladder-climbers: David Packard, Walt Disney, Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and even Bill Gates.
Honestly, I think that Mayer is doing a fantastic job. She has been CEO of Yahoo! for around a year now and while receiving a lot of criticism, she has had many successes. She invested in Tumblr and overhauled Flickr. And just recently, Yahoo! has passed the almighty Google in US visitors. Furthermore, Apple has been favouring Yahoo in services such as default search and weather in iOS.
New Zealand bans software patents
“The patents system doesn’t work for software because it is almost impossible for genuine technology companies to create new software without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents that exist, often for very obvious work,”
This is a dramatic and bold ruling that will probably hit the rest of the world within 10 years. Or at least some rethinking of the current patent system in the US.
The Nintendo 2DS is a new handheld in the DS family due out on October 12 for $130, in red and blue. As its name suggests, the 2DS plays all 3DS and DS games, but in 2D.
Personally, I think it looks terrible. A 2DS will not help Nintendo with their problems. Hint #1: make a new “GameBoy” and “GameCube”. Hint #2: make games for iOS. I’d pay good money to play Pokemon and Super Mario Bros. on my iPhone or iPad!