Archive for February 26th, 2007
Marissa Mayer takes a leaf out of Rummy’s book
Compare and contrast:
Before you could be signed in and be using one of the three products or two of the three products but not all and, of course, because people like to experiment with a new product, they forget whether they signed up for personalized search. Had they signed up for search history? This just makes it cleaner. If you’re signed in you’re using and/or have access to all three, if you’re signed out, you’re on the anonymous version of Google that doesn’t have personalization.
— Marissa Mayer: Feb 26, 2007, on personalization of search results.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.— Donald Rumsfeld: Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing.
Is Google the new WMD?
(Dis)charge of the MBA brigade
This article, Three out of four MBAs are unemployable, says study, in DNA is a lovely example of how to write a scatterbrained story and still have your editors clear it for publication, typos included. The story starts with a quote from a MBA graduate, who having passed out in 2005, ended up working in a BPO because he could not find a job anywhere else. It goes on to mention a legion of jobless MBAs, the existence of which goes contrary to every number mentioned in the article. I can only assume that the writer does not know the difference between unemployable and unemployed.
But the article does make a larger point, that every Tom, Dick and Harry these days (or should it be every Tarun, Dinesh and Harpreet?) is doing an MBA these days. I can’t count the number of times numerous well-wishers, including friends and family, have asked me to do the same. And there is already a fair number of people that I know who are doing a MBA (or planning to do soon) as a way out breaking through the glass ceiling into the echelons of senior management.
That makes me really wonder, who is really an ideal candidate for doing a MBA? I don’t agree too much with the ‘do-it-to-get-ahead’ crowd because I’ve always hated shortcuts in life and you need to have a better reason than pelting stones at celings made of glass to do it. I don’t like 90% of the MBAs out there (the unemployable ones, that is), because they don’t understand business, operations and most importantly, common sense and think life is all about making amazing Powerpoint presentations.
