Down With Evil Corporation Fools

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

Today it was announced that Steve Jobs passed away. Jobs was only 56 years old. If you look at what Jobs accomplished in his lifetime it is pretty amazing. People forget that even Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded. Jobs left in 1985 and came back in 1996. I would say that the real innovation at Apple came in the new few years with the IPod in 2000, IPhone in 2007, and IPad in 2010. Clearly, these products made everyone better off. Steve Jobs was able to figure out what millions of people would enjoy. The vision Steve Jobs had allowed us to listen to hours of music, video conference with people from a cell phone, and introduced one of the first multiuse phones that allowed for internet access. People describe Jobs has obsessed with details. Steve Jobs obsession for perfection made our lives better.  Not only did Steve Jobs enrich millions of lives by providing employees with jobs, money, and benefits, but made himself wealthy in the process. According to Forbes, in 2011 Steve Jobs had a net worth of $8.3 billion. By pursing his passion and being obsessed with details he made himself better off an in addition thoroughly served his fellow man.

Wall Street Protesting Nonsense

In the past couple of weeks there have been protests going on across cities nationwide. It seems as if the protests started in New York and spread to other cities like Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Houston. The one small point I agree with the protesters is the crony capitalism when major banks got bailed out. Everything else these people are talking about is utter nonsense. The people claim they are the bottom 99% and are complaining about the top 1%. Of course, people are okay with the top 1% who claim they want to pay higher taxes (but don’t voluntary do so). Presidential candidate Herman Cain said, “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich blame yourself”. I partially agree with Cain. However, government legislation and regulation have been putting people out of work. The protesters claim that corporations have power. I find this interesting since no company has ever forced me to buy any of their products. I voluntary got out of my chair, voluntary drove to the store, and voluntary handed the cashier money to purchase that product. The main complaint is that corporations have large lobbying power. What the protestors forget is that corporations want lobbying power because the federal government hands out valuable goodies. The government spent over $3.5 trillion last year. If companies could get any part of that federal money through contracts or through specialized legislation they are willing to spend money to get favors. The protestors have the cause and effect backwards. The power of government is causing corporations to spend money to get favors granted. If the scope and size of the government was limited politicians wouldn’t have as many goodies to hand out which would put the lobbyists out of business.

If the protestors think they have it that bad they should take a visit down south to Cuba. Economics is the studying of allocating resources and considering alternatives. The last time people are not trying to break out of the United States to flew to Cuba. Rewarding people for hard work and punishing people who make bad decisions sounds pretty fair to me. No economic system is perfect. The question is what system has lifted more people out of poverty. The answer to that question I would say is free market capitalism.

Luis von Ahn = Brillance

Google: Do No Evil

In what seems like one of the worst antitrust suit cases of all time the Department of Justice is going after Google for their search engine. Like nearly all antitrust suits competitors begin to gripe about how “unfair” the market is and try to get the government involved to break up any type of “monopoly”. People are concerned about Google’s dominance. Nextag and Yelp claim that Google was ranking Google products higher than leading competitor’s products. What is really fascinating is that unlike previous monopoly companies (Microsoft, Standard Oil, and IBM) Google doesn’t even really charge to use its service. I find it hard to call Google a monopoly when consumers are not even paying for it! Not only is Google search free, but other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, and other services are free to use. This is interesting because people years ago would have paid a premium for the quality of data on Google. Researchers even in the early 1990’s had to physically go into libraries hunt down books in order to do research. Google has made searching for hard to find facts and data fast, easy, and very inexpensive. Google handles 34,000 searches per second or over 1 trillion searches per year. I have a feeling Google uses these searches to improve searching. One feature I have noticed Google uses is auto-complete where you type something in and Google tries to figure out what you are typing. Also if you misspell something Google will say “Did you mean…” Google was only founded in 1997 so it hasn’t had a long history yet I have a feeling the technology will get better.

With so much data online now the value will be data mining. Data mining is using data to solve problems or recognize patterns that can help researchers find a common thing between data. Google ranks websites or pages based on how relevant they are. In 2009, alone 47 million websites were added. Google has software that can crawl though these websites and pick up information that people might search. Sites that are visited more frequently are ranked higher than sites not used as much. Even when I have researched certain things I find Google doesn’t always give me the best answer. No doubt in the coming years even more information will be put online which will allow Google searches to get even better.

Why the Department of Justice is wasting countless hours bringing top executives from Google to testify is mindboggling. Executives at any Fortune 500 could be doing better things with their time rather than explaining why their search engine is better than everyone else’s. Like history shows consumers never complain about monopolies it is the competitors who complain because they are getting their clocks cleaned.