Again trying to apply business solutions to public institutions. Your suggestion is particularly ironical since what is stated here is that the problem is actually the difficulty of measuring performance.
What's more, the obsession with measuring performance in education, regardless or resources invested or support for teachers, is getting ludicrous. You want good teachers? Then make taching a profession worth pursuing. The suggestion of trying to measure when real measure would cost more that educating in the first place, or would become the primary focus when it shouldn't, will make teaching as a profession even more unstable, with constant interference from well meaning people who know nothing about public education imposing new controls and imposing artificial measures of performance. The end result will be that you are just going to increase cynicism and drive even more good educators out.
See what is happening in the UK. They are on the route to a 'market' experiment in higher education. This has been launched by no other than lord Browne, the CEO of BP who had to resigned in 2007, and then named at the head of a commission to review higher education finances.
Academics are waking up to the meaning of a law that has been passed without the preliminary white paper, that is, without sufficient public discussion. They are going to cut 90% of public financing to the universities, and harnessing the student with the resulting debt. They call that: "putting the student at the center of the reform".
An experiment of this sort has been carried on in New Zealand in the 90's. The result has been catastrophic. Proposals of this kind, all with a libertarian/market flavor, are being proposed in legislatures all over the world at the moment. It is as if the right had found its next target.
And universities having to pay extortion money ($5,000 per year in some cases for a single journal) is also a non-issue? You are simply describing as inevitable the mechanism by which parasites exploit your work, so you are just looking for the quick way out. Shortsighted. Not a false issue.
Spot on: the question whether we want Amazon to be the only place to get book is THE question, which is neatly illustrated by this fine piece of Newspeak uttered by the Amazon's top executives mentioned in the summary:
The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader
Meaning: The only necessary part of the book publishing process (as demonstrated in the music and the film industries) is distribution and we are now going to take care of that.
The web is a wonderful example for how sharing the burden can work without a traditional organization apportioning the shares. This guy simply doesn't get that.
Agreeing with your insightful post, but a nuance about him not 'getting it': take notice how he talks about "sharing the burden among the users". We may be witnessing a new approach by WIPO and a fresh Newspeak idiom in gestation, where appropriation of the public good by private entities is presented as 'sharing'.
I also just watched the whole committee session, and I disagree with you on Susan Creighton's performance, even on the Apple episode you mention. She had very solid answers to the core questions related to whether Google constituted a monopoly. The questioners simply assumed that to be the case and were very aggressively asking hypothetical questions: "If a court found that Google was a monopoly, what would you suggest Google do in response to correct the situation". She rightly did not answer those and she very clearly established why, in her view, Google did not constitute a monopoly. She was the most articulated of any of the members on this committee, not lessening the solidity of Schmidt's testimony, which was also impressive.
I was also shocked by the 'Stop your whining' line you have been served with your previous comment. Your are making a valid point underlining the importance of users' feedback.
However, I feel that in your response, you get carried over perhaps more by your taking offense of the above line than by the behavior of the Fold-it team. I even read a pinch of regret in your choice of words. What you want to condemn after all is not the idea that brought about a brilliant scientific accomplishment, but the negligence of someone in the team managing feedback from users.
Collective accomplishments are brought about by a sum of people who don't necessarily live up to the same standards, and understanding this is part of the collective learning curve.
This is why, on the different but also brought here in this thread of Wikipedia, I am not too impressed by the people constantly criticizing some behaviors they have experienced and disliked. The sum is greater than the part. We need to get used of the consequences of the second part of this equation.
P.S. There is a good ending to this story: follow the links to the blog of Neil Fraser, a Google engineer who bailed the guy out after he spent seven months in jail, accused of, since video recording police is not illegal... "attempted lynching"....
Check where this initiative originates from, indeed, and observe how it follows a pattern. This is something that we are seeing more and more, like in UK with the creation of the Lib Dems. The creation of new parties, so-called centrists but mostly taking votes on the left, ensuring the election of conservatives, or at least of a coalition government dominated by the conservatives.
The usual response to this observation is that the targeted party, here the Democrats, is anywhere but on the left. Well, considering where are the Conservatives in your country, way out to lunch, and considering how they are actively taking hostage and destroying the democratic institutions, I would pay some attention before voting for a third party...
Get over your frustrations about the process and consider the broad picture and the implications.
Wikipedia continues into the 21st century what the Encyclopedists first started in the 18th.
It needs to be recognized so the collaboration on which it stands is not hampered by corporations wanting to cash on the Internet while having done nothing for its development. We need to point out where real value resides on the Web, when they insist on protecting their narrow economic interests.
I am not sure how much help will come from a recognition by the UNESCO, but I will back any kind of effort without a second thought.
Trolls may be a problem. Personnally, I think that special interests groups present a more formidable challenge.
Once they target a thread on an organized attack, either by themselves or through a PR agency too happy to cater to their needs, there is little that a few, by definition disorganized, moderators can do. The tone heats up in minutes, you can see that any of the seasoned intelligent commentators stay away from such threads. Sometimes, they back off from the site entirely.
Slashdot has a pretty impressive record, and the administrators surely have valuable experience in this regard. Even then, from time to time, you see the sturdy moderating system collapse under an persistent assault. This is always a disheartening experience for me, to see bullies have their... I mean our, cake.
In these times, I always wonder what we could do to prevent this from taking place. I do think that an awful lot is at stake: public interest, to say it in two words.
The chances of the reactor blowing up are next to zero.
Well it has blown up now, and I was just hearing the Japanese prime minister announcing the evacuated zone to 20km.
The biggest problem will be either a core breech(aka melting through the core chamber), or a slow uncontrolled cooling of the control rods because of damage by them being too hot. However considering that the CBC article is hours old already, and they've been slow venting, and finally have the ability to turn the pumps back on to get water into the chamber it should be controllable unless something happens again.
This sounds reassuring...
Now, let this be a lesson to anti-nuke nuts. Most reactors built within the last decade or two have two redundant systems for moving water. Steam, or mechanical. This series of reactors doesn't. You know why? Because in Japan, anything that could possibly at all, maybe related to nuclear, or radiation makes environmentalists go batshit crazy.
But it doesn't help that the reactors were built to withstand at least a 9.0 and it was hit by a 9.1, and I've heard it may be revised again as high as 9.4.
A lesson to anti-nuke nuts??? Oh I see! Disagreeing on nuclear policy makes one a flaky nut. How then are we going to produce sound policies, if people like you instantly jump on ad hominem attacks, instead of assessing a real situation for what it is: the Japanese have now to deal with a major nuclear disaster, itself in the middle of a horrible natural disaster, and you go on blaming those who dare to ask questions, and you dare come here on Slashdot telling us that those reactors are subpar, not because of industry practices, but because the industry could not build more of them.
Take the Lovecraft estate. (...) some small press or other claimed his works, gave them away as part of a bankruptcy case, and often awarded them to some other company that seems to have existed only for a few days as one court settlement after another cascaded through the overburdened system.
Fascinating. No wonder there is so much confusion about the Betty Boop case here, but you are closer to the matter when mentioning attempts by estates to maintain ownership (real or imagined) of copyrights, simply based on your name. The latter seems to be the case here as this paragraph from the Court of Appeal, Ninth Circuit, testifies:
Max Fleischer's family attempted to revive the Fleischer cartoon business in the early 1970s. The family incorporated its new entity under the same name as Original Fleischer and attempted to repurchase the intellectual property rights to the Betty Boop character. To be clear, Fleischer, the plaintiff in this action, is a distinct and separate entity from the now defunct Original Fleischer which first owned Betty Boop. Fleischer believes that its intellectual-property-rights purchases have made it the exclusive owner of the Betty Boop character copyright and trademark. Based on this belief, Fleischer licenses the Betty Boop character for use in toys, dolls, and other merchandise.
Every time an article comes on here about Anon everybody bashes the news organizations for saying Anonymous has a hierarchy with 'senior' members, leaders, and so forth.
So why are you so quick to accept this? How can this press release saying 'Its not really us' carry any more weight then one saying "It's us".
Oh really? Meaning Westboro Church can do a publicity grab and play victim, and there is no one able to set things straight, BY DEFINITION?
Does the nonsense that is Anonymous begin to appear a bit clearer now?
Next are rogue attacks against banks or some vital institutions so that repressive legislation can be pushed through... Oh wait...
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I just noticed this and it is too good to miss. Listen to the voice of Big Brother at 00.12. After the welcoming of a new information age, he describes it emphatically as : "A garden of pure ideology".
Now the people telling you exactly what apps you can and can't use, partner with people that tell you exactly what to think.
1984 indeed. iTelescreen.
Agreed. The 1984 Apple commercial, originally shown in... 1984 during the SuperBowl and beautifully shot by Ridley Scott is worth watching again. I am actually surprised at how little Apple value the goodwill they have generated over the years as the small guy holding on against IBM and Microsoft. It seems to me that they are forfeiting vast opportunities over short term gains:
They are already commercializing a small reactor. From TFA:
The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers.
Also from TFA, in the "responses" section:
Steven B. Krivit, publisher of the New Energy Times, noted that Rossi has been accused of a few crimes, including tax fraud and illegally importing gold, which are unrelated to his research.
...but you can bet your ass that that corporate philosophy has made them money over the years. Schmidt is short sighted.
Right on!
Furthermore, it can be argued that making money is secondary, or at least only a secondary consequence of more fundamental things here. Corporations make money as a result of providing a valuable service to their customers, after all, and here the "customers" are first and foremost Netizens. Brin and Page's corporate values, Google's success and the respect this company has earned in the Net community and here on Slashdot is for me the living demonstration that the "greed is good" ideology peddled by less moral corporate abusers (Koch brothers, libertarians, etc.) is bunk. No wonder some people (think Ballmers' "I will fucking kill them") wish them ill.
I keep wishing that Steve Jobs/Apple would realize that and try to get more on the side of Google than the rest of the corporate bums in that respect. Unfortunately, they don't seem to. In the short run, they are OK and only get bad comments here on Slashdot, but in the long run, they are losing tremendous opportunities. Sad.
My free association of this statement reminds me of this joke.
Cal was out driving in the country (...) "I'm just crazy, not stupid."
What a wonderful story! I would call this one storytelling rather than just a joke Thanks for your insightful as well as lighthearted posts on this topic, Revek. I hope that many parents with an autistic child read you. You bring compassion to the conversation just when it is needed.
Who their leader is changes and doesn't really matter as much as in other cases.
Its pretty much a case of a totally distributed system which forms links on the fly.
The person who decided on the DDOS, and the people who followed him/her could be totally different from the people who will be out protesting.
Who takes charge DOES matter. Otherwise, your enemy may as well initiate any action in your name, that is, take charge and associate your cause with mob disorder. The aim and net effect of this would be to raise public opinion against your cause in order to push for web censorship policies...
I had noticed that reason and critical thinking were fading in the world of late, but I never thought that the rot would get so bad that the foremost geek site on the internet would be giving credence to this sort of rubbish. What the hell were the editors thinking? What should I even have to say that ghosts don't exist and that this "investigation" may as well be looking for invisible green unicorns?
The only question I ask is: where did it all go wrong? When did the world abandon progress?
I share your dismay, and you convey the feeling pretty well.
On my part, I try not to reach premature conclusions on interpreting all this. The Enlightenment over the18th century culminated in two political revolutions (American and French) that brought about the modern liberal state that in turn promoted universal education. The conservative forces, weakened, never really gave up and can be seen as staging a counter-revolution. The attacks on and the demonizing of the "damned liberals" can hardly be interpreted otherwise.
Will they have their way or are they staging their obliteration from history? This remains to be seen.
I think she fails to see the differences between people and corporations. People can be idealists, corporations exist to make money.
I am tired of hearing this argument. Corporations have a reputation to maintain and this has a real value on the balance sheet. Microsoft's bad reputation costs them everyday in the fact of other corps not wanting to do business with them and in influential consumers not recommending their products. Managers who ignore the fundamentals of serving their customers do so at their peril. We may live in cynical times, but reality will ultimately knock at the door.
Slashdot Mirror
Most insightful comment in this thread in the least amount of space. Thank you.
Again trying to apply business solutions to public institutions. Your suggestion is particularly ironical since what is stated here is that the problem is actually the difficulty of measuring performance.
What's more, the obsession with measuring performance in education, regardless or resources invested or support for teachers, is getting ludicrous. You want good teachers? Then make taching a profession worth pursuing. The suggestion of trying to measure when real measure would cost more that educating in the first place, or would become the primary focus when it shouldn't, will make teaching as a profession even more unstable, with constant interference from well meaning people who know nothing about public education imposing new controls and imposing artificial measures of performance. The end result will be that you are just going to increase cynicism and drive even more good educators out.
See what is happening in the UK. They are on the route to a 'market' experiment in higher education. This has been launched by no other than lord Browne, the CEO of BP who had to resigned in 2007, and then named at the head of a commission to review higher education finances.
Academics are waking up to the meaning of a law that has been passed without the preliminary white paper, that is, without sufficient public discussion.
They are going to cut 90% of public financing to the universities, and harnessing the student with the resulting debt. They call that: "putting the student at the center of the reform".
Stefan Collini is the foremost critic of this idea and has just published a book about this. Read this article in The Guardian (free access) to get an idea of how the UK is on the path to destroying one of the finest higher education system: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/19/university-market-white-paper
An experiment of this sort has been carried on in New Zealand in the 90's. The result has been catastrophic. Proposals of this kind, all with a libertarian/market flavor, are being proposed in legislatures all over the world at the moment. It is as if the right had found its next target.
And universities having to pay extortion money ($5,000 per year in some cases for a single journal) is also a non-issue?
You are simply describing as inevitable the mechanism by which parasites exploit your work, so you are just looking for the quick way out. Shortsighted.
Not a false issue.
Spot on: the question whether we want Amazon to be the only place to get book is THE question, which is neatly illustrated by this fine piece of Newspeak uttered by the Amazon's top executives mentioned in the summary:
The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader
Meaning: The only necessary part of the book publishing process (as demonstrated in the music and the film industries) is distribution and we are now going to take care of that.
The web is a wonderful example for how sharing the burden can work without a traditional organization apportioning the shares. This guy simply doesn't get that.
Agreeing with your insightful post, but a nuance about him not 'getting it': take notice how he talks about "sharing the burden among the users". We may be witnessing a new approach by WIPO and a fresh Newspeak idiom in gestation, where appropriation of the public good by private entities is presented as 'sharing'.
I also just watched the whole committee session, and I disagree with you on Susan Creighton's performance, even on the Apple episode you mention. She had very solid answers to the core questions related to whether Google constituted a monopoly. The questioners simply assumed that to be the case and were very aggressively asking hypothetical questions: "If a court found that Google was a monopoly, what would you suggest Google do in response to correct the situation". She rightly did not answer those and she very clearly established why, in her view, Google did not constitute a monopoly. She was the most articulated of any of the members on this committee, not lessening the solidity of Schmidt's testimony, which was also impressive.
I was also shocked by the 'Stop your whining' line you have been served with your previous comment. Your are making a valid point underlining the importance of users' feedback.
However, I feel that in your response, you get carried over perhaps more by your taking offense of the above line than by the behavior of the Fold-it team. I even read a pinch of regret in your choice of words. What you want to condemn after all is not the idea that brought about a brilliant scientific accomplishment, but the negligence of someone in the team managing feedback from users.
Collective accomplishments are brought about by a sum of people who don't necessarily live up to the same standards, and understanding this is part of the collective learning curve.
This is why, on the different but also brought here in this thread of Wikipedia, I am not too impressed by the people constantly criticizing some behaviors they have experienced and disliked. The sum is greater than the part. We need to get used of the consequences of the second part of this equation.
Prisoner 6: "I recorded a video of police beating the crap out of a teenager for no good reason at a bus stop."
http://neil.fraser.name/news/2010/12/23/
http://neil.fraser.name/news/2011/04/28/
P.S. There is a good ending to this story: follow the links to the blog of Neil Fraser, a Google engineer who bailed the guy out after he spent seven months in jail, accused of, since video recording police is not illegal... "attempted lynching"....
Thanks for the link, which leads to the blog of a Google Engineer ...Perusing... MY!!!! Look at what Google employee's do in their free time:
http://neil.fraser.name/news/2011/04/28/
Admirable.
Check where this initiative originates from, indeed, and observe how it follows a pattern. This is something that we are seeing more and more, like in UK with the creation of the Lib Dems. The creation of new parties, so-called centrists but mostly taking votes on the left, ensuring the election of conservatives, or at least of a coalition government dominated by the conservatives.
The usual response to this observation is that the targeted party, here the Democrats, is anywhere but on the left. Well, considering where are the Conservatives in your country, way out to lunch, and considering how they are actively taking hostage and destroying the democratic institutions, I would pay some attention before voting for a third party...
First things first.
Get over your frustrations about the process and consider the broad picture and the implications.
Wikipedia continues into the 21st century what the Encyclopedists first started in the 18th.
It needs to be recognized so the collaboration on which it stands is not hampered by corporations wanting to cash on the Internet while having done nothing for its development. We need to point out where real value resides on the Web, when they insist on protecting their narrow economic interests.
I am not sure how much help will come from a recognition by the UNESCO, but I will back any kind of effort without a second thought.
Trolls may be a problem. Personnally, I think that special interests groups present a more formidable challenge.
Once they target a thread on an organized attack, either by themselves or through a PR agency too happy to cater to their needs, there is little that a few, by definition disorganized, moderators can do. The tone heats up in minutes, you can see that any of the seasoned intelligent commentators stay away from such threads. Sometimes, they back off from the site entirely.
Slashdot has a pretty impressive record, and the administrators surely have valuable experience in this regard. Even then, from time to time, you see the sturdy moderating system collapse under an persistent assault. This is always a disheartening experience for me, to see bullies have their... I mean our, cake.
In these times, I always wonder what we could do to prevent this from taking place. I do think that an awful lot is at stake: public interest, to say it in two words.
The chances of the reactor blowing up are next to zero.
Well it has blown up now, and I was just hearing the Japanese prime minister announcing the evacuated zone to 20km.
The biggest problem will be either a core breech(aka melting through the core chamber), or a slow uncontrolled cooling of the control rods because of damage by them being too hot. However considering that the CBC article is hours old already, and they've been slow venting, and finally have the ability to turn the pumps back on to get water into the chamber it should be controllable unless something happens again.
This sounds reassuring...
Now, let this be a lesson to anti-nuke nuts. Most reactors built within the last decade or two have two redundant systems for moving water. Steam, or mechanical. This series of reactors doesn't. You know why? Because in Japan, anything that could possibly at all, maybe related to nuclear, or radiation makes environmentalists go batshit crazy.
But it doesn't help that the reactors were built to withstand at least a 9.0 and it was hit by a 9.1, and I've heard it may be revised again as high as 9.4.
A lesson to anti-nuke nuts??? Oh I see! Disagreeing on nuclear policy makes one a flaky nut. How then are we going to produce sound policies, if people like you instantly jump on ad hominem attacks, instead of assessing a real situation for what it is: the Japanese have now to deal with a major nuclear disaster, itself in the middle of a horrible natural disaster, and you go on blaming those who dare to ask questions, and you dare come here on Slashdot telling us that those reactors are subpar, not because of industry practices, but because the industry could not build more of them.
Amazing, just amazing...
Take the Lovecraft estate. (...) some small press or other claimed his works, gave them away as part of a bankruptcy case, and often awarded them to some other company that seems to have existed only for a few days as one court settlement after another cascaded through the overburdened system.
Fascinating. No wonder there is so much confusion about the Betty Boop case here, but you are closer to the matter when mentioning attempts by estates to maintain ownership (real or imagined) of copyrights, simply based on your name. The latter seems to be the case here as this paragraph from the Court of Appeal, Ninth Circuit, testifies:
Max Fleischer's family attempted to revive the Fleischer cartoon business in the early 1970s. The family incorporated its new entity under the same name as Original Fleischer and attempted to repurchase the intellectual property rights to the Betty Boop character. To be clear, Fleischer, the plaintiff in this action, is a distinct and separate entity from the now defunct Original Fleischer which first owned Betty Boop. Fleischer believes that its intellectual-property-rights purchases have made it the exclusive owner of the Betty Boop character copyright and trademark. Based on this belief, Fleischer licenses the Betty Boop character for use in toys, dolls, and other merchandise.
Every time an article comes on here about Anon everybody bashes the news organizations for saying Anonymous has a hierarchy with 'senior' members, leaders, and so forth.
So why are you so quick to accept this? How can this press release saying 'Its not really us' carry any more weight then one saying "It's us".
Oh really? Meaning Westboro Church can do a publicity grab and play victim, and there is no one able to set things straight, BY DEFINITION?
Does the nonsense that is Anonymous begin to appear a bit clearer now?
Next are rogue attacks against banks or some vital institutions so that repressive legislation can be pushed through... Oh wait...
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I just noticed this and it is too good to miss. Listen to the voice of Big Brother at 00.12. After the welcoming of a new information age, he describes it emphatically as : "A garden of pure ideology".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
You cannot make this up.
Now the people telling you exactly what apps you can and can't use, partner with people that tell you exactly what to think.
1984 indeed. iTelescreen.
Agreed. The 1984 Apple commercial, originally shown in... 1984 during the SuperBowl and beautifully shot by Ridley Scott is worth watching again. I am actually surprised at how little Apple value the goodwill they have generated over the years as the small guy holding on against IBM and Microsoft. It seems to me that they are forfeiting vast opportunities over short term gains:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
--
"The facts of life are conservative." Margaret Thatcher
--
But reality has a well-known liberal bias.
They are already commercializing a small reactor. From TFA:
The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers.
Also from TFA, in the "responses" section:
Steven B. Krivit, publisher of the New Energy Times, noted that Rossi has been accused of a few crimes, including tax fraud and illegally importing gold, which are unrelated to his research.
...but you can bet your ass that that corporate philosophy has made them money over the years. Schmidt is short sighted.
Right on!
Furthermore, it can be argued that making money is secondary, or at least only a secondary consequence of more fundamental things here. Corporations make money as a result of providing a valuable service to their customers, after all, and here the "customers" are first and foremost Netizens. Brin and Page's corporate values, Google's success and the respect this company has earned in the Net community and here on Slashdot is for me the living demonstration that the "greed is good" ideology peddled by less moral corporate abusers (Koch brothers, libertarians, etc.) is bunk. No wonder some people (think Ballmers' "I will fucking kill them") wish them ill.
I keep wishing that Steve Jobs/Apple would realize that and try to get more on the side of Google than the rest of the corporate bums in that respect. Unfortunately, they don't seem to. In the short run, they are OK and only get bad comments here on Slashdot, but in the long run, they are losing tremendous opportunities. Sad.
My free association of this statement reminds me of this joke.
Cal was out driving in the country (...) "I'm just crazy, not stupid."
What a wonderful story! I would call this one storytelling rather than just a joke Thanks for your insightful as well as lighthearted posts on this topic, Revek. I hope that many parents with an autistic child read you. You bring compassion to the conversation just when it is needed.
Who their leader is changes and doesn't really matter as much as in other cases.
Its pretty much a case of a totally distributed system which forms links on the fly.
The person who decided on the DDOS, and the people who followed him/her could be totally different from the people who will be out protesting.
Who takes charge DOES matter. Otherwise, your enemy may as well initiate any action in your name, that is, take charge and associate your cause with mob disorder. The aim and net effect of this would be to raise public opinion against your cause in order to push for web censorship policies...
Oh wait...
I had noticed that reason and critical thinking were fading in the world of late, but I never thought that the rot would get so bad that the foremost geek site on the internet would be giving credence to this sort of rubbish. What the hell were the editors thinking? What should I even have to say that ghosts don't exist and that this "investigation" may as well be looking for invisible green unicorns?
As a society, we're reverting back to superstition and ignorance. We've even given up on even imagining a better future.
The only question I ask is: where did it all go wrong? When did the world abandon progress?
I share your dismay, and you convey the feeling pretty well.
On my part, I try not to reach premature conclusions on interpreting all this. The Enlightenment over the18th century culminated in two political revolutions (American and French) that brought about the modern liberal state that in turn promoted universal education. The conservative forces, weakened, never really gave up and can be seen as staging a counter-revolution. The attacks on and the demonizing of the "damned liberals" can hardly be interpreted otherwise.
Will they have their way or are they staging their obliteration from history? This remains to be seen.
I think she fails to see the differences between people and corporations. People can be idealists, corporations exist to make money.
I am tired of hearing this argument. Corporations have a reputation to maintain and this has a real value on the balance sheet. Microsoft's bad reputation costs them everyday in the fact of other corps not wanting to do business with them and in influential consumers not recommending their products. Managers who ignore the fundamentals of serving their customers do so at their peril. We may live in cynical times, but reality will ultimately knock at the door.