I have been back at work for three days and today felt like I finally started getting some stuff done. Of course, I spent much of the morning watching the MacWorld
Keynote. There were several interesting things and it was, overall, fairly upbeat, given how poor the business climate is for technology companies generally. Apple is doing some belt-tightening -- a particularly obnoxious example is that they're going to start charging for the "free" email accounts that they've provided for several years. This brain-damaged move is almost certain to bite them in the end: I expect that almost nobody who uses mac.com "needs" it. They use it because they like Macs and it has cachet for them. In the end, they'll simply chase away a bunch of the Mac enthusiasts and give them something to grumble about and hold a grudge about. And I can see the next Microsoft ad: "Do you want .Mac for $99 or .Net for free?"
Still, Apple is particularly well-suited to weather the crisis because several of their constituencies (the wealthy and education) are less likely to suffer cuts in a downturn than business. (As Robert Reich has argued, the only reason that business suffers such cuts is because if the current management doesn't make every possible cut to maintain profitability in a company, then someone else will take it over and make the cuts for them.) Businesses are about making money.
When I worked for a small company a number of years ago, I worked with a fellow who had been a business major. He would look a the director of the company and say, "Now there's a real businessman." There would be an odd catch in his voice when he said, "businessman" and it took me a while to figure out what he meant. When he said, "businessman" it was the worst epithet he could ascribe to a human being. In fact he probably meant that the person was so low they could no longer claim membership in the human race. What he meant was that the person cared only for making money.
I hope that people gain some appreciation of the nature of business from the Enron and Worldcom scandals -- and the other scandals sure to follow. If it was more profitable to have everyone in mud huts, then "businesses" would try to put us there. If it was profitable to gut us all like fish, then some "businessman" would be happy to do it in order to cash in. We need regulation and strong unions to restrict the ability of organized business to try to make money by commonizing costs on the rest of us and privatizing profits for themselves.
Microsoft often talks about all their "innovation". Microsoft's number one goal is to make sure people have to spend money to buy Microsoft software. Seed companies are happy to develop seeds that will provide increased yields -- as long as they can be certain that the farmer will have to go back to them to buy more seed. Companies don't try to make people's lives better: they try to think of ways to make people pay them money. If a company created a way that the worlds starving people could feed themselves for nothing, they would sit on it, until they could "innovate" a way to make people have to pay them for it. That's what business is all about.
Which isn't to say that I don't have great respect for many businesspeople who are people first. Let me recognize Mark Powers who runs the Harp in North Amherst. Mark has lived in North Amherst for the better part of 30 years. When the neighborhood bar closed, and looked to remain closed, he decided to buy it and open it as a traditional Irish pub. What he wanted, was to create a family-friendly environment that could be truly multigenerational. He wanted his community to have a place where kids, parents, and grandparents could come and have a good time. They have great food, a friendly, welcoming environment, and Guinness on draft. Mark also works to give back to the community: he is sponsoring the North Amherst peewee baseball team that my son and his son plays on. Business can be a great thing when it remembers what people really need.