September, 20, 2004 archives

the new york times looks at why the major airline carriers are having so much trouble (via jason kottke). while it’s satisfying to bitch about the poor customer service, i think the key information is in this paragraph:

“The low-fare airlines’ operations are simpler and leaner; their labor costs are much lower; they do not have the financial burden of pension obligations to thousands of retired workers, a major expense for the older carriers; and crucially, they have not annoyed their customers nearly as much.”

it is too bad that the article does not throw out any figures about the impact of the labor costs and pension obligations.

here is another article from the perspective of airline employees, particularly former employees of now-defunct airlines.

• world wildlife fund
• amnesty international
• america’s second harvest
• southern poverty law center
• medecins sans frontieres (doctors without borders)

how dell got soul (via evhead) is an interesting profile of how dell re-examined its corporate culture when its growth decelerated a few years ago. key paragraph:

“I realized that we had created a culture of stock price, a culture of financial performance, and a culture of ‘what's in it for me?’ throughout our employee base,” says [Kevin] Rollins, who this year became Dell's chief executive officer. “There had to be something more in this institution that we loved and enjoyed than just making money or just having a stock price that went up.”

the recent migration woes are why i don’t offer paid accounts and discourage javascript blogrolls. the latter are a pretty bandwidth-intensive service to provide, which could only really be justified by doing the former, which just creates people who have a legitimate reason to complain when you don’t let the service take over your life. (there’s reactions from some users to the original pre-weekend “all clear” when that turned out to not quite be the case.)