On this post, I will examine two blog posts by fellow peers and provide my take on them. This will primarily be my opinion.

Blog Post #1: You Should Give A Damn About Your Bad Reputation by Megan Binder

Right off the bat, a very opinionated piece about corporations committing heinous acts and unethical behavior. She accuses two big companies, Apple and Toyota, for exploiting workers and endangering their drivers (respectively).

In the case of Apple, it’s 100% true and well-known that the working conditions in China are disgusting and the wages sickening; however, we as consumers do not care. Apple’s brand is so massive that any scandal or news story exposing their lack of morals are immediately and blindly protected by fans. How were sales effected after the story about suicide nets was released? Eh, not that much; this isn’t because what they did wasn’t wrong or media turning a blind eye, it’s because Apple consumers just don’t care.

Toyota and other car manufacturers have a long history of letting faulty products sell. I talked about this in my previous blog post where faulty cars caused multiple deaths before the government decided to intervene. But again, we don’t care. We don’t care that Honda cheaped out on a $2 part; we don’t care if their employees die early deaths; we do not care about the latest recall because we would buy a Toyota anyways. That’s because it isn’t in the public’s eye for long; another story about an actress going to rehab or some new disease will divert our attention as they sweep it under the rug.

Blog Post #2: Creating Shared Value: too good to be true? By Sakiko Toriya

Ok, so this tackles the issues of the idea of shared value: primarily that it ignores how society’s problem got here. In a broad sense, shared value almost seems like a diversion, and a poor one at that. A cynical view could be that the businesses have some corporate interest in giving back. McDonald’s sponsoring youth soccer teams? I don’t know if that excuses them God-only-knows

what to millions of kids after the game (I mean really, what is pink slime?); it definitely doesn’t fix the amount of obesity caused by fast food. The point is, corporations should try to correct the negative externality they create in the world; I just don’t know if what they are doing is really helping the problems they have created. A better way to create shared value is spending more money for sustainable, environmentally-friendly, healthy inputs… but that would hurt their bottom line.

Word Count: 447

 

Its official: the shared economy is upon us. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Lyft have changed the game forever. It was once where we had to call a business to get our goods or services (unless a friend or neighbor could do the same thing); now, there’s an app for that.

Shared economy focuses its idea around collaborative consumption wherefore people can fully utilize a highly priced product like say, a house or car (investopedia.com). What incentivizes people is that it turns your house or car from a source of debt to a source of income. It’s easier now than ever to become a taxi driver in your spare time with Uber, and rent out your property when you’re away with Airbnb. Also, it’s cheaper for consumers than conventional services and goods because it creates a more competitive market. This is its value proposition: break traditional monopolies and create more value out of products.

Positive externalities also come out of this. Juliet Schor points out that ‘secondary markets reduce demand for new goods, so footprints go down’ or at least they should (greattransition.org). (Go to the article, it’s very illuminating). What she is quick to point out is that not a lot of studies have been done about that. This is probably because things like Uber are so new and are finally big enough to make a noticeable difference.

So why oppose it? The company relies on people to do their key activities for them. Businesses like Uber and Airbnb put their ‘employees’ in bad positions ‘who may not even realize what kinds of liabilities they’re taking on’ (washingtonpost.com). They are the key partners, revenue streams, and provide the resources. People buy the cars, the houses, the goods that sharing economy businesses offers. If one of the people gets in a crash, or their house gets totaled, for the most part they have to deal with it themselves; Uber and Airbnb does not provide insurance or workers comp. They also exploit loopholes in the laws (Uber and Lyft aren’t a taxi service technically) so that they can provide services for cheaper (a bit unfair). 

The shared economy fills an unrealized demand in the economy. It is possibly helping the environment and improves the flow of liquid cash to many more pockets. On the dark-side, if something goes wrong, only the consumers and contractors get hurt and the corporations get away, earning more profit by doing nothing. Perhaps the shared economy isn’t so different after all, and that is what makes me scared. 

I want to hear your thoughts on this. It’s a free pass to comment, use, or quote me in your blogs. I invite you to take it.

 

 

Word Count: 449

 

Works Cited

“Debating the Sharing Economy,”Great Transition Initiative (October 2014),http://www.greattransition.org/publication/debating-the-sharing-economy.)

 

Radcliffe, Brent. “Sharing Economy.” Investopedia. N.p., 11 July 2014.

Web. 15 Oct. 2016. <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sharing-economy.asp>.

 

Rampell, Catherine. “The Dark Side of ‘sharing Economy’ Jobs.”

            Washington Post. The Washington Post, 26 Jan. 2015. Web. 15 Oct.

2016. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell

-the-dark-side-of-sharing-economy-jobs/2015/01/26/4e05daec-a59f

-11e4-a7c2-03d37af98440_story.html?utm_term=.797c00c4a8df>.

Oh boy some people could write books on this; I’ve got 450 words… Well 436 now.

 

“You could fill an entire MBA course with case studies of all the strategic blunders Yahoo has made”

-Quincy Larson, freecodecamp.com

It is true that some of the most important decisions are the ones not made; however, you might get left behind if you do it for too long. The fact is that Yahoo sat content, not wanting to actively seek for the next big thing. They had the opportunity to buy Google in 1998 for one million dollars (wired.com) but they turned it down and stubbornly denied any way they could improve. They thought they had a sustainable competitive advantage in search engines. What they needed to embrace was the transient advantage successful companies like Google and, once upon a time, Apple deployed or else, like Blackberry and AOL before it, Yahoo would fall to the wayside.

“Yahoo had two problems… easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.”

– Paul Graham, paulgraham.com in 2010

What always drives me crazy is when restaurants sell out; the food tastes like it was frozen, no new ideas were thought of, and it feels like the heart was ripped out of everyone. I always call that situation “when accountants take over” because the strategy seems to be saving a dollar in the short term. In turn, in the long term, that restaurant is ruined.

The same applies to Yahoo. Quincy Larson says that Yahoo fell for professional professionals; never in their history did the company have a visionary like Gates, Jobs, or even Ballmer at the helm after the creators left (freecodecamp.com). Without a strong leader, poor decisions were made and thus sent Yahoo into a spiral until most of their company value was from Alibaba. Execution of new products were poor which shows signs of ineffective operations, marketing was never able to make Yahoo more appealing than Google, and the financing team couldn’t make any smart investments. Overall, none of the executives at Yahoo contributed anything successful after the Alibaba purchase; it was just a matter of time before the former tech giant fell.

“It all started when Yahoo put acquisitions ahead of innovation in the dot-com days.”

– Steven Vaughan-Nichols, zdnet.com

From the top down, Yahoo’s failure was a given via its leadership and bullheadedness to change. Verizon bought the shell of a tech giant in what Forbes calls “(The) Saddest $5 Billion Deal In Tech History”. No moment of silence for another stubborn dinosaur.

 

Works Cited

By 1998, Yahoo Was the Beneficiary of a De Facto Ponzi Scheme. “What Happened to Yahoo.” What Happened to Yahoo. N.p., Aug. 2010. Web. 02 Oct. 2016.

Larson, Quincy. “The Rise and Fall (OK — mostly Fall) of Yahoo.” Freecodecamp. N.p., 25 July 2016. Web. 2 Oct. 2016. <https://medium.freecodecamp.com/the-rise-and-fall-mostly-fall-of-yahoo-ddbceb44670c#.tpi2xqdlk>.

Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. “The Rise and Fall of Yahoo | ZDNet.” ZDNet. N.p., 25 July 2016. Web. 02 Oct. 2016.

Vogelstein, Fred. “How Yahoo Blew It.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 1 Feb. 2007. Web. 02 Oct. 2016. <https://www.wired.com/2007/02/yahoo-3/>.