Yang Gu's Blog

Oct 01 2011

Not-so-Smart Move?

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In the young and bustling smartphone business, Google’s Android operating system is currently the strongest competitor to Apple’s iPhonesOS. Last month, Google announced that it intends to acquire Motorola – it will now dabble with hardware as well as software development.

Google’s, a software producer’s, move to the hardware market made it a competitor to its partner hardware producers for the Android system. Three days ago, Microsoft and Samsung Electronics reached an agreement which allows the two companies to share their patent portfolios. Samsung is the second-largest smartphone producer behind Apple and is also the developer of the Nexus S, the official Google phone.

From the current state, Google’s decision to acquire Motorola does not look like smart move on its part. While the financial details of the agreement are not released, the deal is more significant as a demonstration of an alliance and partnership. Microsoft is a powerful software company and wants to enter the smartphone market, and now one of Google’s most powerful partners is signing a deal that could give Microsoft the chance. The agreement presents Google with two very obvious threats: losing market share to Microsoft and losing the relationship with its hardware producer partners.

Reference news article: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-09-28/microsoft-samsung-smartphone-partnership/50589412/1

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Sep 14 2011

Days and Nights — Ethics in Business

Published by yanggu under Uncategorized

In January, CBC reported that Sunwing Vacations consistently mislead their costumers to believe that they paid for an eight-day stay in Mexico, but did not provide accommodations for the final night. Travellers slept in the hotel lobby or paid extra, and were not aware of this until after they have landed in Mexico. The agency explained that the first night spent the plane counted for one of the advertised “eight.”

Sunwing’s arrangements disappointed many. While they tried to explain it away with as a play of words, both the agency and the hotel had taken care to ensure that the costumers wouldn’t find out ahead of time. The travellers couldn’t see their check-out times on the internet and the hotel cleaned up evidence of the night in the lobby before the next batch of travellers arrived.

Sunwing damaged not only its own reputation. Discussion in the Comment section showed that readers connected this incident to experiences with various travelling agencies. This unfortunately reinforced the stereotype that profitable organizations will resort to unethical measures to make money – unethical behaviour of one business cast an unfavourable impression on the entire industry.

Reference: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/01/03/bc-sunwingpackage.html

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Sep 01 2011