John Dvorak speculates that the way to unlock Microsoft’s potential and for it to remain agile is to make it a holdings company.

More evidence Microsoft’s going the way of Berkshire Hathaway - MarketWatch

I hate to revisit the same subject in this column two weeks in a row. But after thinking about last week’s column, combined with recent laments by Steve Ballmer and his thoughts about Bill Gates, I now believe that my earlier thoughts on the upside potential for the company haven’t gone far enough.

China’s GDP growth eases slightly in third quarter - MarketWatch

China’s economic growth rate eased slightly in the three months through September but remained above the 11% threshold for the third straight quarter, while inflation also rose to the higher end of the comfort zone of policy makers, likely keeping up pressure for an interest-rate increase in the near future.

There’s a lot of insight in this interview.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina speaks out - Oct. 24, 2007

Carly Fiorina didn’t just break the glass ceiling, she obliterated it, as the first woman to lead a FORTUNE 20 company. But her fall from stardom was just as dramatic, and she remains a controversial figure, with opinion split on whether she deserves credit for HP’s success since her firing in 2005. Fortune’s Matthew Boyle talked to Fiorina - who now serves on several advisory boards, including the CIA’s - about CEO pay, Dell’s woes, and what she’s learned from her tumultuous time at the top and, more recently, on the sidelines.

These kind of things happen to companies.

first, the failure to plan — they did not foresee employees cashing in on free phones.

Second, when people make mistakes, whether you should make a stand, or go through the easiest way out.  Apple will have a lot of problems for 800 employees, but making a principled stand may send a message to its other employees and to its customers of where your stand is.

Apple may have fired greedy retail employees for cashing iPhone credit

Apple might be a little upset with some of its retail employees who scored free iPhones this summer. For those who didn’t hear, Apple promised a free iPhone to every fulltime employee and all part-timers who have been with the company for over a year—including retail associates and Geniuses. The company made good on its claim, and we never heard much of a complaint about the program.

 Unfortunately, we have now heard through two independent sources that a few of these lucky retail employees let their greed get the best of them. We’ve been told that as many as 800 Apple Store retail associates who received free iPhones have also cashed in on the $100 iPhone credit that Apple issued for early buyers. Apple understandably wasn’t too happy about shelling out an extra ~$80,000 to employees who already scored free iPhones, so pink iSlips have apparently been issued to the bunch.

Freakanomics is a best selling book, and it tries to trace seemingly unrelated incidents, and hypothesizes that it may have a direct cause and effect.

One of the contentions I remembered was that legalizing abortion could have resulted in a big reduction of crime.  The hypothesis says the mother is the best person to know whether the baby when born will be able to get the love and care that they deserve.  Thus, prevention of birth of millions of babies who otherwise would not have received the love or proper education  ( who would most likely end up as unemployed or prone to petty theft)  did a lot to create  a society that was less prone to crime.

This new hypothesis which says the the lead in gasoline is probably causing brain damage that might have increased crime, is another such contention.

Idea Lab - Clean Air Act - Environment - Pollution - Lead - Gasoline - Crime Rate - New York Times

Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior.

In the early 1990s, a surge in the number of teenagers threatened a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. But to the surprise of some experts, crime fell steadily instead.

The answer, according to Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst
College, lies in the cleanup of a toxic chemical that affected nearly
everyone in the United States for most of the last century.

She
learned that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes
children less intelligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and
aggressive. She also discovered that the main source of lead in the air
and water had not been paint but rather leaded gasoline — until it was
phased out in the 1970s and ’80s by the Clean Air Act