• my bizdriven blog- My Twits: snipr.com/2stob
• my bizdriven blog- A comparison of Microsoft vs Google cultures snipr.com/2t11u
• my bizdriven blog- Car Sales Plummet snipr.com/2t2r5
• eNGy business toon- We are either Flexible, or we really don’t know how to Negotiate .. tinyurl.com/65sudg

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I think we all sort of expected that business would not be good… but with car sales plummeting like that, it does not look good…

HOnda was the only one that did not g down, it increased by slightly over 1 percent, but that was because of their cars. Their trucks were down 24 percent.

Nissan was off 18 percent, Ford 28 percent, Chrysler 36 percent.

Chrysler has an innovative offer.. It guarantees to pay the difference between $2.99 and the pump price for 12,000 miles …. but despite that, it seemed like it did not do much.

Ford’s F series trucks was down 41 percent, and it did not even do half the number of Explorer SUVs compared to a year ago.

When consumer sentiment is down, it does signal that there is still a way to go before business will pick up.

June car sales plummet for nearly all automakers - Yahoo! News

Toyota, with its flexible, efficient factories, couldn’t make the shift from trucks to cars as quickly as American drivers. Its sales for June shrank 21 percent.

The overall market fell 18.3 percent, according to Autodata Corp. It
was the worst June for the industry in 17 years, said Jesse Toprak,
chief industry analyst for auto information site Edmunds.com, who predicted more misery ahead.

This is a good read… and points to the important distinction which I think is important — whether you have processes or not, whether you can scale the projects or not, and most important — whether the software you are producing is aimed at being ‘cool’ or being ‘useful to business’. ..

Working at Google vs. Working at Microsoft @ WEB 2.0 JOURNAL

Google software business is divided between producing the “eye candy” - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them. Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc)
…
This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.

My eNGy Business Cartoons Vol 1 has reached almost 2,000 downloads after 2 months. My eNGy Business Cartoons Vol 2 has reached 100 downloads after a few days.