Beating a Dead Horse
Being in school for an MBA, you hear the same companies talked about over and over again. That’s the good and the “bad” ones. Worldcom and Enron are favorites for what not to do. Google and Sun Microsystems are the most recently talked about in my organizational behavior class as the “good kids.”
There has been a lot of buzz about the new search engine Cuil, including my own review, and many others. But now we have reached terminal velocity, people are tired of hearing about it. There was so much buzz before and so many scathing reviews after that the saturation point has been reached.
So why do we keep talking about it? It’s a clear example of what not to do. If I do get to teaching at the university level someday, I am sure Cuil will be an example I use over and over again. They did everything right before the release, but missed the boat on their release. Like Vista, it’s pretty, but the functionality just isn’t there. Things should have been tested over and over, then checked again by beta testers. Once that was done, and they had the sign off from a few top minds, then they should have released.
So hopefully this will be the last time I speak of the abomination until I end up teaching, or writing a thesis. As writers and educators (which all SEOs are), we love to have a “what not to do” and that’s what Cuil gave us.





2 responses to "Beating a Dead Horse"
Kate, I hear you I just finished an MBA at Wisconsin and am now back in the industry working on a startup. For me it was “if only everyone could be more like Southwest Airlines” I was so sick of Harvard business school case studies. So many of their marketing techniques or so pre-viral and contingent on a massive ad budget. Outside of everything I learned in Finance and the value of actually owning a business rather than working for one there were not that many mind blowing takeaways I couldn’t have learned from wikipedia and the entry on Porter’s theories. B-schools need more classes on emarketing. I enjoyed your post but I couldn’t find an rss feed to subscribe : (
Heh, that’s so funny. When I started b-school at UT in 2001, Enron was just beginning to implode, so they weren’t officially evil yet. But the answer to every question seemed to be Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, and EBay.
MBA’s and b-school professors are retarded lemmings. By the time they pick up on a trend, it’s usually over, yet they still follow it. The key is to zig when they zag.