Category: Big Business

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, my drunken Irish readers! It’s not yet 9am local time, so I’ll assume you only have a good buzz on at present!

It’s a hectic weekend here at stately VM Manor. I’ve got plenty of writing to do for my magazine — two articles (regional bio-investment and disposable bioprocessing systems) and an overhaul of our 20-page annual glossary of pharma & biopharma terms — so expect little by way of posting.

Still, I couldn’t let the “running of the green” go by without a wacky article. In this case, it’s a piece from Der Spiegel about how much trouble the German automakers are having building hybrid cars:

[Toyota representatives] told [Porsche CEO] Wiedeking that they could help him, but only by providing the full package — in other words, the platform for the entire vehicle. The Japanese insisted that merely buying the individual components, as Wiedeking had envisioned, made no sense. The Asians politely advised the Porsche boss not to underestimate the complexity of hybrid engines. Wiedeking’s talks with Toyota quickly came to an end.

Today Porsche’s engineers know that the Toyota executives were by no means trying to make fools of them two years ago. The engineers discovered first hand just how sincere the Japanese had actually been when they set out to develop, in a joint effort with Volkswagen, a hybrid engine at Volkswagen’s research center in the town of Isenbüttel near VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters. But the project failed to progress as smoothly as the Germans had expected.

Enjoy. And go drink yourself stupid.

Michael Bierut at DesignObserver feels that Dreamgirls misses the soul of the music that it’s trying to capture, and he has some neat remarks about the “production line” of Holland, Dozier and Holland at Motown records. It puts me in mind of Jack Kirby’s most prolific and productive era, in the 1960s, in which he was drawing tons of pages but also inventing (or co-inventing) mind-bending character after character.

Neil Davenport’s take over at Spiked! on why British liberals hate Tesco seems markedly similar to why American liberals hate Wal-Mart:

Tesco does not impose a blue-and-red homogeneity (blimey, it’s only a shop, not a police state). Instead it sells a fairly staggering array of quality goods at very reasonable prices. By expanding on the ‘one stop shop’ ethos, it actually helps people save on a very precious commodity: time. Would Tesco’s critics prefer us to go back to the days when we had to trudge around different shops for hours on end? It’s hard to see how being chained to the shopping-basket could enable anybody’s individuality to flourish.

Many critics appear aghast at Tesco’s motivation to be the biggest and best. It is interesting to see how the company turned around its ailing fortunes and shook up the retail trade in the process. There was nothing sinister or malign about this development. In fact, you could argue that in an age where know-your-limits modesty and demands to rein in our potential are all-pervasive, Tesco’s ‘bigger, better, stronger’ drive makes a refreshing change. Far from shouting this down, we could do with a lot more of this guile and gumption across society as a whole – including in areas that have a greater capacity to revolutionise our lives than shops which sell food, clothes and cheap televisions.

Okay, I posted this mainly because I wanted to use that Sneaker Pimps reference in the title. Sue me.