It also was overloaded with fresh-undergraduate talent. However some tasks require a substantial number of people with significant experience, yet Microsoft only rarely went after them. In at least some cases the sole reason they hired talent was to silence them (Mark Russinovich I'm looking at you) not to benefit from them.

Their search engine effort is notorious for the lack of inside experts, and the person in charge is, as best as I understand, a non-techie.

Sorry, but no. Many other foreign countries had a look at the evidence and they voted "no WMD". Only US lapdogs went along (coalition of the willing), everyone else took a pass. So people were able to tell "one way or another".

GM was brought down more by bad quality cars than anything else. Sure, unions didn't help, but unions in Germany are equally strong and their car manufacturers seem to have no problem thriving.

A former manager of GM described the culture as one in which they would merrily spend $100M in an ad campaign for a new car but couldn't get themselves to spend $0.15 in a better rear light bulb which was much needed.

Say what? Management was replaced and contracts were heavily renegotiated and unions lost lots of power. These are big changes and GM is a new company. Still not enough commitment to quality but many of its biggest problems are gone.

Try making sangria once from a $20 bottle of rioja, orange juice, lime juice and a touch of brandy. You'd be surprised how much you can tell the difference, even if you are not a regular wine drinker.

I love it how the press reports this result as if the family tree had a single root.

A family tree has two parents, four grandparents eight grandparents, etc. Out of the 2^n ancestors in the n-generation, two branches standout, one the fully male one carrying the Y chromosome and the other the fully maternal line, carrying mitochondrial DNA. There are good mathematical reasons why such lines come to be dominated by a few individuals over the centuries if not millenia yet the press makes it sound like Warren Beatty was alive 100K years ago fathering each and every one of us. As someone else pointed out, if somehow I became Will Chamberlain and happened to father 10K daughters but no male offspring, the Y chromosome line would makes it look like I ws never there though in practice I'd be the (grand) daddy of half of New York within a few generations.

I agree, the tendency to exaggerate problems by scientists has reached the state of a crisis. Soon we won't know what to believe anymore!!

This is why I am applying for an urgent grant to study the effect of made up crises on academic research.

Oh, BS. How often do you need antibiotics after a simple wound? Personally I don't think I've ever had.

Read the book will ya?

Of course, otherwise Mr. Mintzberg would not be a professor in an MBA program. What he claims (among many other things) is that MBA programs should take as input essentially only managers mid-career, not kids fresh out of school like they often do today.

The problem is that most people hear efficiency and they think cost cutting. For example, while Subway was busy finding the cheapest meat substitutes to sell you as ham Quiznos moved in taking a few billion of Subways market share.

Sometimes the most efficient thing to do is to go upscale (think BMW, Apple, Rolex). In my experience, very few MBAs seem to be aware of this simple fact.

You must be interviewing near the bottom of the barrel then. Usually my potential hires tend to conk out a bit higher in the "code this" part of the interview.

This might pretty much kill Mir. By the time is released Wayland will likely have taken over and even if Mir is better it will be a case of "too little, too late".

Henry Mintzberg has data that shows MBAs tend to correlate with negative traits. This means that an MBA at the very least starts with a "higher probability of not being a good employee", so now they have to prove that they are better than the norm.

MBAs on paper are supposed to teach you a lot of useful things. In practice most students walk away with one thing in their mind: how to cut costs to a minimum even if it drives the business to the ground so long as they collect their bonus before it does so.

You can read all about it from Henry Mintzberg who is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and has spent the last two decades trying to fix the present MBA mess.

His book "Managers not MBAs" is a must read for anyone thinking about hiring an MBA.

Of course, it is the GOP sole characteristic to not look up facts. The rest of the political spectrum (from the middle all the way to the far left) may have many flaws, but ignoring facts and figures is not one of them.

Here are the figures for you, straight out of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

The US has the lowest tax rate of all developed countries. So right there your argument is already wrong.

I don't know where you get this from and it is really funny to see how hard you strive to pin a clear failure of the free market (healthcare is not a freely traded good) on your big government bugaboo.

Clearly you've reached a conclusion first (big government is always bad) and now you are forcing the facts into it.

I don't want big government but nor do I want small government. I want government of just the right size to provide (1) decent public education to all (equality of opportunity, not outcome), (2) decent public infrastructure, (3) enough defense that we can be secure in the world (but not so much that we can go in expeditions to Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction), (4) healthcare to all since a civilized country does not let sick or hungry people die and (5) enough police that I can go to the corner store without fear of being mugged.

If you look at the list above, government is too small for all of those except (3). Those are facts. The rest is ideology.