A few days ago Rupert Murdoch suggested that he plans to make News Corp’s content invisible to search engines. It’s saddens me that obviously intelligent men can be so completely out of touch with the way things are. Old media is dead because of people like Murdoch. Sadly, he will wind up taking a lot of talented people down with him because they have an employee mentality instead of understanding that his complete lack of understanding about how the world works now gives them the freedom to become their own masters instead of reporting through the eyes of half a dozen editors.

There’s a rumored deal for exclusive search between News Corp and Bing. Which is fine but also shows a lack of understanding about the way people use the net. People use a search engine because that’s the one they’re comfortable with or feel gives them the best results. Over the years for me it has been Lycos, followed by Altavista, followed by Google (since approximately when they went live). If News Corp’s content is filtered out of Google’s results I’ll read somebody else’s articles. I can think of very few situations in which I feel the need to read a specific journalist’s article particularly in the arena of hard news.

The cold, hard facts are that Murdoch’s only foray into the net is his purchase of MySpace which he paid too much for and bought at the worst possible time. Perhaps that explains his hatred of the net. Whatever. The landscape is littered with the desiccated  corpses of business men who didn’t understand the changing business climate.  There’s a good summary of the situation over at Mashable (which seems to be getting along fine with Google bringing them all that useless traffic).

[Photo by Dave Beckett via flikr]

It’s probably just me but there are things that I find really irritating and will cause me to not spend my money in certain places. Here’s an example-This morning I had breakfast at the McDonald’s at 1805 N. Harrison in Cary, NC. I had a Big Breakfast with Hotcakes (which is the new name for something that had a different name last week…. but that’s another post entirely) which consists of Eggs, a sausage patty, 3 pancakes, a biscuit, and a hashbrown brick. So she brought me one of the maple syrup flavored corn syrup containers and I asked her for another one because the amount in one is just short of what I consider adequate for use on the pancakes. I’ll admit it bothers the environmentally conscience part of me to use part of a plastic container for no particularly good reason other than some efficiency expert somewhere decided that people use less syrup than I do on an order of McD’s hotcakes, but I do it anyway. At any rate, she said they charge 27 cents for an extra one.

At this point I’d like to point out that I just paid $6.07 for the above plus a cup of coffee so an extra 27 cents puts it within rounding distance of $6.50.  I have several Waffle Houses within 10 miles of me and they all have breakfast specials consisting of food cooked for you instead of food cooked sometime today and kept in a warmer for less than $6.50*. My point is that I spend a significant amount of money at this McDonald’s but won’t anymore because there are and almost limitless number of places to buy breakfast (including other McD’s that don’t charge for syrup) and they’ll be getting my money instead of this one.

I know it may seem petty but if we all voted with our dollars and made sure that the business in question knew why, we wouldn’t have to put up with surly service, bad food, or cheap products.

[image by M.F. Naaldenberg via Wikimedia Commons]

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*Disclaimer: I’m not 100% sure about this because I haven’t been to one lately and I’m too lazy to look it up but I have been to Huddle House where 2 eggs, 2 strips of bacon, hashbrowns and a waffle with all the syrup I cared to put on it plus coffee was $6.35.