NYT on GOOG: Don't Hate the Playa, Hate the Playa Hata

Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain - New York Times.

Hollywood and General Motors

GM stared death in the face and killed the focus groups. You can't design cars people want by committee. And GM is learning that lesson and trying to build cars, like the Pontiac Solstice, that drivers want to buy for reasons other than 'employee pricing'.

Big Hollywood studios are building movies with focus groups, committees and are wondering why attendance is down week after week at the box office. Sure, HD, DVD, TiVo, the Internet, iPod, podcasts, Harry Potter. But until WB learns from GM, we will see more Aztecs than Solstices.

The Honk Kong-ification of Manhattan

SO: the NYT reports today that Philadelphia is the new Brooklyn, and since Brooklyn was the new Manhattan it seems that the Big Apple is now twice removed and a 75-minute train ride away from itself.

The real point, of course, being that City real estate prices have driven out the artists and the hipsters that follow them and the gentrification surfers that follow them.

In a sense, NYC is slowly turning into a Hong Kong. Where business is the business of the town. Where expat euro bankers parade through the local clubs and the hotel concierges recommend shopping as the highlight of a weekend.

Philly might not be the sixth borough yet, afteral it's the place the encouraged Benjamin Franklin to conjure the "Early to bed and early to rise" couplet, but without the poets and the troublemakers, NYC will start to feel like HKG without the hills.