Maybe readers allowing you to purchase electronic copies of books from giant impersonal corporations are not such a good idea after all.

What happens when Amazon decides, for reasons of its own, that you should not be in possession of a particular book? Pop! It’s gone. Eliminated by your friendly corporation’s software update system.

Big Brother came calling on Amazon customers yesterday, as the New York Times reports.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

Lifehacker tells us that Google will be be releasing its free, open-source Chrome Operating System later this year. Google says:

We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Chrome OS is going to be netbook oriented in its earliest version, and the idea apparently is ultimately to replace PC software with on-live Google applications like Gmail and Google Docs.

Persuading users to give up the familiar isn’t easy, but Microsoft has done a fine job lately, particularly with Vista, in creating a real opportunity for anyone able to offer more speed and convenience.

Contemporary Britain is competing very seriously with California in the contest for the best nonsensical ideas applied in daily life.

Newcastle’s onebestway, a small design and marketing firm facing tough economic times, took serious steps to deal with the crisis. It hired a swami, excuse me! a business psychologist, to help in improving morale.

The Telegraph reports:

David Taylor, a business psychologist, told workers at design and marketing onebestway, in Newcastle upon Tyne, that a Naked Friday idea would boost their team spirit.

He was called in to help the firm after six staff members were forced into taking redundancies at the start of the credit crunch.

Mr Taylor told them that, by stripping off their clothes, staff could also strip away inhibitions and talk to each other more openly and honestly.

He said: “Inviting an organisation to go naked is the most extreme technique I’ve used. It may seem weird but it works. It’s the ultimate expression of trust in yourself and each other.”

Despite some initial reluctance, nearly all the staff took off all their clothes – except for one man, who wore a posing pouch, and one of two female workers, who kept on black underwear.

Sam Jackson, 23, the house manager, was the only woman to go fully naked. She said: “It was brilliant. Now that we’ve seen each other naked, there are no barriers.

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The Daily Mail reports that careful preparations had to be made, but assures us that the experiment proved a grand success.

During the week leading up to the strip-off, the workers were encouraged to photocopy parts of their bodies to make them more confident about themselves.

A nude model was also brought in for the workers to sketch and talk to.

Sam added: ‘It took a week of David being in the office for us to build up courage. The first few steps were very nerve-wracking, but once I got to my desk and got used to it, I felt totally comfortable.

‘It was emotional but we found we were much more able to talk to each other honestly – and have been since. The company

Managing Director Mike Owen, 40, said: ‘We’re either brave or mad. But I did tell everyone they didn’t have to do it -only if it felt right.’

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Naked Office, a television program which filmed all this, will be aired July 9th on Virgin1.

Declining Newspaper Quarterly Ad Revenues From 2006

Another graph, this one is from Tech Crunch:

Total newspaper ad sales dropped by an unprecedented 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, a deep plunge that represents a loss of more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue compared year-over-year. Compared to 3 years ago – 2006 was a pretty good year for American newspapers – we’re looking at a drop of more than $4.5 billion in ad sales in just three years if you only take into account the first quarter.

The sharp decline is caused by the lousy state of both digital and dead tree ad sales: the stats posted on the Newspaper Association of America website show that print sales fell by 29.7% in the first three months of this year (to $5.9 billion), while online sales dropped a record 13.4% (to $696.3 million).

Buggy whip sales figures probably looked a lot like this after Henry Ford’s Model T hit the market.

Of course, some of us think it isn’t only the Internet & Craig’s List producing this decline. The arrogance, insularity, partisanship, and dishonesty of establishment newspapers has to be having some negative impact.

50 states’ changes in GDP, jobs, and home prices in 2008

The Atlantic links a WSJ chart which it then graphs (above), showing the varied impact of the recession on all 50 states.

North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, Texas, Hawaii, and South Dakota all managed modest increases (1.9-.2%) in home prices, while California real estate insanity exacted a ferocious toll not only within its own borders (-25.5%), but also in the neighboring California refugee destinations of Nevada (-28.2%) and Arizona (-20.6). Florida, of course, traditionally always jumps on board any real estate collapse and also came in the top ranks of disaster (-24%).

Kevin Hassett argues that Barack Obama couldn’t be doing a better job of destroying the American economy if he was trying to do just that.

Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a “Manchurian Candidate” to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?

He might discourage private capital from entering the financial sector by instructing his Treasury secretary to repeatedly promise a brilliant rescue plan, but never actually have one. Private firms, spooked by the thought of what government might do, would shy away from transactions altogether. If the secretary were smooth and played rope-a-dope long enough, the whole financial sector would be gone before voters could demand action.

Another diabolical idea would be to significantly increase taxes on whatever firms are still standing. That would require subterfuge, since increasing tax rates would be too obvious. Our Manchurian Candidate would have plenty of sophisticated ideas on changing the rules to get more revenue without increasing rates, such as auctioning off “permits.”

These steps would create near-term distress. If our Manchurian Candidate leader really wanted to knock the country down for good, he would have to provide insurance against any long-run recovery.

There are two steps to accomplish that.

Discourage Innovation

First, one way the economy might finally take off is for some entrepreneur to invent an amazing new product that launches something on the scale of the dot-com boom. If you want to destroy an economy, you have to persuade those innovators not even to try.

Second, you need to initiate entitlement programs that are difficult to change once enacted. These programs should transfer assets away from productive areas of the economy as efficiently as possible. Ideally, the government will have no choice but to increase taxes sharply in the future to pay for new entitlements.

A leader who pulled off all that might be able to finish off the country.

Freddie advises that buying a Mac doesn’t really prove you’re cool. (Steve Jobs must really hate this one.)

[A]ll of these greater philosophical underpinnings that people attach to PC vs. Mac are just self-aggrandizing nonsense. Buying the computer from company A doesn’t, as a matter of fact, say anything about you, just like buying a computer from company B doesn’t say anything about your counterparts. As I have said many, many times, there are good things about Apples and good things about PCs. If it makes sense to you to buy an Apple, go with god. And many Apple owners do just that, buy a product, use it and enjoy it. I’ve considered getting an Apple laptop in the past and may in the future. But it amazes me, absolutely amazes me, the number of Apple owners who lack the clarity or self-awareness to realize that purchasing a commodity from a enormous, soulless corporation that is also owned by several million other people doesn’t make you a unique and beautiful snowflake. Apple has a better PR campaign, better advertising and a more gullible, credulous customer base. That’s it. It’s got nothing to do with individuality or noncomformity. I know many people are probably saying that this is a completely banal thing to say but I am consistently astounded by otherwise smart people who will tell you different.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

InfoWorld points to Vista.

Windows Vista has been trouble for Microsoft perhaps since the operating system’s beginning. And this last quarter was certainly no exception. Despite a dip in client software revenue, however, one analyst says the workforce reduction Microsoft detailed on Thursday is healthy—at least from enterprise IT shops’ perspective.

When Microsoft released its earnings report on Thursday, the company indicated not only that it would lay off up to 5,000 workers or 5 percent of its total headcount but also that software client revenue—as in Windows Vista—sank by 8 percent.

“Windows Vista didn’t do well. Based on our data, a lot of clients are skipping Windows Vista,” says Neil MacDonald, an analyst at Gartner. Indeed, nearly every other major analyst firm found a similar lack of Vista adoption, with Forrester Research likening the OS to the failed New Coke.

Vilija Lobačiuvienė

Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

[A] Lithuanian debt collector is offering an unconventional service to retrieve arrears: witchcraft. The Vilnius-based Skolu Isieskojimo Biuras (debt collecting bureau), has hired Vilija Lobačiuvienė, the Baltic nation’s most famous self-styled witch, to hunt down companies and individuals who are failing to pay up. Lobaciuviene, 53, who claims to use hypnosis, herbal medicines and “the bio-energy field,” promised Thursday to “do whatever I can to help people.”

FaceBook shut down Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice promotion, citing privacy concerns. I agree with Michael Arrington that the decision was the kind of triumph of corporate stodginess over creativity and humor that demonstrates that the people in charge, with the power, haven’t a clue.

Original posting

Business Week’s Steve Hamm says the problem is greedy investors’ short term thinking and aversion to risk, and those stingy VCs should start funding “bold new directions” while waiting for Uncle Obama to open up the federal tap.

Hamm’s article lit the fuse of Michael S. Malone at Live from Silicon Valley.

Since Steve Hamm and Business Week aren’t willing to give you anything but their own big government/big business solutions to the perceived crisis, let me give you the real story – and real solutions – from somebody who has been on the ground here in Silicon Valley for 45 years:

Yes, Silicon Valley – and by extension, the U.S. high technology industry, is in something of a crisis right now. Part of it is the fact that, as the largest manufacturing sector in the US economy, electronics is not immune to the larger financial crisis currently impacting the world.

But there a lot of other problems as well. For one thing, the venture capital industry is in real trouble – not because of a lack of courage, but because government interference – most notably, Sarbanes-Oxley – has proven almost fatal to the new company creation process. With almost no potential for a big pay-out on the back end (because companies don’t ‘go public’ any more), VC’s are having to be much tighter on the front end. That’s good business, not gutlessness.

As for the entrepreneurs themselves, to charge them with a lack of courage or character is truly insulting. Instead of hob-nobbing with senior executives, Steve should have called me. I would have taken him to the little Peet’s Coffee shop in nearby Cupertino where I get my lattes twice per day. There, I would have shown him that on any given day you can see at least two entrepreneurial teams – a half-dozen guys huddled over a single laptop editing spreadsheets – almost always different, and all dreaming of starting the Next Big Company. There are hundreds of these start-up teams all over the Valley right now – indeed, I think there is more entrepreneurial fervor going on right now than just about any other time in Valley history.

Are these folks thinking small? Are they short on courage? No, what they are is pragmatic. That’s the essence of being an entrepreneur. They know what the business landscape is out there, and they are adjusting their plans to succeed in that new reality.

No, the problem is not that entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and the rest of high tech aren’t thinking big, it’s that they aren’t being allowed to. If Business Week would just take off its ideological blinders, it would realize that if Washington really wanted to help a sick Silicon Valley, it would get out of the way, and strip away all of those worthless regulations that are inhibiting the imagination and the creativity of this town.

Lifehacker reports that underestimated volume turned the Windows 7 Beta trial into another Mac advertisement.

You’d think that getting soundly beaten by Google and Yahoo over and over in the online space would mean that Microsoft would take the web a little more seriously. You’d be wrong.

Case in point: Today’s epic failure around the distribution of the Windows 7 public beta download. This morning Microsoft’s web servers fell to their knees under the pressure of constant web page refreshes by enthusiasts who want to volunteer their time to test Windows 7 after Steve Ballmer’s announcement the download would be available at noon today. (Since noon today, the download was there, then pulled, and back up again only if you know the direct links, and the promised product keys still aren’t available. There’s “no ETA” when they will be.)

Is it fantastic that Microsoft is offering this freebie preview? Yes. Is it shameful that they’d be so woefully unprepared for the demand it would draw? That also would be a YES.

Hard times are not only impacting large financial institutions like Lehman and AIG.

NY Times:

Queen Elizabeth, the Kremlin and the White House have been customers, but in the current economic climate, luxury crystals and ceramics are a hard sell as Waterford Wedgwood conceded Monday.

The company, which is based in Dublin and whose roots go back 250 years, makes and sells crystal vases, glasses and ceramic figurines and kitchenware. It made the ball that drops each New Year’s Eve in Times Square, and its crystal chandeliers decorate Windsor Castle and the Kennedy Center.

Waterford Wedgwood said on Monday that its 10 British units and 4 businesses in Ireland were placed into administration, similar to bankruptcy protection in the United States, after running out of money and failing to find a buyer. The remaining subsidiaries, including those in the United States, Germany and Canada, remain unaffected.

The auditor, Deloitte, was appointed as administrator of the troubled businesses, which employ 2,700, or more than half of Waterford’s 5,000 employees. The units will continue to operate until the administrator decides to sell, close or reorganize them.

“I am disappointed that certain of the group’s U.K. and Irish subsidiaries have had to go into administration and receivership, but we remain optimistic that ongoing discussions will result in a buyer being found for the business,” the chief executive of Waterford, David Sculley, said.

Waterford Wedgwood was created in 1986 when the Irish crystal maker Waterford acquired the British ceramics company Wedgwood. Both companies have a rich history. Wedgwood was founded in 1759 by Josiah Wedgwood in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Charles Darwin, who formulated the theory of evolution, married a member of the Wedgwood family in the 19th century and was able to finance his research with the help of the family fortunes.

Waterford was founded in 1783 by the brothers William and George Penrose and named after the Irish harbor town where they lived. Waterford faced difficult times in 1851, when it closed because of rising taxes, but the business reopened almost 100 years later. The Irish government gave Waterford glassware as a present to each American president from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan, who kept his jelly beans in a Waterford dish.

The Onion reports Apple’s latest revolutionary user interface design breakthrough: the no keyboard laptop.

2:37 video

Iain Dale reports that the Metropolitan Police is running the above Google ad. Is there a reward? It’s been a while since I’ve been linked by Michelle Malkin. Maybe I’ll turn her in.