QANTAS planes maintained in Malaysia are far more efficient and cost-effective...

So 3 years ago there was a bunch of hoo-ha over the fact that QANTAS was laying off piles of Australian maintenance technicians so they could outsource the jobs to Malaysia. The logic behind it was, as with everything else these days, to increase efficiency and profitability of the whole organisation and therefore increase share prices to make the mum-and-dad investors happy.

And it worked brilliantly. QANTAS shares went up steadily for 18 months after the maintenance was cheapened and moved overseas… And then their planes sort of stopped working properly.

Since the beginning of their troubles in mid 2007, the QANTAS share price is now sitting at what it was worth in the end of 2005. Now can you understand the insight, logic and acumen that QANTAS board-members had to restructure the company?

It only cost 10-20,000 Australian jobs to find out that the lower the quality of service and maintenance gets, the lower the share price gets. That’s pretty efficient. Just ask Australia’s “greatest financial manager ever”, John W. Howard.

And this brings us back to our good friend, NSW Premier / car salesman, Morris Iemma. The completely un-shonky looking Premier has been pushing to sell off NSW electricity supply and services to “increase efficiency and profitability” of the organisation.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma plans to make NSW Electricity more efficient and cost-effective

Mr Iemma says that the “gold plated” engineering used by the electricity company is unnecessary and costs too much, limiting the efficiency of the enterprise.

Now, according to the Premier’s, but if we replace “gold plated” engineering with “aluminium plated” engineering, we’ll have much cheaper fees, higher profits and an overall more “efficient” electricity service.

Or we might have constant blackouts and then pay taxes to bail-out the company that can’t carry out it’s contracts professionally like Sydney’s Cross City Tunnel or London’s outsourced electricity services in the 90s.

As you would have noticed on nearly every news service in the country, Google Street View launched in Australia this week and caused quite a stir.

Apparently, the Facebook-loving internet audience in Australia don’t have enough useless, novelty web applications to keep them away from getting their work done, so Google have released their Street View service in the interests of national procrastination.

Employers across the country will be jumping with joy as their payed staff switch between answering their mobile phones, SMS-ing, checking their email 35 times-an-hour, browsing through Facebook and now looking at the outside of their houses with Google Street View.

While many internet applications have clearly definable uses, Google Street View fills the niche of needing to see exactly what the outside of you or your friends’ houses look like.

Some say that in itself doesn’t justify the millions of dollars in development costs – not to mention the millions of dollars of wasted employee hours just using it – for an application that is essentially window-dressing to the already popular (and actual useful) Google Maps system.

But surveys taken by the MIKETRON University Research Labs* shows that 95 out of 100 Australian office workers would prefer for Google Street View to be available to them.

By contrast only 3 out of the 100 workers tested could give us a reason for using the application that didn’t involve looking at their house or their friends’ houses.

Google earned US$10.492 Billion in 2006 from it’s advertising wing. That’s ADVERTISING. They don’t make money out of Street View.

*MIKETRON University Research Labs is a non-existent subsidiary of MIKETRON University. Their ’scientific’ research is mainly based on the Old Testament.