Best Business Commentary

Microsoftening Google

Microsoft crying antitrust over Google’s purchase of DoubleClick “is ironic for a lot of reasons,” says Holman Jenkins Jr. in The Wall Street Journal. In the 90s, Microsoft at least posed “a real antitrust conundrum.” But “not so, Google.” Google’s 65 percent market share of Web searches is based more on “sticky habit than any structural advantage”—for most users, “one search engine is pretty much like another.” For all that, Google is increasingly aping Microsoft by wasting billions in “fruitless spending.” Neither sees their “luck for what it is,” and both “squander their abnormal returns hoping to make lightning strike again.”

Keeping cool under pressure

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Work-related stress is costly, both in money and health, says Maureen Farrell in Forbes.com. Some estimates have employee stress costing U.S. firms $300 billion each year, but it certainly leads to hypertension, depression, and heart disease in individual workers. To manage stress, the first thing to do is “nail down what specifically is stressing you out”—when you feel it, “put down the circumstances on paper.” Tackle the sources of stress you can control, and work to “mollify” the effects of the ones you can’t. Then take some “quick, smart steps to unwind” (e.g., exercise, “not chain-smoking or binge drinking”). And if all else fails, “try a little humor.”