Even search engine giant - Google, does not seem to be immune to the global recession. On Friday, it announced that it will be cutting down around 200 jobs in its sales and marketing divisions.

In a posting on the Official Google Blog, Omid Kordestani, SVP (global sales and business development) said, “When companies grow quickly it’s almost impossible to get everything right-and we certainly didn’t. In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process. That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be.”

He also admitted that Google had over-invested in certain areas. Kordestani said the company had no option but to restructure their organizations. Google will give each outgoing employee time to find another position at Google, outplacement support, and provide severance packages for those who will have to leave the company, the posting read.

This is not the first time this year that the Internet behemoth has announced structural and strategic changes to its organization in order to trim costs. In January, Google reduced its number of recruiters by 100. It also announced the closing down of engineering centers in Arizona, Texas, Norway, and Sweden. Some of the engineers, around 70 in number, were moved to other centers, while others were asked to leave.

Washington: In the past 20 years, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) factories created the conditions that helped land the global economy in the current mess, writes Bloomberg columnist Matthew Lynn. He also suggests that the business schools should be shut down.

Business schools legitimized a pseudo-scientific approach, promoted a mechanistic management style and formed a managerial elite more interested in rewards than producing lasting wealth for the economies they operate in.

Richard Fuld, who was CEO of Lehman Brothers Holdings at the time of its collapse, has an MBA from New York University. John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, is a graduate of Harvard Business School. Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has an MBA from Harvard University.

In Europe, Andy Hornby, CEO of British bank HBOS, is another Harvard Business School product. HBOS had to be bailed out in a merger with Lloyds Banking Group and then both had to be rescued by the U.K. government. Peter Wuffli, who as CEO, presided over the huge losses that took Zurich-based UBS AG to the brink of disaster, studied management at Switzerland’s University of St Gallen.

If these business leaders were not able to spot the flaws in the businesses they were running, one has to look into the matter of what business and management schools had been teaching them.

The schools promoted a quasi-scientific approach to business, sermonizing that everything could be nailed down in a textbook, and encouraged students to believe that running a company could be mastered by anyone. The entire private-equity industry is founded on that principle. And also, all the intellectual tools that led us into the financial meltdown were largely invented within academia. Complex models for pricing risk created the market for the options and derivatives contracts that have caused so much trouble in the past year.

But, management in reality is a skill that is acquired through experience, judgment and flair. Billions are about to be wasted relearning a simple fact that should never have been forgotten.

The business schools took some mysterious risk and tried to make it as easy to count as peas in a pod. By doing so, they encouraged a whole generation of young men and women to go into investment banking armed with the belief that they had mastered risk. But the truth turned out to be different.

The author pins the growth of business schools to the situation where the economy contracts and jobless bankers seek to boost their qualifications. The people who steered the global economy onto the rocks in the past year all benefited from the finest management education that money can buy.

However, Lynn admits that it is unfair to assign all blame to business schools. Over the last three decades, taking an MBA has become just another qualification, a hoop to be jumped through on your way to getting a good job on Wall Street, or in London or Zurich’s financial centers.

Kolkata: Claiming that nearly 10 million jobs have been lost in the country due to the global slowdown, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has flayed the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for neglecting the interests of the common man in its response to the economic crisis.

“The centre’s policy is not enough for the common people. By the stimulus packages they are trying to keep the big corporates in good health. But they are not doing anything towards mitigating the sufferings of the laid off common man,” Bhattacharjee said in an interview to a news channel here late Friday.

He said total 10 million jobs have been lost in India - both in the organised and unorganised sectors - till date due to the economic slowdown.

“The centre should concentrate on generating more employment at this time,” he maintained.

He blamed the liberalisation policy of the central government for the economic distress in the country.

“Thankfully we (the Communist party of India-Marxist) didn’t allow foreign tie-ups in banks and insurance. Otherwise they would have faced a similar fate as the other affected sectors,” Bhattacharjee contended.

Toronto: China based hackers have infiltrated computers and stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Indian embassy in the U.S. and the Dalai Lama’s organization, Canadian researchers said.

A vast electronic spying operation system, which infiltrated the computers, was being controlled from computers based exclusively in China, said the researchers in a report to be issued shortly. But they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved. The group did also not identify the Indian embassies which were targeted.

The office of the Dalai Lama in India had asked the researchers based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their examination unearthed a broader e-spying operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to Indian embassies as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers believed that the e-spying operation, which they called GhostNet, had hacked into the computer systems at embassies of countries like Pakistan, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea. The networks at foreign ministries of Bhutan, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Iran and the Philippines, had been found similarly hacked.

Moscow: Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) may not be a safe way of transaction anymore as a new software virus has been found out which infects ATMs to steal money from bank accounts of their users. Doctor Web and ‘Kaspersky Lab, two major anti-virus software producers have discovered such virus in the networks of several bank ATMs, which is able to collect information from bank cards.

This is a malicious program intended to infect and survive in ATMs. It is possible that new software will appear, aimed at illegitimately using banking information and removing funds,” an official of the Kaspersky Lab was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti news agency.

According to the official, the virus is a Trojan which is able to infect the popular American Diebold brand of ATMs, used in Russia and Ukraine. Judging by the programming code used, there is a high probability that the programmer comes from one of the former Soviet republics.

The computer security experts say the number of infected ATMs is minimal but individual bank cardholders will not be able to detect whether an ATM is infected or not. However, banks can run security software to find out if their machines are at risk.

Google has become all but synonymous with searching on the Web, but this is no time to sit still. Speaking at the Morgan Stanley technology conference Tuesday, CEO Eric Schmidt described today’s search market as a very fluid industry, and reiterated his enthusiasm for the opportunities lying ahead in mobile computing. “It looks like people will move very quickly from one search engine to another,” Schmidt said.

“A majority of people actually say they use more than one search engine, and of course Microsoft is working very hard to build a competitive search engine,” he added, noting the recent leak detailing plans about Microsoft’s next steps in the market. In search, Schmidt sees an ongoing challenge from a determined Microsoft, as well as a host of upstart players looking to augment traditional search with semantic data and other information on the Web. Microsoft, for its part, has been talking loudly about trying to resurrect a search deal with Yahoo after last year’s abortive negotiations.

Schmidt said he would welcome the competition, provided Microsoft played fair. “The problem has to do with Microsoft’s ability to use its Windows monopoly to restrict consumer choice,” he said. “Anything that Microsoft would do that would eliminate consumer choice with respect to search engines, Internet browsers, distribution — of which it was previously found guilty — are of concern, and there’s a history of that.” Schmidt’s talk comes amid a gloomy economic climate that he warned could get worse before it gets better, sapping the value of tech firms such as his own, which had long seemed impervious to recessionary pressures. Companies across all industries are tightening their belts and reassessing the business value of new initiatives that might have sailed through in flusher times.

“For the next few quarters, things are going to be very, very tough, so we’re talking about 2010″ before the economy begins to right itself, Schmidt said. “Everyone’s sort of assuming that 2009 is a tough, tough year.” The online ad industry may be better positioned to weather the economic storm than other sectors of the economy, but Schmidt said Google is by no means immune. “Google management spends most of its time doing business reviews today,” he added. “I think the situation is pretty dire.

The combination of everything that we have seen does not appear to have a current bottom.” Serving ads along side the search pages users see on their PCs will remain the core of Google’s business in the near term, but Schmidt was characteristically optimistic about the future of mobile computing.

He looks for Google’s revenue from mobile search to eclipse search on the PC over the next several years — “not decades” — as smartphones become increasingly sophisticated and affordable. “The fact of the matter is that mobile devices are going to be the majority of the way that people get information,” he said. “The argument is relatively simple: You already have them.

They’re called your phones.” He also took note of the netbook phenomenon, where smaller, lightweight laptops are making significant inroads in the traditional PC business. “What’s particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point,” he said “Eventually it will make sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of those books so they could make services revenue and advertising revenue on their consumption. That’s another new model that’s coming.”

New Frontiers for Google

In his far-ranging talk, Schmidt touched on several other fronts of Google’s business, including the ongoing integration of the businesses of ad giant DoubleClick. Despite the harsh effect the economy has had on display ads, Schmidt cited that as one of Google’s most immediate areas of expansion. But rather than the static banner ads that many people have come to know and ignore, Schmidt looks to video and interactive rich-media ads that would do a better job of engaging a Web user.

To that end, Google continues to work with major advertisers, such as Proctor & Gamble, to help them develop online advertising strategies. Last fall, the two companies swapped employees for several weeks in an attempt to hone P&G’s Web strategy and enhance Google’s position among the dominant company in the consumer-products sector. Schmidt said that Google is planning similar exchanges with other companies, but declined to name them as details are not finalized.

The online video arena, where Google has a vast reach with the wildly popular YouTube, has thus far yielded disappointing monetary returns. Schmidt said that monetizing YouTube remains a work in progress, and that Google is pursuing licensing and distribution deals with content producers to make money off things like music videos in a model similar to Apple’s iTunes. He also said that YouTube is planning to roll out more long-format and high-definition video content.

As you know, Facebook can be an invaluable source of marketing for your e-commerce business. However, keeping up with the ever-evolving social bookmarking service is a challenge. Since we covered Facebook Marketing and Business Pages in our How-To Guide back in February (see Facebook How-To Guide: Create Business Pages and Ad Campaigns), Facebook has rolled out changes to Business Pages that directly influence how you use them and how your fans can interact with you on Facebook.

To help you adjust, we take an in-depth look at recent changes made to Business Pages. Plus, we offer tips on how to use new features, such as status updates and Wall feeds to better connect with your Facebook fans.

The New Wall and Tabs Layout

The new Business Pages are designed to make your page look more like a personal profile page on Facebook. If you think of the new Page layout as being divided into three columns, the left-most column is where your brand logo, information, fans, links and admin tool links are located.

The center column, like the new personal profile pages, is the largest by width and importance. This center column is divided into tabs, with the Wall tab being the default. Here the Facebook mini-feed and Wall have been merged into a Twitter-style update feed that puts an emphasis on “what’s new” updates on Facebook.

As you make status changes, add links and share other information on your Business Page, it appears in the new central Wall feed. Updates and Wall posts made by your fans are also shown in this feed.

You will also find tabs to access the full-length version of your company information (you can duplicate a portion of this in the left-hand column also), as well as tabs for custom Facebook applications that you choose to add to your Business Page— like RSS feeds, and other applications. Business Page admins can rename and customize these tabs.

The far right-side column is now used to display Facebook ads on your Business Page.

Feed News to your Fan’s Feeds

The changes to Facebook Business Pages are tough to digest. While you may find it difficult to adjust your brand pages, there is a silver lining in all this.

he old Facebook Business Pages were static pages that were disconnected from the rest of Facebook and its millions of personal users. With these changes and a new emphasis on news feeds, your Business Page now is more viral, and your brand has more prominence in your fan’s news feed.

Let’s say you update your status or post a new link or photo on your Facebook Business Page. This update is shown on the homepage news feed of all Facebook users who have become a fan of your Business. Your Business Page news appears right alongside the fan’s friend news updates. While a fan of your Business Page is catching up on what’s new with friends, they will also get updates from any Business Page they have become a fan of in the same news feed.

This removes the barrier between personal and commercial information fed to Facebook users.

Getting the Most out of your New Business Page

If you had a Business Page on Facebook before the recent changes, you’ll want to edit your page layout and also change some permission settings. Here are some tips for getting the most out of the new Facebook Business Page options.

• Wall Tab: Remember, the new Wall Feed is now the main focal point for fans and page visitors. It is also the entry point to your Business Page. As an admin you will want to check permissions for what types of updates are sent to your Wall tab.
• Status Updates: Business Page admins can now share a status updates with fans. These updates will get posted to your Business Page Wall and can be seen by fans in their homepage news feed.
• Less Custom App Space: With the new layout you will need to look at the custom applications you display on the Business Page in the far left-hand space. Ensure you use this space only for apps relevant to your business—like links, notes or RSS feeds. Applications you add for entertainment that are not related to your business should be moved to a secondary tab that admins can rename to make navigation easier. Also, some apps may also need to be moved to secondary tabs because it requires a display width that exceeds what is available in the far left-hand column in the new layout.
• Focus on Facebook Content: The recent changes also means you should start adding fresh content and updates to your Facebook Business Page on a regular basis, now that you can blast your updates and status to the homepage news feed of your fans.

Keep in mind that a user can simply click a little X beside your update in their news feed to hide all future news updates about you. While it’s nice to have your brand and updates mentioned in news feeds, Facebook users are less likely to keep receiving your Wall feed if your updates start to outnumber friend updates.

When you update your Facebook Business Page you’ll need to find a good balance between getting your business message across to your Facebook fans without “commercially spamming” them. Keep the updates light and useful rather than advertising-heavy.

Online storage – uploading your data over the Internet to a service provider’s data center – makes such perfect sense that the market is now glutted with vendors all hoping for a share of the anticipated revenue. And that is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Storing your data online, also called “cloud storage” however, makes particularly good sense for small businesses, and especially for highly mobile employees. Here’s why.

Online services save you the trouble and expense of setting up and managing backup and archival storage systems. You typically pay the service provider for as much capacity as you need, or sometimes for unlimited storage – and you don’t pay very much for it.

Because the data is stored remotely at a secure data center rather than on your own premises, it’s in some ways safer. If your office burns down, you can restore data over the Internet, from anywhere.

And if you need to restore data or access archived or shared files while traveling, you can do it without having to rely on potentially insecure and hard to set up virtual private network (VPN) connections to your office. Plus, again, you can access files from any Net-connected computer.

An Overheated Market

Competition is generally a good thing – it keeps prices low and spurs innovation – but you can also have too much of a good thing.

A glutted market, especially in this case where vendors are still experimenting with pricing and business models, means that choosing one to serve your needs and provide reliable, secure service over time can be a confusing crapshoot.

You might think that buying from an established vendor would protect you from uncertainty, but Hewlett-Packard recently closed down its two-year-old online storage service, HP Upline. Others have also disappeared, including highly rated sites.

Still, there are reasonably well-established providers. And many of these services are so inexpensive, it’s feasible to use more than one to provide redundancy.

Sorting Through the Options

Online storage services fall into two main groups. Some, such as Google Docs (part of Google Apps), focus mainly on file sharing, providing storage so you can post documents to a server on the Net and let other people see and even edit them. Microsoft’s free beta trial of Office Live, a file sharing and collaboration-type service, includes Office Live Workspace which provides up to 5GB of free storage.

Other vendors, such as Mozy, focus mainly or exclusively on backup. Some companies, such as Box and Egnyte, which we wrote about here, combine both functions. We’ll focus on the backup-type services.

Most companies provide a time-limited free trial of their service. Don’t buy any service without trying it first. And many offer some storage for free, hoping you’ll eventually sign up for more. The online backup providers typically offer 2GB, which may be enough for many small businesses to back up their most vital data.

One other way to differentiate online storage services: some provide downloadable client software to manage your online storage, while others, including most of the file-sharing type, are browser-based.

A browser-based service has the benefit of allowing you to access files from virtually any computer. But client software usually makes managing files easier and faster.

Backup: Mozy and Fabrik

The best backup services we know come from Mozy Inc. and Fabrik Inc. I’m lumping them together because they use the same client software, and offer the same basic features.

Mozy provides consumer (Mozy Home) and business (Mozy Pro) services. Fabrik Ultimate Backup is similar to the Mozy Home service. They’re cheap, secure and easy to use.

Both companies offer 2GB of free storage along with free downloadable client software. Mozy Home and Fabrik Ultimate Backup cost $5 a month for unlimited storage for one computer – less if you pay for a year or two years at a time. Mozy Pro is priced per desktop ($3.95) or server ($6.95) and per gigabyte ($0.50) per month.

As with other backup services, the Mozy and Fabrik client applications ?? virtually identical except for branding ?? let you choose which files and folders, and also file types, to back up. After initial backup, they only copy files that have changed so subsequent backups are relatively fast.

Both perform backups either when the computer is not in use or according to a schedule you set. And both can backup open or in-use files such as Outlook database files. Mozy Pro will automatically backup files as they change, and it keeps multiple versions. Fabrik Ultimate Backup detects changed files and backs them up every two hours.

Strong Security

Security is as good as most small businesses require. Mozy and Fabrik both protect your data with 128-bit SSL encryption during backup – the same technology banks use for online transactions.

They store data with 448-bit Blowfish encryption to ensure it’s safe from hackers. Mozy Pro subscribers have the option of 256-bit military-grade encryption with user-set keys.

Mozy looks like it should last. It was originally launched in 2006 by an entrepreneurial firm, but was later acquired by EMC Corp., a multi-billion-dollar diversified IT company.

EMC has always been focused on areas related to storage and backup, so it may be more likely than most to survive the inevitable consolidation in this market.

Fabrik launched in 2005. In 2007, it purchased the consumer business of SimpleTech Inc., then the third-largest provider of add-on storage products. And last month, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies purchased Fabrik outright. So it too has a storage pedigree and strong backing from investors.

Proof in the Pudding

The real test of any online backup service is restoring files in an emergency. Your correspondent can confirm that Mozy and Fabrik work.

My laptop recently died, thousands of miles from home. Luckily I had a second machine with me and had backed up important data using free Mozy and Fabrik accounts.

Both offer a few ways to restore files. You can do it using the client software, but you can also do it from within Windows Explorer or by logging in to your account at the Mozy Web site.

Since my computer was dead and the client software inaccessible, I had to restore from the Web. It took more than two hours to download my 1.5GB Outlook file to the backup machine, but just having it, under the circumstances, was a blessing.

Backup: Other Options Abound

There are lots of other providers, including many that offer similar features.

iStorage from Iomega Corp., another multi-billion-dollar storage products vendor, promises strong security – 128-bit SSL or 256-bit AES – but costs a little more, with prices for iStorage Home ranging from $5.99 a month for 1GB of capacity to $50 a month for 15GB.

Intronis, which started out targeting Fortune 500 companies, launched its eSureIT online backup service in 2003, making it a pioneer. It also boasts strong security – 256 AES encryption during backup and archiving. Intronis offers 2GB of free storage, but charges per gigabyte per month ($2.99) for additional – and you have to provide billing information to get the free capacity.

Back Up My Info, which we wrote about here, is more expensive again but differentiates itself by offering highly personalized service. Its employees check to ensure subscribers’ backups are completed regularly.

Other options include MyOtherDrive (which includes sharing features as well as backup), Storage Guardian (another pioneer that has been in operation for 10 years) and iDrive.

By Gerry Blackwell

Microsoft today released its first-annual Microsoft SMB Insight report, a study designed to look at the challenges and technology priorities facing small businesses. The study surveyed more than 600 of its Small Business Specialists in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France and Brazil.

The Specialists surveyed, all local VARS serving small-to-midsized businesses, identified the issues driving small businesses to invest in technology as declining revenue, competition from larger concerns and the overall economy. In the face of these challenges, according to the survey, companies are concentrating on reducing operating costs, improving employee productivity or acquiring and retaining customers.

Further, the report identified the top technology priorities for SMBs for the coming year: virtualization, IT consolidation, business intelligence, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and support for remote workers. Here’s how the numbers played out:

• Fifty percent of the Specialists surveyed chose virtualization or IT consolidation through a small or midsize server as the technology most likely to reduce operating costs.
• Study participants expect a 20 percent increase this year in the number of small and midsize businesses using SaaS.
• More than 50 percent of those surveyed considered Customer Relationship Management (CRM), virtualization, or IT consolidation as the best investment for maximizing business growth in a down economy.
• Nearly 40 percent expect an increased interest in business intelligence and identified it as a critical tool for helping to improve customer experience and increasing loyalty.
• More than half the study participants anticipate an increase in the number of remote workers, and nearly 60 percent expect that will also lead to bigger role and more responsibilities for those individuals working remotely.

These technologies, along with the support of local VARS, will allow small business owners to address their goals, said Eduardo Rosini, corporate vice president, Microsoft Worldwide Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners Group.

“Virtualization is cost-effective because it lets small business owners expand the capabilities of their existing servers, while business intelligence and CRM can help them to better attract, retain and service customers,” he said.

He added that SaaS applications such as CRM and document sharing give small businesses better ways to exchange data with customers and employees.

The study highlighted the growing trend in remote workers, which gives small companies a lot of flexibility. “Not all companies have the infrastructure to allow it,” said Rosini. “The study showed that Small Business Specialists are seeing a high demand for SharePoint, Windows servers, MS Office, Windows Mobile and SaaS applications, too…technologies that let you access your data no matter where you’re located.”

Rosini noted that two-thirds of all small businesses do not have an IT staff which, he said, makes the local VAR’s role in planning and implementing technology for small businesses absolutely critical.

“Different scenarios require different solutions. Local VARs can customize an IT environment so that it works technically and financially,” said Rosini. “Small business owners are reaching out more and more to re-engineer their IT efforts and actively working with local VARs to figure out what they need and how to do it better.”