Comment by rwmj
5 years ago
I guess as they've gone bust I can tell this story now ... I used to consult for Thomas Cook about 15 years ago, and they were a basketcase of a company even back them, so this doesn't surprise me. I feel sorry for all the reps and workers out in the field and on the planes who will lose their jobs because of the profligacy of the Peterborough head office.
Two examples of stupidity stick with me. One was that at the time they outsourced their website to their main competitor. Which as you can imagine worked well because their competitor had no desire at all to fix the many problems with the website. TC didn't understand that the website was everything because they were at heart a high street travel agency.
The other was when I worked on managing their AdWords account, which was enormous (like 100K different keywords in thousands of groups). Some keywords would be bid at £10s of pounds. It is very easy to lose a lot of money on these keywords because there's a fine balance between the profit you make on each holiday (usually £100-ish), versus paying a large amount of money on each keyword and the number of sales you make at the end of the "sales tunnel". There was also a weekly industry survey which came out ranking the position of all the travel websites according to number of visitors (I forget the name of it). Senior managers at TC were fascinated by "being number one" on this survey every week, and so would instruct us to dial up the keyword bids on Friday night and run like this over the weekend. Google AdWords with high bids is very effective at bringing large numbers of low quality visitors to the website.
Each week they would indeed come number one on this survey (read only by other senior managers in the travel industry), while at the same time losing tens of thousands of pounds selling holidays for negative profit.
This brings back memories... I was the technical half of a two person team who built the very first Thomas Cook website in 1995. Of course, e-commerce was a step too far at the time, but there was much excitement when the spec for HTML frames came out mid-project (don’t judge).
> e-commerce was a step too far at the time
I remember those times. A number of companies in the UK saw web-sites as extensions to their teletext based advertising, just with more information density and a few small pictures (emphasis on both few and small: most of their customers were using ~28k8 connections at home and/or overcommitted shared connections in collages & libraries). You were sill expected to phone in your order, or physically go to your local branch, once you had seen something that took your fancy.
eCommerce was happening at that point (Amazon started in '94 IIRC, and the gambling & other adult entertainment industries were already actively making moves in that realm), but it was in its early days and far from trusted by either the public or many companies.
Ha I can recall in early 95 excitedly explaining to our customer in BT that we had Tables for layout and could change the background colour now
This was an intranet site was launched in 94, we don't talk about bt.com
28.8Kbps dialup was a different time. I think teletext holidays were popular then.
There’s no shame in HTML frames in 1995.
Frames reloading in background is how I managed to create some interactivity before XMLHttpRequest. No idea if there would have been some better way at the time.
As one who specialises in enterprise SEO.
That is still an issue with many businesses, websites are still seen as just an electronic version of a poster on a bill board, its gradually changing.
And Eu companies are even worse, a few years back I suggested a link from a German parents website to the uk subsidiary and was told the Head office lawyers where checking to see if they "where allowed" to add a link.
In German law, if you add a link to another site somewhere on your own site, you take responsibility for the content on the site you link you. You are required to check for that or face liability. This the result of years of court cases around this matter. And courts don't usually understand much about the web, let alone tech in general.
So while involving lawyers every time is definitely high on the CYA scale, it may make sense to run some instances by a lawyer to be safe(er). The subsidiary's website shouldn't generally be much of a problem, though.
Even in the US I’ve had pushback from lawyers about external links from websites and other official content. The idea is that it’s something of a tacit endorsement.
Yes it’s being conservative but the lawyers definitely prefer fewer links where possible and I’ve had them ask me to remove quite a few.
I am very curious to know if the rule of "being responsible to the link a website links to" applies transitively, i.e. a link in the link my website link to. If applies, then can the law be interpreted as my website needs to be responsible to the entire internet. On the flip side, if the rule only applies to one layer deep, then a url shortener would defeat the whole law
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Are they expected to continually monitor the linked website? What happens if they add the link and then a week later something "bad" is added to some sub-page of the linked website?
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So how many times have each of the search engines been sued?
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Has ever happened and does this also cover newspapers?
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Though I'd read a pretty good write up of their AdWords tactics recently and learned a fair bit: https://marketingexamples.com/seo/step-by-step-keyword-resea...
that's a german legal liability thing. not (just) european business generally being stuck in the 90s
What linking to your uk subsidiary?
Was that the 1890's they are stuck in :-)
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Most British companies I’ve seen operating appear to be an absolute mess from the inside. It’s funny that the British have the Northern European credibility in business but I don’t think they’re anywhere close as efficient or organised as the Germans or the Dutch. This is just personal experience but I’ve come to realise it seems to be the norm that British management is overall terrible.
From my personal experience: there are huge German companies that are terribly organized. Inefficient or just stupid processes are being kept up out of tradition often headed by some senior who knows it the best and whos decisions are not being questions "because he's/we've been doing it this way for ever now".
Generalizations don't help here. There is idiocy in companies and my feeling is that the bigger they are, the worse it gets.
Incorrect (Or have you sources?).... the issue is old legacy based companies. No matter where they are based.
Legacy as in business systems, business thought process, legacy IT, etc.
TC is a very old company
There are also old companies who manage to keep up and innovate, and care about competence. Not as much as tiny startups, but enough to survive and do well.
One problem with the British upperclass, is that they tend to be educated at private schools like Eton, where they primarily learn confidence. So tons of British politicians and managers know how to appear to know what they're doing, without actually knowing what they're doing. As long as things are going well, this works fine, especially since the people they do business with come from the same schools. But when the shit hits the fan, it turns into a fumbling circus. Like it did with Tories and Brexit.
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Company being old certainly does not mean it needs to be full of legacy systems and business processes. It only means that the company's management is not competent at evolving the company's processes and systems, which means it will eventually fail regardless of being a fresh startup or centuries old going concern.
Bosch, Siemens, Bayer, BASF and Carl-Zeiss are all examples of over hundred year-old German companies that continue to innovate at the cutting edge of their industries and are massively profitable.
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Bank of England, arguably the ultimate in legacy business at the heart of all business types, are investigating the benefits of the most recent tech developments, namely cryptocurrency. Is it a legacy business issue or simply and ultimately a multitude of factors including bad management with ego's getting in the way which doesnt make a nice easy to read story or account of events?
I'm not suggesting the original poster is incorrect with their account of events, lack of the right investment is something many people can identify in their own line of work, its just timescales to a point of failure can be variable. Likewise bleeding edge technology is not always beneficial for all, but holding back or testing the water and constant monitoring is required to avoid expensive mistakes.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/digital-currencies http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Danezis/papers/ndss16curren... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/30/bank-england-plo...
This seems more like experience with certain kinds of companies - I've worked with companies around the world and there are certain anti-patterns I've experienced everywhere which really have little to do with the nationality of the management. For example, idiot CEOs, nepotism and micromanagement are, unfortunately, international phenomena.
That’s too bad. Being Portuguese for some reason I thought some countries would be better than others. The British tendency to be indirect and weird about being straightforward (people like that are called “rude” if they work in a majority southern English company) doesn’t help.
>it seems to be the norm that British management is overall terrible
What an incredibly spurious, over-generalised anecdote.
He did take pains to specify it was just his experience. And even the fragment you quoted tries to be diplomatic by saying "it _seems_ to be"
> What an incredibly spurious, over-generalised anecdote.
Could be. I'd like to hear what evidence, beyond this one news story, informs the OP's generalization.
The history of Ireland makes me think it's not as anecdotal as some would like. ;)
Edit: I really hope that the people down-voting this just don't like the joke. If they think British rule of Ireland was good for Ireland or was in any way high quality that is far more concerning.
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Suddenly Google's ad profits make a lot more sense.
When I worked in this field (and I must stress that this is 15 years out of date anecdata), my impression was that Google's profits came from a mix of a large influx of naive new users, and established companies with misaligned incentives.
By "misaligned incentives", I mean that we were rewarded with a % of ad spend. This is very common model in the old advertising industry, and AdWords was treated as adverts, not as a technology proposition. Of course this meant that we had very little financial incentive to reduce the ad spend.
A more aligned structure would have been to reward percentage of profits, but companies were reluctant to reveal their profit margins to a third party, and third parties couldn't trust their clients to report this data correctly anyway. Hence percentage of ad spend was what everyone used.
Percentage wouldn't necessarily be so bad, except that there's a certain base cost to setting up and running all of those systems. At some point getting someone to up their spending 10% has very little incremental cost. It would be far cheaper than trying to reduce overhead.
So now you have perverse incentives on perverse incentives.
And if you don't look at it too closely then you can feel good about all the money you're making helping people slowly self destruct. Your parasitism is perfectly justified by the mad stacks of cash you're making.
There's only two ways to get that much money. Do something really really good (at which point you probably will give a lot of that money away), or do something really really bad. If your company has to talk about 'evil', it's probably in the latter camp and always has been.
If you go with Google's suggestions when you setup an Adwords campaign, they will absolutely rinse your budget with minimal return. Google has a churn and burn mentality when it comes their Adwords customers as most new businesses fail within 12 months.
Absolutely. Two things I remember (from back in 2005) were:
Campaigns defaulted to worldwide. You've got some naive new user selling for example hand painted dolls to a UK audience. They sign up for AdWords, and get a huge influx of visitors, yet nobody is buying. Why? Because the website doesn't and cannot sell to all these new US and worldwide visitors. The thing is the seller is an expert in dolls, not SEO, and has no idea what is going on.
You can set a daily limit on ad spend, which is nice, but it means that your advertizing works really well for that niche midnight - 5am visitor profile, but doesn't actually bring in local buyers who are awake at normal times. Again, the naive AdWords users usually have no logging or stats (and if they do they wouldn't necessarily know how to interpret it) so they don't understand what is going on.
I hope Google have fixed these two things, but I'm sure there are plenty of other traps.
It would be interesting to know how significant a factor it is that established b2b companies try their best to rip off the new companies.
Sounds eerily similar to the early days of Ryanair[1] which was a poorly managed basket case in an industry ripe for innovation of its time - managers caring about their looks more than their books, cost overruns and non ownership of key bases... It sounds like Thomas Cook didn't have their Michael O'Leary to swoop in and fix their problems.
Even Ryanair didn't value their website or online offerings at first but they valued something which TC obviously missed time and time again - their bottom line.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/12/biography.feat...
I guess, I can say that I worked on a project for introducing interactive advertising displays into their branches. It was killed because they didn't like the power cabling.