Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

–Joel Makower offers extensive thoughts on Coca-Cola and plastic bottles, which we discussed here the other day.

–Ryan Paul of Ars Technica reports on the decision that SCO will face a judge rather than a jury in its Novell trial. We talked about SCO’s legal issues last month. SCO’s troubles look to be getting worse.

–Ville Heiskanen of Bloomberg reports that “Motorola May Fail to Lift Profits With New Razr Phone.” This reminds me — in the vein of this post from a couple of months back — of how poor an indicator business-magazine stories are for long-term success. When the Razr was at its peak, the stories came thick and fast about how Motorola had gotten its groove back. Now the prevailing line — which seems apt, given the company’s struggles to sustain financial and branding performance — is that Motorola had a one-hit wonder with the Razr, and that so far it’s not built to produce a string of hits a la Apple.

–The New York Times offers this extended business/exec profile on Dell the man and Dell the company: “Can Michael Dell Refocus His Namesake?” Writer Steve Lohr’s answer to that runs to several thousand well-informed words. My own take: Dell the company is nowhere near folding its tents, but Dell the man faces an uphill battle. Just because his company has been successful doesn’t mean it has the long-term answers. It’s hard to think of it this way, but in fact the PC market is still quite young in historical terms. I wouldn’t bet against Michael Dell, but what got them to where they are is not likely to get them where they want to go.

–Like the rest of the business world, we’ve talked plenty about Countrywide Financial as the huge mortgage company has navigated the troubles in the real estate and credit markets. Now they’re going to be navigating with fewer hands on deck: the company is laying off 12,000 employees. I’ll say again what I’ve said before: we’re a long way from working out all the hidden problems that built up during the real estate bubble of the early 2000s.