In my FT column this week, I have written about this week’s recall of 1m folding pushchairs by Maclaren, the British company - and what we can learn from how it mishandled the event. FT.com has now introduced a comment facility on all articles so please add your comments there.

Incidentally, the most confusing thing I found in researching the piece is that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission refers to all large after-market interventions - such as Maclaren’s provision of repair kits for its pushchairs - as “recalls”, even if the product is not actually called back.

It ought to change its terminology because I am definitely not the only person baffled by it.

The recalling of up to 1m Maclaren pushchairs - or strollers, as they are called in the US - must rank as one of the most sweeping ever. It affects not just a single model but all of the umbrella-folding strollers sold by the British company in the US since 1999.

Furthermore, the product recall, which comes after 12 reports of small children having their fingers amputated by the folding mechanism, affects the main selling point of the pushchairs since they were invented in 1965 - that they are easily foldable.

I have an affection for Maclaren pushchairs since I once wrote a long article about the fascinating history of the company, founded by Owen Finlay Maclaren, an inventor and former engineer who was partly responsible for the folding undercarriage of the Spitfire fighter.

However, the recall is extremely damaging for the company, which is sending out free repair kits to everyone who has bought one in the past decade. Any product that potentially causes serious injuries to children will face a battle re-establishing credibility with consumers.

Ironically, Maclaren has been among the most successful of British exporters since being revived under new ownership in the early 2000s. This product recalis a serious challenge to that achievement.

My column in the FT this week is on the Sage of Omaha:

In the annals of double-edged compliments, Warren Buffett’s description of his planned $27bn acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe as an “all-in wager on the economic future of the US” ranks highly. If the best expression of the future of the US economy is a railway operator dating back to the mid-1800s, then growth investors might be advised to look instead to China, India or Brazil.

Perhaps to balance his criticism of the US trade deficit and doubts about the dollar, Mr Buffett often eulogises the US economic system. “It has unleashed potential as no other system has and will continue to do so. America’s best days lie ahead,” he wrote in his 2008 letter to
shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.

Actions, however, speak louder than words. The BNSF deal is the largest acquisition Berkshire Hathaway has made and comes as 79-year-old Mr Buffett has started to identify possible successors. So it may be the ultimate symbol not only of his investment style but of how he sees his country.

“When investing, pessimism is your friend, euphoria the enemy,” he wrote in the letter and, underneath his optimistic gloss, the deal has a downbeat moral for the US. It is a safe, predictable but somewhat dull market for the global investor with a lot of solid but ageing companies.

Please read the rest here and comment below.

I said I would report back on my experience with using a fully-fledged version of Windows 7 on a netbook - an Asus Eee that I bought last week.

To cut a long story short, it has been good so far. The netbook does not appear to have any trouble running Windows 7 Ultimate, of which I was given a review copy last week. Given Windows’ record of demanding ever more sophisticated hardware to work, that is impressive.

The upgrade from Windows 7 Starter, the stripped-down version of the software that Microsoft has licensed to netbook manufacturers, worked smoothly and so I am now being treated to the Aero display features not included in the cheaper version.

That is one piece of good news. The other is that Windows 7 does indeed seem to be a better-looking and more stable piece of software than previous versions (although it is early days).

One of the best things about it is the Aero interface, which beats Apple’s Snow Leopard in terms of the ease with which multiple programs and files can be viewed on the desktop.

Windows 7 also delivers better on past promises on things that matter to users but which Microsoft has been shamefully poor at making work in the past. The machine boots up rapidly and can also come in and out of sleep mode quickly and consistently.

One caveat: I am suspending judgment since Windows has in the past had a tendency to operate rapidly at first and then slow down egregiously the longer it operates. But so far, so good.

Finally, Microsoft seems to have made some strides in making Windows easier and more intuitive to operate, an area in which Apple has been far ahead.

The machine signed on to my home network easily and Windows Media Centre, its program for playing songs and videos - and streaming them on a network - looks good.

Having said this, the netbook suits me just fine (although I am using it in limited ways) and I see no need to spend more money on a more expensive laptop. So Michael Dell and others can hector consumers all they like about netbooks’ shortcomings; I am not convinced.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, was characteristically upbeat at the launch of Windows 7, the new version of its operating software in New York today. Mr Ballmer had good reason since Windows 7 (whether or not is numbered correctly) looks like a good product.

Microsoft has had enough of being pilloried by Apple for the complexity and unreliability of Windows. The software not only appears to be more reliable and much easier to use than previous versions but it does things like setting up a home network and streaming video across it with impressive ease.

The most notable absentee at this morning’s launch, however, was the netbook. When Mr Ballmer unveiled the array of computers from Microsoft’s partners running Windows 7, none of them that I could see were netbooks,  the cheap and popular portable machines about which I have written.

Indeed, Mr Ballmer went out of his way to claim that many people were dissatisfied with the slow graphics performance of netbooks. Instead, he showed off some small laptops that had faster chips and superior graphics cards from manufacturers including Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard.

It was yet another heavy-handed attempt by the Wintel industry to wean customers off netbooks, which are so cheap - and thus offer such low margins - that companies like Dell seem to be making them only under protest. Michael Dell recently made scathing remarks about the category.

Microsoft is only allowing netbook manufacturers to install the hobbled Starter edition of Windows 7, thus depriving users of some of the most attractive and time-saving aspects of Windows 7 - in particular the improved desktop navigation.

The truth, however, is that full-strength Windows 7 runs perfectly fine on netbooks. I have this on authority from a senior Microsoft engineer who told me he had installed Windows 7 Ultimate on his netbook with no problem whatsoever.

This encouraged me to defy Mr Ballmer’s advice today and buy an Asus netbook, which comes with Windows 7 Starter edition. Despite the heckling from the industry against customers who dare to like an inconvenient product, that should do me fine.

I do, however, have one advantage. Microsoft handed out a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (in fact, Windows 7 Ultimate Signature Edition with Mr Ballmer’s inscribed on it) to journalists at the event. So I plan to upgrade my netbook with it and will let you know how it goes.

Those who want to upgrade their netbooks from Starter to Home Premium and did not get invited to today’s event will have to pay $80 for the licence in the US.

I’ve just returned from the launch of the new Barnes & Noble e-book reader, the Nook, which was bizarrely held in one of the most out-of-the-way spots in Manhattan - Chelsea Piers on the Hudson - at 4pm.

Perhaps the slog to get there and back, and sit in a hot, crowded room with lots of publishers and agents, has biased me against the product, which is a slickly executed attempt to rival Amazon’s Kindle.

It is about the same size as the Kindle, will be about $20 cheaper when it goes on sale at the end of November. It also gets one-up on the Kindle in various ways, including having a small colour screen at the bottom of the device (below the main E-Ink one) on which you navigate, and browse B&N’s electronic bookstore.

One thing I liked was that the books are sold in the Epub open format, which is supported by publishers, and the device runs on Google’s Android open source software. In contrast, Amazon sells books in a proprietary format, ensuring they can only be read on Kindles or Kindle software.

Apart from that, B&N has a decent chance of rivalling Amazon, at least in the US, because it has very strong distribution power through its 700 retail stores and 600 college book stores.

However, the somewhat chaotic event and the branding reminded me of the launch of Microsoft’s Zune music player, a late attempt to catch up with Apple’s iPhone.

The Zune also featured some extra gimmicks, such as the ability to swap songs between Zunes (the Nook allows one to “lend” books to friends to read on their own devices, or PCs).

In theory, the Zune was a smart attempt to mimic and improve on the iPod but in practice it gained very little traction. I wonder whether B&N will be able to overcome Amazon’s first mover advantage.

The Companies & Markets section of the US edition of the FT has the following headlines today:

Apple leaps ahead with 47 per cent surge in profits

Options-driven rally likely if oil prices move above $80

Dutch bank DSB left to fail after run (because regulators were confident it was safe to do so)

Henderson says GM on track for public offering

Daimler accelerates to 470m profit in surprise bounce-back

Sands chief back in the money after $1bn punt

Fed tests tools for draining liquidity

UK’s rebound sparks fears of overheating (the UK commercial property market, that is)

Investors take rosy view in big week for earnings

Bullish climate sees S&P sweep through 1,100 level

All this may be coincidental but it indicates a strikingly bullish mood not only in markets but also among big businesses that suffered badly in the financial crisis. How long it lasts may be another matter but it is worth noting.

Of these stories, I was most struck by Matthew Garrahan’s interview with Sheldon Adelson, chief executive of Las Vegas Sands, recounting Mr Adelson’s near-financial death experience.

He denies ever fearing that the group risked bankruptcy. “Never,” he growls. “Not for a moment. I wasn’t going to cap my career of 64 years with a loss.”

However, he admits the year had some low points. “I bit the bullet and I sold equity. That was the lowest point . . . because I felt that my job was to enhance shareholder value and here I had diluted it, including [my own stake].

“But I paid the price. I put up $1bn to save the company. We were down as low as [a market capitalisation of] $1bn and we’re back to $12bn today.”

The equity sale diluted his stake from 69 per cent to 52 per cent. But the recent revival in the company’s shares has lifted the value of his holding up to $6bn from about $500m at the low point this year.

I imagine there are a few similar stories out there of companies that looked like they might be about to founder last year but pulled themselves back from the brink.

In his response to my review of his book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis describes me as “a convenient totem for the media’s insistence on viewing the world through old media lenses.”

I definitely feel like a totem after reading the post on his blog because he attributes to me a set of views I don’t hold (or only partially hold) and then criticises those instead of mine.

Here are a couple of examples from his post:

The Financial Times’ John Gapper gave my book a bad review because he refused to go along with its organizing premise and principal: that our economy and society are undergoing fundamental shifts as we move past the industrial age and that Google is a worthy totem to use to understand that change.

No, I don’t refuse to go along with the first part – I think it is true. I even think Google might be “a worthy totem” (making me an unworthy totem, presumably). I just think Jeff reached some broad and mistaken conclusions about how businesses should respond.

That, I realised, is why Gapper admires [Apple], because it still has control, like the old media moguls. He defines and measures value in their old media terms.

No, I admire Apple for making good products and being able to charge a premium for them. I pointed out in my review that the curbing of distribution monopolies is good for consumers but I don’t think that it helps businesses make money. That is not a value judgment.

Oddly for the author of a book about the company, he fails to acknowledge that Google itself makes profits through dominance of distribution.

Google is not a distributor. Indeed, its greatest misstep to date, the book settlement, came in part because it uncharacteristically was going to control and distribute content (that it didn’t own). Google doesn’t distribute. It organizes. It links. Google is not in the software business. It is in the platform business (advertising being its primary platform).

Here, he mixes up Google’s editorial model with its business model. Google may not control content but it certainly controls and distributes advertising. It makes all – or virtually all – of its money by taking fees to distribute search advertisements.

In general, I think he would rather caricature me an old media Tsarist with dark, conservative motives than to address what I actually wrote, which can be found here.