Last Saturday was Christmas Day, the day set aside by Christian faithful to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago. Christianity remains the largest religion in the world, with over 2 billion adherents across the globe.
Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn’t introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.
In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck’s research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company’s reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. “To remain dominant in the future,” he told Forbes, “we need to dominate the central nervous system.”
If you’re into Google Doodles then Micheal Lopez is your very own Santa. Lopez is responsible for Google’s Doodles, those delightful illustrations that crop up over the course of the year to celebrate holidays, pop-cultural moments, civic landmarks and scientific achievements. But the most highly anticipated Doodle of them all must be Google’s very own holiday card, which launched at 9.00am ET Thursday and will stay up on the home page until Christmas is over.
(See pictures of Google Doodles.)
The 30-year-old’s concept (which took five artists roughly 250 hours to complete) was to show the famed logo via 17 interactive portraits of holiday scenes from around the world. Lopez wanted to roll it out over three days, ending on Christmas Day itself. But the powers that be had other ideas as they asked for the Doodle to go up in its entirety, and thus the six month process suddenly had a rather frantic finish.
Even Lopez had to concede that a Christmas opening might diminish the amount of people who would enjoy the fruits of his labor, including those close to home. “I thought, ‘Is my mom going to be available to play this on Christmas Day?'” he said. “The answer is, no, she’ll be making me food!”
