Personally I would rather BP be getting on with the job than reading unsolicited email from the peanut gallery.
Oh, and to put that $2.35Bn into perspective, Union Carbide paid out $450M for, umm, killing 20,000 people at Bhopal. BP has made a huge mess sure, but after the initial explosion, no-one has died. I think Americans need to take a good long hard look at themselves in a mirror before getting on their high horses.
First of all, let's not pretend like all American's are happy with Union Carbide's "punishment" for that incident.
Second, BP isn't paying for deaths. They must pay for the monumental cleanup and economic damages resulting from the environmental disaster they caused. It's expensive.
According to the article, Innocentive has a global network of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people who are experts in physics, chemistry, math, life sciences, computer science, and many other fields.. I wouldn't be so fast to discount the worth of their ideas. It's that kind of arrogance that got them in trouble in the first place.
This just looks like some free publicity for Innocentive. Maybe they're the arrogant ones?
The simple truth is that BP isn't able to solve the problem. I hope they will. But for the moment, rejecting potential solutions seems short sighted.
It is interesting that one never even HEARS the other side of this story.
That's not exactly a good message to be sending to businesses.
Their rationale: Can't just be cost containment? That would be so idiotic and short sighted! They are going to be dealing with this as a corporation for decades...
They should be owning up to it now. But maybe it's just short sightedness of the people in charge currently. They will likely all be retired long before this is over...
Put simply -- they know what they know and they know what they don't know, and they're worried that if they step outside the comfort zone of redlines, LOLs, and escape clauses that they could worsen rather than improve the current situation.
<edit> That said, it is really myopic of them and it does demonstrate a possibly disastrous lack of foresight.
