The fact that superior service ca n generate a competitive advantage for a company does not mean that every attempt at improving service will create such an advantage. Investments in service, like those in production and distribution, must be balanced against other types of investments on the basis of direct, tangible benefits such as cost reduction and increased revenues. If a company is already effectively on a par with its competitors because it provides service that avoids a damaging reputation and keeps customers from leaving at an unacceptable rate, then investment in higher service levels may be wasted, since service is a deciding factor for customers only in extreme situations.

This truth was not apparent to managers of one regional bank, which failed to improve its competitive position despite its investment in reducing the time a customer had to. wait for a teller, The bank managers did not recognize the level of customer inertia in the consumer banking industry that arises from the inconvenience of switching banks. Nor did they analyze their service improvement to determine whether it would attract new customers by producing a new standard of service that would excite customers or by proving difficult for competitors to copy. The only merit of the improvement was that it could easily be described to customers.

    In 1994, a team of scientists led by David Mckay began studying the meteorite ALH84001, which had been discovered in Antarctica in 1984. Two years later, the McKay team announced that ALH84001, which scientists generally agree originated on Mars, contained compelling evidence that life once existed on Mars. This evidence includes the discovery of organic molecules in ALH84001,the first ever found in Martian rock. Organic molecules-complex, carbon based compounds-form the basis for terrestrial life. The organic molecules found in ALH84001 are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH's. When microbes die, their organic material often decays into PAH's.

    Skepticism about the McKay team's claim remains, however. For example,ALH84001 has been on earth for 13,000 years, suggesting to some scientists that its PAH's might have resulted from terrestrial contamination. However, McKay's team has demonstrated that the concentration of PAH's increases as one looks deeper into ALH84001, contrary to what one would expect from terrestrial contamination. The skeptic's strongest argument, however, is that processes unrelated to organic life can easily produce all the evidence found by McKay' steam, including PAH's. For example, star formation produces PAH's. Moreover, PAH's frequently appear in other meteorites, and no one attributes their presence to life processes. Yet McKay's team notes that the particular combination of PAH's in ALH84001 is more similar to the combinations produced by decaying organisms than to those originating form nonbiological processes.

    In her account of unmarried women's experiences in colonial Philadelphia, Wulf argues that educated young women, particularly Quakers, engaged in resistance to patriarchal marriage by exchanging poetry critical of marriage, copying verse into their commonplace books. Wulf suggests that this critique circulated beyond the daughters of the Quaker elite and middle class, whose commonplace books she mines, proposing that Quaker schools brought it to many poor female students of diverse backgrounds.

    Here Wulf probably overstates Quaker schools' impact. At least three years' study would be necessary to achieve the literacy competence necessary to grapple with the material she analyzes. In 1765, the year Wulf uses to demonstrate the diversity of Philadelphia's Quaker schools, 128 students enrolled in these schools. Refining Wulf's numbers by the information she provides on religious affiliation, gender, and length of study, it appears that only about 17 poor non-Quaker girls were educated in Philadelphia's Quaker schools for three years or longer. While Wulf is correct that a critique of patriarchal marriage circulated broadly, Quaker schools probably cannot be credited with instilling these ideas in the lower classes. Popular literary satires on marriage had already landed on fertile ground in a multiethnic population that embodied a wide range of marital beliefs and practices. These ethnic and class-based traditions themselves challenged the legitimacy of patriarchal marriage.