The Bank of America has come up with another "gee-whiz innovation" that will come as a surprise to almost nobody. It proposes to carry out comparative country studies to determine whether a company should move its operations abroad and if so, where. And it is applying for a patent on the process link here.

The problem here is that prior art is rampant in this proposal. Companies have been doing exactly such studies on their own forever. The graphic that is included in the application is a catalog of the obvious

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One must wonder too, about the public relations wisdom of including this quote in the application: "A typical American employee,' complains BofA, 'demands a high salary, good benefits, a good work environment, vacation time, and other job-related perks.' Such problems are solved with BofA's patent-pending methodology, which eliminates 'demanding work force' problems by identifying another country for a corporation to relocate its work force to."

I hope B of A's pending acquisition of subprime star Countrywide Financial comes back to bite it in the you-know-what.