CONC: Apples and Oranges

Windows Vista delayed
There was once a time when the Mac OS and Windows were direct competitors; two creatures fighting for survival in the
same niche. But that was around 1992.

Mac OS and Windows have since evolved into two distinct animals. One is a cat and the other is a dog (no derogatory connotations intended). Windows has long tended to the needs of IT and the business user while Mac OS X's strengths lie in home computing and media management. The characteristics of both creatures overlap, but they have different strengths and weaknesses and will continue to coexist for a long time. Now if you're saying that the cat will become man's best friend...
That's a different debate ;-)

CONC: xenophobia is alive and well

Well, it was depressing to see the "Buy American" rah rah rah attitude over at GM's Fastland blog. So I had to go over and put the smack down:

This is in response to those of you who are trying to make GM's problems a U.S. vs. Japan thing:
Many of GM's current problems were caused by the "Buying American" mentality. Think of the millions of of Delta 88, Cavalier, Park Avenue, and Bonneville buyers in the 80's and 90's... We bought those cars partly out of "duty" - it certainly wasn't the quality - and look what it got us... GM complacency and more mediocre cars. Tough love from us here in the Fastlane forum and the rest of America is the only way GM will get out of this mess. It's working. GM's making the best cars that I can ever remember now, but it's only because of the competition and people NOT buying GM cars out of duty any more.
No more free pass for GM, means GM having to make good cars, means GM will eventually turn around the business or fail trying.
It's 2006 folks, wake-up and do not buy "American" if it doesn't make sense for you and your family. Auto manufacturing jobs will be lost whether you buy GM, Toyota, or Hyundai. I can't save them and neither can you. A final thought:
"Technology, not necessarily outsourcing, is displacing American workers...Even China is losing manufacturing jobs because the number of people required to make goods is decreasing as a result of technologies that make factories more efficient" - Frank Reich Former U.S. Secretary of Labor

CONC: Day of the digital book may be dawning

eBooks. They're going to take over the world. Just not very soon. My post at Masimumnews follows:

For a portable electronic reader, the E INK screen is as much a problem as it is a solution. It solves the problem of letting human eyeballs read electronic documents for long periods of time. At the same time it poses a problem because it’s functionality is limited (currently) to static, black & white images precluding it’s use in a multi-tasking device. An E INK device that could display web content, video, and photographs is not possible.

Since E INK’s functionality is limited, pricing power for such a device is limited too. Sony doesn’t have a prayer for a successful product if they’re selling this device for over $100. It’s simply not very useful - it’s functionality would be limited to reading novels/non-fiction books, magazines/newspapers (without pictures). Period.

The upshot is: success of E INK will not be achieved as a stand-alone consumer product (portable or otherwise). These E INK displays must get cheaper and thinner so they can be integrated on to existing products which have other functionality (such as the back-side of a video iPod or as a notebook computer’s 2nd screen). Once that happens, it will be a home-run because the killer apps (newspapers, books, journal articles, instruction manuals, textbooks, PDF’s, etc. etc.) will already be in place.

CONC: Rupert Murdoch sez digital video is small time.

I replied undeer the headline "...at the moment"

CONC: Dell kills DJ

It's official now. I posted under the headline: "Couldn't turn up the volume on the DJ"

V cast - useless and expensive

Let me preface this entry with a disclaimer: I just turned 30, so my understanding of technology is beginning its slow and inevitable decline.
That having been said, I can not believe how useless V casts' music download service is. We're in the midst of a media revolution which is allowing people to acquire music (M) without leaving the house (iTunes, Napster, etc.) and videos (V) without leaving the house (netflix, iTunes, Google, etc.) and now Verizon is giving us the 'privelege' of being able to download M&V on our phone so that we can in fact get M&V outside of our homes again because presumably it was an inconvenience to be able to obtain M&V at home. I must be getting old, but to me it seems awfully nice to not get up off my duff ("duff" is an older variation of butt for you youngsters) to get M&V. Back in the real old days, we actually had to go to a store to buy "CDs" or a Blockbuster to rent videos, so old-fashioned me thinks it's great to have M&V download access at home.

Alright enough of the self-depracating "old" talk. Let's cut to the chase which is that Verizon's got a loser on it's hand with V cast. First of all, the commercials promoting the merit of V cast's music-on-demand are laughable.
Exhibit A: commercial showing pre-game locker room of a hockey team getting psyched-up for their game because one of the kids downloaded a song and played it on their phone. Is this phone really loud enough to pump up a hockey team? I don't think it could pump up a ballet troupe. Strike 1

Exhibit B: commercial showing a girlfriend angrily rushing away from a boyfriend and rushing to get away in a taxi. The boyfriend whips out his V cast and downloads a smooth R&B track, plays it and soothes the girl making her feel better.
Ha Ha Ha. How long does it take to download a song? by the time the song is downloaded, the girl would be gone. Strike 2 What angry girl can be soothed by a song being played through a phone speaker? Please send me her number. Strike 3

Alright. So since when have commercials made accurate claims about their prodcuts? But in watching these commercials the sad thing is that these were among the more plausible uses for V cast...

So how much will all this uselessness set you back? $15 / month + $1.99 / song.

R.I.P. Dell DJ

In September '05 I wrote:
"...Since apple is selling their iPods at a higher volume than all their competitors...they could really put the smack down on competitors by selling iPods at a discount and absolutely flatten the competition...Apple could move millions of units at a thinner margin which would force Rio, Creative, and Dell into a very tight spot; letting them choose between moving hundreds of thousands of units at razor-thin margins or maintaining pricing while watching unit sales slide towards zero.
... Apple has now lowered the boom on the competition with the nano. Look at the competitions' products at $199 or $249. Sony and the others have to be sweating bullets. Their products at those price points are very simply, a cut below."

Since I wrote that, Apple sold 14 million iPods in about 3 months. All their competitors combined sold (by my estimation) sold around 5 million units. There had to be casualties. Rio has apparently exited the mp3 player market and Dell has suddenly and unceremoniously apparently stopped selling DJs.

CONC: flash-based notebooks

Flash drives will make hard-drives obsolete.

CONC: GM bankruptcy is a good thing.

In response to a post on The Truth About Cars

re: A Rose by Any Other Name

Mr. Farago,

Neither you or I hold an M.B.A., but we can still discuss business
qualitatively. Any pundit (including you or I) knows that GM and Ford
need to make more desirable cars. But it's a tricky business
proposition when one has high fixed costs like too many factories,
overpaid laborers and overpaid retirees.

It is that it relatively easy for other companies to have niche
successes compared to GM and Ford. Murano: success! Mini-cooper:
success! xB: success! Let's say, hypothetically, that GM engineered,
manufactured, and marketed the entire BMW line-up. It would be a
colossal failure. GM would be bankrupt withiin a week (rather than in
a few years).

The fact of the matter is that the Chevy Cobalt, which is relatively
cheap, solid, pleasant, and bland will sells more units than BMW's
entire line-up for the simple reason that there are many more
mainstream car buyers than there are well-heeled driving enthusiasts.

My point is that GM is in a terrible position. In order to make more
desirable cars to various consumer niches they would have to make
smaller runs of cars. No can do.
If they continue to make bland M.O.R. cars, their market share will
continue to slide because of all the niche cars nibbling at the edges.

Basically I take issue with your simplistic assumption that by
engineering better, more refined cars, more differentiated cars GM
and Ford will sell more cars / make more money.
The fact is that the scale of GM's car sales are (still) so mind
boggling that I think they have no where to go and are trapped by
their cost-structure. If they make cheaper, shoddier cars, their
sales will obviously slide. Less obviously, if GM upgrades their cars
and charges a corresponding premium for those improvements, their
sales will also slide! And if they are selling nicer cars at a
premium, but tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands fewer units,
they can't possibly pay for all their fixed costs.

The question isn't even "what should GM do?" it is "what can GM do?"

again, I'm not an MBA so I don't know exactly what bankruptcy allows
for. But if it allows wholesale liquidation of factories and allows
them to layoff AND stop paying about 15% of their assembly line
workers, then that may very well be the best thing that they can do.

Commentary ON Commentary (CONC)

I've been posting comments to comments made around the web. That last post (Prius = dirty diapers?) was a reply at an economist Brad DeLong's blog. As many of you know, I'm a tech head and often post on cNet with their "talkback" feature. Some of my recent thoughts on bundling and the viability of portable video. More CONC on the way. Like it or not.

Prius = re-usable diapers?

I'm still a skeptic of hybrid cars. Not because of the minimal gas savings (if we were paying European or even CNDN prices, the fuel savings would easily cover the cars' price premium), and not so much because of reliability (although the proof isn't yet in the pudding; these cars just haven't been around long enough).

The main question that I have, which has not to my knowledge even been touched upon let alone addressed in the lay-media is: What is the environmental trade-off of saving gas with a hybrid car?
Using re-usable diapers was an "environmentally correct" alternative to using disposable diapers...until one thinks about it. There is in-fact a trade-off. By using cloth diapers, one lessens the plastic load in landfills but increases the amount of polluted freshwater. There is a (somewhat) similar trade-off when using a hybrid car. One doesn't magically save gas when driving a hybrid. One cost is the large NiMH battery involved. What is the environmental cost of manufacturing/recycling/disposing of this battery? Is this cost equal or less than the cost of burning a few thousand gallons of gasoline?

I'm not anti-hybrid. I'm anti- driving/buying hybrids without a critical look...

NFL Ultimate Power Rankings. Yes, I've got time on my hands.

WEEK 8. Like power rankings, but I won't change them from week to week; I'll only update them when week 14 comes around to narrow down who will go deep in the playoffs.
Also unlike power rankings, I start from the bottom up. Gotta start with the obvious - the riff raff, the dead fish in the water, so to speak... Come back and look at this list in late December. It should be good for a laugh =)

SEASON IS OVER FOR:
sf 49ERS - gb PACKERS - az CARDINALS - no SAINTS - ny JETS - hou. TEXANS - ok RAIDERS

NOT GOING ANYWHERE AFTER JAN. 1 
mn VIKINGS - mia. DOLPHINS - sl RAMS - atl FALCONS - tb BUCCANEERS - kc CHIEFS - nsh TITANS - cle BROWNS - bal RAVENS - det LIONS - buff BILLS


THE REAL DEAL - PLAYOFF CONTENDERS (not in any particular order)

SEAHAWKS - it doesn’t take much in this division, and they have enough.
PANTHERS - stronger than the buccaneers and probably stronger than the falcons.
BEARS - they aren’t an elite team, but they should RUN over their division.
REDSKINS - solid
COWBOYS - solid
EAGLES - mushy
GIANTS - oatmeal

BRONCOS - an elite team
CHARGERS - may be victimized in wild card race finishing 9-7 or 10-6.
JAGUARS - will pounce for the division title. They have a cake schedule!
COLTS - should be solid wild card. You heard me. WILD CARD
BENGALS - good
STEELERS - better
PATRIOTS - their schedule gets much easier after going 2-3 against some of the elite teams in the league. It is concevable they could be 12-4 at the end of the season, and they can easily be 10-6.

NFL Power Rankings - Dig It!

Are you tired of looking at the NFL "power rankings" on ESPN.com and NFL.com? A given team's ranking swings wildly up and down from week to week according to their performance on the previous one or two sundays... They might as well be "Bandwagon rankings"; they jump on the badwagon then jump off. Then they repeat. I myself am addicted to them. It's a ritual for me to log-on every Tuesday during the season to check on whatDr. Z and Mr. Carucci and ESPN have to say every week. But does it matter who is #1 or #5 or whatever in week 2? Or in week 10?. We should want a PowerRanking that lists who is going to the playoffs and who's going deep in the playoffs. It is hard to say who these teams will be early in the season, but here at the midway point somebody should try. Fox Sports is attempting that this year with some sort of mumbo jumbo formula that takes into account teams' full season performance, so we know there are people who want to take more into account than a teams' latest drubbing of the Texans or manhandling of the 49ers...

blogging via e-mail

This is simply a test to see if I can edit the blog via e-mail.
WooHOO! Success!