“The More I Find Out, The Less I Know”
Transparent Horizontal Integration Equals Bad Customer Experience
"Vertical integration doesn't work" is a relatively recent management insight. Recent enough that there's still a lot of people debating the question (especially those clinging to failed vertical integration strategies). But the most successful industries of the past few decades--personal computing, networking, and anything Internet-based--are all aggressively horizontal. I expect the debate to die down within a few years as it becomes "obvious" that with only a few exceptions, horizontal is the way to go.
Mostly this is good. Horizontal integration allows maximal innovation and competition in every piece of a product or service. This drives down costs, advances technology, and generally makes the world a happier place (except for middle management, which is more likely to get fired as part of a lean-and-mean strategy).
Usability, Marketing, iPods, Customer Service, and the PC Experience (a rant)
I spend my professional life worried about usability, particularly the usability of phone-based customer service. I've even written a book (with cartoons!) on the topic, though in the book we mostly avoid the word "usability" since it tends to scare away marketing executives and service managers.
Given that (as a rule) phone-based customer service and personal computers are two of the most frustrating consumer experiences today, and that usability problems are at the core of both, this has been brewing inside me for a long time.
Sonoluminescent Fusion Confirmed
According to a press release today, researchers have confirmed nuclear fusion resulting from sonoluminescence.
From a theoretical perspective, this is way cool. No, cooler than that. This is, like, totally cool.
Making Money from Pump & Dump
If you have a fax machine or E-mail inbox, you've probably seen these:
MICRO-CAP ALERT!!!! FLY-BY-NIGHT TECHNOLOGIES SET TO EXPLODE! Fly-By-Night (OTC:BB FLYB) is about to QUADRUPLE in price as investors discover this hidden gem!
And so forth....
This is the classic "pump-and-dump" stock fraud, where the fraudsters quietly load up on the stock in advance, then promote the crap out of it, hoping to drive the price higher to make a quick profit. The company itself may have nothing to do with the promoters, but just happens to be a convenient target.
Coal in the Stocking
The houses on our block light luminaria every Christmas Eve. This tradition has been going on as long as we've been living here (now almost eight years), and our little cul-de-sac usually gets 100% participation.
Last night, Scooter suddenly disappeared just before bedtime. After several fruitless minutes of searching, She Who Puts Up With Me noticed that all the luminaria in front of our house were dark. "Hadn't those all been lit?" she asked.
Microsoft R&D
Fast Company asks the question: "What, exactly, is Microsoft getting for its $6 billion/year in R&D spending?"
They're hardly the first to ask this question, and I've asked similar questions in the past. The paradox is that Microsoft spends more on R&D than anyone else in the industry--heck, practically more than the entire rest of the software industry combined [note: This rhetorical flourish might even be true depending on how you allocate hardware vs. software R&D at places like Apple and IBM] and more than the GDP of some African nations--but seems to have very little to show for it in terms of breakthrough new products.
Missing an Opportunity
Last week I noticed that our public library had a few "Bill Nye the Science Guy" DVDs on the shelves. On a whim, I checked out a couple for the kids, even though the box says that they're intended for 4th grade and up. Scooter is only in Kindergarden, and the twins are not quite three.
You've probably guessed where this is heading: the kids took to Bill Nye like nothing I've ever seen. I returned the first set of DVDs, and checked out nine more; and the twins have been singing "Bill Nye the Science Guy! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!" all weekend.
Out Of Box Experience
My beloved TiBook died on Saturday night. It was old for a laptop: over three years of rough use. The paint was completely gone from the places I rest my wrists, and the CD ROM made an ominous clattering sound when it spun up, so the final expiration was no great surprise. After trying all kinds of tricks to get it to work again, I finally made the determination that the patient was beyond help.
At this point, it became an organ donor. The battery was nearly new, and the hard drive perfectly functional. I bought a FireWire enclosure for the hard drive and a set of Torx screwdrivers, and with about fifteen minutes' work, the hard drive (with all my precious files) became an external FireWire drive. I dubbed it the Brain-in-a-Jar.
Reforming the Tax System
If there's one part of government which is overripe for explosive remodeling, it must be the tax system.
There's a problem, though. Reform is hard. Real reform--the kind which comes from starting over from a blank sheet of paper--is often politically impossible. Any overhaul creates both winners and losers, and the losers usually fight much harder against change than the winners fight for it.
As long as we’re on the subject of tax reform….
How about a couple of other tax changes to promote the welfare of the country
Reforming the Income Tax
In my prior article, I outlined the difficulties in trying to pass any real reform of our tax system, and proposed a couple of obvious fixes to current problems (which don't have a snowball's chance of passing).
Now, as long as I'm dreaming about remaking the tax code, I'd like to offer a more radical vision of a simpler, fairer income tax system which doesn't have a snowball's chance of even being considered:
The Household Profit Tax
Time to sell the airplane?
This has been in the back of my brain for a while now--since the twins were born, really--but it recently decided to move to my frontal cortex.
I think it is time to sell my airplane.
Managing the Yield Curve
The yield curve has proven a reasonably reliable predictor of future recessions. But what’s not clear is whether the yield curve causes future recessions, or is an effect of underlying conditions that will create a recession.
Honesty is (usually) the best policy
Dropping Scooter off at kindergarden this morning, I made sure to give him a big hug and tell him "Mommy and daddy both love you very much."
"I love mommy, too, and I like you, daddy."
Canceling TheStreet.com
Remember TheStreet.com? I subscribed back when it was the go-to website for stocks and I was in the investment banking business. Neither is true any more.
I finally got around to canceling my subscription, since, well, I basically don't read it any more (that and it's more expensive than the Wall Street Journal). I sent them an E-mail asking them to cancel my subscription. They refused, telling me I could only cancel by phone (and only during working hours).
PayPal: Caught in a Dilemma
There've been a number of angry articles recently about PayPal censoring bloggers who use its donation system. In a nutshell, a handful of bloggers have received notices that they would be cut off from PayPal. PayPal has clearly gone too far down the road of trying to control who uses its service and for what purposes, but I do have some sympathy for them, since the first few steps on this path were not of their choosing.
First a little history: PayPal legally can't offer its payment services for certain types of businesses, particularly online gambling. Gambling used to be a significant business for PayPal (about 6% of revenue), but then they were forced to cut off all gambling customers. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided that if interstate gambling was to be illegal in the U.S., then banking services which support gambling would also be illegal. For better or for worse, this effectively makes every bank an extension of law enforcement when it comes to illegal gambling.
The Mistaken Premise of No Child Left Behind
here is no doubt in my mind that the No Child Left Behind act, as it stands today, is a terrible piece of legislation. It mandates mathematically impossible levels of performance from schools, based on achievement tests which focus only on the 3 R's, and imposes draconian levels of punishment against public schools which fail to meet these goals.
The inevitable outcome if NCLB is unchanged by 2014 (when schools have to have 100% of students meeting minimum test scores) is that nearly all the country's public schools will fail to meet NCLB's mandates, and face penalties. It is simply impossible to devise a meaningful achievement test which 100% of students will pass. But in an effort to stave off the inevitable, public schools are likely to cut all programs not covered by achievement tests, including things like music, drama, "gifted" programs, and advanced-placement programs. Those things cost money, and there's no incentive under NCLB to cultivate the best students, just keep the worst ones from failing.
Campaign Finance Reform? Or Truth-in-Politics
If the goal of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law was to create a better-informed and more meaningful debate about political issues, then it has failed utterly. This is the first Presidential campaign under McCain-Feingold, and it is easily the dirtiest, loudest, and least issue-focused campaign in recent memory. Judging from the sound and fury emanating from the campaigns, the most important issues this year revolve around the Vietnam war. Funny, I thought that war ended 30 years ago.