Ideas Archives

Call me an optimist

* OPINION
* DECEMBER 26, 2008

The Economic News Isn't All Bleak
We may be in for a long slide. But there are also reasons to think the economy could rebound quickly.

By ZACHARY KARABELL

The recent economic news has been dismal, and it's now almost universally assumed things will get worse before they get better. Conventional wisdom also dictates that this recession will be longer, deeper and cause more long-term pain than any financial crisis since the Great Depression.
[Commentary] Chad Crowe

Yet, less than two years ago, conventional wisdom dictated that the housing bubble would be painful but that global economic growth would remain stable. That assertion was proved dramatically incorrect. Why then is there so much conviction in today's forecasts of a dire future?

Predictions about the rate of unemployment by the end of 2009 are based on how high that rate went during and after other recessions, and how steep those recessions were compared to today. Forecasts of GDP growth are grounded in the nature of past contractions and how long it took the system to begin expanding again. But none of these past patterns are necessarily a useful guide to the circumstances of today. The way events have unfolded over the past few months simply has no precedent.

It's common to hear comparisons to the Great Depression, when economies around the globe shrank precipitously, or to the 1970s, when an oil shock gave way to steep contraction of GDP growth in the developed world and a concomitant collapse in energy prices. But those occurred over the course of years. What happened since the collapse of Lehman on Sept. 15 was a global, synchronous cessation of all but nondiscretionary economic activity in the wake of the near-collapse of global credit markets. And it happened over the course of weeks, not years. Data from October and November show shrinkage of 10%, 20% and often considerably more in corporate earnings, car sales, home prices, commodities and a host of other areas. But analysts and strategists now take this as the "new normal" and are projecting into 2009 and beyond as if it were.
The Opinion Journal Widget

Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.

True, this global halt is the dark side of the information technologies and globalization that have created so much wealth and generated so much activity in the past 20 years. The frictionless, instantaneous flow of capital is possible only because of the Internet and electronic exchanges. The supply chain for industrial metals, from copper to iron ore, has gone from being regional and fragmented to global and unified. Semiconductors have become one global industry with pricing and inventories determined based on aggregate world-wide demand. Few industries are local, and almost everything is linked.

In good times, that meant credit expanded and activity magnified geometrically. China for one has undergone more transformation in 20 years than most countries have seen in 100. But when the system was infected with toxic assets, the effects spread everywhere and fast. The collapse of Lehman led to fewer cars being sold in China in a matter of weeks, and the decline of Dubai real-estate prices to boot.

And yet, if things came to a halt more quickly than ever before, they could also restart more quickly than ever before. This is not to say they will, only that the possibility is more than marginal. And there are signs things are not everywhere as bad as conventional wisdom suggests.

First, we haven't seen war, revolution, the collapse of states and governments or massive demonstrations sweeping the globe. Crowds have demonstrated in China, Greece and Thailand -- for reasons sometimes related to the economic crunch and sometimes not. Pakistan is teetering for multiple reasons -- of which economics is only one. But major economic crises in the 20th century almost always led to those types of major breaks, especially during the 1930s. While no one can say whether they will come in the months ahead, for the time being we should be remarking on how relatively stable things are in light of what has happened.

Second, consumers in many parts of the world are in relatively good shape. That statement might strike many as absurd, given the mantra of "consumers have been living beyond their means." But it's not just the third of American households that have no mortgage, or the 50% savings rate in China, or the still massive wealth accumulation in the Gulf region, Brazil and Russia. It's that the credit system, even at its most promiscuous, didn't allow consumers to take on the obscene leverage that financial institutions did. Millions of people who shouldn't have been lent money were, either in mortgages or through credit cards. But they couldn't be levered 40-to-1 as investment banks and funds were.
In Today's Opinion Journal

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

* Obama's Secretary of Earmarks
* Bridges to Everywhere
* Still Oklahoma's Most Wanted

TODAY'S COLUMNIST

* Declarations: A Year for the Books
– Peggy Noonan

COMMENTARY

* Obama Picks a Moderate on Education
– Collin Levy
* The Economic News Isn't All Bleak – Zachary Karabell
* Donor Disclosure Has Its Downsides
– John R. Lott Jr. and Bradley Smith
* Bush Is a Book Lover
– Karl Rove
* A Brother's Plea: Remember Burma
– Min Zin

People have also reacted swiftly to the current problems, paying down debt and paring back purchases out of prudence or necessity. That's a short-term drag on economic activity, but it will leave consumer balance sheets in good shape going forward. Low energy prices and zero inflation will boost spending power. Even if unemployment reaches 9% or more, consumer reserves in the U.S. and world-wide are deeper than commentary would suggest. Household net worth in the U.S. is down from its highs but is still about $45 trillion. As the credit system eases, historically low interest rates also augur debt refinancing and constructive access to credit for those with good histories and for small business creation in the year ahead. Entrepreneurs often thrive when the system is cracking.

In addition, corporations generally have very clean balance sheets with little debt and lots of cash, unlike the downturns in 2002 and in the 1980s. And government has more creative ways to spend, which both the current Federal Reserve and the incoming Obama administration intend to do.

The last months of 2008 will go down as one of the most severe economic reversals to date, and on a global scale. But it is foolish to assume that this period provides a viable guide to what lies ahead.

The rush to declare the future bleak has obscured the fact that no one knows the outcome of an unprecedented event. No one. The worst course in the face of uncertainty is blind faith in conventional wisdom and past patterns. The best is to stay humble in the face of the unknown, creative and unideological about solutions, and open to the possibility that as quickly as things turned sour they can reverse.

Mr. Karabell is the president of River Twice Research. His book on China and the United States will be published by Simon & Schuster next year.

Posted by amol -->

Lotus. Lighter = faster

Behind the Wheel - 2008 Lotus Exige S 240 - A Ton (Just Barely) of Fun - Review - NYTimes.com

Since then, the industry trend has been toward vehicles that are bigger, heavier and more powerful. Not at Lotus, the British sports car maker: the 2008 Exige S 240 is smaller, lighter and less powerful than that 1990 Esprit. It’s also faster.

Posted by amol -->

Green, so long

1. Meeting last night of entrepreneurs -- "green is a waste of time -- too risky"
2. Today Constellation Energy killed their demand response unit
3. Front page of NYT: Green is dying as energy costs fall

Posted by amol -->

People I like in politics

Now that the big O has won, I have to confess I think he's great. Since there's all this 'team of rivals' and 'I will listen to you especially if we disagree' stuff going around, here are some people I think Obama should involve centrally. I think now is the time for dream team stuff, not during the campaign.

From the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, of course:
- Rahm Emanuel is a killer choice
- Schumer should be a point man in Senate

From the rivals:
- Hillary would be an interesting choice to hand the health care reform to get it done 2008-style
- McCain - try to make him an ally on tax cuts?
- Richardson needs a job like State? Though State could be a good one to give a republican
- Defense would be a good spot for a Clintonite like Wes Clark? Or are we talking progressive types here?

On the other side:
- Jindal - is there a big job he could be offered? It would be a get b/c it would further slay the conservative comeback hopes
- Powell - make him a special advisor to the president or something like that -- no specific job

Posted by amol -->

Profiles in unhappiness 3

Profiles: The Oracle: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

One afternoon last spring, Huffington, who lives in Los Angeles, was in Seattle, having agreed to serve as the key-note speaker at an annual Planned Parenthood benefit luncheon. (A fan of the cause, she waived her fee, and even, when a collection plate went around, got out her checkbook.) Long a regular on the conference circuit, she is often found in the sorts of places that require lanyards. Her vocabulary is full of business-book terms—“aha moment,” “meme.” When she hangs up the phone, she some-times says, “I’m jumping off.” At night, she hides her BlackBerrys (she has three) in the bathroom.

Posted by amol -->

Your beliefs are your genes

I love the passion that people feel about political beliefs; and I love the following idea even more: that much of it is determined by parents -- nature and nurture.

There are few beliefs you'd like to to think come from your parents as dogma or genetics! Gravity and 2+2, who cares? But left or right...

Posted by amol -->

Nailing it, but failing a lot first

Winners write history -- as is Taleb warns in his Black Swan books (well, he says you always hear the genius behind people who just got lucky 10 times in a row...) And as I often remark myself -- nothing is easy. It looks easy because that's how it's told. For example, becoming a famous writer sucks. As do many things....Though apparently if you are the right type, it does not suck. The question is which type are you - fun or sucky.

Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.

Posted by amol -->

Hot buttons

Some highly dubious statements

"Oh...I get it, believe me"

"Sure, yeah. Eric. Yeah I know that guy. Erin? Yeah her. Right."

"I have a blank check from these guys. I will make that happen."

Posted by amol -->

Great lines from Jobs

From Wired

Competition
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
-- Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996

"It wasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it's that the Mac was a sitting duck for 10 years. That's Apple's problem: Their differentiation evaporated."
-- Apple Confidential 2.0

The allure of tech as an industry
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"
-- The line he used to lure John Sculley as Apple's CEO, according to Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley and John Byrne

Attacking
"It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy."
-- Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple

Posted by amol -->

Anti-Apple rants

Your crappy Mac of tomorrow

Cranky Windows guy

Posted by amol -->

Being crotchety

Researching a post about email on the Peek Speaks blog, one of my colleagues pointed out these great lines at Neal Stephenson's old homepage:

Umberto Eco: "I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

Donald Knuth: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. "

Then Stephenson himself: All of my time and attention are spoken for--several times over. Please do not ask for them.

Some years ago, I wrote a document that tried to explain why I am not very diligent about answering my mail, and why I only accept speaking engagements on rare and special occasions. The document is entitled Why I am a bad correspondent and you are welcome to read it.

More recently I found an article in the Atlantic Monthly by Jonathan Rauch that describes my personality with uncanny accuracy. It explains why, whenever I find myself in a room full of people, or discover a lot of e-mail from strangers in my inbox, my first thought is: "where did all these people come from and how do I make them go away?" This---i.e. the discovery that I am a classic introvert---does not render "Bad Correspondent" invalid, but it does fill out the picture a little. In particular, extroverts ought to read this article!

The bottom line is as follows: I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don't wish to retire at this time.

Posted by amol -->

Check out Pluribo!

PLURIBO: Instant summaries of Amazon user reviews.

Posted by amol -->

How to impact Washington

A guide at Alley Insider (by me) on how to make waves in Washington.

Posted by amol -->

Why companies try to grow

All Together Now?: Financial Page: The New Yorker

It’s the rare C.E.O., of course, who’s comfortable presiding over a shrinking empire, and running a public company creates a bias toward action, if only as a way of convincing investors that you recognize your problems and are dealing with them. But history suggests that, when it comes to mergers, the best response is often to just say no. In effect, deals like the CNET acquisition are a bit like an aging outfielder taking steroids in order to stave off the boobirds. The difference is that steroids usually work.

Posted by amol -->

iPhone price cut that wasn't

The price cut that isn't: "Cheaper" iPhone, pricier data plan - Machinist - Salon.com

Here's how the costs break down: For the old iPhone, AT&T's cheapest unlimited-data plan went for $59.99 a month. Over 24 months, that was $1,439.76. Add in the $399 price of the phone and you were looking at $1,838.76 for two years of iPhone fun.

AT&T's new unlimited-data plan goes for $69.99 ($30 for data and $39.99 for its cheapest voice plan). For two years, that's $1,679.76, and then you've got the $199 phone -- a grand total of $1,878.76 for the iPhone over two years. So much for more affordable.

Posted by amol -->

Tax cuts =

Tax cuts = deficits = government borrowing = higher interest rates = stronger dollar.

Tax cuts = deficits = govt credit risk = doubts about the dollar = weaker dollar = expensive oil.

Posted by amol -->

Netflix launches a device

Simple, on demand, unlimited, affordable... a device!

Posted by amol -->

Five key ideas about investing from Graham, Buffett and Munger

Buffett summarizes Graham as:
1. The Mr. Market analogy
2. Shares are ownership interest in a business
3. Margin of safety.
That's it.
1 is the idea that the market isn't "efficient" but moody and nuts, and therefore someone you can rationally take advantage of.
2 is the idea that you should judge share price against its value as an interest in the underlying business (how it makes money)
3 is the suggestion that you only buy when you've got a killer killer deal, like 70% below fair value.

Buffett and Munger pretty much just add/revise that:
4. A great business at a fair price is better than a fair business at a great price
5. Load up on winners/"20 punches on your ticket"
4 means you buy Coke in 1965, but not Yahoo in 2007.
5 means you should wait and wait and wait until you are really right and seriously load up. These together mean you should forget 3.

Posted by amol -->

Email is #1

Of all the things people do on computers, hands down #1 is email. Even for early adopters, who theoretically use more things on computers than mere mortals would:

This data comes from RescueTime which chronicled 500K hours of usage by 30K early users of their product. Including me

Posted by amol -->

Motofone review

I used the Motofone for a week. It's the $40 retail price phone that Motorola made last year for developing markets. Super simple, super easy, bought unlocked for only $40 -- what more do you need?

Some great things
- it's cheap
- it's thin! looks really nice
- it's very easy to get going with calls
- not so easy to figure out phonebook but not terrible
- great choices about what to pare back in general

Some bad things
- the contact list doesn't work for me. That's one area where my super-userness is just too super and I can't trim down. I need contacts and sync or I start getting really hosed
- also I need recent calls etc. I get tons of calls. I can't manage them like this.
- the screen!!! I'm not the only one to say this, but this was a cool but wrong decision. Maybe it saved $5, but it was not a wise move. The visual interface is key to the operation of all technology products and this is a massive compromise. Even texting is a total chore with this crappy screen. It's high res, which is nifty, but not justification enough for the horrible screen.
- battery life and call reception are not exceptional. I would have thought they'd be better...

Overall, the Nokia entry level phones like the 1100 are better. Bigger, slightly more costly maybe (?), but rock solid battery and call quality and good UIs.

Posted by amol -->

The size of a book

I have been trying to read this book:

It's totally impractical to read -- way to big and heavy. Can't carry it anywhere. And can't even carry it in the house. Can't read it in bed. Basically, you can read it sitting at a table like a university library. Who does that anymore anyway?

Someone should invent something that lets you read anything...easily...wherever you are...

Posted by amol -->

An aphorism

"There is no sainthood in modern life, there is only better than before" from drinks on Wednesday night

Posted by amol -->

Sidebar: Personal data

One of the nifty trends that keeps building is personal data. That is what Facebook's Feed is about, and the latest hot startup FriendFeed or the other one Mugshot, and Last.fm, and well even blogs or Amazon's wish list or iTunes or my friend's new company Skydeck or whatever. Or even Zenbe, another friend's company.

Well.... I downloaded this other nifty thingo that goes beyond the Mugshot behavior of tracking my content and instead tracks my activity. RescueTime. Here is what I have been doing (in April).

Here are all the personal data sidebars I have been accumulating:
All in one

Posted by amol -->

Two laptops per child

I saw another guy with two laptops at the airport yesterday. I think it's a real mini-trend.

Kind of like the two phones trend -- my friend Jason from Skydeck tells me 15% of the US market has 2 phones.

Posted by amol -->

Foleo, and new ideas in general

The new two-laptop minimum | Computerworld Blogs

About a year ago, Hawkins and Palm launched the Foleo to a skeptical public. Meanwhile, Jobs and Apple announced their iPhone to swoons. Now, the Foleo is gone and the iPhone is a big hit.

Obvious?

Maybe. Raving from the public usually means you are introducing something they understand and want...and that everyone else knows they want. The smartphone wars are only just begun. It's great that Apple sold a few million already. The world will be keen to see what is sustainable about their advantage. Touchscreens that everyone now has? Music? Keypadless keys? The open source S60 browser under Safari? The $500 price point? The contracts and carrier exclusives? It's a great product, a mix of all these things. But I see it's advantage fading fast.

Meanwhile, the Foleo didn't make any sense to anyone. Who would carry a little portable...AND a laptop??? But in today's market I see several entries moving well in that direction. The ultra-thin Macbook Airs are squarely in that range. They are super duper portables. And the Asus Eee laptop is basically a Foleo. In fact, I can see the need very clearly myself. As my laptop is starting to age, I have considered replacing it. Not really for performance reasons but not really for any reason. Why spend $2000 for replacing this device when I can just lock it to my desk and keep a $500, instant-on, ultra-light device in my bag? I see the Foleo's appeal more now than when it first appeared.

Posted by amol -->

Phones

People talk on the phone less these days, according to an office-culture article in the NYT today -- at their desk anyway, this is true. More conference calls though, I think, as collaborative tools of various kinds and demands from dispersion have both grown.

But there is an impact on real estate -- you don't need as much square footage for people to sit in. People don't need private offices, really at all. So little phone talking.

What they do need is lots of little cabinets to go sit in for conference calls or phone calls when they do occur.

Posted by amol -->

Highlight the below

amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva
amol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarvaamol sarva

Posted by amol -->

The shift to corporate takeovers, high tech

Some months back I wrote speculating on what the future would hold if the credit crash meant PE stopped making gobs of dosh. Like the 2001 stock market pop stopped venture investing, and the way cheap credit fueled real estate and private equity, the latest shift should have caused something.

It did -- high quality earners in high tech have prospered, and corporate takeover deals look better as they are backed by companies not high yield. And today: MSFT offers 45bn for YHOO after an amazing MSFT quarter and outlook. It's both in one bundle.

Also, it means high tech startups should continue to look appealing. Glad to say.

Posted by amol -->

Mortgages

I have been investigating mortgages recently -- it's amazing that rates have not responded as sharply as the underlying Fed cuts! In fact, there is a problem other than rates - it is actual flow and market-making in the mortgage business. I was talking to a broker recently and there are guys he is calling that "have left the company" or on "permanent voicemail" or whatever else.

Banks are cutting back on their loan velocity, only partly by keep rates high. The other part is their lending process.

This is friction in the real estate market and should keep things soft. But it also smacks of being temporary as folks get their heads back on straight.

Underlying rates are falling a lot. As that gets reflected in the availability of consumer mortgages, I think we'll see a return to the frontlines.

(This is fodder for my recent "January was the bottom" claim.)

Posted by amol -->

$100 laptop

Whatever names they have given it, the name that sticks to One Laptop Per Child's XO computer is "the one hundred dollar laptop". It turns out to be $182 to build and available to folks like you and me for $400, so that one can go to Mongolia or somewhere.

But it's worth it! After all, the next rung up in style and value is probably an Apple or Sony machine that's much bigger, more bloated, and not likely to be used for a heckuva lot more than web browsing.

This is a great great machine. Though it's unbelievable hard for every single person who meets it to open, and even when you know how still tricky, it has nearly every other thing figured out. Low power, nice size, robust design, etc.

Posted by amol -->

One of the top five mobile devices ever

The Nintendo DS surpassed 65 million units this month. Amazing! All the generations of iPods combined are in that ballpark. Or all the RAZRs.

When people show you their iPhone and tell you it will rule the world, mention the DS, your Canon Powershot, your Garmin nav, your iPod Nano, your laptop, your...Blackberry.

Posted by amol -->

The bottom

I believe we are now at the bottom of the real estate market. NY has not flinched. To test this theory, I predict that new home sales will be higher in June 2008 than they will be for Jan 2008. Hold me to it (by sending me an email now saying you take my bet). I'll buy you a Breitling watch. Or else you buy me one.

For reference (and the benchmark for this Official Amol Sarva Prediction), the seasonally adjusted annualized one family new house sales for Nov 2007 was 647,000. US Census. The Jan 2008 number should be out on Feb 28, 2008.

Posted by amol -->

Quality in special function stuff

Polycom is one of those companies (like Garmin and Blackberry) that has a wonderful business based on gadgets that do one thing -- in this case speakerphones. They are so good that I rarely see any competitor and often see Polycoms on desks next to "converged" phone/speakerphone units.

Just got this one for Skype. Man is it good! 5x better than any Skype experience I have ever had, and only for $100.

Posted by amol -->

Booed and hissed

Bali Climate Talks - Global Warming - New York Times

In a tumultuous final session at international climate talks in which the United States delegates were booed and hissed....

Other topics: human rights (e.g., torture), colonialism, military aggression, economic inequality, anti-poverty

Posted by amol -->

Sign the universal declaration of human rights

I signed. I am #1,252. They are aiming for 1 billion by next year.

Sign up for the universal declaration of human rights

Posted by amol -->

Things I hate about the Blackberry

- The home screen
- The symbol keys
- The autocomplete
- The initial "setup" program you run
- The number of apps and menu items
- OK, back, and menu are not clear.

Posted by amol -->

Things I hate about the iPod Touch (and therefore the iPhone)

Coming soon.

Posted by amol -->

File transfers, another way

One of life's great emerging problems is what to do with your mongo-sized media files. They are more and more numerous, and more and more humongous.

At home, there are drives and web-backup. These things are improving and getting cheaper.

But moving them around is the other issue. To share with friends or even to share among your no-doubt multiple home and work computers. Your phone is a computer, your TV is almost one, your car, your ipod, your multiple laptop/desktops.... there are a lot of computers to take that one mp3 or movie onto and use.

I recently posted here about Bitlet, and some time back about things like drop.io and tumblr and FlyUpload and so forth.

All suck at the following: let me send a gigantico multi-GB file to someone who is a total web-simpleton. This has happened a number of times this year (maybe 3-4 times per year where it is a "need" and I would do it 3-4 times per week if it were "easy").

For example, I made a movie for my friend's wedding and the file was like 2GB. This is not IP-compromised stuff! It's my movie! But I couldn't get it over to him without a very elaborate series of FTP steps (home server, DNS forwarding, router IP forwarding, FTP server, anonymous user login, secure shared folder area...and the other guy needed an FTP client). Same happened when I wanted to give a TV series to a friend I was telling to watch it. And I have never really succeeded in letting others share/sample my 90GB music collection.

So I was very pleased to see PipeBytes recently. I'm testing it out now. Let's see if my friend gets that TV series...

Posted by amol -->

Who's the coolest kid you know?

Help me out. I am trying to study a "networks" topic.

Who are the top 3 people who influence how you make decisions about things? Music, restaurants, shoes, travel, and whatever your interests. Who are your three top?

Email me at amol at drwn dot com

Posted by amol -->

Ads

This is a test of openads. If you see an ad, I will be amazed. This thing is so painful to get going. Well, it could be worse -- at least it's all web and php based and starts "working" fast. But configuring it to do ANYTHING is insane. The UI is terrible. I don't think Google Adsense has much to worry about!

Posted by amol -->

Bitlet

I have had this idea in my head for a while: a very simple web-based torrent tool would make it possible to easily send huge files to your friends. YouSendIt, but without the server-gated limits on speed and size.

Bitlet.org has an app that is almost as easy as it needs to be. It's pretty easy to "create" a torrent, and very easy to get a torrent. So maybe I could even use it to send huge files to friends?

One of the biggest drags in Internet life today is that it is very difficult to share stuff, even though the basic FTP/servers/peering technologies are all out there. They just aren't easy for lots of users. Most people can't even get an FTP!

Posted by amol -->

Product or feature?

The fax-phone. Is it a fax or is it a phone? It's a fax machine.

Camera phone? Phone.

Digital camera that can take videos? It's a photo camera, not video camera.

Blackberry? Treo? Smartphone? Usually a phone. Sometimes an emailer. Ah ha!

Posted by amol -->

Some gadget companies

Gadgets that are good at doing what they do:
- Garmin location stuff
- Nintendo game consoles and portables
- Blackberry email devices
- Nikon and Canon's digital cameras
- Apple music players
- Palm organizers
- Nokia cell phones
- Cable companies' set top boxes
- TiVos
- Linksys wifi access points

Posted by amol -->

Retro phone nerdiness -- slimmer cuts

Phones get thicker to get better, which actually makes them worse.

Consider the greatest phone of the 1998 season, the Sanyo SCP 6000. Thin! Really thin! Thinner than iPhone, thinner than RAZR. 9.9mm. That's 1cm!!

Then there was the CDMA + Amps version, which was 10% thicker. And for comparison, the Razr which was another 15% at 13.5mm thick (though shorter).

Well, the best smartphones of today are the iPhone at 11.7mm and the Blackberry Pearl at 14.5mm.

Comparisons

To get to "wow" thin, we're going to have to get under 10mm.

For example, one of the top-selling T-Mobile phones for the last year or so has been the ultra-thing Samsung T-509

The 9.8mm Samsung

Posted by amol -->

Phone vs. no phone

Including a radio adds a lot. See, for example, the difference between an iPhone and an iPod Touch.

A big difference

Posted by amol -->

MVNOs

I wrote a brief email/blog post for AlleyInsider today which appears below in it's original form.

Sorry, bloggers. You're going to have to stop relying solely on each other for your reporting. Just because BusinessWeek.com said it, does not mean it's OK for RCRNews to repeat it, and then for MocoNews to print it.

Someone, somewhere has to check and see if every MVNO ever created in the US really flamed out and drifted away!

Disney Mobile announced there departure from the market last week. It's a nice bookend to the even higher profile shuttering on sister-company Mobile ESPN last year. And who can forget the flameout (and helicopters) at Amp'd. Or, for that matter, the scarily large sums of money being invested by Helio for not so many customers. A tidy MVNO story, right? Well, there's a "lone exception".

Virgin Mobile -- with nearly 5 million customers, over $1 billion in revenue, and over $75 million in EBITDA for the first 6 months of the year -- is going public next week. It's kind of like calling Skype the lone exception to the failed "VoIP industry" or Ebay the sole successful online auction site.

Of course the other small detail is that Virgin is only the 2nd largest MVNO in the US. The biggest is Tracfone, owned by America Movil. Carlos Slim Helu -- the world's richest man and the guy behind AMX -- picked up Tracfone back in 1999 and has since grown it to nearly 10 million customers and nearly $200 million EBITDA in 2007.

And then there is Boost Mobile, the original Virgin Mobile copycat, launched in partnership with Nextel back around 2002 and now wholly owned by Sprint Nextel. With nearly as many customers as Virgin, it's a tough customer.

Qwest, the 3rd largest phone company, has an MVNO too, so it can offer bundled phone + wireless service. 800,000+ subscribers.

Embarq, the Sprint spinoff launched one last year and is adding customers quickly.

PagePlus runs a big MVNO on Verizon's network, in case you thought only Sprint did MVNOs. About 1 million customers there now.

And as far as startups go: Kajeet's kids MVNO raised about $40 million last month, Greatcall did the same for their old people's MVNO, and Movida did about that for their latino prepaid MVNO. And there continue to be some slightly adventurous new MVNOs marching bravely off to battle: Sonopia's affiliate-driven MVNO and Europe's Blyk which offers free minutes for ads.

In all, about 20 million customers or nearly 10% of the US mobile phone market is MVNOs.

So much for the great MVNO debacle. What's the difference between the helicopter-riding disasters like Amp'd and diligent, patient machines like Tracfone?

Success as an MVNO means playing to your strengths. You are buying wholesale access to someone else's network, so there will be things you can't do well.

For example, a badly conceived MVNO does the following:
1. Targets customers that carriers themselves are trying hard to get (e.g., young tech geeks who love sports and music, and spend a lot)
2. Launches a not-very-distinctive product proposition that focuses on all the same shiny things that carriers are themselves offering (e.g., NFL and ESPN on Sprint, Verizon VCast with Madden, Myspace on Cingular)
3. Builds hugely expensive new product platforms with loads of capex and opex (e.g., build a "mobile media company" from scratch complete with studios, Jack Black on retainer, and so forth)
4. Ignores retailing 101. Launches big glitzy media...with no or little store availability (Amp'd, Helio, Disney, and Mobile ESPN all did this -- Superbowl and MTV ads before they were even available in 100 stores nationally)
5. Therefore acquires customers expensively. Industry standard is $300-500 per customer. Amp'd, ESPN & Co were closer to $500-1000.
6. Gets distracted by "amazing ARPU!!" of people spending $100 per month with your service. The fact is *most* smartphone users spend around that much. The "average" user in the US spends $50/month. Treo, Blackberry, high end type users spend quite a bit more.
7. And so doesn't realize that the revenue per megabyte or revenue per minute is actually worse than it needs to be. MVNOs are wholesalers. They pay a fixed price per minute. The industry average is $0.07 per minute of revenue. When Amp'd was selling 1000 minutes for $40...they were making $0.04.

Smart MVNOs do, well, the opposite:
1. Target "bad" customers that carriers ignore like the low-credit, prepaid customers that Virgin, Tracfone, etc etc focus on.
2. Launch a differentiated product like...prepaid. Carriers have always made prepaid extra horrible.
3. Build cheap platforms. Virgin's phones original phones had black and white screens and zero music. They were just simple phones.
4. Focus like crazy on retail -- like selling in big national chains from day one.
5. Acquire customers cheaply. If you read Virgin's S-1, they spend about $100 per customer.
6. and 7. For example, if Virgin's frumpy prepaid customers spend $20/month to use 150 minutes...they are spending $0.13 per minute.

Now you know the secrets. Start shopping for those helicopters.

Posted by amol -->

Xobni, ow

Well, it crashed my Outlook and uninstalled itself. I guess it's not that amazing.

Posted by amol -->

Xobni, wow

I just tried the beta release of Xobni on my machine and it is so great. It actually makes me regret switching away from Outlook for 60% of my mail (Thunderbird is my main business app). MSFT should buy these guys immediately and release the damn thing as an Outlook patch, like they did with Lookoutsoft's search.

Posted by amol -->

Disruption

Silicon Alley Insider: Next Up for Google: Launch MSFT Powerpoint Killer

*New technologies are considered "disruptive" when the market leader--in this case, Microsoft--adds so many features to a product that it overshoots the needs of the mainstream market. This leaves room for a competitor to offer a simpler, cheaper version that the incumbent can't respond to because doing so would crush the margins of its core business. So, instead, it responds by adding even more features and increasingly concentrating on the high-end of the market. Meanwhile, the competitor continues to gain market share at the low end until the incumbent is marginalized...

I have been reading the Christensen book on the subways lately, and this observation is right. The Google Docs product does less, performs worse, but is cheaper, more convenient, and suitable for different customers/less penetrated customers than the incumbent's franchise. In the face of this, the incumbent (and it's most valuable customers, which is a key Christensen insight) have been saying "what the heck is this garbage?" But the way disruption works is that the commodity, cheap, simple, convenient attacker builds scale and then starts getting better performance and then suddenly crosses the performance curve of the incumbent. And then, all of a sudden, the incumbent is sitting there looking stupid without anything that matches.

Why doesn't the incumbent just copy-and-paste? Because it's own best customers tell it for years that the disruptive approach is useless. And by the time the new approach is big, the incumbent lacks the design know-how or the production scale to do it well. Microsoft sucks at making web-based technologies and certainly doesn't do them efficiently. The core Google Docs apps were built by 15 people at the startup Writely. At MSFT, 15 people probably worked on the spell checker of the latest Word.

Another example: Google AdWords. It was a low-end disruption against Yahoo!'s display ads franchise. They started with an attack that had Yahoo! saying for years that Yahoo had the quality advertisers and the quality guys didn't give a crap about search terms. Well, Google attacked where Yahoo wasn't with customers that Yahoo "overserved" (with homepage ads that plumbers didn't have interest in). And as that machine grew to tremendous velocity, Yahoo can't cut-and-paste to imitate. The performance of search marketing has surpassed display, and the cost to run the network per unit for Google is far lower than for Yahoo. As for MSFT, forget it.

Posted by amol -->

Yahoo Mail! "open"

Mail - Yahoo! Gallery

It's pathetic -- Yahoo Mail has 100s of millions of user accounts, and yet their "open" API developer gallery has....4 apps in it.

Here are 40 for Gmail.

Posted by amol -->

"The best"

Some people like to buy whatever they perceive to be "the best". I met a guy yesterday who had a Razr, lost it, replaced it with another new Razr "because he couldn't downgrade after having had a Razr", and then bought the iPhone as soon as it came out. Huh?

If you were watching the TV coverage of the iPhone "madness", you might have been struck by the motley crews on line. There were lots of...old, fat, ugly lame-o-zoids. Not a lot of super-cool Armani clad future shock troops.

In fact, the word of mouth that I was hearing around then was people like my dad saying "you should just go for it and get it!"

To be fair, though, lots of the technology elite have bought the thing and are toting it around Silicon Valley.... so it's not just the unwashed masses.

Posted by amol -->

The all-in-one

Today I heard the following facts (some were openly announced)
- iPhone prices are being cut by 40% on the 4gb one (and then eliminating the product) and 33% on the 8gb one
- a new iPod is being released that is a phone-free iPhone. It's a touch iPod with wifi and PDA stuff but no phone
- as if this weren't obvious, the iPhone sales are about 25% below internal plan (but easily on their way to the publicly stated plan of 1mm in 2007 -- they have 4more months to sell another 250K...)

Does it mean the all-in-one dream was a joke after all?

Another way to think about it is: they sold 550-600K in the first weekend (Fri-Sun). In the remaining 87 days, they sold only 200K. That's about 2K per day in the 2000 AT&T stores plus 200 Apple stores plus online. Per store productivity therefore was about 1 per day per store. This would be OK if you were selling Virgin Mobile phones in 10K locations around the country, but probably not if you are selling the much-hyped-etc-etc iPhone. At that pace, and assuming a 50% uplift for holiday, they will sell only 350K more by end of year, or about that 1mm they wanted to sell.

By contrast.....

The Newton, priced at $1000 (or about, say, $1500 in current dollar terms) sold about 50K units in the first two months back in 1993 and 100K in the first calendar year. iPhone is 15x better so far (and the gadget plays music and has a phone in it, beyond just being a handy PDA).

More on the Newton, one of those "it was actually successful...just pulled to early" stories (like Foleo?) One of that old gadget's problems was the difficulty of entering text (remember?)

Posted by amol -->

Shelter in the credit crunch

The Dow industrials climbed 91.12 to 13448.86, lifted by technology stocks, which investors see as relatively sheltered from credit-market troubles.

As I was speculating a few weeks back, looks like techs are a destination for those fearing credit issues/housing. Good for venture over the medium term.

Posted by amol -->

What people do

"The Big Red focus groups were both depressing and informative, and they confirmed what I — and Rick — already knew," DiDia told me afterward. "The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don't consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."

Rick Rubin - Recording Industry - Rock Music - New York Times

This snippet of learning seems about right to me. It's hard to fix a company when a) it's hard to learn these obvious and fast-changing truths, and b) it's hard to change your mode of operation to respond. For ten years (roughly since Napster), the industry has been fighting digital and mobilizing its antibodies against the change. Now that the change is so far along and inevitable, the music industry is still flat-footed. Just like everyone says about disruptive technological change (Christensen or Ries), the innovation can't be captured by the mother ship.

Posted by amol -->

A different threat to Google

I recently posted about the dangers of Google's lack of focus. A different comes from the growing mistrust of a company with all your data (personal or commercial). The Economist's writeup on privacy and copyright concerns creating a hostile climate to the company that doesn't want to be evil. (Also, funny that the Economist picks up the arrogance theme.)

Posted by amol -->

The "death" of Google

Paul Graham has this "controversial" essay on the death of Microsoft (i.e., they are no longer relevant). I think it's great, and correct. MSFT is big, profitable, well known, but no longer doing anything that really matters to anybody. Office 2007, so what? MSN v53, same. Etc.

Google is working on a mobile OS, and it's due out shortly - Engadget

Engadget recently confirmed what I have been saying about the Google mobile plans for quite some time. The fact that they hired the Danger guy just means they are working on a mobile phone OS geared for the ODMers of Asia, not that they they are working on an Apple-style gPhone.

The fact that people would believe that Google was working on something so far afield from their search business as an actual piece of mobile hardware (!!!!) says a lot though. And indeed, they are making an actual piece of software for mobile phones. And they are apparently angling for an actual piece of airwaves. And seem to have their fingers in a million things lately: all kinds of print and other media ad networks, search for all kind of specialty data sources like printed scholarly books, maps of all kinds of localities including Mars and stars, web-based email, finance info, music info, real estate listings, user generated video, social networks, a shopping finder, office applications like hosted email, word editing and spreadsheets, and on and on. I'm not even thinking of some of the wackier stuff -- like free municipal wifi, the open source collaboration codebase, the "ride finder". Thousands of people are working on this stuff, while 98% of profit is still from the "better search" + "better ad marketplace" duo that powers the whole thing.

Google looks, to me, like Microsoft in 1995 or Dell in 1998 or IBM in the 1980s or Yahoo in 1999 or a host of other invincible companies at the tops of their games, teetering at the summit of their category. Having dominated a sphere, they look around and say, what now? There's huge change and growth. We need to go in all those directions -- because of portfolio strategy, because of innovation from the bottom up, because of convergence across categories. If we just sit still and focus on one or two big things, we will have all our eggs in one basket, we will bet wrong, and adjacent change will swamp us.

But in retrospect on all these cases, the determined bets on the adjacent and remote directions typically failed. Microsoft made zero progress (i.e., $$) on mobile phones, set top boxes, cars, optical character recognition, image editors, or any of the other irrelevant things they pursued. It's still desktop OS, desktop office software, and to a much lesser extent server OS and software.

And by the way, Microsoft had the monster $20 B war chest, the most geniuses, the most radical culture, the world-beating ambitions, the youngest founder. Similar superlatives can be found for all the once-great champions -- Ford, Coca Cola, SAP, Motorola, you name it.

Well, here is a bold prediction. In the hazy distant future of 2012, Google's market capitalization will be less than or equal to it's market capitalization today.

Posted by amol -->

Prepaid or postpaid?

You probably have a contract plan for your cell phone of some kind. I have long been part of prepaid ventures, but I myself rarely use prepaid. I use a lot of minutes after all!

I recently had to do an analysis, since I dropped my Verizon phone in the water.

8/13/2007 VZWRLSS-IVRVN 1-800-922-0 -257.62
7/14/2007 VZW APO 800-922-020 -209.55
6/14/2007 VZW APO 800-922-020 -211.32
5/14/2007 VZW APO 800-922-020 -463.18
3/23/2007 VZWRLSS-MYACCTVN FOLSOM -210
1/26/2007 VERIZON WIRELESS BRANCHBURG -512.91
8.00 -1864.58
(233.07)

Those are all my payments to VZW since January covering the 8 months from December through July 31 plus a termination fee for the last mont (b/c those guys are jerks).

It works out to about 233 per month for one phone with about 3000 minutes a month (in the plan) and data so I could do email and browse the web on my Treo. Okay.

So for the last 1 month I have had two T-Mobile prepaid accounts. No plans. The total spend below is for the whole year including the payment in January and in May to "keep the accounts current" (basically I had an extra phone line that I would play around with on the Sidekick or other T-Mobile devices...but not really for minutes).

The total is only $253 for the whole year including this last month where I had two T-Mobile phones -- one for voice and one for a heavily-used Sidekick. Two phones, unlimited data, two devices and heavy minutes of usage. Excluding that $131 from Jan and May, my T-Mobile service was actually $100 cheaper than having Verizon! And it's prepaid. And I use it a lot.

7/24/2007 VESTA *T-MOBILE VESTPORTLAND -54.19
6/15/2007 T-MOBILE.COM PAYMENT800-937-899 -69.35
5/13/2007 T MOBILE NO 8143 T MQUEENS -21.66
1/4/2007 VESTA *T-MOBILE 888-278-339 -108.38
1.00 -253.58

Many people are clearly stuck on contracts who shouldn't be!

Posted by amol -->

Start your startup in a startup coffee shop

http://www.cooperbricolage.com/

I think this is a great idea. Great way to start a company.

Posted by amol -->

Pwning customer care

I just surprised myself in what I was able to pressure out of a bunch of CSRs re: my T-Mobile phone account. Here are key principles:

- Start with a real issue. My phone was unusable for 7 days b/c of "system" problems they were having when they tried to port my number in.

- Add on a "fairness" or "you intentionally did something evil" issue. Not good enough that "their network or systems suck". For me, they misled me into thinking it was a brief and temporary issue ("system is updating") when it was clearly deeper and I had no phone for a week. So I got self-righteous about this with rep #1.

- Escalate, but not by saying "let me talk to your supervisor". I said "I need to talk to someone who can address this issue for real because you are not." First they will go check with a supervisor and come back with something.

- Just say "this problem is not resolved". They will hope that first lob and a curt "what else can I help you with" will end it. Don't let it. Just say it's not over and you need someone to help fix this. That will get you an actual supervisor. Now you are talking to someone who can do something.

- There are higher orders. Even that supervisor will plead "that is the best I can do". Then just say "I am going to insist that you put me in touch with someone who can".

- Be an expert. I actually am an expert on wireless and was able to quote all kind of things related to the FCC, the Crossroads systems, CSRs, etc. Maybe you can fake this if your problem is airline related or something. Or maybe you should just assert "I worked in this industry for years and I know the truth!".

- The knockout: rope a dope. By talking and talking to several CSRs management layers who were getting emotionally charged, they themselves slipped up. First, one said "it can take 72 hours to port a number". I called bullshit on that. The high manager actually tried "it can take up to 7 days". I went nuts on that one -- I said she was lying, her colleague had made up something different, their activation department says "up to 24 hours" explicitly and I threw some FCC/Crossroads/law stuff at her too. Then she gave me my $25 credit.

Posted by amol -->

The power of email

I think email is just great (you may already know this about me) and the proof is it's the #1 use of the Internet and used by 3x more people than SMS in the US.

One proof of how great it is comes from this guy's raving about the iPhone. Really, he's raving about email.

What he is raving about is a technology that is ubiquitous, built on open standards, has many clients and servers conforming to each and operating on many different platforms, has great search, has great filing, has great archiving, has great mobility, can be shared, can be ad-supported...only thing missing is it doesn't do podcasts.

Posted by amol -->

More on the Foleo

MEX on the Foleo and where it fits in the world. The Jobs vision of the iPhone is exciting, but the Foleo may turn out to be the more novel set of ideas.

Posted by amol -->

Freeloaders vs. downloaders

I liked the Lala.com service moderately, and then gave up on it. But this new one - well, I'll definitely try it out some...while it lasts. It is so insane that I am sure it will die. Most implausible is their assumption on conversion rate of music listeners to music buyers. There are 45mm iPods sold to date and only about 1bn total iTunes sold -- 20 per iPod. Nothing much. Good luck to Lala. If they can sell 20 songs to each of their users, they'll earn maybe $2-4 per user lifetime.

PC World - Lala Launches Free iPod Music Service

"We expect up to 70 percent of people will be freeloaders just listening to the music but around 30 percent will be buying music," Nguyen said.

Lala is backed by Bain Capital and Ignition Corp., which so far have invested $14 million over two rounds. The company is still raising money.

Posted by amol -->

More with Less

Predictions are usually for more. Why it should be less.

Posted by amol -->

Finally, the end of MS Outlook?

Thunderbird went to 2.0 beta and there are some great plugins that suggest...we are at the end of Outlook.

Thunderbird = great email client and contact manager
+ Lightning calendar + the extension for Google Calendar + Google Calendar = office calendaring/sharing/scheduling
+ Gmail-like search = great search
+ Plaxo plugin = sync with your Outlook or other installs of PIM stuff
Done! No more outlook in the workplace.

Posted by amol -->

Re-aggregators

RSS makes it easy to subscribe to sites you like, and therefore makes it easy to build aggregators like Bloglines. For media, it basically makes it easy to publish a podcast from your site and for "readers" like iTunes or Democracy to tune them in as channels.

But what about other stuff -- like pictures you post or mp3s or other more weird stuff like links or concepts or "recent visitors" or products you link to/recommend -- that is written about in a decentralized way like on Myspace or blogs etc. Hype Machine basically re-aggregates music. I suppose Technorati tries to reaggregate concepts.

Posted by amol -->

Swooping downmarket

A common complaint on my last few projects is "can't the top of the market just swoop down and kill you guys?"

For example, with Virgin Mobile we were focused on a broadly accessible mobile phone for people who couldn't or wouldn't sign contracts will typical carriers. People said "well those guys can easily move down market".

It's kind of like arguing BMW can easily swoop down on Toyota, or American on Southwest, or Pellegrino on Coke, or the Ivy League on community colleges. That is to say, there is a certain prestige and somtimes a nice margin in being the high end product brand. But high end doesn't just mean "low end is downhill". It's a different business to serve the mass consumer -- channels, products, service, pricing, etc. This is a point that is part of the classic disruptive innovations in the Christensen world.

Posted by amol -->

The Smiths Killers

Listen to this song by The Killers "Jenny was a friend of mine".

That bass lick. Remind you of something? It reminds me of a track off The Smiths' Meat is Murder. But which one? I will have to relisten to that album today.

Posted by amol -->

Pricing is hard to change

Price ain't easy to change -- as we know from Virgin Mobile, who is now still charging the same 17c per minute blended rate on most of its customers that we launched with back in 2002 and first came up with back in 2000.

Solving the mystery of the 5-cent Coca-Cola. - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

Part of Coke's problem was the cost of replacing vending machines that accepted only nickels—and the fact that the alternative, dimes, represented a 100 percent price hike. (The boss of Coca-Cola wrote to his friend President Eisenhower in 1953 to suggest, in all seriousness, a 7-and-a-half-cent coin.)

Most companies don't wait so long to change prices if they need to. Researchers have tended to conclude that many prices change every year or so, often sooner. Levy and some colleagues looked at supermarket pricing in the mid-1990s and found, based on detailed accounting data, that to change the price of a single type of product in a typical supermarket cost 52 cents in printing, labor, and errors. The total of all such changes was about $100,000 per store, per year—still less than 1 percent of revenue.

Posted by amol -->

Evite sucks

Why Evite and 7 other sites suck
1. Evite

* Why it sucks: The invitation e-mails don't contain the info for the event! Gah! And the page everyone clicks to is choked with ads. RSVPing takes the user to a page with no new information, a cheap extra pageview for evite, and the user has to go back to see the event info again.
* Why we still use it: No reason, really; evite's great in that RSVPers don't have to register for an account, but plenty of other sites can say the same.
* The alternative: There's Yahoo's Upcoming, which does require a Yahoo account to RSVP. It lets users easily add events to their iCal, Yahoo, or Google calendars. Google Calendar is fantastic. It autosuggests Gmail contacts when an organizer invites people by e-mail; the invitation e-mail includes all event info. Also try Socializr, which seems pretty cool, lets you import contacts from everywhere, and has witty copy.

Posted by amol -->

Mistakes we make in thinking (and techniques of persuasive people)

- We prefer stories to statistics.

- We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.

- We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.

- We sometimes misperceive the world around us.

- We tend to oversimplify our thinking.

- Our memories are often inaccurate.

Posted by amol -->

The Gallery project

The Gallery project, to make an open source web app for storing and sharing your pictures, really sucks. It is a pain to install -- a multi-hour process because of all the stupid dependencies like Mysql and image libraries that are themselves hassles. And it is not able to keep up with the features of Flickr and the online web services. And what about video?

All in all, Gallery is increasingly frustrating and out of date. Please, someone, create a MovableType of pictures to match the many Bloggers of pictures that are floating around.

Posted by amol -->

Music sites, like Lala.com

I liked Lala.com when it launched and I traded something like 40 CDs using it. But I lost interest -- way too much work! Not at all like Netflix. Netflix, you just get CDs and you pack 'em up and mail 'em. Lala, you get CDs -- OK. But then you have to log onto the site, find the CDs people want you to mail, write their address on the envelope, mail, order more envelopes when you run out. It's kind of closer to Ebay than it is to Netflix. Which sucks!

So I was not surprised to see the downward curve on this chart.

To be fair it is likely in part seasonal -- late Winter ain't hopping.

But compare this chart to some services I actually like -- Last.fm, Pandora, iTunes. Those are up up and away.

Alexa Info for: lala.com/

Posted by amol -->

Effective tax rates

Poor "working" people assume that the rich care about income tax rates. 33%! Can you believe it used to be 70%! And so on. But rich people don't pay income tax. They pay capital gains only. Like this guy - one of the richest - whose effective rate was 18% for 2005 on his 1.5B earnings.

Fortune Hunter - Executive Articles - Portfolio.com

Jay Rosser, Pickens’ veteran public-relations aide, returned from an adjacent office with the 2005 personal-income figure his boss had requested. “You made $1.504 billion last year,” he reported. “That’s adjusted gross income?” Pickens asked.

Rosser nodded and went on to add, “You paid the I.R.S. $279 million in taxes.”

Posted by amol -->

How to have creative insights

Murray Gell-mann points out how you get creative ideas.

Some steps:
1. Saturation - soak in the issue
2. Incubation - stop thinking about it and let it rest
3. Illumination - have the answer come to you
4. Verification - check it out
As documented by Helmholz and Poincare and discussed by Gell-mann at a recent Google lecture

Posted by amol -->

Social software

I had an idea in a feverish dream that software could be more "personal" or "social" by simply being more relaxed in the way the interfaces are written. This is a trend that I have observed most prominently in Flickr but also in other new services (e.g., Socializr). They just write their interface-speak in a more informal tone. They say things like "Hey" or "Wait a sec" or "Yay!". They also don't really give you a "full" interface, they more walk you through things the way a friend or a CSR might take you through a process.

It sure would be a way to set our upcoming service apart from the lame corporate-speak of most consumer electronics.

Posted by amol -->

Bad UI, Motorola edition

One way to make things hard to use is to screw up the user interface by trying to make it "better".

Motorola does this better than almost anyone, and even Motorola people will admit they suck at making software.

The world-beating RAZR is a small device but really lousy to use. Here are some ways:
- Overly nested options. Unlike Nokias, which have very long lists of options once you get into "settings", the RAZR has lots of little bundles of options in the group called Settings. But the items in a given bundle are different from each other, forcing the menu writers to come up with names like "Initial setup" for the folder that includes Date and Time. You change the Time quite often actually, not just initially. But how would you find it there? In Nokia land, it would be one item on a 30 item list of settings. Easier to find even if you have to click a while.
- Marketing themes instead of just simplicity themes. On the home screen there is a soft key for "video". Well, nobody shoots video OK? Even if it were camera...that's not what people are doing most often. What people are doing is contacts! Then maybe recent calls! Then maybe about 30 other things before video. Why use up one of the most important and visible spots with something people never use and hide the things people really want to use?
- Communicating the full complexity of a feature rather than it's "focal" or salient point. For example, the "ring styles" concept. When you change the ringer volume, you are changing the "style". The style is a synthesis of volume, music, vibration element, call/text type, etc. A powerful utility! But a stupid one. Nobody dives into their phone to find the ring style. They look for each component element and try to adjust them. Similarly, the overly academic melding of all "multimedia" on the device into one area so that ringtones get filed away into multimedia-land also makes them hard to do.

Posted by amol -->

Global liquidity

Fabrice had a Peter Thiel related post a week or two back about global liquidity growth. Here is another big drop in the ocean.

China to Open Fund to Invest Currency Reserves - New York Times

Some financial experts are already talking about the huge impact China could have as a major global investor, and the possibility that its purchases could push asset prices higher and create even more competition for scarce commodities and resources

Posted by amol -->

The unsearchable (or the Google bubble, part nine million)

The unsearchable web is growing. And Google fails to reach it. I did two searches today that Google was useless for (totally 100% useless).

First, for "un 60 lights".
* on Google
* on Flickr - second result is what I wanted

Second, look at the inmobile.org site -- it's all flash. I signed up and my confirmation email was an image embedded in an email -- no text. Surf around some of these other flash-basd sites that seem to be proliferating daily -- here is a VC website where all there intro stuff is flash. Or what about locked up in Second Life or in Everquest? How do I find that cheat if it was posted in some tavern in the land of Illium in a MMORG? If there is no text, then there is no search.

Maybe they can open the SWF files and look for text embeds, but it sure is tough to read the text in a bitmap or in a video or worse, behind a proprietary database wall. Big pools of proprietary content as well rich-media. How to search them?

Posted by amol -->

Zimbra on my mac

I tried installing Zimbra on my OS X PPC Mac Mini. Kind of a complicated affair for little old me, but then again it was a similar experience putting Mysql or Movable Type or Gallery on there.

Zimbra is a great project. Basically, an open source + commercial flavor replacement for Exchange, one of the most tryrannical of Microsoft hegemonies. Along with OpenOffice.org and Firefox/Thunderbird, you can now run your business without MS. Plug in Funambol and you have (mobile) sync too, so you don't have to worry about the Palm Hotsync or other tools you used to use to keep your mobile PDA/phone/laptops in sync with home base.

To test out this vision of the future I have been using the OpenOffice apps, and my verdict is: they are great.

Installing Zimbra though, man it's not trivial. Some things to watch out for when fooling around with your mac:
- If you have "Web sharing" on (your Mac's http server) then tell Zimbra to run it's web service on some other port
- Tell your home/work routers to allow external users to get to that address
- Set your mail ports (25, 143, etc) to forward through the router as well
- Keep "Remote login" on in that Mac "Sharing" pref. That's ssh which lets your server talk to itself
- MX entries matter too. I used Zonedit.com and a tool that let me diagnose things (search for "mx test")

After all that, I'm still not sending mail successfully. Though I have got the servers all "running", the admin console up, a user created and logged into the mail interface...but no messages out or in.

Posted by amol -->

Reality MTV

I have very little idea what is on TV in general, but recently we discovered that our TV signal in fact carries a few cable channels. So I have tuned into two very interesting MTV programs: Maui Fever and The Hills.

There's this great "reality TV" meets "soap opera" production style (of course most reality programs are totally styled on the drama of soap opera). I wonder how they do it. It has the look that cameras with real-time editors follow around the cast and have them repeat things they actually say casually. The lighting and setting as well as the formulations of the expressions are so well organized, it has to be that way. Yet the content is such gibberish and catty nonsense that it must have its origin in sincere feeling.

It's a terrifically interesting format. I wonder where else people will start imitating it. MTV often innovates, though it be at the low tier of culture.

Posted by amol -->

How to write an Evite

Evites are nice for the inviter -- you get to see who said yes -- but they suck for the invitee:
- You cannot see in the email itself what you have been invited to or when or where
- You get an email full of crappy HTML
- You cannot refer to the email later to refresh your memory on when/where/what
- This missing information is missing in both machine-readable and human-readable form
- The only way to learn it is to be connected to the internet, so if you are offline you are dead
- You have to click a link and launch a web browser on your machine if one wasn't running already
- Then you have to go to the horrible evite site full of ads
- All in all, it sucks

If you are writing an evite you can fix this! IN THE MESSAGE TITLE and DESCRIPTION, put the details. Ignore what Evite tells you to do (i.e., to put it only in the date field). That will make life easier for all involved.

Posted by amol -->

Connect with me

Please connect with me somewhere. On Yahoo Myweb, my username is amol at yahoo. On delicious, it is asarva. On Flickr, my screen name is amol-y. How can I connect with you? Send me an email..

On Linkedin I'm my usual self with amol at yahoo as the contact email address.

I don't frequently use Myspace, Friendster, Mebo, Hi5, etc. But if you look for me, I'm on there.

Posted by amol -->

Text only

I am trying to think of text only websites. Help! What is the coolest design achieved with text only (no images) web design?

I can think of (so far) only:
- Craigslist here
- Google search (almost) here
- Delicious here
- Others?

Posted by amol -->

Google for domains

There is the potential, in Google for domains, to be the "small business app suite" we've all been yearning for
- groupware via Google Calendar
- domain hosting
- mail hosting with killer spamblocking
- application suite of the mostly costly apps (docs and spreadsheets)
- and even some commercial tools for advertising etc.

I am liking it a lot as a host for my personal domain drwn.com since it is a fast mailserver, gives a good webmail interface (Gmail), blocks spam better than Dreamhost, and gives some easy control panel tools (better than the linux world's cpanel, but much less powerful).

Posted by amol -->

Sales per sq ft

Incredible -- that's how they can afford that 5th Ave store.

Posted by amol -->

Life after Exchange

I spend about 1 hour per month trying to break the shackles of Microsoft. One of the most vexing is the calendar.

Recently, I am trying again.

The Holy Grail of Synchronization -- how to use Funambol and Scheduleworld to avoid using Exchange.

The key wrinkle, you see, has been the following:
- need groupware features so people can see my free/busy and schedule appointments
- need sync to my mobile phone/palm
- need sync to the web somewhere somehow
- ideally, would like to do it all without an exchange server

The normal way, of course, is:
- MS Exchange server
- Everyone on Outlook
- Some sync tool with Outlook (so many of them) plugs into my websites (Yahoo Calendar) and my phone/palm (Hotsync)

The radical alternative I consider here, though, is:
- Google Calendar as the "server" and web interface
- ScheduleWorld as the iCal-based sync clearinghouse
- Funambol's Outlook plugin to get the data from Outlook up to ScheduleWorld up to Gcal
- Outlook as the desktop calendar app
- Normal Outlook sync tools (like Hotsync) to get the data onto my phone/Palm

Phew!

The main downside is I have to hit "sync" on the Funambol plugin to make the Outlook sync with the remote calendar.

I tried a different flavor of this using RemoteCalendar, an open source plugin that goes directly to Google Calendar, but...man it didn't work for me. Painful.

The link above tells you *how* to do this incredibly wacky maneuver.

But the bottom line end result:
- you can run your company's groupware with open email (any SMTP/POP email solution with Thunderbird as the mail app) and and with pretty open calendar (no need for Exchange).
- you end up buying Outlook ($100 per seat?) but avoiding Exchange ($5000 and up...)

Posted by amol -->

Dissertation

I noticed recently that the links back to Stanford.edu for my dissertation are broken in various places on my blog. Here is a local link:

The Concept of Modularity in Cognitive Science

Posted by amol -->

Contemporary blackberry culture

Contemporary blackberry culture

Who's using blackberry, now. In New York, anyway.
Posted by amol -->

Hi/low culture

Hi/low culture

I went for the peaceful, meditative tonalities of the Japanese Uniqlo this season. Rather than the taurinated Austrian H&M lineup. They play atmospheric zen-buddhist drumbeats on the sound system.



It's high culture by being minimalist bare bones. The danger at H&M or Ikea or other designy, trendy venues is that design can be clutter. Even spare elements like colors or decorative flourishes end up making noise.



Think of the t-shirt wall at Urban Outfitters, where each t-shirt is a wry, ironic statement but the collection is as noisy as the cereal aisle at Wal-Mart.



Here at Uniqlo it is less as better.
Posted by amol -->

The new religion: GTD

Check out this software:

Midnight Beep Softworks

Get things done.
Above all else, Midnight Inbox is simple. Anyone who has considered implementing Getting Things Done, the workflow described by David Allen's book will find it completely intuitive. Anyone who just wants to get a little bit more organized can run the application and go.

It actually advertises as one of its features the fact that it fits into the GTD framework.

Getting Things Done. I see it so much online in the lands of geekery and personal productivity that I declare it the next Steven Covey-ish phenomenon. But slower. And with fewer book sales. It's amazing to watch this "way" keep building steam.

It just makes sense by the way -- write down everything you think you need to do, and do it. That's it.

Posted by amol -->

Minutes of use

Jun 591 (306 incoming, 45 voicemail) $241.16
July 2884 (989, 158) $329.52
August 2575 (1008, 106) $622.18
September 2388 (792, 118)
October 2003 (277, 68) $249.98
November 2421 (438, 65) $208.29

I've been using nearly 30 hours per month, about 1 hour per day. Definitely much lower on weekends (8 days), so the average per weekday is more like 1.3 hours. If you substract out another 3-4 travel days per month, then it's more like 1.6 hours per day.

Now the dollar amounts above include things like international roaming. But let's just ignore for a second. Over the period I used ~10,600 minutes and paid $1,660. Which is about $0.15 per minute.

You can buy a prepaid phone and pay as little as $0.10 per minute.

Posted by amol -->

Dear Yahoo, a pet peeve

One thing Google does *great* and Yahoo does horribly is interpret user-entered queries into machine-readable searches. Type an address in any old fashion into the Google search box and you get the address map, or if you typed a band you get a smart result for the band.

If you want to do this on Yahoo, you are meant to try typing "map" + the address. But even so the address nonsense doesn't work. Try it for this address that someone gave me today:

104-14 Roosevelt Avenue in Corona. (That's in Queens.)

See how far you get on each.

Google

Yahoo

If you think you are clever, try modifying Yahoo's query format to get it to do the right thing. Just try.

Posted by amol -->

Who do I email the most?

Darwin apparently wrote 1,000 letters a year and was considered a tremendously active participant in scientific dialogue. 3 letters a day isn't all that much.

I write probably 50 emails per day and make 20 phone calls. Per year, that is ~15,000 emails and 7,000 phone calls.

Well, who am I emailing and calling so much? Shouldn't that tell me what my social network looks like?

I tried to search for something that would crawl through and rank all my Outlook correspondents. Couldn't find it. Anyone have ideas for me? Man, I would love to know exactly how important you are to me.

Posted by amol -->

Copycats

Copycats
Originally uploaded by amolsarva.

When Wal-Mart turns its attention to your business, watch out.

This has happened famously and to great devasation in the toys and grocery categories over the last few years.

More recently, the war on Consumer Electronics has had interesting results. The sheer rapidity and complexity of CE hs given Best Buy to keep setting the running pace - services, higher technology complexity, the continuous transformation of the fundamental assortments (e.g., the rise of personal health care).

But here is a clipping about furniture. To that, my guess is it's time to order coffins.

Furniture is not so fast moving as tech or fashion that a 2-year-ead-time cost-crushing overseas-production process can't catch it. In fact it surely can and has.

First they killed the dowdy American Colonials of the world. Then the wickers of Pier 1. And now they will destroy the plastics, velvets and painted woods of the Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel designers.
Posted by amol -->

Podcasts reach...philosophy class

Some of the professors in my Philosophy department in graduate school had always been pretty keen on having a radio show -- a Philosopher's Car Talk, sort of. I think the root cause of this impulse is a commonly felt need among philosophically-trained people to do work that is not only deep (as philosophy is) but also impactful (which requires reach).

I felt that impulse myself. Which is why I left Philosophy for stuff that's more in-the-world.

But Ken Taylor and John Perry are accomplished philosophers, and they did their NPR-ish experiment. The more important outcome, I think, is their stuff has gotten swept up into the march of podcasting.

Stanford put a bunch of stuff on iTunes recently, and now there is suddenly lots more on iTunes than homebrew weirdness, micro-media producers (e.g., Ask a Ninja), and commercial mass production re-purposed for this channel (music, television). There is valuable stuff you could never get before in a form like this -- you used to have to spend your evenings on campus to hear these discussions.

It also tells me that as disruptive as podcasting/cache-stuffing content distribution will eventually be, the idea has reached the stage in its lifecycle that its "potential" has been widely realized. Even the philosopher knows what to do with a podcast...i.e., get famous or make money.

You can check out the show on iTunes or by going to their blog

Posted by amol -->

Carbon neutrality

My footprint is 18 tons of CO2 per year -- that's lower than the average of 24, but man it's frustrating. It's all in those airline miles! I guess there is a moral imperative to do some meetings on the phone if at all possible. Never mind the cost savings.

The average New Yorker must be WAY below everyone else.

For $10 per ton, it's not an entirely unsolvable problem though. For example, I fly 25 flights to generate about 15 tons of carbon. Well, I could easily afford an extra $7 per flight to pay for carbon sinks that offset what the flights create. After all, we are paying nearly as much in fees and security protocols just to protect against the one-off terrorist attack. An attack would harm a few thousand people while the carbon buildup will destroy the whole world.

The interesting business idea, of course, is to create a carbon neutral product or service for people. For example, a credit card that analyzes your purchases (flights, gasoline, etc) and gives you a monthly charge that goes to tree-planting in the Amazon.

One tree absorbs about 0.8 tons (1,600 pounds) of carbon over their lifetime. So I would need to plant about 20 trees -- which shouldn't even cost $200 if it were done at large scale.

Try out the calculator at conservation.org

Posted by amol -->