Category: economy

The New and the Old

daily life economy

Recently I noticed two interactions I had with products / companies / services.

They are un related. I remember them both since they were better / worse than what I had expected.

The bad one

Being bored in a Hotel room I switch on the TV. Since I never watched I was shocked again how bad it was. That was NOT unexpected. I just keep forgetting that. I stumbled upon “Blue Valentine”. I liked it a lot. And interesting movie to watch from the middle. I liked it quiet a bit and wanted to watch it completely. I ordered the BluRay Version.

I liked the entire movie as well. Nice to see that this kind of project gets made.

What really bothered me was the previews and trailers that want to play every time I insert the disc. I can fwd skip through things. But it is annoying. Very.

People do no longer buy media on discs anymore. As a reaction it seems that people try to sell things even harder. An junk-loop-spiral towards doom. Much like the Hotel phone prices jumping up when cell phones took away the call volume. A failed attempt to keep revenues steady in a shrinking market.

The good one

I wondered if it is possible to get a report from Amazon on past purchases. Sure enough it is. It works well. And it is so helpful. I never choose Amazon because of this. I had no idea I existed. I would use them if they had no reports.

Both – the disc makers and Amazon – deliver the core product that they offer.

The difference is in what they do extra: Amazon tries to think about what could be helpful for me. The disc makers try to think what is helpful for them.

How funny that they think that that will work.

It’s the technology, stupid

economy history technology

I like this graph. It is a wonderful example how a theory can be conveyed.

I have trouble following the underlying assumptions though. Plotting the potential output as a straight line going up is a nice illusion. Last time I checked things don’t automatically get better. Thanks to entropy the opposite is true. It takes a certain effort to maintain the status quo and even more energy is needed to improve matters. The past certainly saw advancements in GDP. Over and over again. But assuming that this will therefor continue is equally foolish as to predict the future reign of the Pharaohs in Egypt just because they did so in the last thousands of years.

The Dow is climbing, but unemployment does not decline. It might be that a conventional analysis is under estimating the impact of structural changes that happened in the last two decades. A tempting simplification of what is going on could look like this: Progress in computers and communication technology is creating huge values without creating the jobs as it was usual in previous eras. Facebook employs one engineer per 1.2 Million users.

Quantum leaps in efficiency ( workers vs output ) did happen before. But never as radical and rapid as seems now to be the case. Since this is unprecedented nobody has the faintest idea what this actually means.

For a couple of years the housing bubble masked the effects of this technological revolution on the job market. But eventually we will have to cope with the fact that nobody needs to file TPS reports any longer. That’s done by some computer somewhere.

how to spend 685,100,000,000 dollars

economy politics

real easy: just get allot of burocrats

no surprise here

economy free of any reason internet

people don’t know how fast their Internet is

I hope that it takes a while before the couple of last mile vendors adopt their upgrade plans accordingly.

forecasts

economy history politics

And they keep doing them:
Very nice visualization by the times

cupholders?

economy history technology

In 2007 GM lost $4,589 on each car they sold, in 2008 $4,670. Imagine any GM car, then remove things from it that cost four and a half grand*. This is the car you would get when would try not to loose money on making them. What do you care? Well you should, since next week you will probably own GM. And their losses will (continue to) come out of our (tax) pocket.

* OK, I got those numbers from the Internet and did the division myself, so all sorts of things could be wrong here. And you can also put back about one thousand dollar worth of parts into your imaginary Escalade: That’s what gets spend on marketing to convince you to buy the thing. How about a spare tire, seatbelts, a radio and a fan on the passenger side?

Gotcha Capitalism

economy

Used a different credit card. And it turns out that the exchange rate applied is by 5% worse than that of the other cards. This is one of these things where maybe after 30 minutes I could find the rate applied on the banks website. Or maybe not. My strategy for this kind of gotcha-capitalism is different: I have a list of companies that pulled a fast one on me. I try to avoid doing business with them as much as possible.

Gotcha Capitalism dilutes the whole system that got us here in the first place. Buyers selecting the best offer were the driving force for all progress. If buyers become mere ‘confused consumers’ they will buy all sorts of crap. And things offered will quickly deteriorate in quality, since the pressure to do a good job is gone.

Over time clear decisions haves seemingly become the sole territory of spin, bias and hype. The normal and actually working concept of looking at the situation and then coming up with a clear decision and sticking to it has apparently gone out of fashion. Since people could afford not pay attention allot of things grew into big business that make no sense whatsforever in clear day light. They simply thrive on peoples ignorance. And on the fact that they could afford not to pay attention.

glad we bailed them out

economy politics

Goldman Sachs employs 30,522 people. On average they make $600,000 a year. Glad we bailed them out.

old link

economy

still worth reading
even after a couple of weeks. Thx BlogsNow

“Still haven’t seen my bill, I’m actually eager to pay it.”

confessions of a pixel pusher economy interdubs marketing

That’s an actual quote of a client in an email received a couple of minutes ago. It is his first month with Interdubs, and he is not used to the fact that the bill will only arrive once the month is over. And then he can pay it. Or not. If he should feel like that. Which sounds ‘good hearted’ or ‘weak’. But it makes actually allot of (business) sense: Most of my clients have made more money with the site in their first week of using it, then it will cost them for whole month. A not so significant part of them actually takes just a few hours to make the 285 that the services costs them. Either by direct billing or by improved client relationships. I was aware of this when I designed the system and set the price. The price is solely based on the system working as well as it seems to be. It is arranged around my costs and the future potential of more clients. And maybe on the fact that I like to code fast.

I really hate the business model that tries to leach on to the success of its clients. Network Neutrality is one of those. Phone companies would sure love to charge more for important business conversations than for idle chit chat.

But back to Interdubs: having a super reasonable price that are people actually eager to pay makes everything much easier on everybody. So far people paid their bills. The majority of companies in record time. Thanks again and also from here. If I would try to squeeze more money out of the service, then I might need an accounting department that starts bugging people. I’d rather not.

On the other side with the latest feature additions the price / performance ratio is in danger to tip from “great” to “ridicolously great”. I have feedback from many of my clients saying that the service is too cheap. And I suspect that I could actually sign up more people if the price were higher. Most people think just because the competition is ten times more expensive it also would be better.