Yes, I have been blogging less.
This has not been part of some master plan, but lots of traveling has gotten in the way, along with things heating up around Kloudshare.
Additionally, one of the things I think I don't do as well as perhaps some is multi-task. I am great at handling a small number of regular activities, like coding or blogging. But the more diverse creative tasks you add to the plate the more mental energy, if not time, each of them takes, and at times, something has to give. Writing speeches, and business plans, and conference programs all take mental energy that suck time from thinking about broader industry activity, and therefore blogging.
But fear not! through the holidays, I will probably continue to operate on a somewhat abreviated blog schedule, but I hope to be back to a normal flow by the beginning of the year. Blogging has great value to me because it forces me to think about the world in which we operate and allows me to engage in conversations with people who inform my thinking. Blogging has no doubt been incredibly valueable to my professional efforts in 2008, and so I look forward to a full blogging year in 2009.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Good People of Go Daddy And Arizona
Several months ago I was invited to speak to the development organization at Go Daddy about Web 3.0 and the future of the Internet, and last week I had the pleasure of delivering my talk.
I was in Arizona from Wednesday to Sunday, and Friday through Sunday was a little mini vacation. Giving the talk was great fun and I came away with an extraordinary respect for what Go Daddy has grown into. But what was most striking to me about my trip was what I saw in the people I met.
The interesting thing to me was that everyone I met at Go Daddy, but more broadly, everyone I met in Arizona was extraordinarily nice. First, everyone at Go Daddy was incredibly gracious, from the audience, to the President, to the events coordinator. Now you might discount my perspective on Go Daddy since cordiality would be expected from your hosts. But I have certainly interacted with people who were not nearly so nice despite being hosts. So from my perspective the graciousness of the Go Daddy folks was particularly notable.
But what is perhaps a more compelling argument and less situation specific is the response I got from people who had no idea who I was, and who had no particularly specific reason to be nice. This included people on the street in ghost town of Jerome, Arizona, shopkeepers in Sedona, and service workers everywhere along the way that would make extra efforts to say hello, to smile, and to provide unsolicited help, when their peers in New York, or Boston, or the Bay Area would almost certainly not.
I am not one of those people that complain about people not being nice. I think people are generally nice enough. And so it is particularly striking how extra nice Arizonans were. Of course the truth is I have not traveled to that part of the country very often. I have been to Colorado once, but really didn’t have much of a chance to interact with people off the resort we were at. But beyond that I haven’t traveled much to the mid-west or mountain states. I have spent much time on the coasts and in the south, but this is a very different area for me.
This got me thinking about how big this country is and how we develop parochial perspectives about everything. It is so hard to really understand what “Americans” are collectively about. We are so regionally diverse and are driven by so many competing local as well as national factors that it is difficult to really get a clear picture.
All in all it was incredibly energizing to get out and meet and see people outside my regular sphere of interaction. It is so easy to forget how big the world and even the country really is, and so refreshing to occasionally be reminded of that fact.
I was in Arizona from Wednesday to Sunday, and Friday through Sunday was a little mini vacation. Giving the talk was great fun and I came away with an extraordinary respect for what Go Daddy has grown into. But what was most striking to me about my trip was what I saw in the people I met.
The interesting thing to me was that everyone I met at Go Daddy, but more broadly, everyone I met in Arizona was extraordinarily nice. First, everyone at Go Daddy was incredibly gracious, from the audience, to the President, to the events coordinator. Now you might discount my perspective on Go Daddy since cordiality would be expected from your hosts. But I have certainly interacted with people who were not nearly so nice despite being hosts. So from my perspective the graciousness of the Go Daddy folks was particularly notable.
But what is perhaps a more compelling argument and less situation specific is the response I got from people who had no idea who I was, and who had no particularly specific reason to be nice. This included people on the street in ghost town of Jerome, Arizona, shopkeepers in Sedona, and service workers everywhere along the way that would make extra efforts to say hello, to smile, and to provide unsolicited help, when their peers in New York, or Boston, or the Bay Area would almost certainly not.
I am not one of those people that complain about people not being nice. I think people are generally nice enough. And so it is particularly striking how extra nice Arizonans were. Of course the truth is I have not traveled to that part of the country very often. I have been to Colorado once, but really didn’t have much of a chance to interact with people off the resort we were at. But beyond that I haven’t traveled much to the mid-west or mountain states. I have spent much time on the coasts and in the south, but this is a very different area for me.
This got me thinking about how big this country is and how we develop parochial perspectives about everything. It is so hard to really understand what “Americans” are collectively about. We are so regionally diverse and are driven by so many competing local as well as national factors that it is difficult to really get a clear picture.
All in all it was incredibly energizing to get out and meet and see people outside my regular sphere of interaction. It is so easy to forget how big the world and even the country really is, and so refreshing to occasionally be reminded of that fact.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Walmart’s Black Friday Negligent Homicide
I have always been incredibly critical of the Black Friday phenomenon whereby major retailers, and most notoriously Walmart, offer a handful of products at insanely low prices to people that are too stupid, or excited to realize that they only stock five of the items per store and the items are “while supplies last.”
I am, perhaps, particularly critical because three or four years ago, I was one of those incredibly stupid people. I got up at 3am on Black Friday to go to Walmart and see if I could get one of those $300 laptops. I live in New York City where we have no Walmart’s, but headed over to the Walmart in New Jersey just across the Lincoln Tunnel.
I had no idea how bad it would be.
Approaching the store from at least a mile away, there was a line to get into the parking lot. Once I did actually get into the parking lot, it became even more clear (if that is at all possible) that we would not get in. It was also clear that despite the freezing weather, the person at the front of the line had waited for perhaps 12 hours.
I turned around and went home, feeling a bit frustrated, but mainly just, well, stupid. But what impressed me was seeing in person just how effective the sales technique was. I needed to see with my own two eyes to really understand how powerful, dishonest, and troubling Walmart marketing is. A statistically insignificant number of people would be able to take advantage of the most attractive sale prices they were offering. These were the sale prices promoted in a nation-wide television campaign and on the front of the millions of circulars that they inserted into newspapers around the country.
In short, the promotions are an incredibly effective fraud. They have structured a sale in such a way that it behaves more like a lottery. They create a demand that, for most people, cannot be satisfied. It is a bait and switch. They offer the $300 computer, which of course they are immediately and permanently out of stock on, but once they have you in the store they know you will buy other less impressively discounted items.
In my view this is a horribly unethical technique. But this last Friday, Black Friday, it became clear that the technique is more than just unethical. It is lethal. And perhaps the “Black” description, previously used as an accounting reference to profitability, will now have an entirely new and more troubling context.
In our most recent Black Friday, a seasonal “security” worker at a Long Island Walmart was trampled to death. He was killed as the early morning crowd of thousands of adrenaline high shoppers forced the locked Walmart doors open and mercilessly, and perhaps ignorantly stomped the man to death in their quests for cheap flat screen TVs, computers, and other discount, limited availability items.
This was a totally foreseeable event. First, there are obviously all of the security measures that should have been taken that weren’t. And this will likely be blamed on negligent local store security procedures. But this is not what troubles me.
The truly predictable part of this is that by hyping things up so much, and by creating such scarcity, they are guaranteeing an over the top emotional state which leads to these kinds of things. Of course the over the top emotional state is exactly what they want. But you can’t have it both ways. If you are going to benefit from the incredible and disingenuous hype then you must also take responsibility for all of its outcomes.
If Walmart really wanted to avoid this kind of thing, there is no reason that they couldn’t have a one day sale, and guarantee that anyone who wants a for sale item on the sale day could have one.
Of course being ethical has its downsides. For example, people wouldn’t be competing to be first in line, making for less excitement. And they’d actually have to sell, probably at a loss, more of those super cheap items to thousands of people. Oh, and, of course, one poor insignificant Walmart worker would probably not be dead. Probably not worth it.
I am, perhaps, particularly critical because three or four years ago, I was one of those incredibly stupid people. I got up at 3am on Black Friday to go to Walmart and see if I could get one of those $300 laptops. I live in New York City where we have no Walmart’s, but headed over to the Walmart in New Jersey just across the Lincoln Tunnel.
I had no idea how bad it would be.
Approaching the store from at least a mile away, there was a line to get into the parking lot. Once I did actually get into the parking lot, it became even more clear (if that is at all possible) that we would not get in. It was also clear that despite the freezing weather, the person at the front of the line had waited for perhaps 12 hours.
I turned around and went home, feeling a bit frustrated, but mainly just, well, stupid. But what impressed me was seeing in person just how effective the sales technique was. I needed to see with my own two eyes to really understand how powerful, dishonest, and troubling Walmart marketing is. A statistically insignificant number of people would be able to take advantage of the most attractive sale prices they were offering. These were the sale prices promoted in a nation-wide television campaign and on the front of the millions of circulars that they inserted into newspapers around the country.
In short, the promotions are an incredibly effective fraud. They have structured a sale in such a way that it behaves more like a lottery. They create a demand that, for most people, cannot be satisfied. It is a bait and switch. They offer the $300 computer, which of course they are immediately and permanently out of stock on, but once they have you in the store they know you will buy other less impressively discounted items.
In my view this is a horribly unethical technique. But this last Friday, Black Friday, it became clear that the technique is more than just unethical. It is lethal. And perhaps the “Black” description, previously used as an accounting reference to profitability, will now have an entirely new and more troubling context.
In our most recent Black Friday, a seasonal “security” worker at a Long Island Walmart was trampled to death. He was killed as the early morning crowd of thousands of adrenaline high shoppers forced the locked Walmart doors open and mercilessly, and perhaps ignorantly stomped the man to death in their quests for cheap flat screen TVs, computers, and other discount, limited availability items.
This was a totally foreseeable event. First, there are obviously all of the security measures that should have been taken that weren’t. And this will likely be blamed on negligent local store security procedures. But this is not what troubles me.
The truly predictable part of this is that by hyping things up so much, and by creating such scarcity, they are guaranteeing an over the top emotional state which leads to these kinds of things. Of course the over the top emotional state is exactly what they want. But you can’t have it both ways. If you are going to benefit from the incredible and disingenuous hype then you must also take responsibility for all of its outcomes.
If Walmart really wanted to avoid this kind of thing, there is no reason that they couldn’t have a one day sale, and guarantee that anyone who wants a for sale item on the sale day could have one.
Of course being ethical has its downsides. For example, people wouldn’t be competing to be first in line, making for less excitement. And they’d actually have to sell, probably at a loss, more of those super cheap items to thousands of people. Oh, and, of course, one poor insignificant Walmart worker would probably not be dead. Probably not worth it.
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