I'm slammed this week, traveling last weekend and again tomorrow, and setting up a new business this week which I will talk more about later. So for now here are some things I have wanted to blog about but have not had the time.
Walmart is opening stores in bad neighborhoods. Is it a good business move, or just pandering to the walmart-is-evil crowd?
There is a Web2.0 Journal. Why? Quick story – I was speaking with a programmer friend (embedded, not web) the other day and I said all this web 2.0 stuff is driving me crazy. His response – "web what?" Maybe this isn't all as popular and revolutionary as the pundits would have you believe.
Remember Isolatr? Well Snubster is a real anti social networking site.
Podcasts are listened to regularly by 1% of people.
And two somewhat counterintuitive things to note..
From the Economist comes a piece on banking (reg. required) with this interesting quote.
Perhaps the most surprising result concerned the supervisory powers of bank regulators. Strengthening supervision had a neutral or negative impact on banking development, reduced bank efficiency and increased the likelihood of a crisis. Why? One clue is a finding that corruption in bank lending tends to be higher in countries with stronger supervisors, except in places with strong legal systems and political institutions. Stronger supervisory powers in countries with weak governance may give bent officials more chance to help themselves. Although some economists question whether stronger supervision really causes these problems, rather than merely coinciding with them, the authors worry that Basel 2's second pillar might do a lot of damage: "The overriding message is that simply strengthening direct official oversight of banks may very well make things worse, not better, in the vast majority of countries."
And finally, via Seth I found this article which had the following:
A study by Bain & Company found that 80 percent of companies surveyed believed that they delivered a "superior experience" to their customers. But, when customers were asked to indicate their perceptions of the experiences they have in dealing with companies, they rated only 8 percent of companies as truly delivering a superior experience (James Allen, Frederick F. Reichheld and Barney Hamilton, The Three "Ds" of Customer Experience, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, accessed Nov. 7, 2005). Do you sense just a little bit of disconnect?
I sense a little bit of Lake Wobegone, which is rampant in most areas of most businesses. But I guess falsely believing you do a good job is easier than really working, which is probably why the former is so popular and the latter so rare.
It’s probably a safe bet that WalMart’s operating costs will be higher in the crime ridden neighborhoods due to higher security costs and higher losses to theft. So they either accept a lower operating margin, or raise prices on low income consumers and get crucified in the press. Seems like a no win situation to me.
I think recognition of Web 2.0 is directly correlated with recognition of Jason Kottke. If you know who Kottke is, you probably are familiar with the Web 2.0 buzz. If you have never heard of Kottke…and 99.9% of people in the US have probably never heard of Kottke.
I ask my ex-colleagues at Amazon what they think about Web2 all the time – it’s become a bit of a game – 9 out of 10 of them have not heard the term – those that have, are working on acquisitions. When I was at Amazon, Jeff B useed to constantly remind us that “it is still day 1″ – that was in year 7.
It is a curse of being a visionary that you have to stick with your invention long after it’s lost its sex appeal to you – before you see it earn its fair share of the market. Adoption of consumer offerings is painfully slow – and that’s even more true of web-based products – so, for web 2, it’s still very very very early days.