Category: Business

Ford on TV this AM

So I caught a few minutes of the Ford press conference this moring as I was getting ready for work. Job cuts, plant closings, big changes, new ways of designing and building cars, fewer SUVs, yadda yadda. What caught my ear, though was Bill Ford on the TV saying (more or less) “Why didn’t we make these changes sooner? We didn’t have to.”

One of the more memorable things my Systems prof told us last semester was, “Don’t boil the ocean.” If Ford really thinks they’re capable of making sweeping companywide changes in a smooth, adroit manner, they’re kidding themselves. A company that sat on its butt doing little more than raking in the profits on oversized low MPG SUVs when their competition was taking them to the cleaners is not going to be able to pull that kind of a move off. Toyota or Honda might, but the whole reason Ford is in this mess is because they are not Toyota or Honda.

One of the CNBC commentators noted that the scope of the plant cuts announced implied that Ford was cutting production capacity by about 1 million automobiles. I wonder what that’s going to do to the dealership network. Job losses due to dealership closings will not be counted in the press releases, but surely Ford will not need the same number of dealers if they’re producing so many fewer cars.

Whither Apple and the iPod?

One of the (few) benefits of working in an office that runs the Mac OS is that I’ve started paying attention to the Apple world beyond that of my iPod. So this morning, I ran across the site Apple Matters via a link from CNet. I read an interesting article about why Microsoft won’t be able to successfully take down the iPod (an argument I tend to agree with). It’s worth reading, both for the article itself and the thoughtful commentary.

For what it’s worth, it seems to me that Apple has decided they are not going to be able to unseat Microsoft in the office, so have decided to focus on ‘lifestyle’ computing instead. The iPod, building real photo and video manipulation tools into the OS, and a host of other details, all say to me that personal users are the target. And all things considered, that’s a smart move.

Whether it’s working remains to be seen. My mother told me about two weeks ago that she was thinking about buying an Apple laptop to replace her recently-deceased Windows laptop. When I asked her why, she mentioned the digital camera that she’d recently acquired and said, “Apple is suppsed to be better at that sort of thing.”

She ended up buying a Sony Vaio, though.

A Great Mystery

I have an old text file knocking around on my drive with a collection of quotes that I found interesting. Here’s an apt one, although unfortunately I did not save the name ofthe person who wrote it:

It is a great mystery of late-stage capitalism that, in a marketplace of hypothetically unlimited choices, consumers should all want the same things.

Despite my having hung onto this quote, I actually think that the opposite is true. Everyone wants different things. Retail stores, however, try to persuade us
that we all want the same things. Especially the larger ones. Stores, that is.

Case in point: there’s a few things I’ve needed to buy for the apartment. Nothing particularly wild or unusual: More clothes hangers. A new sugar bowl to replace the one I broke. A couple of baking pans to replace ones that have rusted out. In short, standard household items. Here in the SF Bay Area, with stores of all sorts in every direction, getting this stuff should be a matter of a couple hours, tops.

But it’s not. Take the sugar bowl I broke a few months ago

Intel – One Step Forward, One Step Back

So Intel is revising its branding. OK. I’m not doing cartwheels about the new logo, but it’s no better or worse than the old one.

But who on earth thought it was a good idea to ditch the “Intel Inside” tagline for “Leap Ahead”? “Intel Inside” is a good, memorable tagline that adds value to the brand. “Leap Ahead” is one of those eminently forgettable taglines that adds no value to anything other than the bank account of some misbegotten branding consultant.

Yield Curves and Thin Ice

Of the many bits of macroeconomic esoterica I studied this semester, one that particularly caught my interest was the bond yield curve. Normally, long-term bonds pay more interest than short-term ones, because you have to lock your money up longer (this is also known as the time value of money). When you plot these prices out on a chart, you generally get a nice upward curve to the line.

However, in recent months, this hasn’t been the case. The yield curve has become virtually flat. A flat yield curve means, among other things, that people believe that the economy will continue to decline.

The Big Picture goes into a great deal more detail of why this has the potential to be a problem. The piece is a bit technical but not horribly so. Here’s his bottom line:

While not every inversion leads to a recession, every recession has been preceded by an inverted yield curve.

In other words, it’s a sign that as 2006 fast approaches, the American economy is treading on very thin ice indeed. We may get through it unscathed, but getting back on course is going to be damn tricky.

My Last Palm PDA?

As the semester has started to pick up steam, my calender has started to fill up with classes and study group meetings, due dates and reminders, as well as regular non-school stuff. Normally I’d be loading all of this into my trusty Tungsten C, but this semester I’ve been strangely reluctant to do so. In fact, for the first time in about a decade, I found myself yearning for a simple paper calender to write my appointments down in.

Then today, I found out that PalmSource, makers of the PalmOS, has been acquired by a Japanese software company. What exactly that means for people who care about PalmOS-based PDAs is unclear right now, but my guess is it doesn’t bode well.

My Tungsten C is a couple of years old now. It’s still chugging along quite nicely, but eventually it will need to be replaced. What’s going to still be on the market when I go to replace it? And will what’s out there meet my needs?

I’ve pretty effectively reduced my dependence on Microsoft products over the past year. Thunderbird has been working well as my e-mail client, and the Palm Desktop as the PC side of my PIM. In addition, Firefox has replaced Internet Explorer as my browser of choice, and iTunes does a fine job of managing my MP3s, although those apps are not going to be affected by my choice of PDA. If I were to buy a Microsoft-based PDA, I’d have to switch back to Outlook, and I never liked Outlook. I used it because I felt that I had to.

Microsoft’s PDA OS has improved significantly from what I saw when I used it back in 2000, but I’m just not very enthusiastic about the idea. Given the choice of getting an MS-based PDA and going back to Outlook, or going to a paper solution, paper looks like a much better choice.

There are other alternatives. By the time my Tungsten finally rolls over and dies, Apple may well have come out with an iPod capable of being an effective PIM as well as a music storage device. Or other new devices may come out that work for me. We’ll have to see.

UPDATE: Amid a bunch of self-congratulatory “I told you so’s”, David Berlind at ZDNet agrees that this is definitely not good news for the PalmOS.