Sony says to retailers: “You’re allowed to make $1 on the sale of each PlayStation 3.” Consequently, there is no variation in console pricing between big box stores and little independent retailers; Sony has tight control over the market. (As of this writing in Canada it is $299.99 for the 120GB Slim model and $349.99 for the 250GB one.) Around here, occasionally we’ll get some flea market guy selling a brand-new 120GB PS3 for $250 and not charging any tax. This is something beyond Sony’s control and it smells a bit like a “five-finger discount” to me. From the little research I have done, it seems the other big console manufacturers (Nintendo and Microsoft) orchestrate a similar situation.
Once the “ecosystem” is in place, the retailers theoretically make their money on after-market accessories and the sale of the games themselves. Since piracy has not affected the console market as much as the PC software market, this kind of profit-shifting still makes sense. For my family, we shop at a local small-chain retailer (Microplay in Newmarket) because they offer very strong customer service. I cross my fingers that they are making enough money to stay in business.
Like the movie business, where theaters make their money from concession sales more than box office, I see a day when console gaming retailers make their money from something completely ancillary to the actual gaming activity. Of course, that will be the day when brick and mortar retailing in this space is completely unnecessary and the value-add will be something in the digital domain.
“I love newspapers. I worked in them for almost 25 years. But I’m not itching to bail out a business that is failing in large part because it was so transcendentally greedy in its monopoly era that it passed on every opportunity to survive against real financial competition. With a few exceptions, the newspaper industry essentially deserves to die at this point.”
Dan Gillmor’s recent article in Salon contains the preceding quote as he makes the point that directly subsidizing newspapers is a wrong-headed move. What he proposes instead is subsidizing the infrastructure of communication (broadband internet) and letting the free market determine the shape of journalism in the future. He compares this to the postal subsidies introduced in 1792 that helped establish a strong and free press in the United States.
Government should always be concerned with infrastructure. Railways, roads, and communication services have been critical to many of the economic surges of the last couple of centuries.
Unfortunately, current broadband providers (especially in Canada) are dastardly robber-barons with a virtual monopoly. They really are the last people who should get money from the government. On the other hand, Gillmor’s point still makes sense: legislate affordable broadband internet as a “basic” service available to all, just like provision of telephone service to outlying communities was a condition of CRTC licensing for Bell. That will be enough to grease the economic wheels and allow people to experiment with business models to support journalism and the ongoing maintenance of a free press.
Since I started this blog, I have never missed a month. Sadly, May 2010 passed with nary a post from me.
Do I have any excuses? Sure, but when you set a goal for yourself of posting at least once a month, there really are no excuses.
Right now I am facing another unprecedented situation, which at least provides fodder for this post: three out of five computing devices in our house are broken in some way and I am trying to get them up and running again on a very tight budget.
The PS3 won’t read Blu-Ray discs, which means none of the purchased games work and it won’t play Blu-Ray movies. This has been an ongoing situation for several months. It is frustrating for the whole family, but mostly for the gamers. Off-warranty cost to fix it: $150.00. According to a buddy of mine, I can get a brand new PS3 with more hard drive capacity for $199.99. Needless to say we’re not fixing the old one.
The desktop upstairs (which I was using as a test and printer server as well as a media server) has given up the ghost. It doesn’t output a video signal anymore. I will have to spend more time troubleshooting it before declaring a dead video card and not some weird software problem (like a video driver suddenly not initializing).
My wife’s netbook boots up and responds but offers no Xandros Desktop so it is pretty much useless to her. (Xandros is a Linux distribution that came with the Acer Eee PC 1000 and served my wife’s needs just fine until now. Previous attempts to get my family to use Linux were met with wails of despair that Windows was the only way to go.)
So I am writing this blog post on my main desktop, which I have built and re-built a few times over the past few years. And my business laptop is still working perfectly (which is expected since it is only a few months old).
With my new job, I am far too busy to justify fiddling around with technology like I used to. Learning the quirks of different software installations was part of my job before; now it is just a frustrating distraction. Still, I will tackle each problem with an eye on spending as little money as possible. I am at a stage now where it seems like I have slightly more time than money, which makes my missing a whole month of posting even less forgivable.
With apologies to Marshall McLuhan for completely twisting his famous quote, I wanted to comment on the way the media impacts my life by subtly changing the message in many news stories.
“Massaging” data is what we used to call it when we had to take raw data and make it presentable and consumable for people. One might offer the following at one’s “data spa”:
Anomaly removal
Trend plotting
Choice of mean, median, mode, or average depending on what is most compelling (central tendency)
In any case, you choose what to tell people, even when you start with pure facts.
The mainstream media is no different, so the following is not really a condemnation. But it is an observation to ponder.
The media massages the facts for various reasons, not the least of which is a natural tendency to choose language that reflects one’s own feelings on a subject.
Bloggers are changing the media landscape so that this problem may become less and less relevant. There are more bloggers than professional journalists. They tend to work outside the structure of large media companies. And many of them don’t seem to care about consequences of passing along either unadulterated facts (good) or wild speculation (entertaining but not so good).
In the meantime, media companies continue to want to publish news that “sells”. The choice of which story to report in the first place is one level of filtering. Once that’s done, the language choice is another factor. Then there’s a professional journalist’s concern about continued access to the folks who are the newsmakers on his or her beat. (For more on this aspect of massaging, read about one journalist’s reaction to what he called “a fat kid in a T-shirt in his mother’s basement, eating Cheetos and writing his blogs”.)
In my new business, a message like “interest rates on the rise” is far more compelling than “25 basis point increase being considered by major lenders”. Remember the spa? The headline writer spent a lot of time in the trend plotting room: only the best data masseuse can get a trend out of a single increase. (I am just using this as a generic example. I won’t try to convince you that interest rates are not on the rise; in Canada there have actually been two increases at some lenders in recent months. So what we’re seeing may well be the beginning of a trend.) I just find it interesting that media storms start when one headline is written this way and everyone else in the media “re-tweets” it as if it were fact.
I promised last time that I would veer away from technology temporarily and talk about the people aspect of my new real estate career.
Meeting new people, talking about their aspirations and dreams, then trying to help them realize those dreams is a pretty rewarding way to spend time. Take any one of those three activities and it remains rewarding on its own.
While real estate is fraught with competitive practices and is cutthroat to some extent, the people in my office have been wonderfully supportive.
Then there are the house hunters and sellers. These are the clients in the business. While I recognize that as soon as I identify myself as a “salesperson” many people immediately feel the bile rise in the back of their throat, I’m impressed at how friendly most people are. The bad reputation attributed to salespeople of all stripes is something I fully understand, since I myself hate the schmoozy, schmarmy aspect of selling. I joined this industry with a somewhat idealistic goal of helping people accomplish something they already wanted to do. I grasp the concept of “closing” a sale being a process of addressing objections. But I want to remove obstacles as opposed to sweeping them off the negotiating table onto the floor where they remain a tripping hazard.
All this wide-eyed idealism is something that I don’t apologize for, but my manager gave me a great perspective today by pointing out that learning the business involves taking cues from a variety of sources, while remaining true to our ideals. In other words, she advocates ongoing learning in the sales process and adapting things like lead generation and closing techniques to our own personality. I can’t argue with that.
I could provide many more examples of people I have met and situations I have found myself in where human behavior truly impressed me. The more people I meet the more I realize why society works: most people are good and ethical. Even salespeople.
In a recent post I complained about my cell phone. In the past I have avoided buying a laptop, notebook, or netbook computer. Our track record with digital cameras has not been great (damage and loss claiming several before the end of their useful lives).
All-in-all, I feel like technology and I have a love-hate relationship sometimes.
The great news is that in the past couple of weeks I have been preparing for my new career by getting what I needed for my business. My new cellphone is a smart one: a Blackberry. My new notebook is exclusively for doing presentations: cheap but with a big 17 inch screen and HDMI output. My new digital camera has a wide angle lens and panorama capability: designed for real estate more than portraits.
As much as the advance of technology has slowed over the past ten years, it is still amazing to see what cool new features come with each new generation of electronic device. For example, the panorama setting on the camera allows me to simply pan across the scene to capture it. On my old camera I had to take multiple shots and then stitch them together to get the panorama.
Some of you are undoubtedly wondering why I didn’t choose the iPhone over the Blackberry. After trying both, I found that I was happier with “real buttons” instead of touch screen technology. I can be convinced otherwise in the future, especially as they improve things. For example (in the realm of touch interfaces), my notebook’s trackpad is far more responsive, yet less sensitive (with fewer false clicks), than the one on my wife’s netbook which we bought less than a year ago.
In the coming days, I will be settling into my new office, with a great bunch of enthusiastic real estate people. As that happens, I promise to tell you more about the people side of the business and assume that the technology will “just work” as it should.
Darryl Halse recently wrote about New Year’s resolutions. I agree with his concluding observation that in general, if something is worth doing, what’s wrong with starting today?
In fact, I began my journey to a new career back in July 2009. I had been thinking about different areas of specialty for my consulting business. I had originally set my sights on newspapers as a place that could use content management and social media project advice. But traditional media seemed so set in its ways that I was having difficulty with most of the conversations I was conducting with people in the newspaper business. And to be honest, I wasn’t getting to the decision makers anyway.
Fortunately I met with a friend of mine who had made a partial leap from software development into real estate. He was very enthusiastic and I started to see another industry that could benefit from information technology advice. So, in an effort to increase my expertise in the business, I started taking the real estate licensing courses. As I learned more, I realized that I was already surrounded by people who, in one way or another, are enamored of or involved in the real estate business. (For example: My daughter is hooked on interior design and loves the idea of staging homes. My wife loves analyzing the MLS and getting ideas from HGTV.)
So I started to see myself as a full-time real estate sales representative, with maybe a little IT consulting on the side.
Heeding Darryl’s advice: my New Year’s resolution is to continue down the path of becoming licensed to trade in real estate in Ontario. I write the big “final” exam on 6 February 2010 (final is a relative term, since the education never ends, but it is the last exam before I can start to trade).
May 2010 seems a long way off when waiting for the next Robert Downey Jr. installment of this Marvel franchise. For Downey fans, this season’s Sherlock Holmes will have to suffice.
Also, by way of tiding us over until May, Marvel has released the first trailer of the new movie. It looks better than good. To quote the little boy who watches Mr. Incredible in action: “That was totally wicked!”
My old cell phone was awesome. It got a signal almost everywhere and it had a couple of features that I took for granted until I got my new cell phone. One feature on my old phone actually annoyed me at first but I quickly saw the wisdom of it: the alarm, once set, would ring even if the phone was turned off. So you could turn off your phone to sleep, which means you wouldn’t get any calls, but you’d still be awoken at the correct time.
My new phone is unusable in this area: you must leave the phone on else the alarm never sounds (meaning you get calls in the middle of the night whether you want them or not). Worse: the phone does not allow you to set an alarm unless it is “in service area”. In other words, it must connect to the phone network before you can even set the alarm. Maybe it doesn’t know what time it is until it gets the current time from the network.
My old phone would keep the time always and just update whenever it could get the correct time from the network. To top it all off, my new phone gets significantly worse reception so the likelihood of being connected to the network at any point is much lower than it was on my old one.
I wonder if product designers actually use their products before releasing them to the public.
I took more than a month off from this blog to study (more on that in the new year). But while I was away, I was bombarded with a higher than usual amount of spam comments and spam responses to my main site’s “information request” function.
WordPress and Drupal are popular enough platforms that spammers have widely shared bots that automatically crawl into your site and issue bogus requests that end up in my e-mail box. What the incoherent and nonsense spam really is trying to accomplish is beyond me. Some is apparently for male enhancement products, but much of it is just a jumble of letters in no particular language and a series of links. I assume the links are the thing the spammers are trying to get people to follow, but… who would? No one I know.
To fight this scourge, I have installed a CAPTCHA routine on my main site. This is a pretty rudimentary version but it seems effective. My spam has dropped to zero since I installed it a few days ago. For those who haven’t heard of CAPTCHA, it is a system that displays graphical letters and numbers in random sequences that theoretically only a human can read and type back in as a response. If you match the sequence, you are granted access to whatever function is being protected (in this case the request for information is actually sent to my inbox).
As spammer technology got more sophisticated, graphical codes were not sufficient… the bots could match pixel patterns and submit the sequence automatically. The CAPTCHA routines became more advanced, and warping the images of the letters and numbers is intended to throw off the pixel-matching algorithms of the spammers. Sadly, the spammers up their game and their algorithms begin to approach the accuracy of a human eye. So the CAPTCHA warping — becoming more drastic to thwart the spam reader — starts to get so that a human has difficulty reading the code. In the example above… is that an ’8′ or a ‘B’ before the ‘A’? It is all pretty silly — the escalation of force that inevitably leads to some sort of doomsday scenario.
For now, I am simply happy that my inbox is no longer drowning in useless messages.
Around here, occasionally we’ll get some flea market guy selling a brand-new 120GB PS3 for $250 and not charging any tax. This is something beyond Sony’s control and it smells a bit like a “five-finger discount” to me. From the little research I have done, it seems the other big console manufacturers (Nintendo and Microsoft) orchestrate a similar situation.
Right now I am facing another unprecedented situation, which at least provides fodder for this post: three out of five computing devices in our house are broken in some way and I am trying to get them up and running again on a very tight budget.
One feature on my old phone actually annoyed me at first but I quickly saw the wisdom of it: the alarm, once set, would ring even if the phone was turned off. So you could turn off your phone to sleep, which means you wouldn’t get any calls, but you’d still be awoken at the correct time.
As spammer technology got more sophisticated, graphical codes were not sufficient… the bots could match pixel patterns and submit the sequence automatically. The CAPTCHA routines became more advanced, and warping the images of the letters and numbers is intended to throw off the pixel-matching algorithms of the spammers. Sadly, the spammers up their game and their algorithms begin to approach the accuracy of a human eye. So the CAPTCHA warping — becoming more drastic to thwart the spam reader — starts to get so that a human has difficulty reading the code. In the example above… is that an ’8′ or a ‘B’ before the ‘A’? It is all pretty silly — the escalation of force that inevitably leads to some sort of doomsday scenario.