Vista – they knew

Stunning NYTimes article about Vista – it seems that Microsoft employees and board members knew that Vista was, well, not so good. There’s even a class action suit….

“Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed the certification decision.)

Anyone who bought a PC that Microsoft labeled “Windows Vista Capable” without also declaring “Premium Capable” is now a party in the suit. The judge also unsealed a cache of 200 e-mail messages and internal reports, covering Microsoft’s discussions of how best to market Vista, beginning in 2005 and extending beyond its introduction in January 2007. The documents incidentally include those accounts of frustrated Vista users in Microsoft’s executive suites.

I love being short Microsoft..

Real Estate is falling – what happens next?

The housing crash is cascading around the world, and the dire predictions are coming true. Here’s the latest chart from The Economist – check out Ireland on the bottom. That’s a crash, not a “balanced slump”.

economist

Meanwhile Trade Me just surpassed 70,000 property listings, on the back of signing up one of the last few major real estate agents holdouts.

Things to look out for in the next few months are:

Trade Me listings volumes to peak as the remaining real estate companies sign up, and then settle as the market slows

Increasing time to sell and lower average prices (duh), especially at the top end

A drop in the newspaper pages dedicated to housing advertisements and articles, lowering the income for the likes of APN and Fairfax

Real estate agents switching careers as they have less commission to share around the industry

and a fair few had luck stories from speculators that got in at the peak and/or didn’t get out in time

a general downturn in optimism & perhaps the internal economy

That sense of déjà vu is the ghost of 1987 creeping back.

Why intervention is needed for Telecom and not for Auckland

Falafulu Fisi asks an excellent question to the previous post on Auckland Airport:

“Aren’t both Auckland Airport & Telecom private companies? Why would you want to say that the government is an interventionist regarding the CPPIB attempt to buying shares in the Auckland Airport but not saying the same thing about Telecom?

I am a defender of property rights, and the state has no right at all to meddle in the affairs of private businesses such as Telecom or Auckland Airport. That decision to sell or not to sell is entirely up to the rightful owners (ie, the Airport Shareholders) and not those Commissars in Wellington .

That was a great question, but I feel I am being entirely consistent here.

I am a fan of Govnerment intervention when the market is so inefficient and the company is out of control that the other stakeholders (beyond shareholders) are under threat, and unable to do anything about it due to monopoly power.

I’ve been wandering around NZ this week and frankly the broadband situation is beyond a joke – it is shameful crime that has left us in the dark ages of the internet.

There is a very well run dot com that I visited yesterday that is unable to even hold phone calls over Skype to the UK or USA as their connection keeps dropping out. This means increased costs, but even more importantly, that they are not part of the global internet business community that lives, wheels and deals on Skype. (Try putting together a 6 way phone call using traditional services at a moment’s notice.)

Now their customer base is almost entirely overseas, but they should be able to operate from NZ. But despite Wellington’s other advantages they would be not without cause if they uprooted and headed for the first world.

Government intervention into Telecom is the only way that the primary stakeholders (customers and the economy) could get the service that the country needed. There were plenty of warnings, but the head was stuck firmly in the sands of short term profits.

There are plenty of other monopolies and duopolies in NZ that understand how to play the game when you own a market. You set your prices well below monopoly prices, you are great to your customers and you know if you step out of line then the ComCom and the Government will be all over you.

Auckland Airport has not exhibited poor behaviour – they are running a good business, and are even upgrading the domestic terminal. An equivilent case for intervention would be if they put prices up, ran the terminals into the ground (and so spoiled NZ’s image and tourism numbers) and milked the dying cow.

All that is proposed for Auckland Airport is a change of ownership, which has no material impact on the relationship between the corporation and it’s stakeholders. It’s not as if the new owners are going to roll the airport up, put it on the back of a ship of unusual size and transfer it to a field outside Toronto. This intervention is uncalled for from the customers that use the airport, and to compound it has a negative effect on FDI for NZ.

Where is Infratil while this is going on? They are conflicted – on the one hand they own Wellington Airport and would love a piece of Auckland, so they should keep quiet. However on the other hand they own Preston Prestwick (edit – thanks Tylersdad) Airport South of Glasgow in Scotland, and they should be deeply protesting our Government’s ham-sized fists which will make it much harder for them to buy other foreign airports in the future.

Xobni is cool – add your name to the list

Not that I have it yet, but Xobni is a very cool add-on to Outlook that gives you handy things like threaded conversations and stats for everyone you communicate with. What a great idea!

Their premise is that we have all created far more MB of information through our email than through our web presence. Google does a great job of sorting through the Web stuff, but until now nobody has done much with those email files.

Also – do check out their blog, which is a great way to track for first few months of a company developing and launching what is going to be a blockbuster product.

Sadly you have to join the queue – sign up and wait, with waits ranging from months to Mauricio’s 2 days.

Xobni outlook add-in for your inbox

(this will move me up the beta list)

Promo video

Ham-fisted intervention in markets is dull thinking

Score one for protectionism, and minus several ranks of the economic freedom index for New Zealand, after the Government intervenes to prevent a Canadian fund from buying into Auckland airport.

When the market drops by 2% after a new protectionist law is created it should be obvious to everyone the impact of ham-fisted interventionist Government policy.

This law means that the Government has reserved the right to change investment rules on a whim, and so the risk of investing in New Zealand has just risen substantially. Foreign investors will apply a higher risk rating to NZ, and so will demand higher returns for their investments. That means less foreign money coming in, and ultimately, lower growth.

Is this what the govenrment is promoting? Lower growth?

There are plenty of ways to protect “strategic assets”. Changing the investment laws is amongst the worst of them.

Juran, founder-father of Lean, six sigma, TPM, pareto analysis dies

Joseph Juran, author of the immense textbook “Quality Control Handbook” (or Quality Management Handbook) has died, after an excellent innings of 103. Juran bough QA to the Japanese, and they loved it – the Toyota Production System, Six Sigma, Lean and so forth can all be traced to his work.

He also tried to introduce the concepts into the USA – but they didn’t take, leading to the Japanese invasion of the 70’s and 80’s. It wasn’t until Six Sigma and Lean distilled his thousand of pages into powerpoint that it all really began to take hold.

But still, as the original management guru Peter Drucker said:

“Whatever advances American manufacturing has made in the last 30 to 40 years, we owe to Joe Juran and to his untiring, steady, patient, self-effacing work.”

At Massey the QMH was our text for the “Quality Management” course. Though I did that a significant and classified number of years ago, the latest six sigma and lean work that I see in industry has not really pushed the thinking, just the usability.

Juran was married for an amazing 81 years.

The sage of Omaha speaks

Warren Buffet’s yearly missive is out. Essential reading for anyone interested in investing. Here are some tasty snippets:

“You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out – and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.

It’s better to have a part interest in the Hope Diamond than to own all of a rhinestone.

if a business requires a superstar to produce great results, the business itself cannot be deemed
great.

Going to any other flight-training provider than the best is like taking the low bid on a surgical procedure.

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money.  Think airlines. 

(My behavior resembled that of a politician Molly Ivins once described: “If his I.Q. was any lower, you would have to water him twice a day.”)

A line from Bobby Bare’s country song explains what too often happens with acquisitions: “I’ve never gone to bed with an ugly woman, but I’ve sure woke up with a few.”

The best anecdote I’ve heard during the current presidential campaign came from Mitt Romney, who asked his wife, Ann, “When we were young, did you ever in your wildest dreams think I might be president?”  To which she replied, “Honey, you weren’t in my wildest dreams.”

Former Senator Alan Simpson famously said: “Those who travel the high road in Washington need not fear heavy traffic.”  If he had sought truly deserted streets, however, the Senator should have looked to Corporate America’s accounting.

I should mention that people who expect to earn 10% annually from equities during this century – envisioning that 2% of that will come from dividends and 8% from price appreciation – are implicitly forecasting a level of about 24,000,000 on the Dow by 2100.  If your adviser talks to you about double-digit returns from equities, explain this math to him – not that it will faze him.  Many helpers are apparently direct descendants of the queen in Alice in Wonderland, who said: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  Beware the glib helper who fills your head with fantasies while he fills his pockets with fees.

A fellow was on an important business trip in Europe when his sister called to tell him that their dad had died.  Her brother explained that he couldn’t get back but said to spare nothing on the funeral, whose cost he would cover.  When he returned, his sister told him that the service had been beautiful and presented him with bills totaling $8,000.  He paid up but a month later received a bill from the mortuary for $10.  He paid that, too – and still another $10 charge he received a month later.  When a third $10 invoice was sent to him the following month, the perplexed man called his sister to ask what was going on.  “Oh,” she replied, “I forgot to tell you.  We buried Dad in a rented suit.”

Every day is exciting to us; no wonder we tap-dance to work.  But nothing is more fun for us than getting together with our shareholder-partners at Berkshire’s annual meeting.  So join us on May 3rd at the Qwest for our annual Woodstock for Capitalists.  We’ll see you there.

At 9:30 we will go directly to the question-and-answer period, which (with a break for lunch at the Qwest’s stands) will last until 3:00.

Why Digitalmax now sucks, and how they can get better

Natalie at SimpleandLoveable  laments the passing of a great service into a lousy one – after a shoddy website redesign by DigitalMax.

Now I briefly used DigitalMax two or so years back, so I went to the DigitalMax site to see how bad it now is.  Let’s start with the homepage, an ask the age-old question – What do you want me to do?

digitalmax

..and I have no idea. I can find out more about 20c prints, login, join, add add photos and so on but there  is no obvious “Start here” option.

–>add a Start Here button, section or just make it obvious what the main thing to do is

–> Make it easy for me to understand what the website is for. (“Print your photos”) 

So – I first tried to Add Photos, since that seems to be the “start here” option for me.

digitalmax

I got this screen. What is it saying?

digitalmax

It’s actually an error message – written in small blue script beneath the gloss. While the error message should be a lot more obvious, why not show the registration screen for me to login or register? Why do I have to login to try the site anyway? Can’t I upload photos, play around and then decide whether or not to buy? Most online shops let you do this.

–> let me play before registering or logging in 

I’ve been a member before, so I try to login and get this:

digitalmax

–> Highlight errors by using red text and/or shading  

Again – a tiny, hidden in blue text, error message. So I try looking for my old details and again get these useless error messages.

digitalmax

Digitamax has forgotten that I was ever a customer which makes me feel pretty unloved.

–> never lose my details 

–>put the registration details on the login error page so that I can join without clicking away

I am about done with this site. But, I persevere in the name of bad usability science.

The registration page is actually simple and painless, making it even stranger to understand why I have to click to get there – why not put it on the front page (if you insist on me registering, at least say “Register now to get started”).

–> put the registration form on the front page (if you insist on me registering first, which you shouldn’t) 

digitalmax

Unfortunately DigitalMax then accepts my registration (with no click on the email link to confirm), and then compounds this error by emailing my my login address and password back to me. Thanks for showing everyone my password.

–> never ever email me a password that I’ve entered. Send me a generated one if I ask for it or send me nothing at all. 

–> Confirm email addresses to prevent junk account set-up attempts.  

digitalmax

After successfully registering, rather than automatically logging me in, I am invited to manually do so. Did anyone actually test this new site with real users?

–> test and retest. Listen to your users and watch them in real life.

–> log people in automtically after registration. 

It goes on. The login doesn’t actually seem to let the rest of the website know what is going in – here’s the screen after logged in:

digitalmax

The main part of the page is still thanking me for registering and asking me to log in. The first use of red text is not for an error message, but for a success message.

–> Greet me by name when I am logged in

–> Make it obvious what to do next by putting a giant “Add photos” in the screen after logging in

It goes on and on and I have had enough. There are one or two good screens, but generally Digitalmax fails on a number of levels. They do not make it obvious what to do, they have lots of glitz but poor usability, and they didn’t even deign to respond to Web Designer and customer Natalie’s email.

Now DigitaMax is otherwise a NZ success story – Auckland based, and offering a good service and range of pretty cool products. Terabyte appears to have done this redesign, and while they have a large portfolio, the website is a poor advertisement for their ability to deliver a website that delivers  results. Sitting here it is imposible to know whether the client or the design firm should take the blame, but overall this was a giant leap backwards for DigitalMax.

However, a few simple changes could reap dividends for the bottom line:

–> buy “Don’t make me think”, listen to your customers, understand (through the numbers) what people are doing on your website and make constant tweaks to improve the bottom line. 

–> Continue to work on a redesigned website constantly – without assuming a “website redesign” is finished when the site is up. That may mean you need to budget a bit more.

–> Take ownership of your own website – use the designers as consultants, but understand what you are trying to do and what good looks like.

–> Focus on removing steps from the process – minimise the number of steps between arriving at the website and ordering prints. You should be able to do it in three screens.

–> Respond to Natalie. Indeed go and hire her.

Linked in finally starts moving

With the most elite network – connected through business relationships – linked in has incredible potential. That potential has drifted somewhat recently as the competition (namely Facebook) moved well ahead.

Well – finally a redesign, and a move to some web 2.0 slickness, making, for example, it much easier to upload a profile photo.

But without opening their API up to everyone, what else can they offer?

Well – they are using the power of those connections. Check out my Linked In home page:

linkedin

Yup – I can see what other people connected to McKinsey are reading. (no word on my other connected companies)

Amazon tried this a few years back, in about 2000/2001, but they sadly stopped pretty quickly after privacy concerns were raised.

Now I’m guessing that Linked in will only know about my preferences if I actually click on a Linked In news link. Or perhaps they are aggregating our reading preferences from elsewhere?

That would be cool. Scary but cool. They have set themselves up well for a purchase by Google though.

So – has Linked in given reason to go there more than once per month? Time will tell, but for now – no.

one in 99 USA adults is behind bars

Not only are US Prisons terrifying, . , but now we hear that 1 in 99  of the US adult population is behind bars.

“Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The land of the free.

Actually prison time is probably sociably acceptable, and even getting to be a rite of passage for some of those groups.  When prison is no longer a bad thing, then does a Government have control?

“On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

I’m no public sector economist, but it seems pretty obvious to me that most of the 7% could be better spent on a safety net, education and health care to solve the root cause of the problem.

NetRatings Pop-ins are bad for business

It’s pretty easy to ignore reading the NZHerald (or whatever site) when this happens:

nzherald

I browse in tabs, so I just close the NZHerald tab and move on. It is easier to do that then to move the mouse down to the close (X) button on the NetRatings pop in.

Net Ratings could fix this by sending those invitations out less often, being smarter about unique I/P addresses, making a much bigger “close” button, defaulting to “No” so that if I press enter the box will go away, and updating their survey to ask relevant, interesting questions.