After xtra: Which email should you use?

It may seem surprising, but it seems a few Xtra Mail customers are unsure of what to do, now they have been stung with the transition. Perhaps Telecom will spring for some cash, but I’d not be surprised if many xtra!mail customers want to leave, but do not know where to go.

Surprising because you’d think that everyone out there would know about GMail, Hotmail, dot mac and Yahoo!mail.

Unsurprising because, well, these folk were (locked into) using an ISP for their email.

Here are three reasons why you should not use Telecom, or any ISP for that matter, as your email provider.

A: You lose the ability to easily move Internet Providers

If you move house, find a better broadband deal (e.g. TelstraClear over cable in Wellington ) or simply get frustrated at your Internet Service Provider (ISP’s) poor service, then you’ll either have to change your email address (the one all your friends know you by) or just live with the ISP that you have.

(I’ve had a Yahoo.com address since 1996, and now have a multitude of email addresses from lots of sources. I now never use or even look at an ISP’s assigned email address. Regardless of what email address I am using the most, that Yahoo address is always going to be there.)

B: You tie yourself to a brand that has negative connotations

AOL was hugely instrumental in getting the internet spread throughout America. Unfortunately their service was expensive & shoddy, and they also tried to keep their customers in a walled garden. After a while an AOL.com email address was a highly embarrassing thing to have, as their customers were clearly clueless about the internet.

Telecomms companies the world over have terrible reputations – mainly centered around poor infrastructure and poor service. AT&T is bringing down Apple’s karma with the iPhone, but at Apple is making pots of money out of the deal.

Don’t let your Telco’s bad karma bring down your personal brand.

(My first ISP was Demon, in the UK, Back in 1995. What a great name for an ISP, but unfortunately it took months for them to stop billing me after I left)

C: You miss out on the latest technology

In spite of the terrible handover, Telecom was smart in moving its customers over to Yahoo!’s mail platform. Yahoo! is a professional provider of massive web email services, while Telecom is, well Telecom.

There are a bunch of different web mail clients out there which internet providers can give you, but none can match the likes of Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. Most of them look like they should have stayed in the 90’s.
So by setting yourself free from your ISP’s webmail you can experience webmail in Web 2.0 style, which is a whole new level of ease of use,

(I mainly POP into OSX Mail at home, and use Yahoo!Mail, & GMail for personal mail, and MS Outlook (which every corporate uses) for corporate mail.)

So which email provider should you use?

Dot Mac is expensive, has solid branding, but does tend to lag behind in technology. It is also IMAP, and not POPable, so I use it sparingly. The backup feature is good, but the mail is Not Recommended

Yahoo!mail is the grandfather here, and has both a nice ‘beta’ version and the ability to use a more basic model. That basic model’s great when I’m checking email over my phone or a dodgy internet cafe with aging computers. I pay a little bit to get a few features, including the ability to POP, and extra email addresses.
Recommended

Hotmail – well I cannot really say. I’m not a fan of the brand myself, but others I respect swear by it.
No rating

But the best of the bunch is GMail – Google has simply come up with a better way to do email, it is free, and you can POP and SMTP.
Highly recommended

Going forward you’d back Google with gmail, and to a much lessor extent, Yahoo! to be the ones to keep the innovations coming.

Xtra customers are already with Yahoo! – should they stay there?

I have not seen the final product, but if the email is anything but a clean implementation of Yahoo!mail (i.e. no xtra branding) then I would jump ship. Anything else and you are losing out against points A: and B: above.

By jumping now, when there is plenty of confusion, you will at least be jumping when everyone expects change. You’l also avoid having to learn a new system.

I’d jump to pure mail.Yahoo.com, or, preferably, to gmail.

Evergreen: Why Telecom is a poor company

That Telecom Strategy post below isn’t just some mindless rant. (well no more than normal)

The Evergreen Project, which I led for a while at McKinsey (and which turned into a book) may give some context for those comments.

The Evergreen work was an enormous quantitative and qualitative effort, which took millions of dollars and a number of years.

The core finding was basic:

Companies that succeeded in the long run did four things really well versus their peers: “Strategy”, “Execution”, “Culture” and “Organisaton”.

Strategy means understanding what is happening in your industry, and responding with a well defined strategy, communicated well internally and externally .

Execution means doing the basics well – it’s about having quality products that customers like or love, it’s about sticking to your core business.

Organisation is having a flat and fast structure, free of bureaucracy, allowing the company to be nimble.

Culture is about having a culture of success – about people being aligned towards the company goals, and being rewarded for great performance.

How does Telecom line up against these four?

You decide

The research showed that if a company wasn’t strong in at least 3 of these, then they did not perform.

More importantly, the research showed that if a company was very poor (as opposed to OK) any of these four, then they did not perform.

“Did not perform” means they did not perform over a 10 year period in Total Shareholder Return, EBIT, NOPLAT, on whatever financial metric we could think of.

Telecom’s Strategy is too advanced for its ability

From NZHerald.com

Telecom will seek a new chief financial officer with experience in mergers and acquisition so it can take advantage of consolidation in the telecommunications market, says chairman Wayne Boyd.

People at Telecom:

Please do us all a favour.

 FOCUS ON THE CORE BUSINESS!

Once you get that right, then worry about other opportunities.

Right now you can’t get even your core business right, you are screwing up anything you touch, and the one big opportunity you had, well, you sold.

Fairfax fires star blogger – the dark implications

A Star Blogger is fired by Fairfax…

no not me….(I’m still doing a little work for Fairfax) (oh yeah – and am not a star)….

…or Juha, who has recently moved is job, and blog, (where he is a star) to Fairfax NZ. (Welcome aboard!)

No – Fairfax Australia, clearly a corporation run by foreigners*, has fired The Daily Truth’s Jack Marx. and via email at that.

Marx blogged:

“Kevin would have smelled her — the silky perfume, the hint of sweat, the musky other,”

While writing about Kevin Rudd, who is the great Australian Labour Party hopeful that got himself into a NYC strip club a few years back.
Marx was fired for

“the latest in a long line of indiscretions”

Which is a tough decision. I’m not at all informed about the prior indiscretions, but don’t really think that the above necessarily crosses the line for a blog. for a newspaper yes, but a blog no.

But the editor probably had no choice. It’s a legal thing.

You see the legal systems in Australia and New Zealand are heavily weighted against newspapers when it comes to potential matters of libel.

It’s easy to propagate a libel lawsuit against big media – that is if you have big money and lawyers on your side. There are some folk in NZ and Australia that are almost untouchable as a result – write about them at your peril.

What really concerns me is that the law, as strictly read, brings blog entries on newspaper websites into that fold – and not just blog entries, but also comments on the blog. So if someone on a Fairfax Newspaper blog makes an insiduous comment about a high profile litigious Kiwi, then in theory that person can go after Fairfax. and the blogger. and the commenter even. perhaps.

So media companies must err on the side of discretion, which means things like moderated comments, reviewing comments on blogs that attract contentious content, and, what was clearly lacking in this case, sometimes even previewing blogger entries before they are posted.

The problem is that great blogging content is timely, opinionated and , lets face it, sometimes wrong. The resulting discussion (think Slashdot) more often than not gets to the right answer – when comments are open. and work. However, the very characteristics that can make blogging so wonderful are anathema to libel lawyers and newspaper editors. Blogs stop working if editorial and comments don’t appear quickly, while Editors like material that is fact checked, sub edited, and, if necessary, run by a legal mind.

Meanwhile to readers what is clearly inappropriate in a newspaper is often ok in a blog, and more often ok on a message board. We can all only hope that litigants, lawyers and judges think the same way – no case has been tested yet.

It’s not just blogs. In NZ legal theory Trade Me is liable for comments made on their message board, and Facebook/MySpace/Bebo for theirs. I’d love to see someone go after MySpace.

Which is all patently ridiculous, but doesn’t stop media companies from being very worried, and retaining those fine legal minds.

In the long run I’m backing technology to win, but there is a long road to travel first.

*That would be a Kiwi foreigner.

Chrome Pages. Whatever that is.

Welly start-up Chrome Pages got some publicity today.

CP Guys – I’m glad you have the gumption to get this going, but I am really sorry – I’m going to have to be pretty negative here.

There is a somewhat lame and soundless you tube video showing the product. I cannot for the life of me figure it out:


Can you?

From the article:

Wellington company Chrome Pages believes it has found virgin territory in the hotly contested online advertising market with a mobile version of the Yellow Pages.

Note that is not “The Yellow Pages” online, but a new listing service for mobile phones.

Chrome Pages includes a free social networking site that the company hopes will drive traffic to its business listing service and a portal for mobile content such as ringtones and games. It also plans an event listings guide. 

CP seem to be confused about what they are doing here. Are they a social networking site (yet another one), a ringtone site (so 90’s) or an event listings guide (90’s again)?

I’m totally staggered at the CP idea of a revenue model though.
I’m sorry to slam a newco, but why would anyone want to pay $495 to list on an unproven listing service?

CP has also outsourced development to an Aussie outfit that seems to specialise in resorts & hotels, and has no well known sites under its belt. That in itself isn’t a killer flaw, but it certainly points to an overly expensive cost model, and a lack of control of dev. There are, in fact, no full time staff at all at CP.

The CP website is unusable, with broken links, too much going on, no content and a menu bar that jumps around.

So nothing much there in this business, and what is there doesn’t make sense.

Most of all I’d be worried about where mobile phones are going. Sure I want pictures and videos on my phone, and yes, I even want a listing service. Except I get those pictures and video from the internet on my phone, and my listing service is Google. It has been for years – since 2001.

So my advice would be to start again:

A listing service may work, but start with a price of “free”.

You need a decent website to support the business. Read “Don’t Make Me Think”

Hire tech staff and stop paying others to do your work – it will be faster, cheaper and better.

Link up with one of the many online listing outfits so you don’t have to chase listings.

Choose your business – do one thing well before doing something else.

Make it worthwhile for phone users to use your service.

Make it work on all the phones available in NZ. (There’s a French outfit that will help out. for a fee.)

Keep your publicist.

Check what happened in advanced overseas mobile markets like the Philippines and South Korea.

Buy an iPhone. Then do some navel gazing.

xtra mail to Yahoo! mail change over sucks.

How predictable. Telecom shoots itself in the fot again and again. Shame I didn’t actually predict that the Yahoo!xtra to Yahoo! Mail changeover itself would be screwed up.

Situation:

Telecom internet customers are furious after being left without email over the weekend during a major upgrade of the service.

Reasons:

Change over communications sucked

The company says it is enhancing the overall service to more than 500,000 Xtra customers and had tried to notify people of a 24-hour webmail outage.

Gee – even I didn’t know about that, and I read enough guff when I blogged previously. And how did you notify folk? email? did it get junkified?

Change over usability sucks

He tried webmail again yesterday and was asked to go through a “whole rigmarole” of registering for Bubble.

Dumb dumb dumb. You have all the information you need, why re-register?

Change over approach sucked.

“This change appears to be a unmitigated disaster … [It] appears to be getting forced on us – it’s not optional to take it or leave it.”

Yahoo! actually knows how to do this –  Beta has been running for a long time now in parallel with traditional webmail. Yo ucan chose your interface. Why not offer a choice of either  xtra webmail or Yahoo mail to your customers?

 Change over support sucks

Mr Campbell said he spent almost two hours contacting the Xtra helpdesk only to be told by an operator that he should try again today. He was told hundreds had been calling with similar issues.

How hard was it to predict a big surge in help desk calls?

I’m lost for words.

Ten things you can do in today’s Bear Market

So for the bulls turning into bears – what should you do?

1:  Do not sit around. When markets turn sour then people tend to switch off, as it is not nearly as much fun watchng your net worth go down each day as it was to watch it go up. Act now and you can prevent further loses and maybe make a bit instead.
2: Don’t trust beholden advisers. You may be in denial about the value of your property, or not know where to invest the money you made selling your five rental units last week. Do not ask your real estate agent for help – they have only one eye open. For sure don’t ask your bank manager for advice – investment advisors at banks were eviscerated today by the SST.

3: Diversify. Diversify your assets across different asset classes (stocks, bonds, shares) and countries. Lighten up on real estate – sell out of everything that you don’t live in or earn mortgage beating rent. Cash is an asset too – there  is no harm in holding cash in times like this, but don’t stick it all in one instituton.

4: Lower your leverage. Borrowing to invest (in housing or shares say) is great in a rising market, but it is sure as anything a mugs game when the markets are going down. If you are smart then a fortune is to be made. If you are smart and lucky that is. Smart (or dumb) and unlucky will see you on beggars row.

5: Lead the “flight to quality”. In times of big change investors tend to get out of anything remotely unreliable and move their money to quality products. In the 80’s it was the so-called “blue chip” stocks. Buy companies that will keep making money no matter what happens. Beer, soda & newspapers are all good steady income earners.

6: Get out of “rest of the world stocks” US investors will tend to withdraw suddenly from foreign investments when the going gets tough, so do not be surprised if some markets to fail catastrophically.

7: Go back to old fashioned ratios: Look for long term ratios, such as Price/Earnings, Rent/Buy and industry rules of thumb. You’ll find that many of these are off the charts right now, and so get out of those asset classes.

8: Be a vulture. Cash up now, wait until the prices of assets have dropped low enough, then start investing. Look for those ratios to be at historical lows before you do. Third Avenue Investments does this well.
9: Go short – and be a plunger: Shorting stocks is betting that they will go down. If you belief that the glass is half empty (and increasingly people are) then pick a few frothy stocks and sell them short. If you are unsure what direction the market is going, then make sure you have a mix of long and short stocks.
When the market moves, it can move far faster and further than you feel is normal. Don’t be afraid to short and keep shorting, and don’t buy back those shares until you are sure the market really has hit the bottom

10: Earn more than you spend: You can no longer guarantee that you will make money from your real estate or other investments. Tighten up on yur lifestyle, and sell out of anything that is costingyou too much money. Now is not the time to be rash.

If the going gets tough, then you can always get out. Cash up and go – times of turmoil (and depression) are a great time to see the world. I used the post 9/11 period to travel cheaply in the Americas.

Ready for the plunge?

It’s amusing being a bear in a bear (down) market. Of course I’m usually a bear in a Bull (up) market, so it’s great to be backing the winning team for once.

This chart in Saturday’s AFR hearkens back to 1987, a year I remember too well.

afr the paper not the lousy website

NZ got hit particularly badly because of some nastily frothy companies. Of course we are in a much better situation today. Or are we?:

Brash is predicting a soft landing – a 10% housing drop. I’m not so sure, and even if that was the average, the impact in those markets that accelerated the most will be massive. Expect negative gearing.

But I’m a pig in mud. I only wish I had a decent amount of money in my portfolio, which is up 35% for the calendar year. The green line is me, the blue the S&P500:

portfolio
It could have been more if I had held my shorts longer, but most importantly I have not lost anything from what is a pretty balanced (long and short) portfolio.

Of course everyone, except the bears, look good in a rising market, and bears (like myself) look great in a falling one. The worm can turn very easily.

NZ’s regressive tax system

It’s strange. I always thought that New Zealand has a pretty progressive tax system – that the richer people get taxed more than the poorer, and that we have a share the spoils system that helps make NZ a great egalitarian society..

Meanwhile the USA is meant to be a dog eat dog place run by rabid Republicans that only care about reducing the tax burden for the incredibly wealthy at the expense of the downtrodden poor.

But no.

At least relatively. It is actually far far better (taxwise) to be poor in the USA, UK or Australia. Conversely, and somewhat unbelievably , it is far better to have a high income in NZ than those countries.

I’ve done some rough numbers – comparing NZ’s tax on “taxable income” with Australia (Federal plus NSW state), USA (Federal plus New York State and City) and UK (Blessedly simple). There are a bunch of caveats, so many that I’ve put Ten Caveats at the bottom of the post, after the fold.

Here is the basic result, where you can see how much tax you would pay if you earned a certain amount of US Dollars, and lived in the four different areas:

tax rates

The shape of the curves is interesting – New Zealand starts very high, while the other countries give the poorer folk a break.

At USD $15,000 (NZ $21,500) low income Kiwis are getting a raw deal versus the rest. These charts show how much someone earning a certain level pays in total tax:

Tax USD 15000

Everything is about even at $20,000 and $50,000 (see bottom of post), but at USD $100,000 (NZD $143,000) Australia is the place that is looking pretty sour. “Everyone” seems to say that tax is cheaper “over there” – but this is manifestly untrue for NSW professionals.

tax USD $100,000

At USD $200,000 you would actually pay least tax if you lived in New York – which incidentally is one of (if not the) most expensive State/City tax  combos in the USA. Australia is definitely not the place to be, with Aussies paying a crazy 9% more than taxpayers in USA & NZ, and 8% more than those in the UK. (That 9% is worth $18,000). Ouch.

tax USD $200,000

There are a bunch more charts after the fold:

Continue reading “NZ’s regressive tax system”

A big well done to the folk at RBNZ

The economists and traders at the Reserve Bank of NZ must be feeling pretty smug right now. They intervened in the currency market on June 11 – selling a huge amount of NZD at between 76.2 and 75 US cents.

The RBNZ has access to at least $7bn to make market interventions, and can intervene to a confidential limit without Finance Ministry approval (which was not required on June 11).

Now generally reserve bank intervention is pissing in the wind – the size of the market so completely swamps the intervention that all that can happen is a momentary pause. That’s what did happen.

yahoo finance

So a somewhat useless trade at the time – the blips were only minor, and the tide just kept rising. The Reserve Bank will lose if it tries to fight Japanese housewives and other currency traders.

The NZHerald reported that the RBNZ net sold $702m in June, intervening at least three times. It looks like the bank usually buys about $65m of NZD, so let’s call the interventions $765m. That actually is trivial in currency market terms, but large enough to signal intent.

BUT if  it was ineffective, it was ultimately profitable. If the average selling price in June was 75.5 cents, and with Friday’s close at about 69 cents, thats a windfall profit of about $50m USD. Not bad for a few trades, but if the bank was selling leveraged instruments then the profits would be much higher.

From the August 6th article:

In July, the RBNZ said it would refine its foreign exchange intervention strategy, with some of its actions becoming more passive as it left a portion of its reserves unhedged, allowing it to more effectively respond to any sharp falls in the New Zealand dollar. 

That bodes very well – meaning the bank was on the right side of the currency adjustment. That means that windfall returns in NZD terms will be much much higher.

As someone that was at school and university throughout the Muldoon currency debacle, it is such a refreshing thing to have a independent Reserve Bank. Well done to the folk there who picked the market.

Those sneaky thieves – the dangerous firefox cult

Apparently using Firefox is theft. Or at least using Ad Block Plus with Firefox is theft, so says Whyfirefoxisblocked.com. (Please tell me this isn a fake site)

Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers….

… Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing.

actually – putting up ads that are so obnoxious that browsers have to go to the pain of downloading an ad blocker is the mistake here.

Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending

Bollocks.
I have no idea which websites would be stupid enough to use this service, but do think they are doing a great job promoting Ad Block Plus, which incidentally you can install from here.

negative equity

Front page of today’s Wall Street Journal:

One Family’s Journey into a Subprime Trap

FULLERTON, Calif. — Nearly two years ago, Mario and Leticia Montes found a home they loved, a gray stucco bungalow with a hot tub in the backyard in a middle-class neighborhood of Orange County.

…With a December “reset” on their loan looming, however, the refinancing option now looks impossible. A friend who works as a loan officer called with some bad news this week: Similar homes in their area have been selling for $535,000 to $565,000 recently. That means the Monteses’ loan balance may exceed the value of their home.

….And with thousands of mortgage banks and brokers threatened with extinction, lenders that embraced all kinds of risky loans two years ago are enforcing increasingly strict standards. They are refusing even to consider extending new credit to people like the Monteses who lack any equity in their homes.

….Until recently, the Montes family didn’t seem like the type that would find itself faced with foreclosure. They live in a solid neighborhood and are both employed and in good health. “My wife and I make pretty good money,” says Mr. Montes. Mrs. Montes works as a school secretary. Together, they earned nearly $90,000 last year.

….Being stuck with little or no home equity is no longer a rare situation. Christopher Cagan, director of research at First American CoreLogic, a housing and mortgage data supplier in Santa Ana, recently found that nearly 7% of 32 million U.S. households studied as of December owed more than their homes were worth, based on computer estimates of the property values. An additional 4% had home equity of 5% or less. Since then, house prices have edged down in much of the country, erasing more home equity.

Be warned.

Google Office and xtraYahoo! Bubble

Google is adding Star Office to the Google pack, available now.

Google Pack is quite a collection that includes Google Earth, Norton Security Scan, Google Desktop, Firefox with Google Toolbar, Adobe Reader, Skype, RealPlayer and other Google products  

Sadly the Google Pack is for XP, not the mac, but you can still get a bunch of the apps for the mac.

There doesn’t appear to be any integration between Star Office and the Google Docs & Spreadsheets web applications, but perhaps with time..

Star Office is normally $69  (from Sun), will read MS Office documents, and is, along with Open Office, a free alternative to the Microsoft Office Hegemony. While this will not dent the MS Office sales much, it will take away some of the low end, unless Microsoft gets its pricing right.

If y0u compare this lot with the deal that Xtra subscribers get with Yahoo! Bubble, then it is game over. Not only is the Google pack cooler, and better, but it is also cheaper – as in free.

So why would you pay Xtra anything for their ISP service when their email is moving to Yahoo, their bundled extras are available free  and their service is lousy?

Journalism matters

A good summary of events over at norightturn, along with the output and links to other coverage.

Quotes from Simon Collins speech to Journalism Matters

The Herald now has a total of 28 general reporters including branch offices and Parliament

…At the Herald, there are now no reporters covering what should be major rounds such as industrial relations, energy, foreign affairs and defence; and local body issues outside Auckland City are hardly covered at all.

Roundspeople in the rounds that are still covered, such as health and education, are regularly diverted on to stories about Dancing with the Stars, NZ Idol or Paul Holmes’s daughter.  

…When I had a story on KiwiSaver that got more hits Paris Hilton or the America’s Cup, it was so remarkable that the chief reporter made a point of congratulating me.

…What we are gradually losing is public issue journalism by journalists who are paid to go out beyond their living rooms to gather new facts and present them in a coherent form….

All a bit depressing. We must encourage media owners that understand that great profits start with great journalism – integrity, relevance and high quality writing and editing is everything.

Being inside Fairfax NZ is an eye-opening experience – and in a good way.  High quality journalism matters to everyone in the organisation, and editorial successes are celebrated, whether it is pride in The Press’s result in Newspaper of the Year, getting a story online minutes ahead of the competition or just plain great stories and writing. We are news junkies too…
The resolutions are a bit up and down:

  • The EPMU will lead a review of journalism in NZ over the next 6 months, inviting public submissions on the effects of growing commercial pressures on journalism, journalists’ pay rates and the resulting loss of talent to PR, freelance pay rates, union membership, public interest broadcasting and the growing pressure on journalists to serve multiple media at once.

sounds a very negative mandate to me – I can’t begin to take this as an unbiased report.

a good idea.

  • We want taxpayer funding of TVNZ to be increased to a level that allows it to be a true public service broadcaster.

Me too – but what do you want the Government to stop spending money on instead?

  • We urge everyone concerned about democratic media to take every opportunity to create new media outlets committed to providing people with information about public issues in a coherent form, facilitating an exchange of ideas about those issues and building a sense of social cohesion as a foundation for social action.

Fluffy – but it sounds like they like blogging

  • We support the work of the Bruce Jesson Foundation and urge other funders to fund independent investigative journalism on important public issues.

Sure. Heaven forbid we head the way of the US and Faux News. Our investigative journalism is pretty good here – superb compared to the US.

  • We will establish a Movement for Democratic Media, with membership open to all NZers as well as the union, to create, support and link local websites and other media outlets reporting on public issues, and to campaign for publicly funded broadcasting.

A union-led ground-swell movement? I don’t get it. Besides – don’t we all link to each other already?

Some of those look rather watered down from intentions, meaning they come across as toothless. But what an excellent forum overall. I’d like to get along to one next year, if I could.