Corporate Posturing

In our modern world, posturing has become more prevalent than actual deals.  We posture to get the attention of customers.  We posture to get sales.  We posture to keep customers.

My question is: Why do we focus so much on perceptions and so little on product quality and the reality of the work involved to bring a good product to market?

I am a software developer and simply put good software is hard to write.  It isn’t that getting it to work is hard, if it were then I should be doing something else.  The difficulty comes in accounting for all the possible workflows and for all the small details that can derail things.

For example, you have a field that a user can type in a money amount in.  You have to be able to handle dozens of input formats (with commas, without, with the symbol for the currency, without and so on), you then have to be able to tell the user in a way that does not frustrate them if they typed in something that you can’t handle (like all letters).  That can take a while to go through and account for.

Now take that example and multiply the work by the number of fine interaction points that exist in your product and you have the time it would take to code the product.  This is of course an oversimplification, but the concept applies in general production of products as well.  The same can be said of the little change tray in cars.  It should be big enough for most coins in the world, small enough to not inconvenience the user,  sturdy enough to last as long as the car, aesthetic enough to not be an eyesore and the list goes on and on.

The reality is that most product do not go through all of this to be made and that is why we have recalls on cars due to gas pedals that can jam, software patches (now common even among console video games and mobile phone software) and free straps for Wii motes after some people put theirs through their big screen TVs.

What causes this rush and carelessness on the part of gigantic companies?  The market of course.  We want the fancy new sprocket that will make our life better and we want it yesterday.  Oh, and if it could possible cost us no money, that would be swell.  So, what we end up with is lots of crappy products that we are never happy with because they were not allowed to bake long enough.

I think that as a society, we need to learn patience.  That new phone that will enrich your life can probably stand to be in development for another year, so when it comes out, it is twice as sturdy and three times as optimized.  That new car should probably not go into production within 3 years of its concept phase or we might end up with some people wrapped around trees (and not in the tree-hugger sense).

Medical studies have shown that people with a lower stress level live longer, so why don’t we all take a step back and just slow down when it comes to personal products, we will probably get higher quality stuff that we can enjoy for a longer period of time.

Endgame

The term endgame gets thrown around a lot lately.  Whether it be in politics, the military, personal relationships, sports, business deals, or even just in a simple task, the term endgame seems to come up a lot.  However, most people do not know what the term means and what it’s lexicological meanings are.

Endgame generally refers to a stage in the game of chess, after most of the pieces have been removed from the board and only a few remain.  When used in this sense, the term also carries connotations of psychological strength and the ability to maintain composure under pressure.

The terms is also thrown around in terms of politics and war in a very similar sense.  Lately I have even heard President Obama use it to refer to the war in Afghanistan and the next 2 years.  In this sense, the connotations are more important than the definition.

How does America disentangle itself from a fairly big mess that it has gotten itself into in the middle east?

Flat out leaving has stopped being an option long ago.

Protecting the Afghan and Iraqi people indefinitely is also out of the question as the cost would cripple our economy.

So, the endgame is inevitable.  This is a win or lose strategy, but you can wipe out your enemy, but still lose.  What a lot of people are missing and this is a hard concept to get a grasp on is that this is not a matter of us against them.  We barely understand who them is, and as shown by the shooting at Fort Hood last month, one of us can easily become one of them.

What can you do to have a good endgame.  First, measure your available resources.  Even the best chess player can lose a game that they should have won if they get careless at the end.  In the same way, you can win campaign after campaign and then get bogged down in insurgencies and lose the war due to inability to bring your overwhelming forces to bear on the enemy.

Second, in order to have a good endgame, you have to realize that the game needs to end.  With that in mind, you need to have a plan of how you will end it.  The emphasis there is that you will end the game and not that the game will end with you as a player.  Once you have come to accept that as your reality, you will be able to plan and act on your plan.

Finally, stick to your plan.  This does not mean that if it is not working, you should just keep going, but rather that you should not change things that are working simply for the sake of change. If a strategy is working, keep at it, you might just be on to something.

You might be asking yourself what in the heck it is that I am trying to get at here.  Well, simply put, endgames are a fact of life.  We all have to experience them and we should all be prepared to do so in a manner that benefits us and which does not stress or hurt us.  When looking at something, think of how the process will end, because things end, all things end.

Presents, Holidays and Travel

So, the holidays are upon us.  We all have to deal with them in some way.  Either by having to wait in longer lines, or deal with more paid time off being used by employees or a budget that stops making sense, it bites us all.

With that, we have travel, lots of people have to do it and it is one of the worst experiences a person can have.  I can tell you from personal experience that being stuck for 3 hours on a runway with a nice old lady who just wants to tell you about how nice their grandkids are gets a little annoying after then first 2 hours.  Oh, and let’s talk about courtesy services.

Airlines allow you to set up automated calls to let family know if delays happen or flights get re-routed.  What they also can do is tell you family that your flight is at the wrong time, thus getting you stuck in a cold airport that is having construction done for over 2 hours (worst cold I ever had resulted from those 2 hours).

So here’s a thought, let’s get some bright people on this video conferencing thing and let’s have Christmas pudding over Skype with a big screen TV instead of freezing ourselves in airports.

By the way, Happy Holidays to all of my readers.

Travel, Supply and Demand

I will start this post with a disclaimer.  I have to travel about 1000 miles every holiday season to see my family.  I have been stranded in airports, charged extra for the first checked in bag, charged $40 more because my bag was 2 lbs too heavy and been fed stale pretzels that were deemed “lunch”.  I may have a bit of a dislike for the way airlines treat their cattle, uh I mean, sheep, uh I mean passengers.

Flight is a terribly complicated thing, especially when you are doing it inside of a steel drum powered by things that spin an 15 thousand RPMs.  Ever since the Hindenburg exploded and burned all those people to death we have as a people become terrified of dirigibles.  Understandably so mind you, I would not want to be burned alive in a hydrogen fire either.

So flight with airplanes is expensive, no way around it really.  And flight with dirigibles is dangerous.  Well, no, helium is actually very safe.  Modern designs also use much lighter weight materials for the canopy which allow for more chambers, so the chance of very quickly making your acquintance with the ground is astronomically low.  To put it in perspective, it would be like digging a hole to plant your petunias and finding oil or gold in your back yard.

I have seen designs of new airships and frankly I would love the idea of a scenic flight of a 2-3 days over America in luxury similar to one of those old time trains or ocean liners.

Write your congressman and let them know that you are not happy with the cost of flying and that dirigibles are something that more research should be put into.  Don’t do it just because I told you, look into the subject yourself and form your own opinion, but please look into it.

Kudos to Digital Distribution

A strange thought came over me this weekend.  Overhead drives profit.  Yeah, that seems kind of obvious right.  Well, I was thinking about it in a different light.  If you are in a business where you can reduce your overhead to basically nothing, then you can afford to fight price wars with the competition and win.

On the opposite end of the spectrum we have businesses where overhead is kind of fixed (it will always take some people somewhere to turn a bunch of materials into a car).  Then, price wars hurt everyone.

This thought hit me as I was browsing the sales on the online game distribution service Steam this weekend.  I ended up picking up a game pack for $50 that would in all fairness have at one point in time probably cost north of $500-600 dollars.  There are some games in there that I don’t really want, but there was enough for me to warrant a purchase.

Now, think of it this way, this is like getting a bunch of GM cars from the last 5 years or so (never driven mind you) for the cost of one mid-size car.  Even in their darkest days last year, GM always sold cars for discounts that would make digital distribution retailers scoff.

We will always need physical things and the overhead on those is always going to exist. But on the flip side, digital distribution of software and media will not only help drive down the cost of older products, but also cut down on pollution due to manufacturing of physical media and and transportation thereof to the end users.

So here’s me, giving kudos to the digital distribution model and encouraging all of you to try it and see if you like it.

Turkey Day: A Postmortem

Thanksgiving has come and gone again.  The shopping craze has stalked us again.  Buy, buy, damn it buy something. The economy is counting on you.  Just like the old Lewis Black joke, people went out and bought stuff they didn’t really need or want and retailers and still claiming that they didn’t sell enough.

My question is: How much is enough? If your store was completely emptied out, would that be enough? A friend of mine showed me the old Dr. Seuss Grinch cartoon this weekend and the lesson felt very poignant these days.  The Whos didn’t need presents to be happy on Christmas, but we apparently do.  We need iPhones and Netbooks and designer clothes and TVs.

Oh, and one other thing: A car is not a present, it is a huge financial burden both on the purchaser and on the owner.  I am frankly sick and tired of these commercials where one person wakes up to see a car with a big red bow on it in their driveway and their spouse walks up with the keys and an impish smile on their face.  You know what that smile is for? They just fucked you over.  You know how much the premium on a new Lexus is? Yeah, that right, rent money every month.

So here’s my 2 cents.  If you have something that you want to give someone or you have a family member or friend who really needs something, then give it to them.  Otherwise, how about you give them a nice bottle of wine or a nice pie, something that can be shared on the day of Christmas (or whatever you celebrate) and avoid the unnecessary expenses.

We should not need a certain time of year to come around to be nice to each other. We should do it all of the time or not do it all of the time.  This fake nicety that takes over out lives for a month every year is really disturbing and says something about the hollow nature of our society.

The Paradigm of the Weekend

The Weekend. A time of rest and relaxation, where you get to gather your energies for the week to come. Or so the theory goes.

I have found that this modern life we engage in robs us of our rest time and replaces it with a constant chase to “do things we want to do”. We no longer enjoy a morning with a paper and cup of coffee, we now have “things to do”. Always “things to do”. Shopping, social engagements, things we “must” buy, errands we have to run.

But do we really? I am going to try something something different this coming weekend and will let you know how it goes. I am going to try and use the weekend for what it was intended: rest and relaxation. I will not run any errands that I really do not need to run and I will only go buy things that I really need.

The stresses of our daily lives build up enough without us putting more stress on top of that. We need to find time for ourselves so we do not burn ourselves out while there is still a lot of life to live ahead of us.