Driving home from our country place this evening we ended up behind this German registered pickup truck. Notice the oddity on the back windshield?
Using URL’s in signs and printed media is common. Even general email addresses in printed media are rather common - I wonder when this type of personal communications transparency will become commonplace.
As I am up way past my bed time, listening to some great Internet radio-stations, a Progressive car insurance ad came on. The message was simply “if you sign up for our car insurance online, you save $50″. Great, right? They are saving money by not paying for a customer service representative to deal with that customer, right?
Probably, but I see an issue here. Soon (now for some, including my employer in a particular case) the web will offer things way better than any offline application ever could. And when time comes to start selling these amazing services and tools, the world will be used to web services and tools to be a cost saver rather than a service improver.
I wonder how the thinking will shift. It will shift, of course, but it might take some time.
If you like me dream up tens of web services each year, you will inevitably run into the problem of great domain names. What to call the service?
My friend today showed me the beginning of the solution - a Web 2.0 name generator. Use it like this: press the “Generate Name!” key many times. 500 times. Then, copy the list created on the right hand side, and run it through this bulk domain name availability check system.
Tada! Long lists of available domain names.
I can not believe the troubles I go through trying to file my Swedish taxes via the web using my MacBook. It is simply amazing. Last year, I had to install an outdated version of Netscape. This year, I have to downgrade my Firefox. The secure applications hang the Java running in all browsers.
And then I called Handelsbanken support. First, the automatic voice guides me through choice of language etc. only to then say “all lines are busy - call back later. Click.” Not even put on hold - simply disconnected.
Every year around this time I start first regretting having this computer. Then I get mad at the taxes. And then I always end up hating the banks again. They seriously need to get their customer service together. How long can a group of companies that treats the small customer consistently poorly stay in business? Why are they allowed to exist? Why is there no uproar?
I am switching banks tomorrow. It is all I can do.
Update: OK, so I haven’t changed banks yet, but I will. I have, on the other hand, used a PC to file my taxes. I made some changes to my return, but even with that time, the downloading and configuration of the authentication system, and the jumping through bureaucratic rings of hell-fire, the whole process took no more than 3 minutes. On a PC. Yesterday I spend in excess of one full hour trying to get through the first step using my MacBook.
I am in general positive to the American influence on international life. Without any doubt there are lots of negative aspects, but overall the market has decided, and the US way of life has in many ways won. I enjoy the food. I enjoy the TV-shows. Yesterday I saw two people enjoying something different.
The language.
Sure, I throw around a lot of English terms. And I always claim that English is a wider language (true or not, it is fun to claim: Swedes tend to disagree) but I speak Swedish when in Sweden. But yesterday on the train I heard two guys, clearly Swedish carry on their every day conversations in English. Gangster English. Now and then they did not know the English word, and went back to Swedish.
I wonder if it was a fluke, or if the minority languages will take the path of the minority food - will Swedish eventually disappear? Would that be a good thing? Naturally, the answer should be a loud and clear “no”, but imagine the practicalities: being able to speak with all persons around the world unhindered. Imagine if knowing English tomorrow will be the equivalent of knowing English, Spanish, French and German today. I think that would be highly practical. Boring, but practical.
During a flight recently I noted this interesting map modification in the in-flight magazine. I do not know if it was intended, but this must be an example of excellent grass roots campaigning. And, in this case, it worked. The word spread, more people are now interested in, and aware of, the naming conflict of this water.
Here is the Wikipedia article regarding this naming conflict.
This is Swedish ecological milk. It costs one crown more than regular milk, which is around 12% more. I always buy the ecological milk. Why? Because I can.
I do not know what ecological means. Is it primarily an environmental implications thing, or a animal cruelty thing? It really doesn’t matter: I have the extra crown, and it makes me feel good, and I lose nothing in the milk experience.
Why are there so few products that make this kind of choice easy? The hybrid cars are expensive, and sometimes have limited space. The fair trade food is way more expensive. Give me a 10% increased cost without losing any experience, and I will buy.
I just bought 5 books from Amazon. When there were two books that looked as interesting, I ignored all factors except the reviews. I did not even read them - I simply looked at the average rating, and the number of reviews.
I didn’t really realize this until I had pushed the “purchase” button, but it must mean something. I know that the Edelman Trust Barometer clearly states that we “trust a person like me” way more than any “authority” such as mainstream media reviews, but I had not realized that I was a part of it until now.
I wonder if there is a “how to get your book sold on Amazon” book, and I wonder if it contains the suggestion “go to 25 internet cafés, create Amazon accounts, and give yourself great ratings”.
My Mac does many things very well. This, however, is not one of them. This swollen battery cell looks pretty scary, huh?
MacBook Pro Battery (Click for high resolution image)
I was challenged today by my boss to find examples of really good two and three level web navigations with good use of related information and best bets. I knew I would succeed, simply because I do some simply breathtaking amounts of web surfing each day.
But I failed.
I went to all my favorites - Boeing, Sun, Apple, Cisco - and they are all simply not good. The only site we could find with some forward thinking was http://office.microsoft.com, but I can not shake the feeling that it is simply a half hearted web version of the ribbons Office navigation. We spoke briefly about the revolution that ribbons is introducing for Windows application menu structure, and how the same revolution will play out on the web. Good question, huh?
The web strategy group I am a part of at work has some really good answers. More about them later…
I thought not. But I discussed it with my father today, and he spoke of a TV-show he had seen which discussed the pharmaceutical companies and their race for cures and money. Most would react to the statement that “their only goal is to make moneyâ€. I have a hard time getting upset when hearing this – being in business is no altruistic activity: the pharmaceutical companies have an obligation to their stockholders to make money. Their goal is not to save the world – I know this is difficult to accept sometimes, but if that was the goal of companies a lot of things would be free, and a lot of companies would cease to exist.
But the scenario of a company such as Pfizer stumbling upon a one-time solution to the problem that Viagra solves and thereby killing one of their biggest streams of income is interesting. Even more so if you imagine a company which survives on symptom suppression of diseases such as HIV or a cancer. One would hope that the company would chose to release the cure rather than continue reaping the benefits of no cure existing, but I doubt it. Call me a cynic, but I believe that there are lots of cures hidden away in gold plated safes. And call me horrible, but I almost can not blame them.
I have said several times before that I like the idea of people in influential positions blogging. It gives insight, builds a relationship, and is an excuse to visit a website and be exposed to a company’s products or services. When I talk with senior colleagues, the two points of resistance most often are that 1. “How do they have the time” and 2. “I do not want the CEO of a company I own stock in spending hours blogging”.
Valid points, of course, and probably more effective in Sweden than in the US. Here, CEOs are not as exposed, and are much not in any way (with extremely few exceptions) the public “rock stars” that some US CEOs are. (Jonathan Schwartz and Mark Cuban come to mind.) But I think this will change. I think that Swedish CEOs, HR managers and other key people will shortly be forced to communicate directly in this fashion. If nothing else it will be a move forced by increased competition to recruit top talent. If a top student gets a clear view of a company’s culture through a straight forward blog, I believe this will have a big effect on his choice of employer.
That being said, maybe the HR blog has a bigger brighter future here in Sweden. No matter what part of the corporate communications department starts blogging (or in any other way communicating directly to stakeholders) it will be a positive move. It will create a transparency that is vital for building trust, insight and eventual relationships. And it should be such a natural and automatic part of a day’s work that the question “how is the time found” no longer should apply.
I am not completely certain that this is a big issue all things considered, but one thing caught my eye in this CNN article. They talk about SEC filings and a certain aspect of the size of Mulally’s compensation package. They say that the values was “disclosed in a footnote buried on page 228″. As a constant preacher of transparency, this makes me sad.
A highly upstanding annual report analyst I spoke with once told me that he expects total CEO compensation to one day be printed not in footnotes, not in renumeration tables, but on the annual report cover. And I agree - few things engage people and media as CEO compensation, and perhaps the only thing worse is trying to hide its size.
I have spent the better half of this evening searching for old school classmates. I found an image of my 9th grade class, and simply started searching. I was lucky to have a lot of very unique names in my class, so I could be relatively certain that the results I would get would be close to accurate.
My play gave me two distinct impressions: firstly, the Swedish classmates.com-company, called stayfriends.se, is probably getting lots of traffic from name searches in the search engines. They simply show up all over the place. Secondly, there are many people who simply are not mentioned anywhere in Google’s index. I am probably way to involved in this world to make a biased conclusion based on this, but I find it simply odd that one can live 27 years without a single mention.
It was not but a couple of days ago that I read of the very common HR-practice of “googling” (oh how I dispise the term…)Â potential new employees. It was stated clearly there that no web presence was almost as negative as purely negative web presence.
If one of my friends were to ask me to change their non presence, I would tell them to sign up for the major social networks (LinkedIn, Xing), create some shared media accounts (YouTube, Flickr), and then a hosted Wordpress blog. It could be done in 30 minutes, and would make an impression within weeks.
I was speaking today with a colleague about the odd situation with taxi companies here in Stockholm. Natives are generally drilled to only, under all circumstances, only use one of the three large companies. Tourists arriving at the airport are warned, and the big companies are physically separated from the smaller ones by different queues. Smaller companies generally have older cars. They generally cost more. Overall, they are worse in almost every way imaginable.
Yet they thrive. In great numbers. They are simply all over the place.
What does that mean? That you do not have to be the best? That a sucker is born every minute?
Expectation management. I thought it was a buzzword until I was painfully forced into understanding its importance. I was flying to Ã…re, and used the self-service check-in computers at Arlanda Airport. As I was checking in a bag, I expected it to direct me to a short queue when I was done, but instead I was directed to the same queue used for checking in manually. That is expectation mismanagement on a corporate scale.
On a much more personal scale, I created a trap for myself in the same weekend. I had been looking forward to this skiing trip way too much. I had ignored the bad weather signs almost every day. I had ignored the fact that the location was probably as crowded as it would be all year. I had fantasized my skill to be way better than it actually is. And there I was. Too wet, too steep, too crowded.
With another mindset, the trip would have been a success.
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