Came across an iPhone app lately that will tell you if a food is healthy or not by scanning the bar code on the package. Well, I’ll tell you something. If a food has a bar code it is not healthy. Period. How ’bout that. And you don’t need an iPhone.
Trying to make money by arbitrarily investing in various stocks or bonds is like trying to win a chess game by randomly moving your pieces.
Dear shampoo manufacturers. I know that your shampoo is made of the finest ingredients on earth and unlike your competitors you never use the bad stuff. I know that it invigorates the scalp etc. etc. and yes I will remember that it is for daily use god forbid to skip a day.
I have something to share with you as well. I do not shower with glasses. So I’ll appreciate if you find space on the label to write large enough which one is the shampoo and which one is the conditioner. Thank you. Your daily user.
My grand mother used to have a slice of dark bread and two walnuts for dinner.
This was all she had.
I often have a slice of bread and two walnuts for dinner for another reason. I want to live at least as long as she did.
What was the boldest lie you’ve been told in 2011? For me it was
“Click here to find a solution of the problem on line” by Microsoft’s Windows OS.
Mistakes are like mountains. They are best visible from a distance.
I have heard it many times from the phone companies during my years as a technology CEO. “No sir we don’t want to sell you just fiber. We don’t want to be in the business of selling “dumb pipes”. We want to be in the intelligent (read more profitable) applications.”
Well I have a message for you too, after spending several hours trying unsuccessfully to purchase iPhone from Verizon. “You better stay in the “dumb pipes” business simply because you are “dumb””.
Ordering product from Amazon is a breeze. Using Facebook is easy. Many “smart” businesses embraced the Internet to make our lives better. Phone companies are not among them. Trying to hold clients hostages and push lousy and overpriced applications trough their throat may look smart but it is not.
Print media is putting in their own words what they have learned on the Internet.
Jean Paul moved from France to the U.S. pursuing the “American Dream”. He started a small business selling French Soaps online. He came to realize the hard way that the grass is not greener here and that it is a struggle to survive by running a small business. Jean Paul would be on the brink of bankruptcy for years. The labor, insurance and marketing expenses would eat all of the modest profit margins before Jean Paul could put something aside for himself. One day Jean Paul was devastated by really bad news. Large national retail chain started selling his mainstream soap “Savon de Marseille” for less than his cost was. “This is the end of it” he said to himself “I better go back to my day job in France if it is still available.” Indeed the online orders went from meager to nil. This lasted for 2-3 months and a miracle happened after that. The orders came back big time and surged to levels unseen before. Jean Paul had finally made it. What happened was that the retailer dropped the “Savon de Marseille” product. They managed to educate the consumer of the wonderful smell of French lavender and the clean fresh feeling after using “Savon de Marseille” soap by their trial. Consumers started looking for the soap online and ordering from Jean Paul in quantities he had never dream of.
The moral of the story is that Lady Luck is out there and she visits those who are prepared and have their doors open for her.
The story.
DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was one of the titans of the computer industry in the 70-ies. Hoards of programmers were writing applications to run on their famed PDP and VAX platforms. Any application one may think of was available. What went wrong and why DEC was sold for cheap to Compaq (part of HP now)? Corporate greed and arrogance among other things. DEC became so big and powerful at the time that they have refused to follow the standards and decided to set their own. They have encapsulated themselves in their own cocoon which led to their demise later.
The repetition
Apple has hoards of programmers writing applications for their famed iPhone OS. Hundreds of thousands are available. Practically any application one can think of is most probably written and available. Of course Apple is not a stranger to corporate greed and arrogance. Their system is closed, proprietary and they twist the hands of their programmers and consumers alike. They do not respect de-facto standards and try to set their own. We know how it ends. Steve Jobs, the history tends to repeat itself sometimes as a comedy and sometimes as a tragedy.
The repetition