James Surowiecki’s In Praise Of Third Place discusses Nintendo’s success and offers an interesting look at arms races, simplicity, and why companies should focus on profit over market share.
Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines.
Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games…
Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.
A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.
Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations.
Related: Build Less: Underdo your competition [Getting Real]
Carlos Segura, the man behind T.26 and 5inch, and one of the original partners at 37signals, has quietly been sharing his car obsession with the public. Car lovers everywhere should be thankful.
Cartype is a growing collection of everything car. There are plenty of car sites on the net. Plenty of sites that cover one brand or provide lots of stats like Edmunds. But Cartype takes a different approach.
Besides the standard car photos and info, Cartype spews car logos, company logos, dealer tags, concepts, people parking like idiots, interesting signs, and more.
If you are looking for the standard car site content, the car section has subsections packed with info and photos for current cars, topless cars, supercars, hybrid cars, wagons, classics, comebacks, ugly, cars not coming to the US (interesting), and more.
Yes, the type on the site is a little small, and some things are tough to read, and it may not be comprehensive in the way Edmunds or Yahoo Autos is, but it’s a lovely and unique obsession. If you love cars, do check out Cartype.
An excerpt from How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick:
Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new…
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
[via DL]
BibliOdyssey blog is a neat collection of eclectic, old school book illustrations.
If you only read one post there, check out Dr. Alesha Sivartha’s Brain Maps.
There’s also lots of other good random stuff at the site…
[tx RP]
"If you want to change big things, you pay attention to small things."
-Rudy Giuliani on C-span talking about the Broken Windows theory
The Broken Windows theory was the catalyst for solving NYC’s crime wave in the 80’s and 90’s. NYC’s administration had been focusing on major crimes, like murder, and overlooking smaller crimes along the way. But it wasn’t working. So the city started going after petty crime that it had been overlooking: turnstyle jumpers, squeegee men, public drunks, etc. The result: All crime rates fell suddenly and continued to drop for the next ten years.
Giuliani says, “The idea of it is that you had to pay attention to small things, otherwise they would get out of control and become much worse.”
In a lot of our approach to crime, quality of life, social programs, we were allowing small things to get worse rather than dealing with them at the earliest possible stage…So we started paying attention to the things that were being ignored. Aggressive panhandling, the squeegee operators that would come up to your car and wash the window of your car whether you wanted it or not — and sometimes smashed people’s cars or tires or windows — the street-level drug-dealing; the prostitution; the graffiti, all these things that were deteriorating the city. So we said, “We’re going to pay attention to that,” and it worked. It worked because we not only got a big reduction in that, and an improvement in the quality of life, but massive reductions in homicide, and New York City turned from the crime capital of America to the safest large city in the country for five, six years in a row.
Building momentum
One key component of Broken Windows is that it shows progress. It’s not about miracles or heroic solutions or solving massive problems overnight. It’s about building momentum. It’s showing your audience that you’re headed in the right direction. It’s making visible changes, even slight ones, that show you’re doing something. Someone is on the case. People know that you haven’t abandoned them. You’re giving them a reason to trust you. You’re building faith.
Continued…
Veer is looking for a Web Designer in Calgary, Canada.
Campaign Monitor is looking for a Designer and Customer Service Legend in Sydney, Australia.
TIBCO is looking for a Senior User Interface/Experience in Palo Alto, California.
Netflix is looking for a Senior Web Designer / Art Director in Los Gatos, CA.
Boston.com is looking for an Application Developer in Boston, MA.
PayPal is looking for a Javascript Guru in San Jose, CA.
Continued…
An author of a romance novel spurred fading sales by making personal appearances at book clubs.
Shors is the author of “Beneath A Marble Sky,” a romantic novel about the building of the Taj Mahal. The book got decent reviews, but didn’t sell much until he added a note to the paperback edition. “I came up with the idea of putting the letter in the back of the paper back, with my e-mail address, and inviting book clubs to invite me to their evenings,” Shors explains. That was 200 book clubs ago.
The authors of “WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future” tried to hack the publishing system by getting people to buy the book at Amazon at exactly the same time. The goal: Make it the number one book, if just for one day.
It is possible for a relatively small number of people to time their purchases right and, for a short period of time, drive the book they wish to support up the charts…every other bookseller, reviewer, producer and store manager will hear about Worldchanging, and our odds of getting the traction we need to bring worldchanging ideas into the public debate will dramatically increase.
Did it work? According to one commenter, the book got up to #12 but that’s as high as it went.
News.com
What’s Hot gives a visual snapshot of the 15 newest and most read stories on News.com. The bigger the block, the hotter the story. The brighter the block, the newer the story. Bright yellow means the story was just published.
Archive.org
Each item at Archive.org gets a “batting average” (the percentage of people who downloaded the item after visiting its details page).
Walmart
Walmart’s home page has a revolving slide show of products. The 1-2-3-4 bubbles at the bottom slowly fill up so visitors know how long until the next image is displayed. Jay, who submitted this screen, calls it a “nifty way of giving people who are slow readers an idea of how much time they have for your slideshow, and if they need to pause or not.”
Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.
Lectric Shave will give you a shave “up to 52% closer.” SBC Yahoo DSL features download speeds of “up to 6 megabits per second.”
Bah. “Up to” is meaningless. “Up to 6” includes 0-5. It could be everything, it could be nothing. It’s marketing code for “we want to sound impressive but we won’t actually promise anything.”
Where else does this fly? The minimum wage isn’t “up to $5.15/hour.” Good luck telling a loan officer you plan on paying back “up to 100%” of your loan. Doctors don’t say, “The operation is risky, but your chances of making a full recovery are up to 90%.”
So it’s nice to see some pushback against the term’s widespread use among internet providers.
With few exceptions, they include language that says consumers will get ‘up to’ a certain speed…In many cases, consumer advocates and industry analysts said, customers do not get the maximum promised speed, or anywhere near it, from their cable and digital subscriber line connections. Instead, the phrase “up to” refers to speeds attainable under ideal conditions, like when a D.S.L. user is near the phone company’s central switching office.”They don’t deliver what’s advertised, and it’s inherently deceptive,” said Dave Burstein, editor of DSL Prime, a newsletter that tracks the broadband industry. ” ‘Up to’ is a weasel term that should be taken out of the companies’ vocabulary.”
A similar movement is afoot in the UK where ‘Up to 8Mbps’ ads were recently ruled misleading.
ISPs advertising an ‘up to 8Mbps’ service without explaining that many people will be unable to receive these speeds are misleading consumers…35 per cent of people who live more than 3.8 km from an exchange, would be unable to get more than a 5 Mbps connection.
Ok, get back to work. After all, you really should get up to eight hours of work done today.
