Drew B has linked to me in a meme called 4 things. In this people who have been linked to name a number of different items in groups of four and then link to four other blogs that they know of that could continue this one.In typical Wired reader style, this concept of an idea that can be communicated is called a meme (and memes are often written about in digerati circles).
Classic memes that non-geeks would have heard of include the ‘Frankie Says’ series of t-shirts and ‘No, but Yeah’, but No dialogue from Little Britain.
Why 4?
Three or six are the perfect numbers according to a discussion between Lee van Cleef and Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Wikipedia couldn’t shed any light on it either.
Four jobs I’ve had
Agency drone – at present Shift leader – heading up a shift team on the bitumen plant in what was then UK’s second smallest oil refinery DJ – up north, and a few times in London On the line – in a meat packing plant and various other factories as a student
I was prompted to think about the working class thanks to an interesting opinion piece The Great Divide by James Delingpole in the Sunday Times Style magazine (February 5, 2006) about a division in the middle classes between the haves and the have-nots. The haves stay in Tuscany and go on ski-ing holidays.
My own thoughts on this is that the working class haven’t gone away, they just slave away with a phone, the laptop and the Blackberry. The have-nots referred to in the article are the normal working class folk of yore. They are the infantry of the knowledge economy. In place of soot-covered waste coats or donkey-jackets it’s suits-and-ties or media casual.
I have no problem calling myself working-class. I learned my trade as a PR person by working with great people in the same way that I served my time as an apprentice in the chemical industry in my early 20s.
They have the same fears as the working class of past decades with the fear of their jobs being exported to India or China rather than seeing their factory closed down by foreign competition. Self-service online and IT-driven business process management in banks has replaced robots and automation on the factory floor.
I found it particularly interesting that Delingpole assigned education and politeness with middle class society. The working class neighbourhood I grew up in was not full of cavemen: respect for yourself and others was something that was drilled into me. Indeed, I still occasionally have that uniquely Irish refrain from my mother asking me ‘not to disgrace the family-name’ ringing in my ears.I worked in many jobs from managing a tightly knit production team, to working on a factory line, being a cleaner, being part of a call-centre hive, banking and working in PR. It was in the middle-class environs of the PR agency life where I saw the most morally repugnant mistreatment of fellow colleagues and peers practiced.
With regards education, there has been a long tradition of a well-read working class, indeed some of the ‘new’ universities sprang out of mechanics institutes and other places of working-class education. The things that stood me in good stead for working in the knowledge economy were:
The wide range of reading that I did whilst working shifts in the oil industry and have carried on since
The work ethic that my gaffer taught me as an apprentice
A practical approach to problem solving that I picked up working in the chemical industry
The typing tutor software on the mini-computers that we used in the oil refinery and other places that I worked at
My university degree just got me in the door at my first ‘graduate’ roles. The under-class of today are the dispossessed bypassed by the knowledge economy, rather like the farm workers left by land reforms and the industrial age. The working-class education is now a combination of the state education system, public libraries and the worldwide web were institutions like MIT Open Courseware and Wikipedia which equate to the mechanics institute of today. It will be interesting to see if or how these new working-classes get organised. If you would like to read more consumer behaviour related content, you can find it here.
The Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter carried a story about Palm’s largest shareholders asking the company to sell out to another player while its fortunes are still on the rise. This raises concerns about Palm’s roadmap and vision if even their largest shareholders don’t believe them.
Why sell out?
Palm has a number of challenges to overcome:
Maintaining relationships with distribution channels which are different and distinct for both the Treo and PDA ranges
Palm needs a new OS that will have it ready for the next ten years. It could have done with that new OS in the year 2000
Innovation and localisation: in order to keep its head above water in the PDA market Palm needs to innovate, Pocket PC manufacturers can leverage reference designs and even sell devices at a loss to support service businesses in the enterprise. In the cell phone market, Palm needs to localise the device to meet each carriers needs.
Make like Dell: Palm not only needs to get better at innovation and localisation, it needs to innovate operationally; something that had a positive transformative effect on Apple. Dell is a by-word for a slick logistics chain that keeps cost down and allows for user customisation at the order stage
One-trick pony: when HP goes into business it is looking to sell everything from a HP9000Superdome high-end computer to an iPaq and the services to support it. When Nokia speaks to carriers it can sell them everything from all the kit to run a network to budget phones for PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) customers
Convergence: cell phones now have PDA functionality and so do iPods, Palm has unsuccessfully tried to make a convergence play with the LifeDrive and seems to have a crisis of ideas
Get big or get out: As can be seen from the MP3 player market, where there is a hot, competitive sector size wins because it can bring economies of scale to bear. Palm could not have taken the gamble that Apple did in terms its forward contracts for flash memory to role out a flash-based LifeDrive even if it had the vision to do so.
Who should buy?
A lot of the heat in this discussion centres on Research In Motion, Nokia and Apple.
Research in Motion has never had the best product design and user experience, Palm could help them.
Palm’s pen computing experience could be invaluable to Nokia.
Apple is the collectively the player considered by technology pundits the people who can make a market work and has the expertise and chutzpah to make change the game devices work. Palm could bring carrier relationships and expertise.
Why buy?
Palm has a strong brand its name has been a by-word for PDAs for a long time. The Treo has made a name for itself amongst early adopters and has proven itself to be more adaptable than the Blackberry. Its product design has made it a success that has saved Palm up to now. However, much of the crown jewels within Palm (its distinctive look and feel) marched off with PalmSource acquisition by Access and even then there was a lot of work to be done to assure the future of the PalmOS as a modern platform.
If Apple wanted to build a Palm-like device it already has much of the expertise needed, arguably the best product design team in the world and it could license or buy the PalmOS software from Access. It even has the talent to build its own OS over Darwin. However, this would necessitate a hell of a lot of work during the time that the company is migrating its hardware and software to the Intel platform and rolling out new entertainment services. This means that a Palm-like Apple device is probably not likely
Research in Motion could poach a few of the Palm design team and licence the PalmOS software, but it has bigger issues as competitors are using the NTP case as an excuse to eat the companies lunch. In addition, services and software are more lucrative so there is already some industry signs that RIM are looking to move away from being a hardware player
Nokia has some of the best mobile phone designers in the world, the user experience of its Symbian phones rivals Palm. It makes sense only as a way to eliminate competition, but it would be more profitable to tempt key staff away and watch Palm nose-dive into wherever dead companies go
Conclusion
OK, first of all there is the question of whether Palm needs to be sold: probably not, but a shot of energy, vision and cajones in the management team wouldn’t go a miss and this shareholder action may be the boot in the backside that they need. Bottom line is that this question can get kicked back and forth for a long time to come, what’s more its an emotive area so don’t expect a consensus soon.
If a ‘for sale’ sign went up, Palm may get a buyer, but I would expect the purchaser to come from the Far East rather than the established tech players named. I would also expect them to buy if or when the company is on its knees. Ningbo Bird, Haier, Lenovo, BenQ or HTC for example already know how to make phones, if they want cute industrial design they can buy it in as necessary from IDEO, frog design or their ilk. If the company did tout around for a buyer, you could expect the business to drop as carriers and enterprise look for alternative ‘safer’ suppliers. If the business isn’t on its knees when the for sale sign goes up, it may be by the time the deal is signed.
The crown jewels: the PalmOS software is already available to whoever wants to licence it at a discount to Windows Mobile, the value would be in the carrier relationships and the brand recognition of the Palm name.
UPDATE: Palm Addicts ran this piece in full, you can find it here. More related posts here.
I first came across the day pass concept with Salon.com, its an interesting compromise between subscription content and ‘free content’. First of all, with the possible exception of consumer homepages there’s little free content on the web. Content that you don’t have to pay for has advertisements around the sides of the pages and in the text, these are often paid for on a ‘per click’ basis.
Self described ‘premium’ publications like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal go for a walled-garden approach where you have a paid for subscription and they vend the content out.
The day pass says my content is valuable; however if you engage with my sponsor, they will pay for your access to my content over the next 24-hours. It means I have a moral contract with them to listen to their sponsor (and actually Aviva the insurance company did a smart bit of work by tailoring their content to deliver their message to an Economist reader whilst at the same time getting over their positioning as a progressive innovative company), I understand the ‘real value’ of the content that I get to look at AND the publisher remains relevant to a modern net audience rather than trapped in the dead forest business.
As Oscar Wilde said it is better to be talked about than not be talked about; in the online world, getting talked about means that you have to be accessible. Bloggers will tend not to blog about sites were people cannot go and see the content in context, for instance I have reduced the number of links I have to New York Times stories because of their part-way subscription model.
During my day pass tour of the Economist, I came across a series of trend articles and a number of interesting podcasts for download touching on some of the editorial teams hot topics for 2005: economic change
The future of the oil market by oil maven Daniel Yergin (I recommend his book The Prize which is a history of the petroleum sector as excellent reading)
Hallyu – The rise of Korea as a cultural hotbed (what’s called the Korean wave in some quarters) in Asia: from the sexiest mobile phones, or well written and produced cinema to K-pop (the Korean equivalent of J-pop: sugar-coated Japanese pop music that carries well in other Asian markets and performed by young performers so physically perfect, you wonder if Sony hasn’t a secret laboratory protected by ninjas inside of Mount Fuji to manufacture J-pop artists).
Interestingly the Korean wave has not yet impacted on Japan in the same way as its neighbours, which was an interesting aside that came out of Richard Edelman’s keynote at the London presentation of his agency’s global trust barometer survey. Kudos to the New York Times Online (registration required).
Expect to see more of hallyu: the mix of professional product perfection and the conservative nature of Korean culture produces a product that travels better around the world than much US culture.
Mociology – The study of how mobile technology impacts with sociology from purchasing concert tickets to organising political rallies, raves and flash mobs. (Derived from mobile and sociology).
Microchunk – A product or service sold traditionally as a package broken down into its constituent parts so buyers can purchase a la carte for consumer electronics to news feeds. Think sachet marketing for the digital world. People like 37signals have successfully built ‘microchunk’ applications and services (like Backpack) that do one thing extremely well and compete against other much larger software companies that take a bundled approach leveraging an effective desktop monopoly (mentioning no names). Kudos for mociology and microchunk to Wired Magazine. More related content here.
