Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

CMOs
Premature obituaries of CMOs

Almost 11 years ago business academic Dominique Turpin wrote an article describing CMOs as ‘dead’. Turpin worked at the IMD business school in Switzerland and the article was a classic bid for thought leadership.

Alicia Tillman, CMO at SAP AG until 2021, at the time of writing CMO at Delta Airlines

It’s just the kind of thumb-stopping headline that drives readership of LinkedIn content where it was published.

… the decline in the CMO’s influence is alarming, especially at companies that claim to put the customer first but in reality are product-driven.

True, some companies have marketing in their DNA, especially firms that had a visionary founder with a great understanding of the customer. Examples include Ingvar Kamprad at IKEA or the late Steve Jobs at Apple.

But these are exceptions. The norm these days is that the CEO sets the overall strategy, the R&D and innovation teams design the product, and the CFO determines pricing and departmental budgets. No wonder some CMOs feel unloved and are considering a career change
Dominque Turpin – The CMO is dead (August 21, 2013)

Turpin goes on to explain what he believes that there are four causes, that together result in no CMOs.
- Most CMOs aren’t focused on planning and delivering customer value
- Short-termism has meant that organisations have become CFO-focused – a la ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch’s perception of shareholder value, rather than a balanced scorecard approach
- Marketing impact is hard to measure
- Organisations lack a clear understanding of what marketing is
Instead Turpin wanted to create a CCO role – chief customer officer. He saw that this role could sit with the CEO, the CFO or the former CMO. While the CFO as CCO might take the fuzziness out of marketing as Turpin put it, there would be a tension between their natural ‘ neutron Jack Welch’-nature and being customer-centric. What about the CEO? Turpin pointed out that they tend to come from engineering or finance. Both are efficiency focused disciplines with incremental short-term views. Again both are barriers to customer-centricity and would be largely blind to long term effects.

3G Capital

Move forward six years and a CFO-driven approach to running Kraft Heinz by 3G Capital saw a massive destruction of value some $15.4 billion from the $50 billion paid to buy out the business in the first place. The quarterly dividend got cut and shareholders filed lawsuits. The founder of 3G Capital talked extensively about the GE Way driven by Jack Welch as a key influence on their approach.

Scott Galloway

Professor Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur who is provocative, interesting and often right.

On CMOs Galloway said

“If you’re the CMO that shows up and says ‘I need more budget so that I can do a brand identity study, can spend money on advertising and get invited to great conferences and hang out with people who are more interesting and better looking than me by spending media dollars that are less and less impactful’ then you’re like the second lieutenant in Vietnam — you’re dead in 18 months or less,”
Scott Galloway

There is a lot to unpack in that statement, but it doesn’t spell the end of the CMO or advertising.

Pax Americana to Pax Australis

In this post Galloway taps into a wider criticism that we’ve seen of American marketers over the past few years. When I was in college American professors and marketing thinkers set the tempo for the profession around the world. As Mark Ritson recently wrote

In the 20^th Century marketing was American. The discipline, the theories, the textbooks, and the approach. To arrive at Wharton in 1994 was to see a future that was not just untenable in the UK, it was one nobody back home was even aware of. Marketing was a decade ahead of anything in the UK. The American marketers I met, academics and practitioners, were so advanced it made my head spin.
Mark Ritson – Effectiveness ignorance has left American marketing lagging behind the rest of the world (Marketing Week)

Text books by the likes of Philip Kotler and David Baker, were perceived wisdom of old white academics. None of this thinking was evidence-based; beyond anecdotal successful case studies.

One of the ‘secrets’ that marketers and CMOs at large FMCG companies like Mars, Proctor & Gamble, Kellogg’s and Unilever had was access to Australian based marketing science research. This was primarily via their long-term sponsorship of the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute in Adelaide, Australia.

This body of research in turn shook up wider marketing thinking when Professor Byron Sharp published How Brands Grow. (There were other important works as well such as the UK based publications from the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising – notably The Long and The Short of it and Effectiveness In Context).

While marketing outside the US was shaken up by the works of Sharp and Binet, the US continued onwards in its marketing the way it always had.

Mark Ritson’s recent column on the state of American marketing caused international furore in the marketing community, despite Marketing Week being a UK-only publication. Ritson complained about American marketers lack of awareness about the importance of marketers effectiveness.

This comment on Mark Ritson’s post sharing the article, while humorous has a lot of truth in it:

Okay, okay. Stop throwing big words like vituperative and effectiveness at us simple-minded Americans. Sure, we handed the keys of marketing over to software engineers at the turn of the century. Maybe that led us to a fair bit of myopic strategery here in the very exceptional United States of America.

Based on the comments I’ve read, when asked to define effectiveness the answer provided is essentially #IYKYK. Why let a golden opportunity to school American marketers on the wise ways of the world beyond our ample shores slip through your fingers?

I don’t care if you call it Marketingwirksamkeit or efficacité du marketing, what matters is more than just numbers on the scoreboard, but how the points were won. Just the other day I was reading a scholarly piece on the effectiveness of meme marketing by the faculty of Griffith University in Queensland. It hit me. My American, effectiveness ignorance has blinded me. I now lag behind the rest of the world.
Michael Simmons, Sendofy

While the US obsessed over marketing technology, the rest of the world was attempting (imperfectly) to more knowledge about marketing efficiency and the marketing technology stack. Having worked in the technology sector, it was the last place I would have gone for marketing lessons. At best, marketing as a function was sales support.

A case in point in this mis-application of focus was the relative performance of this year’s Super Bowl advertisements. I realise that this delve into marketing efficiency has at least made the case for a dramatic change in US-based CMOs. But not so fast, CEOs don’t think that their CMOs and marketing teams are performing that badly.

CMOs: from the dog house to the boathouse

American agency Boathouse have been doing an annual survey of CEO attitudes to marketing and their CMOs. The third edition of this survey was published in January this year.

Some of the highlights of the report include:
- CEOs identified what they want their CMOs and marketing teams to address: driving growth, market share/sales, differentiation, improving brand reputation, and “transforming company narrative.”
- 49 percent of CEOs believe their marketing team is “best in class.”
- 40 percent of CMOs are rated “best in class.”
- One point I found quite interesting was that half of CEOs believe the short tenure many CMOs have “is a sign of success, not failure.”
- CMOs’ perceived trust with C-suite stands at 43 percent and 41 percent with the CEO. This has doubled over the three years that Boathouse has been running this research project
- In a bit of an odd note: CEOs believe CMO loyalty is growing, stating that “in a dramatic shift from 2021, the CEO’s perception of CMO loyalty is growing, [as] 8 in 10 CEOs perceive CMOs would take a bullet for them (up from 3 in 10 in 2021).”
- 76 percent CEOs are “integrating A.I. into their organizations” and 90 percent believe that 90 percent of their CMOs are engaging with AI for the benefit of the company in areas such as “content, analytics (about two-thirds), and customer experience or research (half).”
TL;DR CMOs don’t sound as if they will be disappearing in the next 18 months or so as Galloway believed.

C-suite without powerful CMOs get punished.

You could argue that CEO are the ultimate arbiters of CMO success, failure and tenure. But the reality for public companies is the large investors who can vote the CEO of most companies out of office. The key influencer in this decision process is the equity analysts who sit within, or advise client organisations such as fund managers.

Even if CEOs don’t think that their marketing is important enough to have a CMO, their shareholders will. Equity analysts have indicated that they rate brand strength and marketing as more important than reported profit, or leadership quality.

Given that most of the c-suite can’t speak or do effective marketing, they really need their CMOs. Companies like 3G Capital and Reckitt Benckiser have been punished in public markets for failing at marketing, despite operational and financial excellence. Unilever has been punished for its focus on ESG at the expense of brand building and is even under regulatory investigation.

More information

“You’re Dead In 18 Months Or Less”: Scott Galloway On The Future Of CMOs – B&T

UPS’ Removal Of CMO Role Reveals The Real Problem Facing The C-Suite

Boathouse CEO Study on Marketing and the CMO | Boathouse

Fortune 500 companies are cutting CMO jobs | Fortune

The Unspoken Truth About CMO Churn | AdWeek

Marketers, investing in market research is not superfluous | Marketing Week

Gartner Survey Shows 73% of CMOs Will Fall Back on Low Risk, Low Return Strategies for 2021

9 recent CMO departures that point to the radical transformation of marketing | Marketing Dive

Mark Read: CMOs have become too much like chief communications officers | PR Week

Coca-Cola’s decision to scrap the CMO role for a CGO should begin to pay off anytime soon | Observations In Marketing | The Thinking Marketer
March 21, 2024
Brand clichés

Brand clichés have been in the background of my career in agencies, all the way through. I am sure that brand clichés will continue long after my career is over.

I started off writing copy for technology clients. Short pithy marketing copy and longer thought leadership pieces, opinion editorials and white papers.

Back when I first started working on technology, media and telecoms brands we had a raft of clichés. These brand clichés were in the product and vendor descriptors.

Broken technology marketing

These weren’t the most sophisticated brand marketers. Marketing was sales support. There maybe some brand equity at the corporate brand level. But that was often down to user passion, rather than skilful brand marketing. You can still see that mindset at work in ingredient brands like AMD, Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, NVIDIA, Oracle or SAP.

Created using Dall-E

Part of this was down to history, marketers were often engineers who had been promoted out of pre-sales consulting. Their corporate and product communications was often run by people who were ‘vested’ having worked early on in the companies life in an admin role. A personal assistant or an office manager, probably with a liberal arts degree from a university or community college.

The modern iteration of this dearth of marketing experience is the broken adtech space and a legion of growth hacker profiles on LinkedIn. Once you understand this broad brush picture of the technology sector the brand clichés start to make sense.

Technology brand clichés

A leading… – we compete in the following market for sector, but there isn’t anything to separate us from our peers. High fives happen in the office if we end up in the right part of the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports.

Best – Someone somewhere said that they thought we were better than our competitors based on their particular view at that time. We’ve paid an analyst firm a large amount of money for digital reprints where they said it. We will give you this as PDF if you give us all of your personal information and opt-in to being in constant contact with our marketing automation application.

Best-of-breed – we cobble together bits of technology from a number of sources, all of which are good. We usually have competitors who are vertically integrated and do everything reasonably competently in-house. It tells you more about market dynamics than it does about benefits. See ‘end-to-end’ used by vertically integrated businesses.

… compatible – usually a hygiene factor in areas were there are clear open standards like email and web browsing. It used to be that back-in-the-day a peripheral that was Mac compatible would cost double the price of PC compatible products. USB was a major change in this. Where there aren’t open standards, then beware of ‘lock-in’ where you get bled dry by vendors, rather like the Mac users of old. A second aspect of compatability is where vendors built super-standards on top of the ‘open standards’. Adding additional features over the top, if they can get their client to adopt them it can increase lock-in without having to go to the hassle of creating a completely bespoke standard. For example, POP and IMAP email doesn’t support being able to delete an email after you’ve sent it, unlike sending email from and to a Microsoft Exchange email server.

Cutting edge – will be obsolete, but not just yet.

Disruptive – we have an incumbent competitor and we hope you’ll change for the sake of change.

Enabler – we provide part of what you need, but we know that the majority of IT projects fail to reach the objectives that businesses have in mind. A classic example of this truth would be the NPfIT (national programme for IT) done by the NHS, Post Office Horizon project or most implementations from the likes of Autonomy to Adobe Workfront.

End-to-end – usually followed by solution or solutions provider. This was trying to make a virtue out of vertical integration of the corporate parent (think about the way HP used to do everything from servers to printer paper), in a market that was likely orientated towards horizontal integration (a classic example would be Windows running on an Intel or AMD processor, or Google Android running on a MediaTek or Qualcomm processor). The reality is that it’s barely a feature, let alone a benefit.

Fastest – the devil really is in the details of fastest. The measure of speed depends on what you want to measure. In technology real world speeds are difficult to capture and you can’t benchmark across systems. Way before Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal chip companies like Intel and Nvidia were routinely doing conceptually similar design tricks to recognise and optimise for benchmarking tests, often to the detriment of real-world use.

First – this would be then followed by a really arcane descriptor. For example ‘Product X is the first tree-based database structure in cloud services that supports MUMPS database language instructions aimed at industry 5.0 applications’.

Innovative – we spent money on design and putting things together. Appreciate it. Often used to support disruptive.

… ready – usually this is about a technology that might be in the news but is years away from the standards being developed being ready for commercialisation, or the standards may not even exist. In 2023, we saw several blockchain based companies talk about their technology being metaverse ready. You can read here about how far away and uncertain that statement is. The reality is often that this is pure hype.

Scaleable – it will work with more of our stuff. It might even work with other people’s products. If by any chance your business grows, we want to sell more stuff.

Solution – a mix of web hosting, other vendors products, our products and consulting time as a kludge to make things work. Think of every collaboration in streetwear and luxury fashion that was a dog’s dinner – this is exactly the same, but in IT.

The world’s leading… – this might be supported by either market share data for one quarter’s sales, or a number of analyst reports. Basically ‘a leading…’ but with a bit more confidence. Usually you will find that the brand has some visibility within their market sector and is likely considered. So when green tech company 1pointFive announced an agreement with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) – BCG was described as:

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s leading management consulting firms
1PointFive and Boston Consulting Group Announce Strategic Agreement for Direct Air Capture Carbon Removal Credits

Yes business people are likely to have heard about BCG, but that doesn’t mean that they would prefer to hire them over McKinsey, Teneo, Bain, Accenture etc.

Value-added – a synonym for expensive and complex.

Bland brand clichés

Now the key ones I see, tend to be throughout the brand book. A good proportion of the reason why these have become brand clichés is down to over-use. In a world where brands are the above average equivalent of the children in Lake Woebegon.

Authentic – we do what we say (most of the time). Unless it has implications for our bottom line. Often used interchangeably with principled and brand purpose. The latter two often look at higher order ambitions than the business.

Dedicated – more about the focus of the business than the quality of the product or services. Through to the 1980s in western countries, there were companies called conglomerates which were a mass of disparate businesses. Originally they may have started off as looking to integrate businesses into their offering. So if you sold hardware to businesses, you might want to provide software that those businesses would want. You might help them put it all together, which then meant you had a professional services business. All of this doesn’t come cheap, so you might add a finance business to help them spread the payments rather than an overly expensive bank loan. All of a sudden you are a conglomerate. Being a conglomerate makes it harder for you to focus on what you do well. Being dedicated means that in theory you have that focus.

Helpful – We do enough so that you will probably do business with us again.

Passionate – we behave in a professional manner. Basically they weren’t the guy in the coffee shop I went to on Saturday, where he let us wait in a queue to be served while he finished rolling out five cigarettes. He then asked ‘what do you want?’. He demonstrated authenticity, but not dedication or helpfulness.

Trusted – customers pay us for what we do. Some of them do this on a repeat basis.

It’s even been spoofed in ‘The Bland Book‘ (PDF).

That’s me for today, happy St Patrick’s Day to my fellow Hibernians out there.

March 17, 2024
A Hackers Mind by Bruce Schneier
I eagerly anticipated reading A Hackers Mind, being a long-time follower of Bruce Schneier’s blog. A Hackers Mind caters to the well-informed individual. Schneier commences by defining what constitutes a hacker, delving into the essence of hacking and its widespread prevalence.

Subsequently, Schneier takes us on a journey into a hackers mind, guiding us through fundamental hacks targeting:
- ATMs (automatic teller machines or cash machines)
- Casinos
- Airline frequent flier miles
- Sports systems
- Financial networks
- The legal realm
- Politics
Through these examples, Schneier aims to illustrate the parasitic nature of hacks on the systems they target, offering various techniques to impede or render them unfeasible. In doing so, he makes a broader socio-political statement about how the very foundation of the economy and society is continuously ‘hacked’.

The implication is that power lies in a hacker’s mind being applied to the systems that govern our lives. And that with the right mindset and ‘hack’ the ordinary person can turn the tables on those in power.

When this happens it makes great film or television. (A classic example of this would be ITV’s People vs. Post Office which told the story of postmasters combating wrongful prosecutions due to software defects. The reality was that in that particular case, it actually took the media coverage around the TV drama being shown to actually start moving the needle.)

Schneier in his book recognises that over time societies have evolved to become more equitable over time. He also attributes late stage capitalism to the hackers mindset, mixed with resources and technical capability in law or finance. The book is designed to wake the public up with a view to them also developing a A Hackers Mind and hacking the system back to equilibrium.

It’s an interesting light read, but I think VR pioneer and author Jaron Lanier writes better books focusing on the inequities inherent in the intersection of technology, culture and society. A great example of this is his book Who Owns The Future?

I don’t think Schneier gets close to inspiring his desired outcome with A Hacker’s Mind, but if you want something above the usual airport reading then it gets a thumps up from me, but it won’t be staying on my book shelf for me to re-read it at a later date. For more book reviews and recommendations go here. For recommendations of non-fiction books in particular go here.
March 12, 2024
Y2K
Early last year, fashion started to pillage the late 1990s and early 2000s for fashion inspiration, which became a Y2K trend on social platforms and in the fashion media. But this divorced Y2K from its original meaning. Y2K was technologist short hand for a calendar problem in a lot of legacy systems that were designed around a two digit date for years.

The rise of micro-processors had meant that the world had more computers, but also more computer control of processes from manufacturing to building air conditioning systems.

The HBO documentary Time Bomb Y2K leaned into the American experience of Y2K in an Adam Curtis type archival view, but without his narrative.

Millennium layers

There was so much to unspin from the documentary, beyond the Y2K bug, including the largely alarmist commentary. The run-up to the millennium had so many layers that had nothing to do with Y2K, but were still deeply entwined with anxiety around what might happen with Y2K.

This included:
- Internet adoption and more importantly the idea of internet connectedness on culture through the lens of cyberpunk – which in turn influenced the spangliness of fashion around this time and the preference for Oakley mirror shades that looked as if they were part of the wearer. The internet was as much a cultural construct and social object as it was a communications technology. It memed AND then got people online.
- Telecommunications deregulation. In the United States the Telecommunications Act of 1996, saw a levelling playing field be set out and allow for new entrants across telecoms networks to television. They also defined ‘information services’ which internet platforms and apps fitted into giving them many freedoms and relatively few responsibilities. You had similar efforts at telecoms deregulation across what was then the EEC. This saw a rise in alternative carriers who then drove telecoms and data commuunications equipment sales, together with a flurry of fibre-optic cables being laid. There was a corresponding construction of data centres and ‘internet hotels‘ to provide data services. With these services came an expectation that the future was being made ‘real’. Which in turn fed into the internet itself as cultural phenomenon. The provision of new data centres, opportunities for computer-to-computer electronic data interchange (EDI) and services that can be delivered using a browser as interface also drove a massive change in business computing.
- An echo boom of the hippy back to the land movement, many of the people involved in that movement were early netizens. Hippy favourites The Grateful Dead had been online since at least 1996 and were pioneers in the field of e-commerce. The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (or The WeLL) had founders from hippy bible The Whole Earth Catalog. There was also a strong connection through Stewart Brand to Wired magazine. Long time ‘Dead lyricist Jon Perry Barlow created a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – a libertarian totem for netizens up to the rise of social media platforms like Facebook.
- Millennial religious fervour. The Heaven’s Gate cult committed ritual suicide in 1997, and even posted about it on their website. The disastrous FBI showdown with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas had happened four years earlier and even today is a point of discussion amongst right-leaning Americans.
The confluence of noise around Y2K drove some anxiety and a lot of media chatter.

Advertisers did their bit to fuel insecurities as well.

However by October 1999, American consumers who responded to a poll by the Gallup Organisation were pretty confident that glitches would be unlikely
- 55% considered it unlikely ATMs would fail.
- 59% believed direct deposit processing wouldn’t be a problem.
- 60% said they felt that temporary loss of access to cash was unlikely.
- 60% believed credit-card systems were unlikely to fail.
- 66% felt that problems with check processing were unlikely.
- 70% had received Y2K-readiness information from their banks.
- 90% were confident their bank was ready for Y2K.
- 39% said they would definitely or probably keep extra cash on hand.
Y2K: More Signs of the Time | Computerworld (January 10, 2000)
Experts had felt that the Y2K challenge had largely been beat, but some prudent advice was given. I worked for a number of technology clients at the time including telecoms provider Ericsson and enterprise software company SSA Global Technologies. I had to keep my cellphone with me in case anything went wrong and we would have to go into crisis mode for our clients. Needless to say, I wasn’t disturbed during my night out at Cream by THAT call.

Technology experts like Robert X. Cringely were rolled out to advise consumers on prudent precautions. Have a bit of cash in your wallet in the unlikely event that card merchant services don’t work at your local shop. Have some provisions in that dont need refrigeration in case there is a power cut. And a battery or solar powered radio just in case.

All of these are still eminently sensible precautions for modern-day living.

Why were we ok?

The warning

There were several people who voiced warnings during the 1990s. Some of the most prominent were Ed Yourdon and Peter de Jager.

Risk management

During the 1990s company auditors were informing boards that they had to address Y2K. Failure to follow this would affect their ability to trade. Their public accounts wouldn’t be signed off and there would be implications for the validity the insurance policies need to run a business.

Approaches

IT professionals took Y2K very seriously, which meant that there was little to no impact. Some academics such as UCL’s Anthony Finkelstein posited that the problem was taken too seriously, though it is easier to say that in retrospect. There were a number of approaches taken to combat the risk of failure due to Y2K. In order of least to most ambitious they were:
- Systems testing
- Rip and replace
- Recode
Systems testing

The Russian military had tested their systems for vulnerability to the millennium bug and announced this in the last quarter of 1999. Meanwhile businesses were often passing the testing out to contractors like Accenture with teams based in India, the former Soviet Union or the Philippines. There was a thriving market for auditing software to check if applications used two-digit dates or not. One of these was Peregrine Systems ServiceCenter 2000 Y2K Crisis Management software.

Testing highlighted problems at Oak Ridge Laboratories who process American nuclear weapons, the alarm systems at Japanese nuclear power stations and some kidney dialysis machines.

Problems would then be addressed by ripping and replacing the systems or recoding the software.

Rip and replace

Apple used Y2K as a sales tool to get Macs into businesses, including this campaign from early 1999 where the HAL computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey featured in Apple’s Super Bowl advert.

Two years earlier IBM CEO had the company re-orientate an offering that he called e-business. There was snazzy advertising campaigns ran over an eight year period.

Mainframes and high powered UNIX workstations became internet servers running multiple instances of Linux. IBM Consulting learned as they went building the likes of internet retailer Boxman (which would go bust due to IBM’s cack-handed software and the rise of Amazon).

Timely replacement of business systems with e-business systems, paired with new personal computers like the latest Apple Mac allowed the firm to avoid Y2K and make speedier approaches in digitising their businesses.

German enterprise software company SAP launched SAP Business Connector in association with webMethods in 1999, this provided an integration and migration layer for SAP and other business software applications. It also allowed the business software to be accessed using a web browser and for it to trigger business processes like email updates.

Articles (like Robertson & Powell) highlighted the wider business process benefits that could be generated as part of a move to rip-and-replace existing systems with ones that are Y2K compliant. Reducing the amount of systems in place through rationalisation as part of Y2K preparation would then provide benefits in terms of training and expertise required.

Recode

Where rip and replace wasn’t an option due to cost, complexity or mission criticality recoding was looked at as an approach. For PC networks there were a few off the shelf packages to deal with low level BIOS issues

IntelliFIX 2000 by Intelliquis International, Inc. Their product would check hardware, DOS operating system, and software. This version was free and ran a pass/fail test. The full version, which could be purchased for $79, would report the issues and permanently correct date problems with the BIOS and the CMOS real-time clock. In 1999, Stewart Cheifet of the Computer Chronicles rated the product as a very good all-in-one solution for hardware and software.
National Museum of American History: Y2K collection

Products similar to IntelliFIX included Catch/21 by TSR Inc.

Longtime software makers like Computer Associates and IBM provided large companies with tools to audit their existing code base and repair them. IBM’s software charged $1.25 per line inspected. OpenText estimate that there 800 billion lines of COBOL language code out there. So having one of these tools could be very lucrative at the time.

You might have mainframe code on a system that might not have been altered since the 1970s or earlier. Programmers in the developed world who had skills in legacy languages were looking at the end of their career as more of this work had been outsourced to Indian software factories saw Y2K as a last hurrah.

COBOL is still very robust and runs business processes very fast, so is maintained around the world today.

Y2K impact

Professor Martyn Thomas in a keynote speech given in 2017 documented a number of errors that occurred. From credit card reading failures and process shut downs to of false positive medical test results across the world. But by and large the world carried on as normal.

Academic research (Anderson, Banker et al) suggests that the most entrepreneurially competitive companies leaned hard into the Y2K focus on IT and used the resources spent to transform their IT infrastructure and software. Garcia and Wingender showed that these competitive returns were shown to provide a benefit to publicly listed company stock prices at the time.

There were also some allegations that software companies and consultants over-egged the risks. Hindsight provides 20:20 vision.

IT spending dropped dramatically during 2001 and 2002, and by the middle of 2003 technology started to see replacement of software and equipment bought to address Y2K. But the US department of commerce claimed that was no more than a transient effect on economic growth. This was supported by the Kliesen paper in 2003, which posited that the boom and subsequent economic bust was not as a result of Y2K preparation.

More information

Like It or Not, Gaudy Y2K Style Is Roaring Back | Vogue

These Celebrity Y2K Outfits Weirdly Look Like They’re From 2023 | InStyle magazine

20 Years Later, the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke—Because Those Behind the Scenes Took It Seriously | Time magazine (December 30, 2019)

National Museum of American History – Y2K collection

Y2K: a retrospective view by Anthony Finkelstein (PDF)

Y2K: Myth or Reality? Luis Garcia-Feijóo and John R. Wingender, Jr.
Quarterly Journal of Business and Economics (Summer 2007)

Replacing Y2K technology boosts spending | The Record (July 28, 2003)

Y2K spending by entrepreneurial firms by Mark C. Anderson, Rajiv D. Banker, Ram Natarajan, Sury Ravindran US: Journal of Accounting and Public Policy (December 2001)

Exploiting the benefits of Y2K preparation by Stewart Robertson and Philip Powell (September 1999) Communications of ACM

Was Y2K Behind the Business Investment Boom and Bust? Kevin L. Kliesen

What Really Happened in Y2K? Professor Martyn Thomas (April 4, 2017) (PDF)
February 20, 2024
Hong Kong measurements
The train of thought to this post about Hong Kong measurements started with a friend’s class learning do-it-yourself skills. I had rented an apartment when I lived in the city and had no need to do home repairs myself. I wondered past hardware stores, saw metric drill bits and rules.

Metric

My supermarket-bought groceries had their measurements on in metric. Hong Kong measurements go back to history and culture. I knew more about traditional measurements from traditional Chinese medicine shops and period Hong Kong cinema than the local ‘wet’ markets.

I didn’t drive, but the speed limits were all in Km/H like Ireland. Pedestrian signs for the most part didn’t need distances because everything is so compact and the public transport so good.

If I had driven, I would have seen distances in kilometres on the expressway. In fact, the only time I can remember using distances on pedestrian signs were on hikes like this one below, with distances in kilometres and approximate time that the walk should take.

What became apparent in my discussion that that Hong Kong measurements are more complex than would appear at a cursory glance.

Inches and pints

The method of instruction in the do-it-yourself was predominantly imperial measures with a metric equivalent being secondary. Timber could still be provided in 2×4 inch planks. Both imperial and metric drill bits were available to buy.

You could order a pint, though like many other countries, you will be served a 1/2 litre glass in most bars.

The laws governing weights and measures in trade is covered by the Weights and Measures Ordinance. This was drafted in 1988, came into force in 1989 and has been amended for formatting since. The related Weights and Measures Order of 2021 added US units were different alongside imperial measures, metric and traditional Chinese measurements. Though this seemed to be for reference, rather than encouraging the active use of American measures in Hong Kong. American products usually come with the equivalent metric sizing for items like drinks cans volume.

Taels and Cattis

Hong Kong uses Chinese traditional measures alongside more standard measures in certain markets – from fresh produce bought in the ‘wet’ markets to sales of gold and silver.

Before I had got to Hong Kong I had hear of taels and cattis. Taels is the traditional unit by which gold (and silver) had been sold amongst the wider Chinese community from Liverpool to Shanghai. If you’ve sat through enough old kung fu movies, you will have heard of a bounty or reward to be paid in taels.

However like other pre-Metric weights like hundredweights and tons; taels and cattis now mean different dimensions in different markets.

Hong Kong hews to the traditional weights and measures for this. Taiwan’s taels and cattis are more related to the measures of the Imperial Japanese empire. Taiwan may even refer to taels and cattis using different words. Mainland China went through a period of simplification during communist rule from Chinese characters to measures. Their taels and cattis are more aligned to metric measures.

Singapore struck much more closely to the metric system which it has adopted from 1968 – 1970. While traditional measures are included in the statutes for reference and fabric discussions still happen in terms of square yards, you will be charged for the metric measure. This was because post-independence Singapore had to make its own way in the world without the mother country of empire. China was closed off at the time and the city state had to think of its place in terms of global scale.

So why is this all important?

Measurements are essential to our points of reference in everyday life. The variance of points of reference can affect perceptions around attributes like value for money, or whether something is big or small. It affects how we think about tasks to be done or distances to be walked and things to be carried.

It can be a ‘grain of sand’ in the shoe level of dissonance, familiar, yet different. Rather like the average European pondering the American distance definition of ‘a block’. Our cities aren’t built on grid systems for the most part, so we don’t have the same feel for the measure. Speaking to a New Yorker friend; a block was considered by them to about a tenth of a mile. BUT, different cities have different sized blocks and it isn’t a formal definition. It’s a quintessential American cultural artifact and yet very inexact.

For a business there are additional factors to consider
- Complexity of regulations.
- Additional complexity in terms of product instructions.
- Descriptive copywriting and advertising claims.
- Pricing strategies and arbitrage opportunities. For instance, while Hong Kong gold might be duty free – does the differing weight from one’s home affect price considerations?
While Hong Kong is being reintegrated back into mainland China, even apparently small issues like measurement units could become political in nature.

As they are product of a unique history and emergent culture not shared with the mainland, rather like modern Hong Kong Cantonese. The Cantonese language evolved from being similar to that spoke in Guangdong province in the early 1960s to develop its own Hong Kong-specific idioms, lone words (from English, Japanese and South Asian languages spoken in the territory by minorities). Now with the increasing influx of mainland immigrants there is use of mandarin code switching added into the mix.

The use of multiple measures allows Hong Kongers and their businesses to be commercial ‘citizens of the world’ in their transactions. Hong Kongers have also taken these measures abroad. Going to a China town jeweller or pawn shop will allow you to buy gold taels, even though the weight on your receipt might be in troy ounces or grams.

Alongside Hong Kong-specific cuisine, the unique mix of measurement units may be its unique informal contribution to the world alongside archive films, long after the city becomes just another city in China.

More Hong Kong related content can be found here.

More information

Chapter 8: The language of the Road – Transport Department Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

The Weights and Measures Ordinance, Chapter 68, Laws of Hong Kong

The Weights and Measures Order (2021)

Weights and Measures – The Customs and Excise Department Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
February 16, 2024