Ged Carroll

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.

  • Free party clampdown

    An old clubbing pal of mine from Birkenhead Si forwarded on this interesting article in the Western Morning News. According to the article police are preparing to use the wide ranging powers of the Anti Social Behaviour Act 2003 to clamp down on unauthorised open-air gatherings – a free party; in conjunction with provisions already made by sections 63 – 67 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. With its definition of music as an emission of a succession of repetitive beats, thus allowing unscheduled opera performances but not young peoples music.

    While I can understand people’s concerns over noise; I am more concerned about the right to associate, freedom of expression (by speech, music or visual media) and the two standards allowed in the law making free party attendees second-class citizens.

    And politicians wonder why so many voters are apathetic?

    May it have something to do with:

    • the persistent erosion of voters rights?
    • a lack of clear differentiation between many of the social policies of both major political parties?
    • legislation that no longer represents the social mores of much of the electorate?
    • a collectively small amount of life experience amongst professional politicians, the significant majority of which are trained lawyers?
    • a cynical political process that means that politicians go after softer targets rather than dealing with the big policing issues in the UK, such as organised crime, rise in violent crime, white collar and corporate crime?

    Si also generously included a link to lots of information on where there might be a local free party here, just remember its free as in speech; the parties do cost money to put on. More culture related posts here.

  • Unskilled and Unaware of It?

    I came across research on unskilled hubris, whilst reading the latest article by Bob Cringely.

    Bob Cringely’s column for PBS.org, the online version of America’s undervalued public broadcasting service usually provides an unusually clear window into tech industry issues that affect us all.

    Microsoft vs. Burst Networks

    This week Cringely is talking about a court case between Microsoft and Burst Networks about alleged sharp practice and intellectual property theft by Microsoft (glass houses and stones seem to spring to mind).

    Unskilled and unaware

    What was of more interest however was a link to an American Psychological Association publication: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments by Justin Kruger and David Dunning Department of Psychology at Cornell University

    People that would fulfil this category are not new. Peter Ustinov was quoted as saying that he got in his career because he wasn’t good enough to be held back. In his case, this was self depreciation, but the  humour of it taps into an essential truth. 

    Office based sit coms are usually based on this premise. The talent but put upon underlings with an unskilled boss who thinks that they are they are under. This can be seen from the Mary Tyler Moore Show and 9 to 5, to The Office. 

    Conversely many capable senior people that I know suffer from feelings of impostor syndrome. More consumer behaviour related content here. 

  • Dance Music Industry

     Many dance music labels have closed down, particularly those owned by the majors like Strictly Rhythm and Credence. Cream runs festivals and restaurants rather than clubs and looks to Latin America and Eastern Europe for growth, Home is looking to be let out as retail space and the giant screen on the side of the building sits there in darkness

    – Young people are listening to rock now, yes they are but they also have varied taste – which is why dance music festivals are doing well

    – People want live music, the amount of live music venues in the UK dropped way below what it should have done and it is good to see it come back

    – People want R&B, R&B has always been popular

    – The dance music scene has stagnated, much of it has and UK record labels have been guilty of churning out more rubbish than most. The mash-up is a classic sign of creative bankruptcy in the industry and Hoxton’s tastes do not play well thoughout the rest of the UK. I cannot remember the last record I bought from a UK label, I suspect it was probably this time last year. I have however, kept buying imported records from the US and Europe

    – US labels like Nervous, Guidance or even going back to Trax Records and DJ International, survived in a hostile home market by selling abroad, why can’t the UK labels

    -US labels on the west coast are surviving an onslaught on to their scene by police using draconian crack house laws to shut the parties down and send organisers to jail for ten years, they are still making good music and selling records worldwide successfully

    – Young people are drinking and not doing drugs: that’s why cocaine seizures are up, MDMA is plentiful and cheap

    There are labels that are thriving: Defected is licensing American content from the likes of Miguel Migs. While there is much of the input like Junior Jack that is not my cup of tea you have to hand it Simon Dunmore that he is managing to walk the line between quality and commercial success for his label

    AATW – all around the world. A label based in Blackburn, Lancs that realised what Pete Waterman discovered twenty years ago. You can run a record label on single sales. Like Pete Waterman the records are well produced tat that know their target market really well. They are down market and the listeners are disparaged as ‘Northern Pill Monkeys‘ by London based record executives, and their acts are criticised as ‘a plumber with a tired lap dancer’ but they are getting out there and buying the singles.

    I personally don’t believe that you have to provide customers with a ‘crap’ product, that a well crafted one will sell, but you have to know your marketplace. Many of the tastemakers within the industry have lost sight of that and need to move on.

    One person that seems to have it right (all be it on a small scale) is my friend Nick Lawrence’s label Altered Vibes that has gone from strength to strength by not compromising on quality and developing its artists. Something that is hard to do when the majors like EMI are dropping 30 per cent of their rostered artists in one fell swoop and putting less and less each year into development. More media industry related posts here.

  • Ivan Seidenberg downfall?

    Who is Ivan Seidenberg?

    Ivan Seidenberg is head of Verizon, a U.S. telecoms company based in New Jersey, they jointly own one of the U.S.’s largest mobile phone operators with Vodafone and are provide landlines to Americans living on the eastern seaboard. They are a direct descendant of the Bell Telephone Co. a former telecoms monopoly rather like BT prior to privatisation. Verizon was one of the baby Bells made by the break-up of the previous company. It was originally called Bell Atlantic but has grown beyond its roots by acquisition and joint venture.

    What is a folly?

    A folly is the ruins of a great accomplishment that never gets finished. The English landscape is dotted with disused and crumbling monuments. Many of the follies were made by industrialists who spent the wealth generated by textiles mills, shipyards and heavy industries. A more modern day version of this would be the expensive shower curtains purchased by L. Dennis Kozlowski during the recent Tyco scandal in the U.S.

    What’s the SP?

    In January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Seidenberg laid out a plan to spend two billion dollars digging up and replacing the copper cables that lie between the customers house and the telephone exchange, replacing it with strands of glass called optical fibre.

    This is interesting because:

    Verizon until now has been very focused on creating shareholder value, broadly that means working the business in such a way that they keep paying a dividend and the share price keeps going up. In order to do that you need to avoid ‘bet the farm’ type moves, or anything that may unsettle institutional shareholders. One of my frustrations working as a PR consultant agency-side with Bell Atlantic mobile (a predecessor of Verizon) was trying to get my spokespeople to say anything daring, visionary or forward-thinking. We struggled to send out news, even issuing European  press releases about mobile phones donated to battered wives shelters in New Jersey

    • Verizon, historically has made more of a mess in providing value-added services over broadband and wireless services than other carriers like Deutsche Telekom or BT, there is no indication of how Verizon is likely to be able to make additional value out of the investment. Capgemini did a survey of 100 CEOs in the telecoms, media and technology sectors in 2000, which I helped to promote. One of the summary conclusions that came out of it was that everybody knew they wanted broadband, but they did not know what it would be used for, or how they were going to make money out of value-added services. I still believe that to be the case, I have seen nothing that has convinced me otherwise
    • Online and digital entertainment is very much up in the air, no one is sure how the market is going to pan out
    • Content providers will rob you blind, Apple recently said all the 99 cents a track from iTunes Music Service went on credit card transaction costs and record company royalty payments, How will there be room for someone like Verizon at the table?
    • Selling fibre to consumers would disrupt the market for business data communications, driving prices down and causing a corporate bloodbath unlike anything we have seen in modern times. It could annihilate companies like WorldCom who are in the final stages of bankruptcy protection and Comcast who sell broadband DSL services. This very disruptive process while in theory of some benefit to consumers, could still be loaded with many anti-trust issues
    • The economics of putting fibre into the ground are very complex. Putting fibre in the ground is no more difficult than putting in cable. Optical fibre has its own challenges, water must not be allowed anywhere near the fibre, otherwise it will get between its plastic skin and the glass causing a kink that greatly reduces its ability to carry a signal, Despite the best efforts of the likes of Corning this process happens by osmosis, because of this optical fibre is very likely to decay to uselessness in less than ten years; potentially a much shorter lifespan than the copper cable it replaces
    • Generally the denser the population the cheaper it is to wire them up, you don’t have to go miles from one house to another. Verizon covers some of the densest population on the planet and the high rise living of Manhattanites presents its own engineering problems with added expense
    • The biggest barrier to putting fibre into the home has been the cost of the electronics at either end of the cable, these have come down in cost, but not as fast as the cost of computing power or electronic storage. This would still be substantially dearer than a cable box, broadband satellite receiver or DSL router
    • Providing consumers access to huge amounts of bandwidth means that you need to ensure that there are no bottlenecks in the core of the network. Verizon like most carriers are still carrying the billions of dollars already spent in the core of their network as high value assets. Will this have to be scrapped and made over to allow for the new fibre world? How would this affect their balance sheet?
    • Verizon like many carriers relies on declining numbers of traditional voice calls to finance new services including this ambitious plan, how would it finance it and how would this affect shareholders?
    • In order for Verizon to even make their money back on the fibre installation they need the regulators cut them some slack on forcing them to rent the lines to alternative carriers at cost. A practice currently in place to encourage competition in telephone and broadband services

    If Verizon are successful, it may encourage other telcos to do the same thing, they may not be so lucky….

    Ivan Seidenberg and the False Prophet

    The bet by Ivan Seidenberg reminds me of George Gilder a strange mix of techno sage and right-wing evangelist that America is good at putting out. He foresaw a golden age for the information economy brought about by photonics and charged many business executives a whole pile of money for a newsletter about companies that he felt was at the vanguard of the revolution.

    George’s vision hasn’t come to pass, yet Seidenberg’s plan sounds like something straight from the Gilder playbook including the lack of profit imperative. More telecoms related content here.

  • Sony doesn’t have a clue

    Sony announced yesterday that it was pulling out of the PDA marketplace by stopping making the Clie range. There has been much analysis already of this on all the usual suspect sites online.

    The good news is that they are managing the process in such a way that existing customers won’t get shafted. They deserve a HUGE amount of kudos for this, I wouldn’t expect that kind of attitude from Palm, Dell or Apple.

    Most of the Sony gear that I do like now like their MDR 7506 and 7509 headphones are professional gear that is hard to get hold of, I am saddened that the business isn’t everything that it could be.

    Having in the past been involved with Palm and Sony as consultant and a customer I just wanted to share some observations and unanswered questions that had been brewing about their portable devices for a while:

    – Why did the Clie range never support the Mac community? Their overly designed devices were ideally targeted at these non conformist computer users. Palm and Handspring supported them, whereas Sony made their product as Mac unfriendly as an iPaq

    – Why has Sony bought into to PalmSource and Symbian?

    – Why has it taken them so long to get their act together on iPod type devices and services when they were the first people to have a Palm PDA that could play MP3s

    – Why is the new Vaio iPod wannabe so ugly and complicated looking?

    – Why is there no joined up thinking going on using content to leverage platforms? Do you think that Microsoft would have sat on their hands for this long with the kind of diversity of resources that Sony Corp could knit together?

    – Why did they expect people to buy a 600USD device? This is a known dead price point in tech marketing circles, almost the price of a no make laptop and well over double the price of many competitor devices

    – Why were Clies so slow to adopt wireless?

    – How long are they going to allow Playstation to carry the rest of the business?

    – Will SonyEricsson phones benefit from the Clie product design team?

    More related content here.