Archive for the 'Business' category

The Real Numbers Behind AT&T’s Price “Increase”

Jan 19 2012 Published by under Business, Mobile, Technology

It has been interesting to watch the reaction to AT&T’s price “increases” today – interesting in that most of the chatter on AT&T’s rate increase focuses solely on prices going up.  There really is a bigger story there:

 First, the increases:

AT&T Data Plus 300MB: $20 for 300MB
AT&T Data Pro 3GB: $30 for 3GB (up from $25)
AT&T Data Pro 5GB: $50 for 5GB, with mobile hotspot / tethering

The lowest tier is $5 higher (33%) but comes with 300MB instead of 200MB (50% more).  The net effect is a reduction in the cost per 100MB from $7.5 to $6.66. If my math is right, that’s about an 11% decline.

The middle tier also rises $5 (20%) but comes with 3GB instead of 2GB (50% more).  So the cost per gigabyte actually dropped $2.50. A net reduction of 20% per GB.At the high end, the rate has actually dropped by $5 from $55 to $50 (see this price chart from PCMag just a few months ago). That’s a 9% decline.

Most of the coverage I have seen mentions the rate increase only in the lower and middle tier. I suspect the reason nobody is commenting on the higher tier in most of the coverage is because it contradicts the “rates are rising” storyline.  Why let facts get in the way of a good article, right?

The price drop for heavier users, and the fact that you are paying less for the equivalent amount of bandwidth, is largely unreported. I guess it just doesn’t fit with the established narrative that telecom companies are out to take more money but not improve service.

No responses yet

A La Carte for Video Games

Sep 22 2011 Published by under Gaming, Sales, Technology, Xbox

Last night I tweeted something mostly to mock the “free culture” movement that doesn’t want to pay for anything.  Since I mostly play the multiplayer versions of video games, and rarely spend any time at all with the storyline, I made the following comment:

A la carte for video games! Why should I have to buy the storyline just to get the multiplayer?

Since then, it occurred to me that there is a larger point to be made from that idea.  Everyone agrees that a disk based video game industry is on the way out.  As next generation consoles include more drive capacity, broadband speeds continue to rise; and optical drives fall aside in favor of downloadable content, the idea of a straight download model makes sense.

As delivery changes, the options for sales grow.  Services like OnLive, Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade clearly illustrates that streaming or direct to drive game delivery are models that work.  Given the removal of physical constraints that accompany disks, there is little reason game companies couldn’t provide three versions of a game – multiplayer, storyline, and a combo pack.

If they did, people like me would never buy the storyline again.  I simply don’t find the storyline game all that interesting.  Linear games are boring affairs and open-world can get just as tedious.  Multiplayer is infinitely variable depending on the opposition.  Campers (those cowardly rat bastards) aside, human players make a more interesting game.

If I could buy just the multiplayer for half the cost of the combo pack, I’d buy a lot more games.  My total contribution to the industry wouldn’t drop, but it would be spread out across a wider array of companies.  I suspect a lot of people would do the same.

The possibility of owning a larger library of games I would play (multiplayer) and keeping my drive from being all crudded  up with storyline crap, appeals to me.  I hope the game developers will realize the options available to them and consider breaking up the product.

That said, I’m not about to demand FCC acton to regulate game companies to make that happen.

No responses yet

Taco Bell Now Transphobic AND Bashing Immigrants

Sep 28 2010 Published by under Business, How Not To Sell, Marketing, Sales

I’m not sure who is doing Taco Bell’s advertising, but speaking as someone who does communications for a living, I think they should be fired immediately.

Apparently it wasn’t enough to bash the transgendered.  That ad was pulled and they issued a formal apology.  Now the fast food giant’s advertising brain trust has set their sights on a new scourge facing America – Hispanics who sell food door-to-door in offices.

For a couple of years out of college I worked in a warehouse – arriving every day at 5:30 am to get the morning shipments out the door.  Around 6:45 every morning, a guy would arrive carrying a cooler chest full of breakfast burritos.  They were, and to this day, remain some of my favorite burritos.

The point to that little anecdote is this: I would pay $5.50 for one of those burritos right now, before I would consider spending ninety-nine cents at Taco Bell.  The quality was far superior.  The larger reason, though, is that the Hispanic guy selling them got up earlier than I did every morning, made dozens of breakfast burritos, and then spent his morning selling them door-to-door.  He had drive, a good recipe, and found a way to support himself peddling those burritos. That deserves my support far more than Taco Bell does.

Taco Bell, part of a giant conglomerate of sketchy food brands, is now bashing exactly that sort of hard working individual – suggesting that it’s proud to be undercutting them and pushing them out.

That’s a lovely campaign.  Taco Bell should really be proud of themselves and their ad firm.

No responses yet

Putting the “Old” Back in New Media

Jun 08 2009 Published by under Business, Politics, Society, The Internet

Recently I have been troubled by something and I was having a hard time putting a finger on what it was. As I was scanning RSS feeds and Google Alerts this morning a number of articles with similar headlines jumped out at me. They all shared a common theme about the dangers of social media “experts” and “silos” within companies. Reading them helped crystallize some of my own shifting thoughts on the proper role of social media, and even the Internet more broadly, within an organization or campaign.

An AdAge article by Jonah Bloom titled Dedicated Social-Media Silos? That’s the Last Thing We Need caught my eye and I took a read. Bloom thesis is pretty sound – when a “new way” appears, people split into two camps. The adherents or adopters of the new way begin to see it as a critical component of future planning and separate from those who do not adapt.

Every time an apparently foreign object is identified… the inhabitants split, roughly speaking, into two parties — those who fear the foreign body and those who are excited by it. The excited annex the object and create their own nation around it. The fearful homelanders breathe a sigh of relief and go back to doing whatever it was they were doing — albeit with just a few nagging fears about the ambitions of the fledgling country being built next door.

I have, myself, led the march of adherents in several instances and find I am still doing so today. I have, for much of my career, seen the “nagging fears“. I sense the derision and skepticism every time my fellow blogger and I walk the halls at our office and hear the “there go the ‘bloggers’ with their ‘Twitters’ and their ‘FaceySpaces”‘.” He and I often wonder if the first media guy at the association heard, “there goes the ‘TV’ guy with his ‘saturation buy’ and his ‘gross rating points’.”

When people sense change, but fear or don’t understand it, they mock it. They make it different.

But the adherents to the new way are no different. Look at my old blog post that I linked above. I sound like a cokcy prick. Only my way can save us.

At the RNC I led the creation of a new Internet division charged with overseeing all things digital. It was, to say the least, a mistake in retrospect. The problem was not one of divisional boundaries. As Bloom argues:

By dedicating resources and attention to the new medium, discipline or, in social media’s case, idea, those who work in the field are able to quickly advance it and ensure that it prospers.

The problem, however, is that the new and old states cannot exist successfully without the other, a fact they realize after they have set up separate and often competitive fiefdoms that barely speak the same language.

Elevating the importance of the eCampaign division at the RNC was beneficial as it made people think differently about the role of the Internet. Over the long term, however, I believe it has ultimately proved harmful because it has created a new layer of bureaucracy. Further, the focus on how to be tech-savvy has, I believe, detracted from the larger mission of how to be savvy.

I am hereby reversing my earlier position that the Internet be given special prominence in your organization or campaign.

The RNC dodesn’t need a division for the Internet, they need people (not a person) in Communications that recognize the Internet’s role as a channel for multiple types of communications. That could be blog outreach, banner advertising, SEO, social media, or countless other ways to move a message or have a conversation.

The RNC needs people in political that understand how these tools can be used for organizing, and more importantly, how the people can be empowered via these tools to organize themselves.

The RNC needs people in finance that understand the difference between revised direct mail copy and good e-mail. They need people who understand SocNets and the way to leverage them to make small dollars add up to big bucks.

Your online media is no more, and no less important than anything else you do. The fact that you can use new media to more quickly attract and reach customers or voters has little relevance if you have no idea what to say to them and no idea what you want them to do.

Before I became “an Internet guru” (not my word choice, but one that I hear when I’m introduced), I was simply a political operative. I did statistical analysis to determine voting patterns and I focused on things like voter files, turnout models, and coalition building.

When I listen to twenty-something consultants taking about the Internet and what it will do, most of that is gone. There is much discussion of the long tail and the crowdsourcing, but little discussion of the offline mechanics of politics – as if every conversation in every diner in America has been supplanted with Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe that every conversation taking place at every diner in America is currently taking place online. But for most people, the real world is still their playground of choice. We cannot become so focused on our love of innovation that we lose sight of the core technology at the heart of politics – people.

Just as books changed the way we told stories, radio changed the number of people to whom we could tell them, and video changed the richness of our narrative, the Internet will empower us all to be both story teller and audience. The story, however, is still the same, and no media can claim supremacy. Before we act high and mighty, we must, as Bloom says, look at what we are leaving behind.

One response so far

The Perfect Storm Of Stupid

Oct 03 2008 Published by under Business, Congress, Craziness, Crime, Democrats, Government, How Not To Sell, Legislation, Republicans, Society, Stuck On Stupid, The Economy, The Law, Waste

Let’s be clear about one thing. The economic disaster we find ourselves in is not entirely the making of Wall Street. For the Democrats in the audience, it is not entirely the fault of Republicans. For the Republicans in the audience, this is not entirely the fault of Democrats. This is, to put it plainly, the net result of the perfect storm of stupidity.

If you have ever read The Perfect Storm, there is a great explanation of the three weather phenomenon that came together to create the system that is the focus of the book. The movie glosses over the explanation, so read the book instead.

What we are witnessing this week is the same interaction of three deadly factors. Any one of the three would be destructive. In total, however, they have just cost you and I a trillion dollars. And don’t for a moment think the total will end there. Mark my words, this bailout has only begun to cost us.

The Three Factors

Under a Republican congress and Democratic President, Washington expanded a Carter era relic called the Community Reinvestment Act.

The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound banking operations.

In other words, banks will make loans for houses to people who are ill-equipped to pay them back. The “encouragement” came in the form of penalties for not doing so.

Add to that another bill passed by a GOP controlled Congress with a Democratic President. That bill, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act sought to:

Enhance competition in the financial services industry by providing a prudential framework for the affiliation of banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and other financial service providers, and for other purposes.

In other words, prior to the law, Insurance companies could sell insurance, banks could do loans, securities firms sold stock, and never the three should meet. After the law, it was a free for all. Banks created securities out of the shitty loans they issued under the CRA, Insurance companies under wrote those while creating their own shitty securities, etc, etc.

Now into the mix you have to throw the American people. They look at the news and see home values going through the roof. The react the same way they did during the Beanie Baby craze. They rush out to get a piece of that action. They can buy a $5 stuffed animal and sell it for $300 on eBay, so they buy the hell out of Beanie Babies.

Unfortunately, economic laws will only support that for so long. The company will make more (thereby reducing demand for the things), people will lose interest, or some other force will enter the market and suddenly your left with crates full of stuffed animals rotting in closets. Beanie Babies were an artificial market.

In the same way, people saw home ownership as a great way to make money. Home flipping became the rage, people took out second mortgages to buy second homes, and suddenly everyone had to buy a house.

The Perfect Storm

The trouble is when you have people who can’t afford to buy houses meeting up with people who have to sell houses to keep from running afoul of laws designed to promote home ownership among the poor, you wind up with a) a guy who will lie about his income or b) a guy who will lie about the value of the house or the terms of the loan.

So suddenly a lot of people are invested in houses they can barely afford anyway, and the real terms of those notes go into effect. People can’t pay, so the value of that note becomes worthless.

Since you have built shitty securities on the value of that house, the value of those securities go into the toilet. When that happens, the debt that the mortgage company is carrying becomes unsustainable and the house of cards comes tumbling down.

This is exactly what we’re witnessing. We’re seeing exactly what happens when an artificial market comes tumbling down. There never was a market for housing for people who can’t afford it. The government created one, took their eyes of the guys who were managing it, and is now asking us to throw another deck on the house of cards so people who can’t afford to borrow can keep doing so.

DC is Fundamentally Broken

I have said that Washington DC is so fundamentally broken it is going to drag the rest of the country down with it. I am more convinced of that than ever today.

With this bailout, we’re solving nothing. We’re simply allowing people who shouldn’t have credit to keep on borrowing. We’re enabling addictive behavior. The Congressmen who voted for the bailout should be tried as traitors.

Despite all of that, I was forced to watch to politicians on TV last night both of whom blamed “the greed and corruption of Wall Street” for the mess while giving a pass to the incompetence and stupidity of Washington. Make no mistake. This dismal situation was the result of horrible policy that started with, and was supposed to be overseen by, Congress. They passed the laws that allowed this to happen and ARE TAKING ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSIBILITY for the mess they created.

What’s worse, is both candidates for President, and both candidates for Vice President, appear to have learned absolutely nothing from watching this happen and are pursuing the same ridculous policies that have crippled our nation.

I believe you can absolutely count on two things.

First, when the next Administration is about 6 months or a year into its term, they will have to deal with an economic disaster of Biblical proportions. This is a band-aid fix for a missing leg. It’s stupid and will do nothing but punt the problem into an off-year when the sheep aren’t watching.

Second, if you think we dodged a bullet with this bill today, you haven’t seen anything yet.

No responses yet

Older posts »