Tag: Amazon.com

The Remains of Print

The Post is now under new ownership. So is the iconic Newsweek. Both incidentally got taken over by jungle-like entities like Amazon and the Beast, respectively. New world order (or jungle order). The “barbarians” are once again at the gate.

New totem pole. New titanic shift, from analog to digital, from print to online.

I prefer to see this change-over than seeing the Washington Times taken over by  a then cultic figure (Moon).

Big play. Big players. The game of influence. of Soft Powers and soft-wares.

It’s the other shoe that drops (from the time of the Reformation, with the advent of the printing press).

Back then, it was the free circulation of the Bible among the mass ( oral and scribal tradition).  Now, it’s the viral popularity of an Islamic scholar studying the life of a “political”  Jesus

With Al Jazeera (the other CNN) and Amazon, we got the complete set of opinion leaders for our world.

Want to know something? go on Wikipedia.

Want to hear something? plenty of cable channels.

Want to buy something? go on Amazon.com.

Jeff was telling interviewers that his favorite book was “the Remains of the Day” (about a butler who saw the change or more likely, the decline of aristocracy in the West).

Now, he finds himself amidst another real-life decline, a paradigm shift. And all that remains of print are those Google’s scanned pages (our modern equivalent of microfiche) for researchers of historical facts.

We process information differently. In print, we interact with those fonts and we turn the pages.

Online, we are glued to the screen, and before we know it, we might click on porn pages.

Just one of the many differences.

As creatures, we have yet learned how to handle the beast.

Massive inflow of content. Sheep among wolves.

Sleepy eyes and desensitized filters.

7 billion souls, one web site (Google).

We search that which reinforces our prejudice (a priori), or when lazy, let the SEO bots dictate what we are exposed to.

All that remains are stove-pipe thinking. More alliances and armed comrades are formed. But less in original thinking.

We need another generation or two before we can handle this new change (by then, it’s a new norm).

No more memoirs in print. Just sensational up-to-the-minute expose on celebrity and consumerism.

Those who have built good “filter” will become great curators of this new information explosion.

Those who don’t, won’t.

The new divide (information gap) won’t be geographical. It will be content-rich and content-poor folks.

The the twain shall never meet.

All that remains are for the brokers to exploit, and the pipe deliverers to profit in this new “jungle” whose sole law is survival of the smartest.

In this post-print environment, we need to say farewell to prejudices. We need to learn to be childlike, to soak in new and uncomfortable piece of news. To be changed and change-agent. It will be a tearful farewell to “home”, where each morning we expect to see sunrise and newspaper delivered on the front lawn. All that remains is a new You, with all the changes in one’s life time, more than our great grandparents and later generations have ever experienced.

That’s how important this tectonic shift is. It’s a bookend to a long overdue, but necessary re-structuring: modernity and progress.

 

Value Added

JC Penney “sales managers” are told to pack up, and get back in line to apply for their direct reports’ jobs.

Yahoo people back to the office.

And Best Buy mobile Geek Squad are told to park out back and get in the office as well.

Big-box retailers are suffering and pinching pennies.

The flip side of this tory is the rise of Amazon and other online retailers.

So consumers are still buying. Just not from traditional stores as much (auto parts are also sold online).

Maybe Pet.com can try again 12 years after the crash.

As long as you seek to “pour your heart into it” (It here refers to the Starbucks coffee cup), people can sense it.

The VAS effect.

Human empathy, listening and connecting.

Win-win value proposition.

Yes, I know how you feel. There has been one thing after another: the threat of annihilation, of elimination and of inflation.

We thank you for your patronage, knowing you have other choices.

Just to illustrate the power of a positive experience.

When I first saw Woodstock footage in my cousin’s theatre, I never forgot Ten Years After.

The solo guitarist has just died at the age of 68. But sure enough, he had made lasting impressions beyond ten years after  I saw the film.

Not only satisfied customers remember the VAS effect, they go about telling others (customer turned advocate). Hence, customer service closes the loop (Marketing-Sales-Service–Word-of-mouth marketing).

Remember to go beyond the sales, beyond deliverable, to complete customer’s buying experience. Good impressions last for years after.

De-clutterization

With Kindle, one can download library e-books and save a trip to the library.

(no more browsing video titles like Yoga for beginners, Yogurt for vegetarians….).

Just search, type in your ID and click “borrow”.

I first noticed that huge book, entitled KNOWLEDGE, with a fine print which says, “Printed in China“.

Now, even those outsourcing jobs are eliminated as we get closer to full digitazation. Spell checking, meaning look-up, translation, archive and links, all on one screen.

Our offices at home and at work should be adapted accordingly (except for Zappos‘ which positioned its desks in the way to encourage staff interaction and reinforce its people-oriented culture).

Just look at the NYSE Euronex’s traders on their feet all day, with wireless headsets and eyes glued to terminals. They still use bookie’s notes, but not for long.

In ten years, we will hook up headsets into our ears and maybe water into our mouth (to skip the bottles which take 60 years to decompose).

Living longer, with less stuff and more data. Welcome to our 21st century, when less is more. Welcome to the age of de-clutterization (not anti-materialistic, just less stuff). You might want to put the 3-D glasses in a special case, next to the remote control, to go along with our new minimalist green-and-sustainable life style. One thing we can’t get rid of is the mattress (personal library can go). The evolution of man has been to go from sleeping bags at a garage start-up, to foam mattresses for baby boomers.

Mattress comfort is ranked up there, right along with our library book download in large-font.

Culture shock, future shock, aftershock

We just saw an aftershock in Japan at magnitude 7.0. In and of itself, it’s a major earthquake. But, since it had been preceded by the big one (9.0), it is pale in comparison.

As to culture shock, a man from the Amazon who got transported to Seattle, WA will only hear one thing in common: Amazon.com.
The rest like Starbucks, Microsoft etc… seems strange to him. Off the bet, he needs winter wear to survive.

Like Austin Powers who needs to adjust expectations, majorly, upon stepping out of deep freeze.

Things are partitioned with biometric passwords and cumbersome authentication process (unlike the Woodstock fence which got pushed down and stayed down for the duration of the three-day concert). No room on the VW van or Love bus for Luddites.

Welcome to our digital future, where everything is mobile and online.

Austin cannot use his traditional charm to pry for information.

In other words, his spy craft needs serious brush-ups.

(incidentally, dentistry has advanced quite nicely since his time).

He will hardly get any service or human interaction: at the gym (finger print pad, more sophisticated than Austin’s spy school,) on the phone with “customer service” (speech recognition and voice activation before you get a live operator, from call center far way, whose accent Austin incidentally can ID, but may be doubtful if he had mis-dialed the country code).

Even kids check text messages while talking to parents. The Dad still checks out stock quotes while his wife nags that dinner was ready.

Yet one deadline remains the same: April 15th. As sure as death, tax time is due time for everyone. Government might get shut down, so pay up.

The future is now. But it comes not without a few shocks of its own.

Meanwhile, ROW (rest of world) is playing catch up. Emerging countries all try to export their stuff to the Walmart near you. Pretty soon, we are surrounded by Dollar stores, where everything is priced at one dollar, inflation-adjusted.

BTW, when our Austin Powers runs into our Amazon man in Seattle, they can agree on one thing: we need to take care of Mother Nature, because these aftershocks are not funny. Quite inconvenient indeed. Whether you are a primitive man or a hit man, you know that when the bell tolls for thee, it’s also for me. Culture shock, I can adapt. Future shock, I can embrace. But aftershock, …. it keeps me up at night. Just check with Fukushima and Sandy refugees in the shelters. They can tell you, it may take years, not months, before they can return to “normal”. I can empathize, having absorbed all three shocks myself.

co-ding

It’s been an amazing contest. Netflix 1 million dollar prize was awarded to the first team of coders.

The second team came in, with equally good stuff, just 20 minutes after the deadline.

Data rule.

Organized and monetized data, that is.

The information age is here to stay. Symbol recognition and manipulation.

Pretty soon, we won’t have to tell websites what we want . They will have the ability to hold up the mirror, and help us see ourselves, our preferences, remote or immediate .

Concierge Age. Both for advertisers and for shoppers.

“Those who shop for this, tends to buy that”. Agent of influence.

I had my share of buying Amazon popped up suggestions.

In the age of Long Tail, companies like Netflix base their models solely on buyer’s known preferences.

There is no need to pay for store front, stocks are almost at zero cost if you consider Digital publishing or DVD copying (just-in-time.)

With Red Box, I feel sorry for the video pirates. It’s already a dollar for each new release. Who need to go to the alley,

risking an arrest, to purchase a poor quality (perhaps made out of home videotaping in the theater) pirated copy?

Back to our winning team. At the end of Market Place interview, they said they wanted to catch some sleep.

These guys don’t go to Disneyland. They like to code.

What I learned from the interview was that they collaborated with people from a different team, as long as they

can generate new ideas and together, come up with solutions. The runner-up also said that while working on the project, they already applied their new learning to help their clients. The reward had already been reaped before they handed in their project 20 minutes after the deadline.

These guys must be made of a different cloth. Their concept of teaming, winning is as radical as their approach to coding. I mean, since when people came up with Open Source, i.e. letting others see their recipe.

The answer lies in what Chris Anderson said all along in Wired: it’s the abundance mentality whose Tail is long.

Come and join us. Share the land since  the harvest is abundant. 24/7 around the globe. Just code.