- Use the store closings to winnow out bad stores and bad staff.
- Double down on the maker market. Improve execution in parts (stocking and organization).
- Give up on laptops. The office stores have won that war. Keep a modest presence in computer accessories.
- Give up on large TVs; the wholesale clubs own that market. Stay with small TVs.
- Decrease the emphasis on phones but don't exit. Keep a strong presence in accessories and prepaid phones.
- Stay with audio and video cables and accessories. Keep the prices reasonable rather than trying to chase the premium cable business.
- Batteries, especially specialty batteries, are a core strength of the business. Never forget that.
- Keep a toe in audio. Be prepared to step it up if Best Buy fails.
- Stay with the electronic toys. Sales are decent and they bring holiday shoppers into the store.
- Get rid of sales commissions. You want people on the floor who are focused on helping customers, not maximizing their paychecks.
One problem is that their employee incentives work against them. Commissions are a big part of the pay for their sales staff so those people have little interest in selling parts; they want to sell you big ticket items that get them a juicy commission. Contract phones count as high priced items because the commission is based on the unsubsidized price, not the penny you hand the store for the new phone.
All Radio Shack stores that I have ever visited still sell components. The parts just aren't as obvious because most of them are now tucked into drawers rather than displayed on hooks. But a lot of their stores do a terrible job of it, with everything hopelessly jumbled in the drawers and half the components out of stock; that's something they need to change, and closing the weak stores is a step in the right direction.
Having three accounts (my money, your money, and our money) is a common arrangement for couples, including married couples. It keeps you out of a lot of fights about how you spend the non-shared money. Pooling everything works for some people but not for everyone.
Your bank still sends back your checks? All the banks around here just send you printouts with little pictures of checks, assuming you haven't opted out of paper statements. If you have you can download PDFs with little pictures of checks instead. It's not really any more of a paper trail than the printed statement listing your electronic payments is.
This. The main success of Keurig has been in offices, not home use. You quickly get one cup at a time, different workers can each get the kind of coffee they want, and cleanup is painless. All of those things are a huge boon for the break room at work.
I think you'd have to be pretty lazy to buy a Keurig for home use. The home version isn't as convenient because it doesn't have a plumbing connection, so you have to fill it with water for each cup. Cleaning up is easier to do at home, where you usually have a well equipped kitchen, than in a typical break room. It costs a lot more money to use unless you buy the refillable coffee pods. But some people are that lazy and willing to pay the price.
I have a CableCard for my HD HomeRun Prime. Now that it's configured it's great, but getting Comcast to activate it was a painful process.
First there was the problem of getting them to supply me with one. Originally I was told that they were not available at the local service centers; I had to get one sent by mail. So I requested one by mail, and received a package that contained a DVI to HDMI cable and no CableCard. When I called to complain, another call center rep said that they CAN'T mail CableCards, you MUST pick them up in person. Gee, thanks. I then had to visit two service centers to get one; the first center had them but couldn't actually give one to me because their computer didn't believe they had any. (Releasing one is not just a matter of handing you the physical card. They also have to associate the card with your account on their computer or it won't work.) Evidently the cards had been there so long without anybody asking for one that the inventory system had removed them from their active inventory. This was in a poor neighborhood where there probably aren't a lot of TiVos (the main user of CableCards) installed; it just happened to be the easiest one for me to get to. (They don't have a center in my section of Boston.)
After two failed attempts at self-installation they had to send an installer (which, to their credit, I was not charged for because of the failed self-install attempts), and the only reason the installer succeeded when I had not is because he was able to get connected to a more clueful person at the home office which is where the problems had been all along. Basically, the person at the other end during the self-installs had not dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts correctly. The first time, CableCard was recognized by the system but wasn't authorized to watch any channels; the second time it was never recognized by their system at all. Yes, I had supplied them with all the correct numbers from the HD HomeRun.
It's a little more complicated than just not wanting gentrification. In the earlier waves of gentrification, the people moving into the city mostly lived AND worked there. It was a mixed blessing for the city but there were benefits.
The combination they are getting now is the worst of both worlds. They get the rich people living in their city, driving up real estate prices and driving out inexpensive shops and restaurants. But they don't get the businesses, which means that San Francisco loses out on the jobs and the corporate taxes.
It's hard to come up with a location that is good for everybody. Locate in the city and it's good for the transit users but bad for the people who drive to work. Locate in a distant location and it's the other way around. C-level executives mostly drive, so they are the ones who get their wish.
Sometimes the house IS colder when it's colder outside. The thermostat regulates the temperature at one location, which is usually somewhere in the middle of the house. (More modern houses have multiple zones, but the thermostats are still usually well away from the exterior walls.) The temperature in a house is not completely uniform; spots near the walls are usually cooler than spots in the middle of the house. So even if the temperature as seen by the thermostat is identical, the temperature where a person is sitting may not be.
A cut in the price of Windows will improve the margins on devices like Dell's Venue 8 Pro. But I suspect they were already getting a price much lower than $50. It will also mean a resurgence in low-end Windows laptops, basically netbook redux - basically take a Chromebook platform and put in more flash memory.
Now that there is a console that comes with Kinect, the game developers of the world are working on games that will take advantage of it. When it was an optional peripheral, not much game development was aimed at Kinect because the market was too small.
What this says is that making drugs illegal (and thus horrendously expensive) has negative social consequences. Back in the 19th century there were solid citizens who were addicted to drugs, but they were able to support their relatively inexpensive habits with their work or family income so they didn't need to turn to crime.
The headline is comparing apples and oranges. There are some essential differences.
Most of the tech company people who are making really huge sums of money are business creators; the people who started companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, and so forth. The people making big bucks in financial services are caretakers of already-existing businesses; none of the really big financial services companies was created in the past 50 years.
Second, tech companies create things. Banks manage other people's money and make profits from that.
Third, many of those financial service companies wouldn't exist right now if the US government3 hadn't bailed them out a few years ago.
We can argue that tech CEOs who did not start businesses - people like Marissa Mayer or Satya Nadella - shouldn't be as well paid as they are. But that's really the same question as whether non-founding CEOs of any company are paid too much. I believe that they are, but that wasn't the question asked here.
As for the bank bailout, I think the US government should have imposed harsher restrictions on the banks that took the money. I would have made restrictions on executive compensation a permanent condition of taking the money rather than one that only applied until they paid back the money. It's possible that some of the banks would have chosen to dissolve rather than accept that constraint; if so, good riddance.
Comcast is both a cable company AND a large content provider. (They own NBC and its associated cable networks, and Universal's movies and TV productions.) That is why any merger involving them is a special concern; they would both have a huge amount of control over the internet AND the ability to privilege their own content. I would have had less trouble with Time Warner merging with Charter, though I would still have worried about their amount of control over the internet.
What it involved in the case of the original reporter was a connection that would show high speeds with some data sources such as Speedtest.net, but at the same time show very low speeds with other data sources, notably Amazon AWS. (Throttling Amazon Web Services affects many online services, a notable case being Netflix.) The reporter's work connection, also through Verizon, did not exhibit the same selective slowness.
The ACM said "ensure that every K-12 student in the US has the opportunity to study computer science". That isn't the same thing as "everybody learn to code" as the headline says; it's making sure that schools offer classes in computing so students can take them if they wish.
But I would take it further and say that everybody, or at least most people, should learn the basics of coding. Writing computer programs teaches important lessons about logical thought: the importance of including all the necessary steps and including them in the correct order, and of not including steps that don't belong. Students used to learn that kind of thinking from proof geometry, but coding is a better tool because the computer itself provides fast and non-judgmental feedback, and because the actual skill of coding is more likely to be useful to the student.
W3schools reported 9% usage of Internet Explorer, but other sites report much higher numbers. W3schools usage is probably not representative of the internet at large. Another thread here looked critically at that report.
Lenovo wasn't offering phones in western markets and their product line lacked higher-end products. Buying the Motorola phone business gets them both. We may never see a phone bearing the Lenovo name in the US since this deal gives them permanent rights to the Motorola brand for phones. Or they may sell Lenovo-branded phones to the business customers who are already buying Lenovo computers and tablets. They'll do whatever works best to get people to buy the phones.
The Moto purchase and sale may not have been a big success for Google but it looks like a huge win for Lenovo. Another strong player in the Android market is a win for Google, so I think they're going to come out of this deal just fine even if they're losing a bit of money up front.
The Moto G appears to be a hit in developing countries where it was marketed first. It just hit the US market so we don't yet know how well it will sell here. The lack of LTE capability may hold it back, but it's not much of a factor outside the US and Europe because there is little LTE deployment elsewhere. If I were thinking about a $200 Moto G I think I'd pony up the extra money for a Moto X ($330) or a Nexus 5 ($300) instead.
The original pricing of the Moto X held it back from being a big hit; it was priced like a high-end phone but its processor and display were more mid-range. But it does have some innovative features like full-time voice activation, and now that its price has come down to high mid-range ($330 with no contract or $50 with a contract) it may start selling.
The cell phone is quite a bit older than the length of a patent, but there are many cell phone technologies that are newer and still have valid patents. Analog cell tech is all out of patent now and the first patents on digital cell technology are now expired or about to expire, but patents relevant to things like 3G and 4G data still have some time to live.
We don't know how much Moto cash and how many deferred tax assets are going to Lenovo as part of the sale. When that information becomes publicly available (if it ever does) we'll have a better idea what the final price was. Even if the patents (and the advanced development lab that Google is keeping) ultimately cost them $3 or $4 billion they probably got reasonable value for money, so although the Moto buy wasn't a home run by Google it wasn't a strikeout either.
W3schools usage is not fully representative for three reasons: most of their usage is from personally-owned computers rather than work computers, their user base skews toward tech-savvy people, and they don't get a lot of mobile usage (evident from the poor showing by Safari; if substantial numbers of iPhone and iPad users were hitting their site that number would be larger). But it does show notable trends in desktop browser usage; because of the bias toward techies it probably leads the general population but we can expect to see the same patterns play out in other populations over time.
The lack of mobile usage of W3schools isn't really surprising. Mobile platforms are not very useful for development of code or content, and development is what that site is all about. You can't code for iOS on iOS. It is possible to code for Android on Android but few people do it because mobile form factors aren't well suited to the task. You can develop for mobile Windows systems on mobile platforms that run full Windows 8 rather than Windows RT, but users on Windows 8 platforms won't show up as mobile users in statistics.
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My recommendations to Radio Shack:
- Use the store closings to winnow out bad stores and bad staff.
- Double down on the maker market. Improve execution in parts (stocking and organization).
- Give up on laptops. The office stores have won that war. Keep a modest presence in computer accessories.
- Give up on large TVs; the wholesale clubs own that market. Stay with small TVs.
- Decrease the emphasis on phones but don't exit. Keep a strong presence in accessories and prepaid phones.
- Stay with audio and video cables and accessories. Keep the prices reasonable rather than trying to chase the premium cable business.
- Batteries, especially specialty batteries, are a core strength of the business. Never forget that.
- Keep a toe in audio. Be prepared to step it up if Best Buy fails.
- Stay with the electronic toys. Sales are decent and they bring holiday shoppers into the store.
- Get rid of sales commissions. You want people on the floor who are focused on helping customers, not maximizing their paychecks.
One problem is that their employee incentives work against them. Commissions are a big part of the pay for their sales staff so those people have little interest in selling parts; they want to sell you big ticket items that get them a juicy commission. Contract phones count as high priced items because the commission is based on the unsubsidized price, not the penny you hand the store for the new phone.
All Radio Shack stores that I have ever visited still sell components. The parts just aren't as obvious because most of them are now tucked into drawers rather than displayed on hooks. But a lot of their stores do a terrible job of it, with everything hopelessly jumbled in the drawers and half the components out of stock; that's something they need to change, and closing the weak stores is a step in the right direction.
Having three accounts (my money, your money, and our money) is a common arrangement for couples, including married couples. It keeps you out of a lot of fights about how you spend the non-shared money. Pooling everything works for some people but not for everyone.
Your bank still sends back your checks? All the banks around here just send you printouts with little pictures of checks, assuming you haven't opted out of paper statements. If you have you can download PDFs with little pictures of checks instead. It's not really any more of a paper trail than the printed statement listing your electronic payments is.
This. The main success of Keurig has been in offices, not home use. You quickly get one cup at a time, different workers can each get the kind of coffee they want, and cleanup is painless. All of those things are a huge boon for the break room at work.
I think you'd have to be pretty lazy to buy a Keurig for home use. The home version isn't as convenient because it doesn't have a plumbing connection, so you have to fill it with water for each cup. Cleaning up is easier to do at home, where you usually have a well equipped kitchen, than in a typical break room. It costs a lot more money to use unless you buy the refillable coffee pods. But some people are that lazy and willing to pay the price.
The real problem is the existence of the confidentiality requirement. Confidential legal agreements are evil. They should be prohibited.
I have a CableCard for my HD HomeRun Prime. Now that it's configured it's great, but getting Comcast to activate it was a painful process.
First there was the problem of getting them to supply me with one. Originally I was told that they were not available at the local service centers; I had to get one sent by mail. So I requested one by mail, and received a package that contained a DVI to HDMI cable and no CableCard. When I called to complain, another call center rep said that they CAN'T mail CableCards, you MUST pick them up in person. Gee, thanks. I then had to visit two service centers to get one; the first center had them but couldn't actually give one to me because their computer didn't believe they had any. (Releasing one is not just a matter of handing you the physical card. They also have to associate the card with your account on their computer or it won't work.) Evidently the cards had been there so long without anybody asking for one that the inventory system had removed them from their active inventory. This was in a poor neighborhood where there probably aren't a lot of TiVos (the main user of CableCards) installed; it just happened to be the easiest one for me to get to. (They don't have a center in my section of Boston.)
After two failed attempts at self-installation they had to send an installer (which, to their credit, I was not charged for because of the failed self-install attempts), and the only reason the installer succeeded when I had not is because he was able to get connected to a more clueful person at the home office which is where the problems had been all along. Basically, the person at the other end during the self-installs had not dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts correctly. The first time, CableCard was recognized by the system but wasn't authorized to watch any channels; the second time it was never recognized by their system at all. Yes, I had supplied them with all the correct numbers from the HD HomeRun.
It's a little more complicated than just not wanting gentrification. In the earlier waves of gentrification, the people moving into the city mostly lived AND worked there. It was a mixed blessing for the city but there were benefits.
The combination they are getting now is the worst of both worlds. They get the rich people living in their city, driving up real estate prices and driving out inexpensive shops and restaurants. But they don't get the businesses, which means that San Francisco loses out on the jobs and the corporate taxes.
It's hard to come up with a location that is good for everybody. Locate in the city and it's good for the transit users but bad for the people who drive to work. Locate in a distant location and it's the other way around. C-level executives mostly drive, so they are the ones who get their wish.
Sometimes the house IS colder when it's colder outside. The thermostat regulates the temperature at one location, which is usually somewhere in the middle of the house. (More modern houses have multiple zones, but the thermostats are still usually well away from the exterior walls.) The temperature in a house is not completely uniform; spots near the walls are usually cooler than spots in the middle of the house. So even if the temperature as seen by the thermostat is identical, the temperature where a person is sitting may not be.
A cut in the price of Windows will improve the margins on devices like Dell's Venue 8 Pro. But I suspect they were already getting a price much lower than $50. It will also mean a resurgence in low-end Windows laptops, basically netbook redux - basically take a Chromebook platform and put in more flash memory.
Now that there is a console that comes with Kinect, the game developers of the world are working on games that will take advantage of it. When it was an optional peripheral, not much game development was aimed at Kinect because the market was too small.
What this says is that making drugs illegal (and thus horrendously expensive) has negative social consequences. Back in the 19th century there were solid citizens who were addicted to drugs, but they were able to support their relatively inexpensive habits with their work or family income so they didn't need to turn to crime.
The headline is comparing apples and oranges. There are some essential differences.
Most of the tech company people who are making really huge sums of money are business creators; the people who started companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, and so forth. The people making big bucks in financial services are caretakers of already-existing businesses; none of the really big financial services companies was created in the past 50 years.
Second, tech companies create things. Banks manage other people's money and make profits from that.
Third, many of those financial service companies wouldn't exist right now if the US government3 hadn't bailed them out a few years ago.
We can argue that tech CEOs who did not start businesses - people like Marissa Mayer or Satya Nadella - shouldn't be as well paid as they are. But that's really the same question as whether non-founding CEOs of any company are paid too much. I believe that they are, but that wasn't the question asked here.
As for the bank bailout, I think the US government should have imposed harsher restrictions on the banks that took the money. I would have made restrictions on executive compensation a permanent condition of taking the money rather than one that only applied until they paid back the money. It's possible that some of the banks would have chosen to dissolve rather than accept that constraint; if so, good riddance.
Comcast is both a cable company AND a large content provider. (They own NBC and its associated cable networks, and Universal's movies and TV productions.) That is why any merger involving them is a special concern; they would both have a huge amount of control over the internet AND the ability to privilege their own content. I would have had less trouble with Time Warner merging with Charter, though I would still have worried about their amount of control over the internet.
What it involved in the case of the original reporter was a connection that would show high speeds with some data sources such as Speedtest.net, but at the same time show very low speeds with other data sources, notably Amazon AWS. (Throttling Amazon Web Services affects many online services, a notable case being Netflix.) The reporter's work connection, also through Verizon, did not exhibit the same selective slowness.
The ACM said "ensure that every K-12 student in the US has the opportunity to study computer science". That isn't the same thing as "everybody learn to code" as the headline says; it's making sure that schools offer classes in computing so students can take them if they wish.
But I would take it further and say that everybody, or at least most people, should learn the basics of coding. Writing computer programs teaches important lessons about logical thought: the importance of including all the necessary steps and including them in the correct order, and of not including steps that don't belong. Students used to learn that kind of thinking from proof geometry, but coding is a better tool because the computer itself provides fast and non-judgmental feedback, and because the actual skill of coding is more likely to be useful to the student.
W3schools reported 9% usage of Internet Explorer, but other sites report much higher numbers. W3schools usage is probably not representative of the internet at large. Another thread here looked critically at that report.
Lenovo wasn't offering phones in western markets and their product line lacked higher-end products. Buying the Motorola phone business gets them both. We may never see a phone bearing the Lenovo name in the US since this deal gives them permanent rights to the Motorola brand for phones. Or they may sell Lenovo-branded phones to the business customers who are already buying Lenovo computers and tablets. They'll do whatever works best to get people to buy the phones.
The Moto purchase and sale may not have been a big success for Google but it looks like a huge win for Lenovo. Another strong player in the Android market is a win for Google, so I think they're going to come out of this deal just fine even if they're losing a bit of money up front.
The Moto G appears to be a hit in developing countries where it was marketed first. It just hit the US market so we don't yet know how well it will sell here. The lack of LTE capability may hold it back, but it's not much of a factor outside the US and Europe because there is little LTE deployment elsewhere. If I were thinking about a $200 Moto G I think I'd pony up the extra money for a Moto X ($330) or a Nexus 5 ($300) instead.
The original pricing of the Moto X held it back from being a big hit; it was priced like a high-end phone but its processor and display were more mid-range. But it does have some innovative features like full-time voice activation, and now that its price has come down to high mid-range ($330 with no contract or $50 with a contract) it may start selling.
The cell phone is quite a bit older than the length of a patent, but there are many cell phone technologies that are newer and still have valid patents. Analog cell tech is all out of patent now and the first patents on digital cell technology are now expired or about to expire, but patents relevant to things like 3G and 4G data still have some time to live.
We don't know how much Moto cash and how many deferred tax assets are going to Lenovo as part of the sale. When that information becomes publicly available (if it ever does) we'll have a better idea what the final price was. Even if the patents (and the advanced development lab that Google is keeping) ultimately cost them $3 or $4 billion they probably got reasonable value for money, so although the Moto buy wasn't a home run by Google it wasn't a strikeout either.
W3schools usage is not fully representative for three reasons: most of their usage is from personally-owned computers rather than work computers, their user base skews toward tech-savvy people, and they don't get a lot of mobile usage (evident from the poor showing by Safari; if substantial numbers of iPhone and iPad users were hitting their site that number would be larger). But it does show notable trends in desktop browser usage; because of the bias toward techies it probably leads the general population but we can expect to see the same patterns play out in other populations over time.
The lack of mobile usage of W3schools isn't really surprising. Mobile platforms are not very useful for development of code or content, and development is what that site is all about. You can't code for iOS on iOS. It is possible to code for Android on Android but few people do it because mobile form factors aren't well suited to the task. You can develop for mobile Windows systems on mobile platforms that run full Windows 8 rather than Windows RT, but users on Windows 8 platforms won't show up as mobile users in statistics.
The headline would have been more clear if they had included one more word. "AMD announces ITS first ARM processor" would have said it unambiguously.