There is one company that I have dealt with that not only will have a tech support person stay on the line until the problem is solved, they will contact developers, data folk, and third parties until the problem is solved. It's Bloomberg (Baseline does a good job too) the financial services company the mayor of NYC started. It's the only company I've found with consistently excellent support.
The only word processor that I used that had a good layout tool was Lotus 97 (oddly enough). You set the anchor (anywhere on a page) and then put the picture where you wanted it relative to the anchor, and it stayed, and pulled the text to a new page when neccissary.
That's pretty funny, since MS total research budget is $4.8 billion and with 70+% operating margins on office, the total costs (including retail box costs and selling costs) can be no higher than $2.2 (including other apps like Project and Visio). I'd be surprised if office accounted for more than $500 million in R&D.
The document was written for channel partners as a heads up piece (it's for the sales people) presumably they are either familiar with the MS office requirements or could walk over to the nearest box and read them. Think of this as MS sales force' dossier on OpenOffice.
That's what happens when you try to use something other than MS office to make a document (earlier posts show it was made in Quark Express for Mac fitting since it's document creation for a sales team). You don't have the autocorrection or paperclip to come dance around and tap on your screen.
StarOffice includes AdibasD which is, AFAIK, an access like shell wrapped around the SAP DB. However due to licensing issues between SUN and SAP it is not allowed to be distributed with the open version. A sweet project would be a quick and dirty GUI for one of the opensource DBMS as acess is basically a way for people to make queries, forms, tables, and reports with no knowledge of SQL.
I love Ross/TJMaxx etc for this reason they sell the leftovers from high end stores extra cheap year round. If you care about style then they might be a season off, but for stuff like socks you can pay significantly less than normal. Of course, part of this comes from the fact that I have to wear a shirt, tie, and slacks every day and this is a great place to pick up some really nice threads. The other really cool area is their home furnishings department. Knives, plates, and other items don't go in and out of style nearly as quickly as clothes so when you get a deal there it can last a lifetime. I found a sweet knife at WalMart prices, so nothing would match if I put them in a butcher block, their still quality forged knives.
I'm fairly young still and I'll second every point you made except getting married. If you happen to still be in college get married now (you can wait on kids), if I could change one thing in my life I would have gotten married before graduating from college. In my experience, the girls who are avaiaible after you hit your 30s are generally mothers or just plain boring (not even the narcissitic boring and at that point they often have esteem issues). I realize that you might have to put a huge investment into the search but I was hoping to get married after I had established a decent lifestyle and have found that I misjudged. While it seems like this is the most prudent decision, it seems like enough of my peers don't share that view to make my decision imprudent. Once they get married the market changes a lot (do you really want a divorced, hurting gal?).
On a more positive subject the Prius and Insight should be hitting the lease return market in about a year, and while battery life might be an issue (I think that is ahout a $2000 expense), they should offer excellent reliabilty. Other than that you have a good head on your shoulders and you should do nicely.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Walmart sells cheap crap because the masses want it (American's are notoriously short sighted) we buy new clothing every year, Europeans tend to buy 1 or 2 really nice things to add to their wardrobe each year. Wal~Mart's big secret isn't so much that they decided to sell a bunch of cheap crap it's that they were better able to capture their retail sales data into useful decision making info. I think the fast company article (might have been a businessweek article from about the same time on WalMart) mentioned that the company dropped the buy American campaign when they found that in many cases two widgets would be sold one made in China might cost 5%-10% less than the Made in the USA one, and sales were considerably lower.
Another big thing is that Wal~Mart does do a better job of ensuring that things they need are there all the time. A big part of that is they let people in the store monitor and order additional (they also give them years of weekly data on how each of their SKUs sold for the upcoming week. A friend works at Safeway and stuff arrives in Montana as shipped from Seattle with no input to Montana's desires or thoughts. There are many examples of things like this which start to explain why Walmart did so well initally.
I have no good answers as two why Americans love Wal~Mart so much. Take food for example, their produce looks awful, and generally rots much faster than the same bought at a traditional grocer. Also the offer significantly lower selection of brands within a product category. Safeway might have 10 brands and 30 varieties of maple syrup walmart carries 3 and 8. I prefer the added selection and quality and do my shopping at safeway. Well that and I get tired of the wild kids and long lines at walmart. But it seems that others don't have the same preference set.
No one forces a company to do business with Wal~Mart, but if a company wants to compete with Wal~Mart they better have a good plan. Tiffany's isn't going to be put out of business by Wal~Mart anytime soon. What has happened is that Wal~Mart did to retailing what Dell is doing to computing. That doesn't mean that other's like IBM cannot survive just that they will have to change how they operate. One think is that Wal~Mart continues to have plenty of US employees without offering more than say $7/hr and almost no benefits, for the same job that Safeway pays $10/hr and full health benefits (at something like $15/mo). If Safeway cannot provide services (shorter lines or friendlier and more productive employees) equal to their cost (figure those health benefits are worth an additional $300/mo or so) then they are going to be bankrupted by the fact that no one wants to offer the services they are offering.
I don't understand why this is so hard to see in retailing, when the average/.er has no problem with Dell or a home built being cheaper than an IBM Intelistation that costs more but offers certain other services. The market picks what it wants, and most people don't see a whole lot of extra service better quality that is worth the price premium of shopping at a more expensive retailer.
Classic walmart stores are only $160 billion of that (Sam's Club is another $30 billion) the remainder is international retailing. That's still $650 (and another ~$125 for Sam's). Still a ton of cash per person per year. Crap I know people here who do most of their shopping at Walmart. (figure a good 20% of income. It came up earlier that walmart sells about 20% of the US retail market.
From what I understand Wal~Mart's online forays have largely been accomplished by people outside the retail environment. They benefit from the brand name and any help on the supply chain but other than that they have a pretty long chain, for Wal~Mart.
Call it an educated guess, I read an article that put their portion of Tide, Crest and other big consumer brands at about 15-30% depending on the brand (Some things are morelikely to be sold in a big box, others at a convienence store). I think Great A&P was a bit bigger in their heyday (around or just before the turn of the century.
And your right that they are the gorrilla that everyone listens to but not just because of market size, they are also seen as the best retailer (other retailers follow in their footsteps to cut their own costs) similar to Dell and Nokia. Wal~Mart believes (their suppliers are willing to trust Wal~Mart) that investments in IT will drive down the cost of retailing and allow them to deliver lower costs for their consumers. The company is a huge investor in new IT technologies. They were pushing for UPCs, have the worlds largest database (they know to the day how many of each SKU each store sells every day they have been in operation) they use this to establish and track promotions (other retailers are trying to catch up with this information base and that's a big reason for those loyalty cards), and they will continue to drive new technologies that they think will reduce costs.
Try 20%, it's big but nowhere near half. I don't see why it's a problem if the RFID tags are attached to the disposable parts (packaging or clothing tags), notice that in the Gillette example the tag was on the box not individual razor heads. It seems like two reasonable sides can make an agreement but if the anti-tag groups tows the line "RFID baaad" like Orwellian sheep then they will be excluded from the decision making process.
This fine is small, but when Longhorn ships with an integrated video player, and MS wants to add VoIP software integrated in the OS, they get to spin the wheel and play again. Also, they have to publish and document the things required to make a competing operating system interoperate with MS, but they get to keep any IP that is exposed in the process. Shipping two versions of consumer windows is sort of a wildcard.
Yeah, their one advantage is access to the Multiple Listing Service. MLS is a database that lets real estate agents show houses that other agents post. Once someone is able to provide viable, sustained access to a competing service you'll see a huge shift in the business. The difficulty will be, working around all the hurdles Realators(TM) put in your path to slow you down. I've seens some stuff that commissions are beginning to be negotiable (4-5%) if you can find a newer agent who doesn't have a ton of business yet. Do realize that the commission is split between the listing agent and the selling agent (although both work for the seller, don't let your agent fool you they work for the seller have an interest in the highest selling price).
I grew up in a pilot family and while flying is fun I'll never really understand their mindset. Pilots are never really as happy as when they are behind the stick. The rest of their time is usually spent with flying on the mind. I don't think a pilot type (and one who knew they were) would ever be happy doing something that wasn't related to aircraft.
Don't get me wrong I enjoy my job, and have had the day pass exceedingly fast when I get on a project that is challenging and interesting, but it doesn't seem to match up to the fun that pilots seem to have when they are flying.
I was talking with a guy who was asking a similar question last night. He didn't like working with the public (retail was out of the picture) but didn't mind small groups. I suggested cook perhaps on a merchant ship. You get to see the world, deal with only a few people, and if you enjoy cooking could be pretty cool. The pay stinks but you have few living expenses when you are on the boat.
Teachers are shackled by two major problems, they have nearly zero disciplinary authority and they are tied to a system that promotes only on seniority. The best teacher in the school is paid and promoted at the same rate as the slacker who barely gets their job done.
Real Estate just finished a huge boom, and now that mortgage rates popped a whole bunch of people who just joined the business now are having to work for their commissions. Even the old timers who have been in it for years are having to compete a whole lot more as something like a million extra people got licensed over the past year or two. Additionally, FSBOs are having a much better time using online services.
If he had a good rep he could have easily made bank cutting hair in NY. Top hairdressers charge several hundred for a woman's cut/shampoo/style. If you could go for three days book all your clients those three days, and shaired a space in a big salon, you could do quite well.
Short term investments are effectivly cash, they are the same sort of investments as a money market fund holds. Loans made to high credit quality organizations that range in maturity from 1 day to 1 year. As a result while you might only be able to raise 40 billion of that $42.1 billion in 45 days it is as close as you get to holding effectivly cash. Right now they likely have it in the shorter term stuff (less than 3 months) as people fear a rate increase and don't want to be holding paper that will decline in value if when they do. Short term investments would be considered cash (long term ones are usually not considered cash, as they might not be liquid enough to raise cash quickly). MS will likely pay the fine with short term notes as the Europeans would likely put the money to work in the same markets until they had a use for it.
It was a stack of fives. Montana has a big chip on their shoulder regarding influence from Wasnington about things they consider to be their decsion. Back in the 60s we were one of the states with effectivly no speed limit (the rule was reasonable and prudent) and it was left to the driver and police to decide what was reasonable and pudent. In the 1970s as a result of the oil embargo the Governement wanted a national speed limit of 55 mph but they didn't have the authority to madate this limit. So they passed a law that any stated that did not have a 55 mph speed limit (and enforced it) would not recieve any highway funding. Montana has a ton of long streches of interstate that require significant maintence. So they had to pass and enforce a 55 mph speed limit. However there was never a penalty about how a state enforced the law. So they had a $5 speeding ticket (up to about 30 over which transitioned to reckless driving) which was payable in cash and not ticket was filed (so your insurance company never found out either). Many people considered it their price to go fast and kept a stack of 5s in the jockey box or on the dash. Except at night when the speed limit went back to 55 and heavy fines were levied.
After the highway funding law was recinded we tried to go back to the reasonable and prudent and it worked fairly well (most people drove reasonably and prudently) with the occasional out of state joyrider who thought that their 88 camero who may well have thought it was prudent to trave at 130 through the mountains. I think there was a race car driver who successfully argued his way out of a 140 mph ticket while driving his Porsche on an abandoned eastern montana highway (you can see for miles) on a sunny summer day (weather was a factor in the reasonable and prudent decsion), but that might have been a "rural" legend. He was skilled, the equipment could handle the stresses. The law was backed off when everyone took their speeding ticket to court (as a ticket for not driving prudently got you a pretty significant fine and possibly put you back into reckless driving) and the courts found that it was too costly to fight every single fine issued so we have a 75 mph interstate speed limit (although it's fairly rare to pass the HWP except in a few areas) but most people still drive the interstate at 80-85 which was the speed they generally have gone for the past 30 years. This is ofcourse after you leave the mountains, the turns, altitude, and incline keep you pretty close to the speed limit as you go through the mountains.
I think it was vitamins C and Beta Carrotine could have been A and some of the B Complex (I don't think it included any of the exotic suppliments). Anyway there were several big vitamin companies (a japanese one and ADM over here) who all conspired to keep the prices high by limiting supply. They were pretty direct about it, but thought that as long as they met in places where it was legal and were quiet about it they would get away with it. That's why the fines were so big, it was a major scandal in the mid 90s when the governments broke the cartel (and it was an open and shut case as they pretty much did it in the same style as OPEC (here's your quota etc). If you google for anti-trust and ADM you should find more than you ever wanted to read about it.
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There is one company that I have dealt with that not only will have a tech support person stay on the line until the problem is solved, they will contact developers, data folk, and third parties until the problem is solved. It's Bloomberg (Baseline does a good job too) the financial services company the mayor of NYC started. It's the only company I've found with consistently excellent support.
The only word processor that I used that had a good layout tool was Lotus 97 (oddly enough). You set the anchor (anywhere on a page) and then put the picture where you wanted it relative to the anchor, and it stayed, and pulled the text to a new page when neccissary.
That's pretty funny, since MS total research budget is $4.8 billion and with 70+% operating margins on office, the total costs (including retail box costs and selling costs) can be no higher than $2.2 (including other apps like Project and Visio). I'd be surprised if office accounted for more than $500 million in R&D.
The document was written for channel partners as a heads up piece (it's for the sales people) presumably they are either familiar with the MS office requirements or could walk over to the nearest box and read them. Think of this as MS sales force' dossier on OpenOffice.
That's what happens when you try to use something other than MS office to make a document (earlier posts show it was made in Quark Express for Mac fitting since it's document creation for a sales team). You don't have the autocorrection or paperclip to come dance around and tap on your screen.
StarOffice includes AdibasD which is, AFAIK, an access like shell wrapped around the SAP DB. However due to licensing issues between SUN and SAP it is not allowed to be distributed with the open version. A sweet project would be a quick and dirty GUI for one of the opensource DBMS as acess is basically a way for people to make queries, forms, tables, and reports with no knowledge of SQL.
I love Ross/TJMaxx etc for this reason they sell the leftovers from high end stores extra cheap year round. If you care about style then they might be a season off, but for stuff like socks you can pay significantly less than normal. Of course, part of this comes from the fact that I have to wear a shirt, tie, and slacks every day and this is a great place to pick up some really nice threads. The other really cool area is their home furnishings department. Knives, plates, and other items don't go in and out of style nearly as quickly as clothes so when you get a deal there it can last a lifetime. I found a sweet knife at WalMart prices, so nothing would match if I put them in a butcher block, their still quality forged knives.
I'm fairly young still and I'll second every point you made except getting married. If you happen to still be in college get married now (you can wait on kids), if I could change one thing in my life I would have gotten married before graduating from college. In my experience, the girls who are avaiaible after you hit your 30s are generally mothers or just plain boring (not even the narcissitic boring and at that point they often have esteem issues). I realize that you might have to put a huge investment into the search but I was hoping to get married after I had established a decent lifestyle and have found that I misjudged. While it seems like this is the most prudent decision, it seems like enough of my peers don't share that view to make my decision imprudent. Once they get married the market changes a lot (do you really want a divorced, hurting gal?).
On a more positive subject the Prius and Insight should be hitting the lease return market in about a year, and while battery life might be an issue (I think that is ahout a $2000 expense), they should offer excellent reliabilty. Other than that you have a good head on your shoulders and you should do nicely.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Walmart sells cheap crap because the masses want it (American's are notoriously short sighted) we buy new clothing every year, Europeans tend to buy 1 or 2 really nice things to add to their wardrobe each year. Wal~Mart's big secret isn't so much that they decided to sell a bunch of cheap crap it's that they were better able to capture their retail sales data into useful decision making info. I think the fast company article (might have been a businessweek article from about the same time on WalMart) mentioned that the company dropped the buy American campaign when they found that in many cases two widgets would be sold one made in China might cost 5%-10% less than the Made in the USA one, and sales were considerably lower.
Another big thing is that Wal~Mart does do a better job of ensuring that things they need are there all the time. A big part of that is they let people in the store monitor and order additional (they also give them years of weekly data on how each of their SKUs sold for the upcoming week. A friend works at Safeway and stuff arrives in Montana as shipped from Seattle with no input to Montana's desires or thoughts. There are many examples of things like this which start to explain why Walmart did so well initally.
I have no good answers as two why Americans love Wal~Mart so much. Take food for example, their produce looks awful, and generally rots much faster than the same bought at a traditional grocer. Also the offer significantly lower selection of brands within a product category. Safeway might have 10 brands and 30 varieties of maple syrup walmart carries 3 and 8. I prefer the added selection and quality and do my shopping at safeway. Well that and I get tired of the wild kids and long lines at walmart. But it seems that others don't have the same preference set.
No one forces a company to do business with Wal~Mart, but if a company wants to compete with Wal~Mart they better have a good plan. Tiffany's isn't going to be put out of business by Wal~Mart anytime soon. What has happened is that Wal~Mart did to retailing what Dell is doing to computing. That doesn't mean that other's like IBM cannot survive just that they will have to change how they operate. One think is that Wal~Mart continues to have plenty of US employees without offering more than say $7/hr and almost no benefits, for the same job that Safeway pays $10/hr and full health benefits (at something like $15/mo). If Safeway cannot provide services (shorter lines or friendlier and more productive employees) equal to their cost (figure those health benefits are worth an additional $300/mo or so) then they are going to be bankrupted by the fact that no one wants to offer the services they are offering. /.er has no problem with Dell or a home built being cheaper than an IBM Intelistation that costs more but offers certain other services. The market picks what it wants, and most people don't see a whole lot of extra service better quality that is worth the price premium of shopping at a more expensive retailer.
I don't understand why this is so hard to see in retailing, when the average
Classic walmart stores are only $160 billion of that (Sam's Club is another $30 billion) the remainder is international retailing. That's still $650 (and another ~$125 for Sam's). Still a ton of cash per person per year. Crap I know people here who do most of their shopping at Walmart. (figure a good 20% of income. It came up earlier that walmart sells about 20% of the US retail market.
From what I understand Wal~Mart's online forays have largely been accomplished by people outside the retail environment. They benefit from the brand name and any help on the supply chain but other than that they have a pretty long chain, for Wal~Mart.
If you are willing to settle for syncronous laser diode current controls they have those in hardware next to the sandpaper (Usually Aisle 20 or 21).
Call it an educated guess, I read an article that put their portion of Tide, Crest and other big consumer brands at about 15-30% depending on the brand (Some things are morelikely to be sold in a big box, others at a convienence store). I think Great A&P was a bit bigger in their heyday (around or just before the turn of the century.
And your right that they are the gorrilla that everyone listens to but not just because of market size, they are also seen as the best retailer (other retailers follow in their footsteps to cut their own costs) similar to Dell and Nokia.
Wal~Mart believes (their suppliers are willing to trust Wal~Mart) that investments in IT will drive down the cost of retailing and allow them to deliver lower costs for their consumers. The company is a huge investor in new IT technologies. They were pushing for UPCs, have the worlds largest database (they know to the day how many of each SKU each store sells every day they have been in operation) they use this to establish and track promotions (other retailers are trying to catch up with this information base and that's a big reason for those loyalty cards), and they will continue to drive new technologies that they think will reduce costs.
Try 20%, it's big but nowhere near half. I don't see why it's a problem if the RFID tags are attached to the disposable parts (packaging or clothing tags), notice that in the Gillette example the tag was on the box not individual razor heads. It seems like two reasonable sides can make an agreement but if the anti-tag groups tows the line "RFID baaad" like Orwellian sheep then they will be excluded from the decision making process.
This fine is small, but when Longhorn ships with an integrated video player, and MS wants to add VoIP software integrated in the OS, they get to spin the wheel and play again. Also, they have to publish and document the things required to make a competing operating system interoperate with MS, but they get to keep any IP that is exposed in the process. Shipping two versions of consumer windows is sort of a wildcard.
Yeah, their one advantage is access to the Multiple Listing Service. MLS is a database that lets real estate agents show houses that other agents post. Once someone is able to provide viable, sustained access to a competing service you'll see a huge shift in the business. The difficulty will be, working around all the hurdles Realators(TM) put in your path to slow you down. I've seens some stuff that commissions are beginning to be negotiable (4-5%) if you can find a newer agent who doesn't have a ton of business yet. Do realize that the commission is split between the listing agent and the selling agent (although both work for the seller, don't let your agent fool you they work for the seller have an interest in the highest selling price).
I grew up in a pilot family and while flying is fun I'll never really understand their mindset. Pilots are never really as happy as when they are behind the stick. The rest of their time is usually spent with flying on the mind. I don't think a pilot type (and one who knew they were) would ever be happy doing something that wasn't related to aircraft.
Don't get me wrong I enjoy my job, and have had the day pass exceedingly fast when I get on a project that is challenging and interesting, but it doesn't seem to match up to the fun that pilots seem to have when they are flying.
I was talking with a guy who was asking a similar question last night. He didn't like working with the public (retail was out of the picture) but didn't mind small groups. I suggested cook perhaps on a merchant ship. You get to see the world, deal with only a few people, and if you enjoy cooking could be pretty cool. The pay stinks but you have few living expenses when you are on the boat.
I'd guess that the florists who are unhappy are florists who are now running a business (department) and would rather just be working with flowers.
Teachers are shackled by two major problems, they have nearly zero disciplinary authority and they are tied to a system that promotes only on seniority. The best teacher in the school is paid and promoted at the same rate as the slacker who barely gets their job done.
Real Estate just finished a huge boom, and now that mortgage rates popped a whole bunch of people who just joined the business now are having to work for their commissions. Even the old timers who have been in it for years are having to compete a whole lot more as something like a million extra people got licensed over the past year or two. Additionally, FSBOs are having a much better time using online services.
If he had a good rep he could have easily made bank cutting hair in NY. Top hairdressers charge several hundred for a woman's cut/shampoo/style. If you could go for three days book all your clients those three days, and shaired a space in a big salon, you could do quite well.
Short term investments are effectivly cash, they are the same sort of investments as a money market fund holds. Loans made to high credit quality organizations that range in maturity from 1 day to 1 year. As a result while you might only be able to raise 40 billion of that $42.1 billion in 45 days it is as close as you get to holding effectivly cash. Right now they likely have it in the shorter term stuff (less than 3 months) as people fear a rate increase and don't want to be holding paper that will decline in value if when they do. Short term investments would be considered cash (long term ones are usually not considered cash, as they might not be liquid enough to raise cash quickly). MS will likely pay the fine with short term notes as the Europeans would likely put the money to work in the same markets until they had a use for it.
It was a stack of fives. Montana has a big chip on their shoulder regarding influence from Wasnington about things they consider to be their decsion. Back in the 60s we were one of the states with effectivly no speed limit (the rule was reasonable and prudent) and it was left to the driver and police to decide what was reasonable and pudent. In the 1970s as a result of the oil embargo the Governement wanted a national speed limit of 55 mph but they didn't have the authority to madate this limit. So they passed a law that any stated that did not have a 55 mph speed limit (and enforced it) would not recieve any highway funding. Montana has a ton of long streches of interstate that require significant maintence. So they had to pass and enforce a 55 mph speed limit. However there was never a penalty about how a state enforced the law. So they had a $5 speeding ticket (up to about 30 over which transitioned to reckless driving) which was payable in cash and not ticket was filed (so your insurance company never found out either). Many people considered it their price to go fast and kept a stack of 5s in the jockey box or on the dash. Except at night when the speed limit went back to 55 and heavy fines were levied.
After the highway funding law was recinded we tried to go back to the reasonable and prudent and it worked fairly well (most people drove reasonably and prudently) with the occasional out of state joyrider who thought that their 88 camero who may well have thought it was prudent to trave at 130 through the mountains. I think there was a race car driver who successfully argued his way out of a 140 mph ticket while driving his Porsche on an abandoned eastern montana highway (you can see for miles) on a sunny summer day (weather was a factor in the reasonable and prudent decsion), but that might have been a "rural" legend. He was skilled, the equipment could handle the stresses. The law was backed off when everyone took their speeding ticket to court (as a ticket for not driving prudently got you a pretty significant fine and possibly put you back into reckless driving) and the courts found that it was too costly to fight every single fine issued so we have a 75 mph interstate speed limit (although it's fairly rare to pass the HWP except in a few areas) but most people still drive the interstate at 80-85 which was the speed they generally have gone for the past 30 years. This is ofcourse after you leave the mountains, the turns, altitude, and incline keep you pretty close to the speed limit as you go through the mountains.
I think it was vitamins C and Beta Carrotine could have been A and some of the B Complex (I don't think it included any of the exotic suppliments). Anyway there were several big vitamin companies (a japanese one and ADM over here) who all conspired to keep the prices high by limiting supply. They were pretty direct about it, but thought that as long as they met in places where it was legal and were quiet about it they would get away with it. That's why the fines were so big, it was a major scandal in the mid 90s when the governments broke the cartel (and it was an open and shut case as they pretty much did it in the same style as OPEC (here's your quota etc). If you google for anti-trust and ADM you should find more than you ever wanted to read about it.