During the height of the dot.com, I attended the seminar where the founder of Kozmo, Joseph Park, as a guest speaker.
His original dot.com concept was offer instant gratification. I recalled he said that he wanted to buy a book on Amazon, but was dismayed that it would take a day for delivery. He wanted it NOW! To make his idea profitable, Kozmo originally offer a narrow but profitable line of merchandise, buy in bulk, sell at retail, limit the customer base to a densely populated well-heeled area that can afford the necessary volumes of $15 minimum purchases (say, wall street) to make 'last mile delivery service' feasible and profitable.
Also, not having overhead costs associated with running a brick and mortar convenience store was didn't hurt kozmo's business model.
As many know, profitability took a backseat to national expansion, and rest is history.
I came away learning a few things about kozmo and dot.coms in general.
1. Warren Buffet was right. If you can't figure how they're making money, don't invest.
2. Never sacrific long time profitability for short term promotional hype.
3. You don't need to be technical to create a startup. Prior to kozmo, the founder didn't know how to setup a web page, but he did a whole rolodex of clients from his days of being a Internet startup financial analyst at Goldman Sachs.
4. kozmo was named after the drink, not the character on seinfield.
In my old company, the 'router' guy accidentally mistaken that 'big red' power reset button by the door for the light switch. He thought he would do the equipmment a favor by turning off the lights, so the room would run cooler. Within five minutes of him leaving the room, HP OpenView started to barrage everyone on the network staff with a list of 'down servers'
Since then, the 'big red' button is now enclosed inside a plastic box, and as for the router guy, he was pretty hostile to everyone and wasn't a team player. You'll think he been fired or reprimanded. Instead, he lucked out as we had a corporate consolidation on the regional scale, and he was promoted to manage the new regional WAN group.
You can readily observe this in nature, ants, termites, bees, and wasps have survived for millions of years on this strategy; working together as a group. Pay attention next time you encounter an anthill, termite mound and bee hive.
Microsoft already has documentation on disabling USB, and you do not need to wait for SP2 to implement this.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;823732
As for the quote,
"IT managers do have access to tools that would allow them to block USB ports, but such tools are little-known, and little-used. "There are tools that are available to...manage USB ports, but 99.9 percent of all machines in corporations don't have anything like that," Brill said."
I guess Mr. Brill is not aware of the obscure concept of Microsoft Group Policies, file permissions and google.
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During the height of the dot.com, I attended the seminar where the founder of Kozmo, Joseph Park, as a guest speaker. His original dot.com concept was offer instant gratification. I recalled he said that he wanted to buy a book on Amazon, but was dismayed that it would take a day for delivery. He wanted it NOW! To make his idea profitable, Kozmo originally offer a narrow but profitable line of merchandise, buy in bulk, sell at retail, limit the customer base to a densely populated well-heeled area that can afford the necessary volumes of $15 minimum purchases (say, wall street) to make 'last mile delivery service' feasible and profitable. Also, not having overhead costs associated with running a brick and mortar convenience store was didn't hurt kozmo's business model. As many know, profitability took a backseat to national expansion, and rest is history. I came away learning a few things about kozmo and dot.coms in general. 1. Warren Buffet was right. If you can't figure how they're making money, don't invest. 2. Never sacrific long time profitability for short term promotional hype. 3. You don't need to be technical to create a startup. Prior to kozmo, the founder didn't know how to setup a web page, but he did a whole rolodex of clients from his days of being a Internet startup financial analyst at Goldman Sachs. 4. kozmo was named after the drink, not the character on seinfield.
In my old company, the 'router' guy accidentally mistaken that 'big red' power reset button by the door for the light switch. He thought he would do the equipmment a favor by turning off the lights, so the room would run cooler. Within five minutes of him leaving the room, HP OpenView started to barrage everyone on the network staff with a list of 'down servers' Since then, the 'big red' button is now enclosed inside a plastic box, and as for the router guy, he was pretty hostile to everyone and wasn't a team player. You'll think he been fired or reprimanded. Instead, he lucked out as we had a corporate consolidation on the regional scale, and he was promoted to manage the new regional WAN group.
Imagine the lobbying power AARP would wield?
You can readily observe this in nature, ants, termites, bees, and wasps have survived for millions of years on this strategy; working together as a group. Pay attention next time you encounter an anthill, termite mound and bee hive.
Microsoft already has documentation on disabling USB, and you do not need to wait for SP2 to implement this. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;823732
As for the quote,
"IT managers do have access to tools that would allow them to block USB ports, but such tools are little-known, and little-used. "There are tools that are available to...manage USB ports, but 99.9 percent of all machines in corporations don't have anything like that," Brill said."
I guess Mr. Brill is not aware of the obscure concept of Microsoft Group Policies, file permissions and google.