Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Category: business (Page 1 of 6)

Returning to an analog watch

Starting in around third or fourth grade, I wore a watch every day. I always had more than one option, and they ranged, over the years, from various Casio gadget watches to Swatch Skin designs, from a Movado (bar mitzvah) to a Breitling (engagement), from $15 fake Rolexes on Fifth Avenue to the M&Co 10-One-4. I always had more than one, and I’d match them to the occasion and even to the color of my shoes.

Then I got an Apple Watch. The Series 0, first one out the gate, in stainless steel so I could wear it with a suit (back when such things mattered). I wasn’t a heavy user, but I loved the basic functionality—never miss a text, never miss a call, tap-tap reminders of meetings, easy use while driving or carrying things. It became my daily wear. I had two recurrent thoughts: What will I do with my old watches now that I’ve converted to a smart watch? And what will the watch manufacturers do to keep up?

The second answer is a continually evolving business essay, but the first answer was, for a long time, “not much.” I stuck my three non-Apple watches in a drawer and left them there. I missed them, for various reasons, but I got hooked on the Apple Watch’s functionality, just as so many people did when upgrading to smartphones.

Then the pandemic hit.

For the first time in decades, I didn’t have anywhere to go, and I didn’t have a regular place to work. I found myself moving around a house in the suburbs all day—desk, bed, couch, kitchen table—always with my Macbook Air, never at a proper keyboard. I discovered very quickly that my watch band was getting in the way. Ten hours a day clacking the Apple Watch clasp into the corner of the laptop became frustrating. At the same time, its functionality was losing its appeal: no longer commuting and moving around, my phone was on my desk most of the day, and I never missed an alert.

And for the first time in nearly 40 years, I stopped wearing a watch.

I started by removing it for heavy typing, then realized I was fine not wearing it at all, and that was that. After a while, I didn’t miss the smartwatch at all. It didn’t hurt that my watch was aging; but instead of pining for the latest version, I just stopped wanting one entirely. Switching to an entirely remote company for work sealed my Apple Watch’s fate.

As the world came out of the pandemic, I realized that my wardrobe was missing something. All those years wearing watches are hard to ignore; I like having something on my wrist (I wore bracelets on and off for years, on the opposite arm) and the return to socializing and occasional in-office days had me staring at everyone else’s timepieces. My arm felt naked.

So I pulled out my beloved Nixon 51-30, and after months of meandering repairs (the battery was dead; I got a new battery installed, and the now-brittle rubber strap immediately snapped in two; I convinced Nixon to send me a replacement strap, but the screws holding the strap were stuck; I sent the watch back to Nixon, who discovered the case was dented and needed replacing) I actually have a mostly new watch on my wrist.

I’m wearing my watch as I type this, laptop bumping be damned. And now, when I next go to the office or out to dinner, I’ll feel just a little bit more whole.

Until the End of the Internet

It’s a catchy prase, “until the end of the internet,” isn’t it? The folks at what was then 37 Signals coined it back in 2015, as “a promise to our customers: we’re dedicated to supporting our products forever.”

This matters to me because, for the past four and a half years, I’ve been a beneficiary of this policy. I use Highrise, the onetime CRM counterpart to the Basecamp project management system. I’ve been on it since my agency business development days, and I’m still on it today.

When I first got a Highrise account, I was looking for a dirt-simple relationship management program. Highrise checked all the boxes (easy to understand, inexpensive, shared a billing account and login with an app we already used in the office) and was straightforward to integrate into my processes. I didn’t need it for much, and for what I did—centralized contacts, emailed reminders, bcc-enabled conversation tracking—it did the trick.

I kept using Highrise when I switched agencies, and when I left the business development cycle, I hung onto my account, as it contained many of my contacts. I spooled up an individual plan and discovered it was great for personal CRM, too. I began keeping reminders for staying in touch with colleagues and classmates.

My trusty Highrise account proved invaluable when I had to look for work: I had a repository of everyone I knew, when we last spoke or emailed, and my plans for future outreach. It kept me organized and kept me honest. It may be the only software for which I pay a recurring fee, and I’ve never questioned its value.

So when Highrise went end of life in 2018, I was grateful for the Basecamp team’s approach to longevity. Sure enough, the app still works great, despite going into maintenance mode back when Shohei Ohtani was a rookie. I’m in the app regularly, and its reminders are in my email all the time. I have a few changes I’d like to see, but they’re not major, and after 11 years I’ve gotten very comfortable with the UI. In an industry known for its ephemeral nature, a service you can trust to stick around is a revelation.

“Until the end of the internet” sounds coy, but it means something to the people it impacts. I’m grateful for it, and for as long as Basecamp keeps its promise, they’ll have me as a customer.

Virtual office apps and the idea of space

I’m working with a client this winter that is a client of Roam. Still in beta, Roam’s premise is “to bring a whole distributed company together,” which means combining text, voice, video and conferencing functions in one place, with an added UI layer that creates a sense of space.

That last bit is the differentiator, and it’s interesting to experience. The default Roam screen is a grid of employees. There are additional, smaller visual grids off to the side, representing “floors.” Several of them are organized by department, while one floor contains meeting rooms of various sizes and an auditorium.

Each person has an “office” with quick links to booking appointments and sending text messages. An office has two spots in it, one for the employee and one empty. Anyone can click on the empty spot and invite themselves into their coworker’s space. It comes complete with a knock-knock audio ping. If the knockee accepts, two people can then talk voice directly to one another. Text messaging is available everywhere.

The most important feature of this app is that Roam tries to place its users for the benefit of everyone else. If I go into a meeting room, for example, I no longer show as being in my “office”; it’s empty until I exit the other room. When coworkers are in conversation, their icons pulse lightly when they speak. And if a user switches to Roam’s mobile app, it disconnects the desktop app, and vice versa—a person can’t be in two places at once, after all.

The idea is that Roam is replicating in-person office culture. If we’re in a modern, pre-pandemic office, we most likely have open floor plans, low cubicle walls and glass-walled rooms. We know who’s in a meeting, we see who’s doing a 1:1 or a pull-up or even having an idle chat with one another. Wouldn’t it be nice, Roam asks, if we work remotely and still have that?

What’s interesting to me is this sense of place. Roam’s assertion is that what remote offices are missing is the being-there component: looking across the way, knowing your colleague is plugging away at a file, noticing that two peers are in conversation, that a few other folks seem to have stepped away: finding a new level of situational awareness. Being there, as it were.

My colleagues like the Roam app because it feels tangible: they can see the whole company (60-odd employees) at once, and they know who’s around and what’s going on. It’s obvious that they miss in-person office culture despite embracing full remote.

I appreciate the sentiment. I’m a big fan of the Huddle feature in Slack, which I’ve described more than once as the desktop equivalent of, “Hey, got a sec?” And I get why a company or leadership team would want this. It’s nice to know by looking, just like a live office, who’s around. Even if it’s a bit apocryphal—the app doesn’t know, for example, if a user going idle represents a lunch break or an hour deep in code—it feels good to have a pulse on the cadence of the org. The team is actively thinking of ways to leverage that knowledge to improve cross-team communication and camaraderie, which is great.

What remains to be seen is whether this is an advantage, or if it undermines some of the very things that make remote work pleasant. I’m curious to see how the app evolves, and where its founders (who are rapidly iterating, and devouring user feedback) take it.

Tennis balls and the failures of the Amazon ecommerce model

I played tennis Monday afternoon and noticed our tennis balls were just about through their useful life. After dinner, I started wondering how to replace them, living in my Upper West Side apartment, closer to the tennis courts than anyplace that would sell balls (the courts don’t, although they should).

Offhand, I couldn’t think of anyplace local to run in. Modell’s closed down, taking both local sporting goods stores out of our neighborhood. There’s a Target up here, but it’s way over on Columbus Avenue, and I don’t go over there much. We have some bodegas and 99-cent stores, but I’m not familiar with most of them, and didn’t want to wander around asking who has a sleeve of Pro Penns.

In an attempt to solve my problem immediately, I went, as we have been conditioned, to Amazon. Surely I could get some tennis balls shipped to the apartment before our next court time, on Thursday. (Disclosure: we are Amazon shareholders and Prime members.)

Turns out, yes, I could. But not in any useful way. Because Amazon’s model is cost-effective shipping, there’s no reasonable size worth buying; the site pushes you toward bulk: sacks of 18 balls, packs of 12 sleeves. Not what I’m after.

In addition, because Amazon is a marketplace focused on generating shipments with margin, the prices were awful. A can of tennis balls is $2.99 at retail, give or take. Not on amazon.com: they’re as much as $12, as I write this, for one sleeve of three balls. Even in bulk sizes, the prices don’t budge: I found $27.50 for four sleeves, for example ($6.88 per sleeve), and $59 for twelve ($4.92 per). Sure, you can get tennis balls tomorrow, but only if you’re compelled to leverage the free shipping and ignore the exorbitant prices.

Amazon’s current business model takes 34 cents on the dollar from its vendors. To sell me a four-pack of tennis balls, a reseller on amazon.com feels the need to charge $27.50 (at the time of this writing). After the reported 34% Amazon take, the vendor’s recognized revenue is around $18—still not three bucks a can, but at least not egregious. But Amazon isn’t concerned that the product is overpriced, it has that Prime lock-in. The site thus converts an ignorant shopper, traps a hurried one, or turns off one who’s paying attention. That last one, tonight, was me.

After a detour to the Dick’s Sporting Goods website, where tennis ball prices were fair ($18 for six cans) but free-shipping hurdles were high, I wound up on target.com. They sold me a four-pack of cans for $11.19. And because I have a similar relationship with Target as I do with Amazon, I threw in a few household staples and got free shipping, albeit a day or two slower than amazon.com.

And it turns out that Target on Columbus has individual tennis ball sleeves in stock. Maybe I’ll walk the dog over there and pick some up for Thursday.

After Shopping

Hey, I’m blogging again! Yes, a little bit here, but much more at After Shopping, my new site keeping track of the changing landscape of retail and storefronts as America grapples with the economic impacts of covid-19.

This is familiar territory for me in an unfamiliar environment. Longtime readers of this space will recall Timely Demise, which I spooled up during the financial crisis, just over a decade ago. I had a good run with it and learned a ton.

I’d thought about rebooting the concept for a few weeks and got set up in just the past few days. Once I found a name that resonated, and an appropriate angle to pursue, I was off and running. And run I shall: just to baseline the news to date for launch, I penned nine blog posts in the span of a few hours.

With effort, determination and a bit of good fortune, most of America’s retail footprint will persevere, but we’re already on a trajectory for an unimaginable amount of change. I’m hoping to capture as much of it as I can in one space and understand the forces and trends behind it.

I’m excited for this project and hope it proves interesting and enlightening. I wrote a little more about the concept over there, but readers can also just start at the top and explore.

A simple step to customer satisfaction: databases with long memories

I’m flying United Airlines later this month for the first time since 2004. A few days ago, United emailed me: “Don’t miss out on award miles on your trip.” The email encouraged me to sign up for MileagePlus, United’s customer loyalty program.

I’m no United regular, but as I actually have three flight legs booked with them through April, I figured they had a point.

But I decided to do them one better. Digging around old text files, I found my old Continental OnePass number.

I pulled up my flight details and dropped in the old OnePass number. United recognized the account instantly and added it to my itinerary.

Pleasantly surprised, I proceeded to log into my account, using the same number and the decade-old PIN I had on file. United.com had no trouble pulling my account together, listing my lifetime miles flown while simultaneously updating my address to the one I entered for my upcoming travel.

This is what all customer loyalty programs should look like. With the right investment in database architecture, companies can have information about their customers readily available, and utilize that to surprise and delight even the most passive of patrons. Like me, the once-every-twelve-years infrequent flier, now pleasantly blogging about a company I once publicly rebuked.

I recently had an unsatisfying discussion with Hyatt via Twitter where I challenged their policy of expiring accounts. Seems they are deleting my Gold Passport account next month because of lack of use—not expiring my points, but wiping out my ID entirely. Why? I asked. I got back a corporate version of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and a suggestion I buy some points to stay in their good graces.

Compare Hyatt’s attitude with United, where any customer stickiness remains part of my lifetime value, regardless of frequency. Or AMC Theatres, where my Moviewatcher account worked for roughly 20 years, despite being forgotten for a good 15 of them between uses, when I lived out of reach of one of their locations.

AMC welcomed me back with open arms (and I’m now a highly satisfied Stubs customer, too). United has now done the same, and suddenly I’m looking forward to my flight.

On leadership

In the wake of the Royals’ latest improbable postseason run, I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent New York Times Sunday Magazine profile of Ned Yost.

Not because Yost is so hard to parse—how is someone that obviously wrong turning out to be that right?—but because of Yost’s anecdote about his friendship with Dale Earnhardt:

In 1994, when a labor dispute truncated the baseball season, Earnhardt invited Yost to travel with him on the Nascar circuit and serve as “rehydration engineer” (in other words, water-fetcher). At one race, Earnhardt roared back from a huge deficit and nearly won. When Yost congratulated him, Earnhardt grabbed him by the shirt and pulled his friend nose to nose. ”Never, ever, let anybody who you’re around, anybody you’re associated with, allow you to settle for mediocrity,” Yost says Earnhardt told him.

What great perspective. So good I’m going to highlight it twice:

Never, ever, let anybody who you’re around, anybody you’re associated with, allow you to settle for mediocrity.

Why are the Royals successful? Because Yost holds his players to a high standard and expects them to reach it. He doesn’t pander, second-guess or micromanage. He sets a standard and his team follows it.

Ballplayers like to say they “believe in ourselves.” Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer stated as much in his post-game interview last night. That comes from the top: Yost, like his mentor Earnhardt, doesn’t let his team settle. It’s an attitude any good manager should adopt.

Job hunt best practices

We’ve been doing a fair amount of hiring at the office of late, and my reputation as a stickler for detail has rapidly resurfaced. Colleagues are amused at how I’ll give my head of research a hard time for interviewing a candidate with a pair of typos in his or her resume and how I’m parsing the grammar on thank-you notes.

I stand by my practices, because the printed form says a lot about a person: attention to detail, communication skills, drive. The same holds true for the interviews I get to take, where I can spend more time gauging someone’s intellect, curiosity, and enthusiasm for the position (even though I think Seth Godin is onto something, and my interviews typically run 40 minutes).

So I was going to do a write-up on resume and interview best practices, and then I remembered that I did this already, way back in 2000. The tips contained therein are still accurate and sound. Well, maybe not the note about avoiding italics for fax machines, but the rest of it.

If you’re on the market, or will be soon, take a read:
How to Succeed at Getting Hired (and Lots of Ways Not To)
Good luck with your search!

My vote for innovation of the year

LiquiGlide is my dream come true, because it solves this problem, as described by the New York Times: “Much of what we buy never makes it out of the container and is instead thrown away — up to a quarter of skin lotion, 16 percent of laundry detergent and 15 percent of condiments like mustard and ketchup.”

Of course, the folks at the Times and Consumer Reports never saw how much toothpaste I manage to eke out of that tube. (LiquiGlide-slicked Colgate may thus be my wife’s dream come true, too.)

How industry consolidation affects you: beer

Beer! Microbrew this and craft-brew that, how can beer be victim to consolidation?

The business of hops, yeast and malt is still fairly unconsolidated, but it has come together rather strongly in the past decade, to the point where the most famous American beer brands are all owned by foreigners. Anheuser-Busch InBev is the world’s largest beer manufacturer, with 21% of global sales. Don’t let the storied names out of St. Louis fool you; AB InBev is a Belgian-Brazilian company headquartered in Brussels.

In second place is SABMiller, founded in South Africa, headquartered in London, and owner of the Miller-Coors brands that hearken back to the Colorado Rockies. SABMiller sells roughly 44 billion pints of beer each year. SABMiller just made an offer to buy Heineken, a brewing conglomerate of similar size, which the Dutch company has so far rejected; should a deal go through, the combined firm would also control 21% of the beer market. The Economist also suggests that InBev may just buy SABMiller, creating a behemoth with combined production of nearly 600 million hectolitres (or, in practical terms, 125 billion pints) of beer per year.

Despite this consolidation, local and regional brewing continues to thrive. From mid-size producers like Sam Adams and Brooklyn to do-it-youself brewpubs, a wide variety of beers exist alongside the majors—some 3000 commercial entities in all, ensuring some diversity in a consolidating field.

Update: Flowing Data made a nice beer family tree that visually represents the industry.

This is the latest in a series of summaries of industries whose corporate consolidation has led to a small number of players controlling the majority of a sector, creating oligopolies in the mass market. Previously

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