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Yahoo’s Merissa Mayer: I Can Have it All- You Can’t
She was six months pregnant when, at age 37, she took the job as the CEO of troubled internet giant, Yahoo. How’s she going to manage that, the world asked as it marveled at the brilliant young woman who had just become the youngest female top executive officer of a Fortune 500 company.
Well, it turns out she came to work a mere two weeks after the birth of her baby last autumn. That’s how she handled it. And now we learn, after announcing the end of telecommuting at her company last week, that you can go back to work just days after you give birth- if you build yourself a nursery in your office and bring the kid in with you.
Business Insider, which broke the story about Mayer’s nursery, interviewed the husband of one of the female telecommuting Yahooo employees who now has to trade her home for a cubicle every day beginning June 1st.
“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set ‘em up in the cube next door?”
A lot of folks are critical of Mayer’s anti-telecommuting move arguing it’s a step backward in the evolution of humane, family-friendly working conditions but some former Yahoos think she was right to do it because many employees there have been abusing the privilege and had not been particularly productive. Some argue she’s clearing the deadwood and getting them to step down, which is a much cheaper move than paying severance for laying people off.
Then again, some predict it’s the weakest employees who will show up to their cubicles come June 1st and the smart ones who will get recruited by other internet companies who will let them keep working from home.
The real problem here is that Mayer has opted for a one-size-fits-all option. One of the arguments Yahoo’s HR director made for banning telecommuting is that a lot of good ideas get discussed in casual meetings and hallway conversations. Ok- then make the creative and business development types come in to work. But a pure tech-geek who writes code all day? I’m guessing they’ll be working for Mayer’s former employer, Google, by the end of May.
By the way, on its news page, Yahoo has reprinted a Christian Science Monitor article favorable toward the company’s anti-telecommuting move. There’s no mention whatsoever of Mayer’s office nursery. Which is their editorial right. It’s also their right to make employees come to the office if they want to continue to get a paycheck. Who knows, maybe it’s exactly the right thing for Yahoo to do.
But what may be right for Yahoo may not be right for every other business in America. There really is a lot of research that shows telecommuting employees have high productivity rates. And there are certainly a lot of children in America who could use more time, not less with a parent around- even if that parent is working out of a home office.
My Tenuous Relationship with Social Media
I’m really only half connected and I think that’s the way I want it to be. Mostly, I find social media potentially exhausting.
Of course, the grand daddy of them all, Facebook, has been a nice way to reconnect with a lot of people whom I would have completely lost track of. Because of FB, I carry all elements of my past life bravely into the future: my high school friends- the folks I connected with at every job I ever had. I appreciate that they are sort of “in for the ride” with me, and I with them.
I have found that some of life’s challenges like sudden unemployment or health issues have been easier to deal with because of friends that seem to come out of the woodwork at these crucial moments. My friends are very, very kind and have a way of making me feel warm and loved and have been there at some pretty damn critical junctures.
But I look at some folks I know who have purposely avoided social media and I feel a little jealous. Their privacy is total. Their journey is not necessarily a lonely one because they have friends and family with whom they communicate the old fashioned way; around a kitchen table, on the phone- or God forbid, sending an e-mail or a post card- but it is a narrower if not more intimate and possibly more substantive existence.
I am, in fact, amused that those few who avoid social media are kind of like 21st century Henry David Thoreau’s; their internet-free lives the modern day equivalent of living in isolation in the 1840’s at Walden Pond. Thoreau was a lot of things- a poet, an abolitionist, a historian, a surveyor- but mostly he’s known for being a leading transcendentalist and his book, Walden, was a tome to simple living in natural surroundings. I would call that the exact opposite of the way we lead our lives now.
Oh, I imagine there are a lot of folks into meditation or yoga who get glimpses of internal quiet, calm and centeredness and are then perfectly capable of tweeting 140 characters on something or other when they’re back in social mode.
But I don’t know about ‘ol Twitter. I use it as a marketing tool to basically announce when I have posted something on this blog. But I’ve never really used it they way you’re supposed to. First of all, if I have something clever to say about current events, for example, I prefer to write several paragraphs than create snarky Haiku. I’m just too wordy and editorially undisciplined for Twitter.
I do appreciate the role Twitter has played in being used as a tool for truth and as a vehicle for mobilization in regard to a number of recent global political revolutions. But it is also the purveyor of rumor, innuendo and outright falsehood and has done a remarkably effective job at humbling a number of media organizations through the years.
I find it amusing that with social media still being kind of new, there is so much focus on the medium itself instead of its content. For example, when something weird happens in the world, like a black-out during the Super Bowl or Clint Eastwood talking to a chair at a political convention, the headlines are not about the public reaction, but how that reaction gets disseminated. How long do we have to go on reading headlines that read “Twitterverse explodes over X event,” or “Social Media abuzz about X transgression.”
Really, who cares HOW the reaction is going public. Shouldn’t the focus be on the content of the reaction instead of the tool that was used to broadcast it? I suppose some reporter somewhere once wrote that the President arrived to a particular town by train. But eventually, people figured out trains were here to stay and so they just started writing that the President arrived without mentioning how he got there.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter reactions to the world’s events can be hilarious and highly entertaining. And it’s kind of cool that you can follow, say a famous person like a ballplayer and you can send them a message and sometimes they respond.
But remember Foursquare (it still exists)? For awhile there, people stopped using Facebook to announce where they were and started using Foursquare to communicate their location at an event, restaurant, sports arena, museum or whatever. Who cares?
And then there’s Linked In. I’m supposed to care about Linked In. I get e-mails all the time telling me that someone is trying to connect with me or join my network or has endorsed me. Thank you, I very much appreciate being endorsed. I hope my friends who have tried to reach me or connect with me via Linked In don’t take it personally that I only log into the thing about twice a year, approve 30 or 40 connections and then get back to my life again. I’m just not a Linked In kind of guy. I’m sorry. I do feel guilty about it. That’s why I get on the site twice a year to kind of clean things up. But, sheesh, why should I feel guilty about not really caring two bleeps about Linked In?
There are lots of other social media I am totally missing. Wikipedia lists about 180 social media sites, of which I am familiar with about six. Some of this ignorance on my part is totally due to the fact that I am getting old. I know, I know, a lot of people don’t consider 56 to be old. But I am and sometimes all of this social media stuff just exhausts me. “Help me, I’ve fallen, and I can’t keep up!”
Hell, I was born the year the last known Union Civil War soldier died. I was born a year before the Soviets launched Sputnik. I’m so old, I would have to explain to 85% of the world’s population what Sputnik was.
And I was born just 94 years after the passing of Henry David Thoreau, who, in turn, was born just 40 years after the American revolution:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Irony Alert: I would have really enjoyed his blog.
Facebook Fail
I’m no financial expert which, I presume, is why I’m not a wealthy man. But I’m not an idiot either and I’m telling you right now- this Facebook IPO stuff is an unmitigated disaster that is becoming more and more of an embarrassment by the second.
Let’s start out with the basics. Facebook early this week was valued as a $100 billion company. That’s more than Disney, Visa or McDonald’s. As Washington Post financial writer, Dominic Basulto, puts it- at least McDonald’s sells burgers. What’s Facebook got? What does Facebook make? It makes ads that no one pays any attention to. Ask General Motors. They pulled their Facebook ads just a couple of days ahead of the IPO because it was like throwing money into a large black hole.
We’ve been down this road before in the late 1990’s when the Dot.Com bubble burst. Now it’s the social media bubble that’s bursting. Facebook stock was offered initially at $38 a share. It’s trading at $31 this afternoon, but the day is young- there’s plenty more room for it to fall even further. Your average Facebook employee is about $2 million richer this week. But the poor people who got suckered into buying Facebook stock on Monday have already suffered a 20% loss on their investment—an amazing achievement over just two short days.
Some analysts say in order to justify the share price at which Facebook was being offered the company would have to make more than a 40% profit over each of the next three years. That’s a tall order for any company that actually makes things, much less one that is essentially a large data collection service that can’t quite figure out what do with all its data.
I won’t even go into the speculation about the things Facebook must do to make the kind of money it has to pile up to avoid becoming a penny stock. Maybe selling our personal data? Maybe overwhelming its real estate on your computer with ad after ad after ad? Maybe breaking down and finally charging for the service?
And then there’s Facebook’s growth potential. What growth? It has already saturated the world. A half a billion users are already on it. There’s no way to go but down.
I have a friend who counsels adolescents. He tells me the big social media trend among the nation’s youth is getting the hell off Facebook. Presuming the universal adolescent appeal of “coolness,” Facebook is about the least cool thing in the universe. Their grandmothers are on it, for Christ’s sake. And their teachers. And if they can ever find jobs- their damn bosses will be on Facebook asking to friend them so they can check and see if there are any pictures of them projectile vomiting in an alley after an all-night kegger.
But there’s more. Much, much more. Here are some headlines from Marketwatch.com today so we can all revel in the base greediness and irrational exuberance of the great Facebook IPO.
Facebook Stock Dubbed “Falling Knife”
How Facebook Threatens the U.S. Economy
Here’s an absolute brilliant analysis of all of this by Martketwatch.com’s David Wiedner:
It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg is having the ultimate nerd’s revenge: He’s humiliating all of us and taking our money in the process…
There were few regular people who made fortunes on Facebook. Its private placement and exclusive club made certain that Zuckerberg and his backers decided who would get rich and when….
At the end of a Facebook session, we feel an anticlimax. We hope for contact and more often than not get silence. We exploit our own privacy to our friends, advertisers, strangers. We rarely, if ever, make that connection that’s worth the investment of putting so much of ourselves out there…
In the end, it’s clear Facebook’s was the rare initial public offering in the markets that catered to that same kind of person, an exclusive sort of investor: the sucker.
In 2010, the movie “The Social Network,” told the story of the Harvard nerd who hit it big with his Facebook concept. There’s a sequel ahead that’s sure to be a hit with all those people Mark Zuckerberg has taken for a ride for all these years. And it will be called “The Fall of Mark Zuckerberg: Avenging the Revenge of the Nerds.”
A Tale of Two Companies: Apple and Netflix
You could write a textbook on this topic but I’ll try to do it in 600 words or less.
Netflix, once a phenomenally successful company has seen its stock price tumble 35% this week on news that it managed to lose 800,000 subscribers over the past six months and that four different analysts downgraded them because no one can make sense of their business plan. Apple just lost its CEO and resident genius but is riding an I-Phone computer voice and plans for a new TV that just might revolutionize how you watch the medium- all the way to the bank.
Earlier this year, Netflix hiked prices 60% when they decided that’s what you’d have to pay to get both DVD’s sent to your home and get streaming. And they did it rather arrogantly without much of an explanation or even, an “I’m sorry, it’s the cost of bringing you all this great quality.”
Then when they finally did apologize, they announced they were splitting into two companies, Qwikster, which would be the old DVD-sent-to-your-home business and Netflix, which would now be the streaming part. The two companies would keep separate data bases and be basically disconnected from one another- which confused their customers and made them mad all over again, because you’d no longer be able to go to one place to figure out if they had the programming you wanted to watch.
Then they changed their minds and dropped the Qwixter idea and said, nah, we’re going back to what we originally intended.
Meantime, they seem intent on cutting really expensive content deals with companies like Dreamworks in order to be able to provide decent streaming services- except with their current business model charging what amounts to about $10 a month, there’s no way they bring in enough revenues to pay for these content deals. Seems to me you either collect good (and expensive) content, suck it up, and tell your customers it’s going to cost more but its worth it- or you keep being a real cheap monthly service wih average to below-average offerings of old movies and TV shows. But you can’t have both.
It’s all stated best by a guy named Tony Wible with Janney Capital Markets who gave this analysis to his customers, as quoted by Marketwatch.com:
We believe the [Netflix business] model is unsustainable, as the company faces rising costs that it hoped it could pass on to its [subscribers],” who appear unwilling to accept them, Wible wrote to clients. “The company has paid exorbitant prices for content while painting itself as a cheap rental service. Simply put, the company’s brand does not fit with its large/growing content obligations.
Meantime, Apple sold about 4 million of it’s new I-Phones a week after launch, mostly because of one added feature- Siri. This is the friendly computer voice you can interact with that looks stuff up for you and offers suggestions, tips, reminders, etc., etc. You can even talk dirty to Siri, though her sense of humor is such that all you’ll get back is words like “dirt and compost.” For the record, I have not tried this but so I’ve read.
And I see today that the “next big thing” Apple is up to is the launch of Apple TV. This would be a smart television that with a few easy, typically Apple-like steps, would allow you to see what’s available to watch without having to wade through category after category of Cable TV, Netflix and Hulu menus. And, of course it would incorporate a Siri-like application so you could ask your TV what’s on or have it find you the program you want to watch.
With their on-again, off-again, customer-belligerent and confusing business strategies, one of these two companies is coming off like New Coke on steroids. The other seems to be confidently pursuing its climb toward global domination. I’m going with the ghost of Steve Jobs over the seemingly aimless and perplexing strategies of Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings.
Help Me, I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Use my Blackberry
Man, can you imagine being an engineer at RIM, the makers of the Blackberry? Your company is already facing a stockholder revolt, your stock price has plummeted 60% since the start of the year, you’ve already had to delay your next round of new smart phones, nobody even knows you’re selling a computer tablet meant to compete with the I-Pad, and now….oops…a little planetary failure.
I suppose if you’re going to screw up, do it big; do it globally. The whole thing felt like some digital-viral-pandemic. The first of the zillion people who stopped receiving their Blackberry e-mails were in Europe. And then the Middle East. And Latin America. And India. And Africa. There was a bad “switch” somewhere on one these continents. RIM hasn’t been real detailed in their explanation. But then the back-up switch that supposedly had been previously tested also failed.
Then the e-mails started stacking up, log-jammed, like a bazillion airplanes with suddenly no place to land and RIM playing the role of frantic air traffic controllers. As the suddenly constipated Blackberry system continued to clog up, the outage spilled over to the United States, Canada, Japan and Singapore.
My own Blackberry is testimony to the failure, like a clock that stops at the exact time an earthquake hits. It was 6:56am. Then total e-mail silence until 8:48am. Then nothing from 9:03am until 3:37pm.
But that 3:37 experience was really something. Suddenly, six hours worth of work e-mails started coming over the transom all at once. The vibrating was constant. It caused a momentary epiphany as I thought for one brief moment (brief, I swear), about how the Blackberry, if set to constant vibrating mode, might somehow be repurposed for other uses. I urge you not to linger on this thought too long.
But even though millions were affected and some important meetings may have been missed, I noticed a next-day disturbing trend for RIM. Last major Blackberry outage a few years ago, it was clearly a universal experience. This time around, it was less of an elevator conversation-starter.
“So, did you survive the Blackberry outage?”
“What are you talking about? I have an I-Phone.”
“Oh.”
Next week, at the San Francisco Marriott hotel, RIM happens to be holding its annual Blackberry Development Conference. Because right after you have a monumental failure across every continent of the globe that calls into the question the reliability of your service that could easily be displaced by others- what you want to be talking about to the assembled media hordes, is a rehash of your single, most embarrassing corporate moment.
Assorted Thoughts on Steve Jobs & Professional Basketball
NBA: Rich Guys vs Rich Guys
I’m in mourning today after hearing the news that the first two weeks of the National Basketball Association have been cancelled due to an impasse in contract negotiations. Crushed beyond belief. Why can’t millionaires all just get along?
No, seriously. You could have cancelled the first two weeks of every NBA season since the dawn of time and no one would have noticed. I would argue that, really, there are very few people in this country who care all that much about the NBA, except in April, but not usually until the final round of the playoffs.
But what is charming about the current labor dispute is the picture of grown men fighting selfishly over how many hundreds of millions of dollars to split among themselves. At this time, with the economic calamity that has befallen so many people, it is the perfect message for your sport to be sending to America: We Are Clueless About Your Pain.
Steve Jobs Contrarians
I have noticed that one of the most predictable trends in the world of blogging is the 2nd day contrarian viewpoint. This is the opinion that is forged by people way smarter and more clever than you and I who decide the initial consensus on any given story is too quaint or trite or too predictable, whether it’s valid or not.
Gawker recently posted an article on the “dark side” of Steve Jobs. He was mean. He once told someone at Apple their work was crap. He fired a project manager. Shocked, I tell you, I’m completely shocked. Why, he must’ve been the first successful media mogul in history to have been an SOB. Hey, I worked for Ted Turner. A visionary. A hilarious man. A great businessman. Check, check and check. Nice? Not so much.
And Andrew Sullivan published a reader letter today that says the notion that Steve Jobs changed the world is a ridiculous exaggeration. All he did was repackage existing technology and charge outrageous prices for it.
Let me give you just one example of his genius and how he changed at least the music world. Do you remember life before the I-Pod? Yes, others had digital media players but they were crap. Here’s what life was before the I-pod; CD’s. The genius was not just the simplicity of the device but the development of the business model that connected it to countless amounts of content: I-Tunes. By charging 99 cents a song, he singlehandedly saved the music business, even as the industry complained that selling songs for a buck was bad business. To the contrary, it saved the music industry from pirates who were giving the stuff away for free and artists were once again able to receive royalties for their work.
And by the way, I bought my I-Phone precisely because it was so integrated with I-Tunes and my song list and everything else you can get from videos to podcasts. So as the I-Pods become obsolete, the appetite for the technology is now transferred to smart phones.
We don’t even have to go into Jobs’ development of the first computers designed for use in the home. Or the first personal computers to connect with this thing called the World Wide Web. No, he didn’t invent the mouse, but he did make the graphical computer interface the world standard.
So Steve Jobs was no saint. He did not reinvent the world, just portions of it. He had a temper and he was single-minded and intense and ignored his kids and family for years and he said nasty things to his workers when they didn’t execute his vision properly and he wasn’t generous with his philanthropic giving. And blah, blah, blah.
I, for one, did not nominate him for sainthood last week. I just thought he had a hell of an impact on the world and certainly as much as famous innovators before him like Thomas Edison.
And he lived and urged others to live life as if every day was their last. Find me the contrarian point of view on that one. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.
iSad
That’s what someone wrote on a post-it note and put on the glass wall of an Apple store last night. A lot of people are doing that today. Paying heartfelt tribute in one form or another to Steve Jobs.
I thought about him this morning as I slipped my I-phone into my jacket pocket after checking my e-mail and my messages. I thought about him last night as my girlfriend tapped away on her I-Pad. And then again as I used my mouse and clicked and dragged an item on my non-Apple PC. I thanked him silently on the subway as I put in my ear-buds and listened to a beautiful song composed and performed by my own son- a tune I had transferred from my I-Pod to my I-Phone. And I think about him as I write this- knowing he was the guy who produced the first personal computer designed to interact with the internet.
Many have compared Steve Jobs to Thomas Alva Edison (very interesting piece on that here). In terms of impact on the everyday lives of billions of people throughout the world, the analogy is spot-on. And like Edison, he didn’t exactly invent any of this stuff. He figured out how to put it all together. He’s the guy who understood the creativity that could be realized if only computer technology were made simple enough to use by anyone, not just techie geeks who knew how to maneuver through MS-DOS.
And when he got fired at Apple, his way of dealing with unemployment was to revive a then dormant animation studio called Pixar.
Of all the lovely tributes being penned about the genius of Steve Jobs, one of the most eloquent came from the White House in a statement released by the press office at 9:15pm last night:
By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike.
Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.
I’ve always been taken by the sleek, modern simplicity of Apple products. Their lap tops were the lightest and thinnest. The I-pod was the size of a pack of gum, but thinner. The I-Phone is a simple rectangle activated by one button. Besides a virtual one, the I-Pad doesn’t even have a keyboard. And here is the essence of what I think was one of Steve Jobs’ guiding philosophies; that there is great virtue and elegance in simplicity.
Thank you, Steve Jobs, for your spark and your vision and your good sense and good taste; for the lessons you leave behind about how to live life and for your undying belief in the enormous creativity and possibility that can be unleashed by the digital age you helped create and that you made accessible to us all.
I-Phones, Non-Candidates and Hank Williams Jr.
It’s not even Wednesday yet and there’s a new I-phone I won’t be buying, another non-Presidential candidate no one will be voting for and a country music star making headlines whose political opinions no one cares about.
The New I-Phone
Maybe it’s because I recently spent $200 on an I-Phone 4 and Apple announced today it’s now going to be reduced to $99. Maybe it’s because the new I-Phone is 7 times faster at playing games and I use my phone mostly as a…phone. Or maybe because it was touted as the I-Phone 5 and it’s actually the I-Phone 4s.
But, no, I will not be shelling out $300 for this new “thing.” I cannot keep up with all the new “things.” Often, new “things” don’t work all that well. Somebody let me know when the I-Phone 10 comes out.
The Latest Version of “No”
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had to call a news conference today because the media did not believe him the previous 107 times he said he would not be running for President. So everyone gathered in Trenton this afternoon to hear him say it again and the non-event is going to be leading newscasts all day today.
Note to political pundits desperate to spice up the increasingly bizarre Presidential race- when a politician says over and over and over and over again that he is “NOT READY” to be President, he knows that’s something that could be used in a campaign ad against him and he is definitely not interested in running for President.
Are You Ready for Some Football?
Actually, no. I had absolutely no interest in Monday Night Football this week because who cares about the 0-3 Indianapolis Colts when there are baseball playoffs that actually matter? So, I missed that ESPN dropped Hank Williams Jr.’s opening song because the country music star made a comment recently comparing President Obama to Adolph Hitler.
Now conservative bloggers are reportedly outraged that ESPN is outraged at Williams who seems to be quite outraged about Barack Obama still being in the White House.
Ok. Why do we care again what Hank Williams Jr. thinks about anything?
Let me make this clear. I expect country singers to sing, athletes to play sports, Hollywood actors to act and politicians to make things up. Don’t confuse me by mixing up your roles in our lives. I’m already confused about what I-Phone to buy and what non-candidate not to vote for.
Netflix: The Streaming Gamble
I’m getting dizzy reading all the contrasting views from business analysts trying to make heads or tails of what Netflix is up to. My conclusion: unless they figure out the content piece of their streaming services, they’re cooked.
First, they angered their customers by unapologetically raising their rates 60%. Their stock price tumbled and they managed to lose a million subscribers. Then this week, Netflix CEO and co-founder, Reed Hastings, sent a belated e-mail apologizing for all the arrogance and announcing the company would be split in two. Setting the PR debacle aside, the strategy is quite the riverboat gamble.
Netflix will now be streaming the TV Shows and horrible movies you’d never see in theatres that you can access on everything from your lap top to your Xbox 360. Qwixter is the new name for the DVD-delivery service that was the initial business model that put the company on the map and helped bury Blockbuster and similar companies that charged the outrageous late fees for movie rentals that Netflix didn’t.
The services will be completely separate, from billing to menus to websites. You’ll no longer be able to go to one place to figure out whether the video you want to see is streamed or available by mail delivery. Terribly inconvenient and done so on purpose. They apparently see their future in streaming not the resource-intensive mailing and processing of DVD deliveries. They seem to think Netflix, the streaming model, will survive and thrive and the DVD business will sink of its own weight and eventually go away.
I think they’re right about the DVD’s. Not so sure they’re right about the streaming. If you think for one second you can give up cable TV, FIOS or dish services and still watch streaming movies you’ve actually heard of for 7 bucks a month, you’d be sadly mistaken. Netflix and Starz failed to renew the deal that provides about 20% of the streaming content and the few movies they have that are worth watching. That content will be gone as of early next year.
And Hollywood cheered. The folks who make our motion pictures would prefer to make money from a public that will pay anywhere from 5 to 8 dollars through their cable systems for a single movie. They are not so keen on having their product made available to an outfit that allows unlimited monthly viewing for the price you’d pay for one on-demand cable TV movie.
So who is going to work with Netflix to provide any decent content? Where in the world are they going to get it? Streaming would work if you had the same variety you have with the DVD deliveries. But it doesn’t have that variety and it never will.
Netflix was about the DVD’s delivered to your home that you could keep as long as you wanted. It was genius. But it’s hard to see any scenario in which the streaming portion of Netflix will ever be more than garbage in and garbage out. And that’s too bad because I’m rooting for these guys and their ability to make movie-viewing an affordable proposition. Unfortunately, I’m afraid the old axiom is applicable here. You get what you pay for.
Goodbye Borders- Mixed Feelings about the Death of the Book
Someday we’ll tell our grandkids that people used to read books that were comprised of paper, binding, a front cover and a back cover. Books you actually held and required you to physically turn the pages by hand.
I love the two remaining book cases I have in my apartment. They’re all sorted in categories; Biographies, Science Fiction, Politics, Science, the American Civil War, Baseball, Reference, even a section on Chess. I’ve read every one of them and I keep them because of the fond memories I had experiencing them. And they tell your guests something about who you are; what you care about, what interests you. It’s a peak into the soul, really.
I noticed the other day that with a few exceptions they’re all five years old or way older. I don’t really buy books anymore. They are now transmitted into my Kindle through thin air and appear magically seconds after I purchase them with hardly any effort at all. I can change the font sizes too, so my 54-year old eyes can comfortably read the print without strain. I can bookmark and make notes and highlight passages. And, yes, I can curl up with the Kindle on my couch just as I used to do with a real book.
So blame me for the closing of the local Borders book store. It was supremely sad. For a month they had their close-out sales. Each day, it seemed, the sales got bigger and bigger until by the end, the scavenged book cases had nothing left except the last thing anyone wanted to read. But you could buy it for 50 cents. And soon the store was empty and stripped bare, and today it sits vacant and barren and lonely-looking- a ghost of a retail space and yet another victim of the digital age.
Books take space and they’re heavy. If you move a lot, as I have, they’re a bit of a pain. And I’ve gotten rid of hundreds of them through the years so I have distilled the collection down to the bare basics of who I am and what I once read. I will always keep them, though. Because you could buy one case with one shelf and just put the Kindle on a stand- but it’s not the same effect.
And what of human history? A thousand years from now, after the great apocalypse that forever takes down the electrical grid; will anyone remember us without physical books? Will there be manuscripts and parchment from 100 A.D. but nothing from 2008 on? Will people think we just stopped reading and writing because without the electrical grid and wireless networks and credit cards- there’s no way to actually access the books of the early 21st century?
I wonder sometimes that if our entire existence ends up getting stored in some huge Digital Cloud designed by Apple- if we run the risk that someday no one will ever be able to ascertain that we even walked the earth. No connectivity-no history.
That’s the thing about clouds. They’re just vapor. Maybe we should keep a few real books around- just in case.
Garcia Media Life 
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