Madness

Attention hack business journalists: you are free to write stories every March about how many hours of productivity are lost to the NCAA basketball tournament as long as you balance it out with stories about how many additional hours of productivity are gained throughout the year when employees do extra work after hours and over weekends and holidays for no additional pay.

WTF?

As anyone who still has a job is probably aware of by now, companies are trying to minimize the costs of doing business during these lean times. I got an e-mail from management at my job last week outlining a number of cost-cutting initiatives that have recently been put into effect. The one that caught my eye was an admonishment for employees with company-provided mobile phones (a club that I am not a member of) to stop texting so much. I've always wondered why texting is so expensive. After all, a single text message is at most a couple hundred bytes worth of data. A voice call is at least thousands of bytes per second. Based on the five minutes of research I just did, it appears that it's because texting is such a cash cow for wireless carriers. By charging ridiculously high rates for text messages, carriers basically force anyone who wants to use text messaging on regular basis to buy an unlimited plan, guaranteeing them an extra $5-10/month per customer over the life of their contract. Carriers can charge whatever the market will bear, of course, but any business that is built on constantly ripping off its customers is setting itself up for fall when someone comes in and challenges the status quo. At the very least, once Internet-connected mobile devices achieve critical mass, text messaging is going to go the way of the CB radio unless the pricing model is rationalized.

Postscript:
I've been sitting on this post for a couple of days and wouldn't you know it - Google has gone ahead and added SMS text messaging to Gmail. I don't this is going to put an end to extortionate text messaging rates, but I'm still holding out hope that Google/Android is going to finally force some sense into the US cellular phone market.

Look Sharp

In case you haven't heard, The Sharper Image filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday. My initial thought upon hearing this news was it's about damn time. For as long as I can remember, I've had nothing but contempt for The Sharper Image. I'm not entirely sure why. Could I really have been sophisticated enough as a 12 year old to realize that they sold a lot of overpriced junk to people who equated paying a lot of money for useless products with status? I guess so, and it's only taken the rest of America 20 years or so to catch up with me. I knew a guy in college who used to work at a Sharper Image store, but had to quit after he could no longer maintain the fiction that the products they carried were in any way useful and/or worth the price that they were charging. If only all of his co-workers had been so wise.

Panic in Detroit

On the way home tonight, I caught part of On Point, a decent news talk show out of WBUR in Boston. One of the guests on tonight's show was GM's vice chairman product development, Bob Lutz. I don't follow the auto industry as closely as a I used to, so while I am familiar with Lutz's name, I don't really know anything about him. He started off talking about the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid that GM is hoping will finally be the car that will best the competition in style, quality, and efficiency. He's not a very good speaker and his voice leaves a lot to be desired, but I can't really hold that against him. Once he switched out of sales pitch mode and starting fielding questions from the host and the callers, he came completely unhinged. He sounded more like an anonymous commenter on a third-rate conservative blog than an executive of a fortune 5 company. He literally responded to a caller's question about the possibility of improving the efficiency of gasoline engines by challenging the caller to come up with some new ideas. I could practically hear the spittle hit the microphone when he started talking about "professor" Tom Friedman's ideas about the US automotive industry. I don't know if he was confusing Friedman, who to my knowledge is not and has never been a college professor, with his colleague Paul Krugman, who is a professor. Either way, it made him sound like a complete fool. If this is what Detroit, or at least GM, has to offer, the US auto industry is in even worse shape than I had previously imagined.