1. What is the best iOS phone on the market?
2. What is the best Android phone on the market?

Zynga is an example of a company destined to fail,under this hypothesis. This is a company that revoked stock from some employees before going public. Google is positioned to succeed with its focus on people, but will start to fall if it continues to make statements like this.

It could be said that I have this backwards, that you must first be profitable before you can afford to give back to your people… but I think that’s wrong. I think you can’t afford to not be people driven.

So… books. Historically, books sold at vastly different prices… for purposes of this post, let’s say: $25 hardcover, $15 trade paperback, $10 mass market, $7 or less second hand.  The key differences, it would seem, are based on type/quality of the book, and to some extent date of purchase (i.e. hardcover books are released first).

Adding in e-books completely destroys this whole model. You are no longer paying for the quality of the book, and the second hand market is completely eradicated. However, the book world isn’t really acting that way… still relying on antiquated business models. I can’t really think of another medium that offers the exact same content in so many different formats, without gradually phasing out the older formats.  Unless of course you are still buying cassette and VHS tapes… Sure, vinyl is still out there, but it’s filled a niche. Hardcover, the book equivalent of vinyl is still paraded around like it is somehow every consumers first choice. It isn’t. e-books tell us that. People aren’t paying for format, they are paying for content.

Aside from the shift to paying for content over format, there’s another shift happening at the same time: to the end user, books become nearly valueless the minute they are read. Sure, some people re-read books, but that’s likely the smallest value that a book that has been read has in the physical world. In the physical world, books that have been read derive value from: 1) sharing 2) displaying 3) reselling and 4) re-reading.

Reselling is the most obvious and quantitative dollar value that a read book has.  e-books have made this impossible. Sharing books that you’ve read offers social value, by allowing you to connect with someone based on shared interests in reading and common knowledge gained from a shared book. There’s also just an intrinsic benefit of giving / exchanging that helps tighten bonds. That benefit is gone from e-books. Displaying provides an aesthetic and often egotistical benefit. Books on a shelf are a nice decoration, and also say something about the person displaying the books. The more leather bound books you have, the less it’s a message that I would want to send, but that’s just me. This value, again, gone. So, now the remaining value is, re-reading. This one is still possible! I’m sure for some people that’s great… but, if you’re like me, that’s irrelevant. I really don’t re-read many books, and I have to assume that many are in the same boat.

What this all means, is that once an e-book is read, its value nearly 0. Maybe that’s why they are priced somewhat cheaper than other formats, but I have a question: Why do we have to own e-books?

Think of DVDs… is anyone still buying them? Sure, some people are. But not as many as were pre-Netflix. What about services like Pandora and Spotify… think those have helped sales of songs and CDs?  Probably not.  So, why, when the format is irrelevant and the content loses its value upon consumption, does anyone own an e-book?  What I really want, is to be able to subscribe to e-books. I want to pay a flat monthly fee and have all e-books (or at least some tiered set) at my disposal, without actually owning any of them.  I’d gladly pay $10-$15 a month for that, or whatever the right pricing model works out to. Whatever it is, it probably ends up as more than many people spend on books…

This isn’t what Barnes & Noble or Amazon could do… it’s what they should do, especially Barnes & Noble. It’s seems that BN and Amazon have lost their way. They went from selling e-readers, which made sense, to trying to compete with Apple by selling tablets… yeah, that’s what I think of when I think Barnes & Noble.  So, stop. Stop trying to compete in an unfamiliar business and rewrite the rules of your business: selling books.

Maybe there’s an interesting angle. It’s just that it’s something of a lonely individual process.

I’m editing currently… it’s going okay. Yawn.

Here’s part of a sentence I wrote this morning: “he was preparing for a barrage of skepticism about his general intelligence quotient and capacity for rational human thought.” Exciting! 

Writing this post helped me catch a spelling mistake. Woo hoo!

So maybe I should write about the industry… that could be interesting. The Kindle, eBooks, all of that. I used to have a tech savvy audience that would likely enjoy that angle… now I have no audience. We’ll see what happens… this is just an aside.

This is the fourth time I’ve rewritten this story… sort of. There was a first draft, then two rewrites in the original format, though neither was a full rewrite, and now there’s the new version – switched from first person to third. So, the first full rewrite, which is technically roughly the fourth iteration, is finished. Now, it’s time to edit. I’m fairly certain that this is the last time I’m going to completely rewrite.

This version, which took nearly a year to write, is much different than the previous – which obviously means nothing to anyone other than my wife (the only other reader thus far) – and I’m pleased with how it has turned out. Hopefully, I’m getting closer to the end. Not because I want to be done writing, but because I’m looking forward to starting the publishing/rejection process, and I’m looking forward to starting whatever comes next.

OWS is a mixed bag, so i’m really only looking at how it, as a movement, relates to Wall Street. The pitch is essentially that Wall Street is made of the 1% of the country’s wealthiest, and the rest of us are getting hosed.  But what if there were no wall street? No stock markets? No public ownership?

Wall Street, however flawed it may be, is a vehicle for breaking up concentrations of wealth. If we didn’t have public ownership, things would probably be a lot less equal than they are today. The only ownership would be private, in a system more like venture capital – a world far more exclusive than Wall Street. Wall Street actually gives the 99%, or at least some percent above 1, an actual chance at ownership.

So, I look at OWS and ask why would the group attack Wall Street? And it’s really about what was promised – the chance for wealth to be less concentrated – and what was actually delivered – still a pretty big disparity in wealth. But it really has very little to do with what Wall Street should, and to some extent does, represent – a way for more people to invest.

The narrative is changing a bit, but when OWS was first discussed, I feel like all that I read was that this was a group of semi-radicals with no organization and no clear message. The message is getting refined, it’s about reform. It’s about rules catching up with the changes in society. It’s about the fact that the internet has given a voice to everyone, but our government wants to pretend that we still need the same representative system… when our representatives look less and less like the people they represent. How a name like Occupy Wall Street makes sense in that context, I really have no idea.

It’s an article about Steve Jobs passing away. What struck me about this was the url… especially the date: 2011-09-22.  Weird, huh? I’m sure it’s not unusual to write these types of articles well in advance for certain figures, but wouldn’t you want to update it?

In other words… let’s say company A employs 50 people and company B employs 50 people. They make the same type of good and they are the only two companies that make it.Everyone in each company starts out working 40 hours a week. Then company B produces an inferior product and it closes. Now, the employable workforce is still 100 people, but company A decides that rather than hire the employees from company A, they’ll just double the hours of everyone that already works for company A to meet the new demand created by company B’s collapse. Shareholder’s are happy… employees probably still make the same wage so that the bottom line increases.

All the ex-employees of company B are only skilled creating the same type of product/service that they’ve always created, and now there’s only one company creating it and they aren’t hiring because they can get 80 hours out of their employees. To combat this… former employees can either learn a new skill or come up with a better product/service to try to compete with company A – though likely when they do this they’ll need to ask their employees to work at least 80 hours.

Unfortunately… none of that’s happening. The ex-company B employees are too busy trying to learn a new skill or find a job to have time to innovate, and they just lost their jobs so they don’t have any money to go starting new businesses. Company A’s productivity is through the roof… market demand is being met and profits are increasing. All the company B employees are on the sidelines watching… oh and they are also consumers of the product/service, but again with less money to spend, so company A must try to reduce the cost of its product/service by not offering company A employees as many perks or increasing salaries, even though they are working much more. But, hey, the bottom line is looking great!

If company A would have brought on the company B employees, everyone would work 40 hours, the margins would be less, but everyone would at least be employed.

In reality, the stock market and shareholders do demand more productivity, so we don’t hire more people, we ask our employees to work more. If we ever really wanted to end unemployment, we’d reduce working time and share the work. We’d also stop working our lives and start living our lives… but then those at the top, those that make money from our productivity, wouldn’t be as rich… so, good luck with that.