Yearly Archives: 2010

Innovate or Die: Lessons From BlockBuster Applied to powerOne

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If you missed it the king’s of the movie rental business, Blockbuster, is being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. I guess the news wasn’t totally surprising. After all Oregon’s very own Hollywood Video, bought by a Texas company called Movie Gallery, went bankrupt a few months ago. And every little movie rental place in the area is gone, opening up what I am sure is tens of thousands of retail square feet nationwide.

15 years ago there were few choices. If you wanted to watch a movie without interruption you were stuck with premium cable channels, buy it at a store, a movie theater and places like Blockbuster.

Now I have these choices plus so many more. I can watch instantly on Netflix, download one from various sharing sites via BitTorrent, and rent one from Redbox or Netflix. A decade ago it costs me $4 to rent a movie. Now I can get one at Redbox for $1.

And so it goes. Yesterdays killer company becomes today’s roadkill.

So let that be a lesson for all of us. Stay up-to-date. Adjust to the competition. Don’t bite off more then you can chew.

Even focused solely on developing killer calculators for the iOS platform, it is more than a full-time job. Over the past few months all we have done is kept up with Apple, developing powerOne for iPad, re-developing for iPad and, approved by Apple last night, now ensuring iOS 4 and iPhone 4 compatibility.

But it isn’t enough to keep up. Our next step is to leave them all in dust. And so we begin to develop powerOne version 2. I can’t wait!

The Economics of Fear

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In my lifetime — at least in the part of my lifetime I can remember — there has never been such a big debate about what to do with the economy.

I believe very strongly that economic success is all about positive thought. I said quite some time ago on this very blog that fear drives the US economy like no other issue. When times are good, happiness drives the economy higher and every negative — wars, droughts, terrorist attacks, whatever — makes the economy dive. The inverse, I believe, is also true. In downturns it is the negatives that outweigh the positives.

A second belief is that the practice of economics is too complicated. Economists — and politicians — like to talk about the Fed and interest rates and inflation and deflation and spending money and tax cuts and all the stuff that goes along with it.

These are just levers and descriptors, though. To solve a downturn all we really need to do is to improve positive thinking.

So rather than a discussion of more government spending or tax cuts, we should be talking about American’s greatest fears, short-term and long-term, and our government should enact policies to fix that.

Personally, I am more concerned about US and state current and future debt obligations than anything else. I think we have spent like drunken sailors on shore leave for the past 25 years and it is time to pay the piper. I think it is time for a national discussion about what we should and can expect from our governments.

And for me I know getting our debt under control sure would improve my mood.

Quick Thought On Each Mobile OS Company

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A single thought on each OS manufacturer and my biggest concern for each:

  • Apple: federal government action
  • Google: forgetting it makes money on advertising
  • Palm: crushed under HP’s weight
  • Nokia: makes so much money on feature phones that it doesn’t invest enough in the future
  • Microsoft: organization is too screwed up to matter
  • RIM: innovate too slowly to keep up

Apple, Verizon and the Sound of Deflating Balloons

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Ever since the rumors cropped up again about Apple and Verizon, I have been thinking about the impact of that deal. I have thought, at various times, that Apple won’t do it because it is a completely different device infrastructure (CDMA instead of the world-standard GSM), that Apple would wait for LTE, the fact that Apple is letting Google catch up by not moving to Verizon, the fact that Verizon’s network can’t handle voice and data at the same time, which is a big deal for Apple and a chief selling point of the iPhone.

And then Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and lead developer of Tumblr, wrote a great piece on his experiences and thoughts this morning. Spot on, Marco, and thanks for killing my LTE hopes. Hmmm…. now I have no idea if and when Apple will ship iPhone on Verizon but am concerned it won’t happen soon enough. Or maybe Apple’s strategy is to skip the carriers and go straight to VOiP services with multi-tasking on an iPod touch. (But I still think Apple wants Verizon.)

(Hey, I make money from this platform, iOS. I want Apple to sell 3 trillion units per year.)

28 Day Rental Window Is Stupid

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Many major movie studios are restricting movies from being rented (via Redbox or Netflix or other means) during the first 28 days after release. The belief is that the studios will sell more movies. This is stupid.

But before I get into why it is stupid, let me explain my own movie set up. First, my wife and I watch lots of movies. We are aficionados and have 300 or so movies in the house plus use Netflix, both rentals and on demand. We do not have cable (just the local channels and Discovery) as I could no longer justify paying the cable company $70 a month for crap so instead we have higher bandwidth Internet and our Netflix subscription. We don’t go to the theater much because most movies aren’t worth seeing on the big screen.

First, when my wife and I see a movie we want to watch, something just hitting theaters, we add it to our Netflix queue. We only know it is a “new release” when Netflix tells us so. With that, we could care less whether it became a new release four weeks ago or today.

Second, we only buy movies that we really would watch again. Since few movies are of that caliber we don’t buy many movies any more. In fact I would say we buy less than three movies/TV shows a year, whether they are in the new release window or not.

We devised a rating system years ago: buy, theater, rental, cable, no way. A “buy” movie has to be exceptional. A “theater” movie has to be best on the big screen. A “rental” is interesting but not qualified for the top two. “Cable”, a category we abandoned a while ago, is the recycled movies you find on standard cable and “no way” is, well, self explanatory.

So for you movie studios paying attention, it is not rent v. buy. It is more like watch v. don’t watch. And to be honest, lately you’ve been failing at that one, too.