Athletes in general are considered to have lower levels of intellect than the rest of us.  It may be offensive.  It may be prudish.  For all we know it might not even be true (although that is highly unlikely).

Bill Simmons (Editor of Grantland) took things a bit farther than that in October.  Simmons took to Twitter and stated that basketball players don’t have the intellectual capital to negotiate an economic model with the people who run the NBA.  At first glance that doesn’t really seem all that bad.

Consider what a basketball has to be chiefly concerned with.

• The offensive and defensive sets of his team
• His individual assignments in a game
• His contract and endorsements
• His health and viability in the league

I don’t think it’s going out a limb by saying that most basketball players professional concerns start and stop somewhere in that list.  None of that has anything to do with running a full fledged basketball league.

As you know the NBA season is locked out and if the negotiations don’t close shortly we may lose an entire season.  The players are standing hard and fast on their demands.  The players are working themselves down from the 57% share of revenues to what may well end up being a 47% share of revenue when things are all said are done.

Is the players lack of intellectual capital keeping them from striking the right deal?

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2011 has been a roller coaster for Netflix to say the least.  Look at what they’ve been through.

• Stock Price – on 1.3.11 the stock price stood at $180/share.  By 7.28.11 the stock price had skyrocketed to $300/share.  On 11.15.11 the stock price rested at a humbling (for Netflix) $86/share.
• Membership – Over 800,000 people dropped the service outright.  Several others dropped parts of their Netflix package.
• Content – Starz is leaving.  Showtime is taking its best content off streaming.  New movies aren’t available for streaming (not to mention they come to DVD 28 days after Blockbuster).
• Qwiskster – Netflix was supposed to spin off its DVD business into a service called Qwikster.  The switch to Qwikster would mean managing 2 queues, getting 2 different charges on your credit card, and paying more for it than customers were used to. People pissed and moaned until Netflix dropped Qwikster altogether.

It’s normally a sign of trouble when a company lands this much bad press in one calendar year.  Netflix’s gaffes have given competitors like Blockbuster, Roku, and Redbox a much welcome kick in income.  To make matters worse there aren’t very many premium content providers clamoring to provide more Netflix content.  Netflix is definitely down…but is it out?

I tend to lean left on politics and movements in general.  Sometime ago I signed an online petition for something that I can’t remember.  Since then I have been bombarded with emails from the site that I signed up with…Moveon.org.  I’m not writing this to complain about that site or even the number of emails.  I’m writing this to discuss an email I got from them about a month ago.

On October 17 I received an email from Michael Sherrard saying the following:

<BEGIN TRANSMISSION>

Dear MoveOn member,

Forgiving the student loan debt of all Americans will have an immediate stimulative effect on our economy. With the stroke of the President’s pen, millions of Americans would suddenly have hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of extra dollars in their pockets each and every month to spend on ailing sectors of the economy.

As consumer spending increases, businesses will begin to hire, jobs will be created, and a new era of innovation, entrepreneurship, and prosperity will be ushered in for all. A rising tide does, in fact, lift all boats—forgiving student loan debt, rather than tax cuts for corporations, millionaires and billionaires, has a MUCH greater chance of helping to raise that tide in a MUCH shorter time-frame.

The future economic success of this country is wholly dependent upon a well-educated, prosperous middle class. Instead of saddling entire generations with debt from which there is no escape, let’s empower the American people to grow this economy on their own!

That’s why I created a petition on SignOn.org, calling on President Obama and Congress to support legislation seeking student loan forgiveness as a means of economic stimulus.

Will you sign the petition? Click here to add your name, and then pass it along to your friends:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=263764&id=32074-19657234-OKpWEqx&t=2

Thanks!

–Robert Applebaum

<END TRANSMISSION>

Being the selfish mofo that I am I hopped on, signed the petition, and passed it on to exactly no one .  Apparently, they didn’t need my help anyway because I got an email on 10/20/2011 saying that had reached 600,000 signatures.  Apparently, a lot of people don’t want to pay their student loans.

Now I’ll admit.  My views on this topic are hypocritical.  I owe about 8k in student loans and I’d like to get that over with sooner rather than later.  If it could disappear into thin air that would be even better.  But I also wonder what type of a lesson this would teach us long term as a country.  If we get bailed out now, what’s to stop us from begging for bailouts later?  What happens to the financial institutions that don’t get the money they are owed?

What do you think about the topic?

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Groupon is the United State’s largest daily deals site.  Before there was Living Social there was Groupon.  Before there was Google Offers there was Groupon.  Before there was the now defunct Facebook Daily Deals there was Groupon.

Groupon sprang onto the scene like so many mega tech sites do.  Groupon started in Chicago and quickly blew up to become a large scale juggernaut.  Businesses of all kinds clamored to make Groupon offers.  Groupons were flying around like hotcakes and it seemed to make everybody happy.

For a while it appeared that Groupon could literally do no wrong.  Negative reports about Groupon started to surface about the same time as the world’s honeymoon with the service was wearing off.  People seemingly started to complain about all things Groupon.

• The merchants on the site were terrible
• Groupons weren’t being honored
• Groupons weren’t being renewed
• Groupon was having trouble with its IPO

Just as it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse for Groupon they did.  A certain segment of businesses and internet writers started to say that Groupon wasn’t profitable for the very businesses that it made money from.  To date Googling the term “groupon bad for business” yields 32MM results.  Most of those articles and videos say exactly this…Groupon sucks if you’re a small business.  Of all the articles my favorite is this one from Jeff Korhan.

Here are the reasons that Jeff gives:

1. It sends the wrong message
2. It attracts the wrong customers
3. It creates new expectations

Another that I’ve read that Jeff doesn’t list is this.  Groupons are only profitable for a small subset of companies.

So what do you think?

Earlier this week our friend BigAl made a very good point.  BigAl said

In terms of a typical consumer MS is behind, but not so much on the business side.

He’s right.  Microsoft is HUGE in the business realm.  Office, Microsoft Exchange Servers, VBA, and Windows all dominate the business world.  If you don’t believe me send an important spreadsheet to 25 coworkers and use a format other than .xls or .csv.  Just don’t blame it on me when you get 25 emails back.

In the business world if you’re not using Microsoft products you’re really not using anything.  That begs the following question.  Why doesn’t Microsoft focus all (or at least the vast majority) of their energies on business clients?  Business clients pay more.  They are less fickle.  You can stick it to them for licenses.  They have to pay for people to attend your classes so that they can use the software (or hardware) that you sold them.

Plenty of large tech companies focus on business customers with good results.

• Blackberry (whether they want to admit it or not)
• IBM
• Netezza
• Cisco
• Oracle

None of these companies are hurting in the bank.  Hell,  in 2008 IBM pulled in more revenue than Microsoft.  That’s right IBM.  Imagine what Microsoft could do if they just focused their energies there.  They wouldn’t need to chase Google and Apple in markets that they are clearly the ugly duckling in.  They wouldn’t have to embarrass themselves with excursions like Windows Vista and the Zune.    They would likely make more money.  They could save big money.  They could quietly become the giant they really should be.

That looks like a winning situation to me.  Maybe I put a little too much of the good stuff in my piece pipe this morning.

What do you think?

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I’ll admit that I’m harsh on Microsoft.  It seems that they have become the new BASF.  They’ve garnered a nasty reputation for entering markets late and copying the competition.  To that end its no surprise that the world let out a collective yawn when BING was announced.

People thought (and rightfully so) that Microsoft was simply copying Google.  Without a doubt Google has set the trail for what a search engine will be and Microsoft has certain “leveraged” a few ideas.  However, BING brought its own innovations to the table as well such as:

• Homepage background image
• Left rail navigation to filter search results
• BING created a unique image search experience that Google “leveraged”

When you get down to their essence the search engines are basically the same, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at usage patterns. In the time period between May 2010 and May 2011 BING’s market share went from 9% to 17%.  Yahoo!, Ask, and AOL kept their paces over the previous year.  That alone leads me to believe that Microsoft is doing something right with BING.

What do you think it is?

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My relationship with Windows is sort of like my relationship with the rapper Nas.  When I first got into music I was a HUGE Nas fan.  The guy could do no wrong in my eyes.  Illmatic, It Was Written, and I Am were mainstays in my Walkman.  Then it happened.  On November 23, 1999 Nastradamus was released.  I ran to the music store, dropped $15, and ran home in anticipation.  I listened once and was unimpressed.  I figured that I just wasn’t listening hard enough.  I listened again and I still wasn’t impressed.  On the third listen I finally admitted that I just didn’t like the album much.  I picked 3 favorite songs, licked my wounds, and moved on.  My faith in Nas was restored in 2001 when Stillmatic hit stores.

My first computer was a Windows ME machine.  Naturally, I thought it was God’s gift to computing.  I was in love with it.  I held on to it through 2 viruses, a ridiculous (I’m talking 60%) slow down, a RAM upgrade to combat that slow down, and 4 years of college.  Eventually, I gave up on that machine and purchased a new shiny windows Vista laptop.  My euphoria returned. My next Windows machine went through the same cycle as my first.  This time the degradation was faster and more frustrating.  It seemed like I couldn’t turn the thing on without having to delete files, fight viruses, deal with the loudest fan on the planet, and worry about the thing melting a whole in my desk when I was away.

I bought a macbook and never looked back.

It seems like more and more people have the same experience with Windows.  It starts off great and then it goes sour.  Microsoft seems to be addressing that issue with Windows 8.  It is by far more user centric and visually appealing than its counterparts.  It boots faster, the system refresh looks phenomenal, split on screen keyboards, and it reportedly uses half the RAM of Windows 7.

Can this OS return Windows to its glory days?

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Microsoft changed the way we live our lives.  Perhaps more than any other tech company could ever hope to.  Before Microsoft released Windows  computers were seen as nice toys.  Actually I need to rephrase that.  Before Microsoft released Windows computers were seen as nice little nerd gadgets that nobody outside of nerd central would possibly bother with.

Windows blew the doors off of that theory.  It didn’t take long before everybody and their mother (and her mother) was sporting a personal computer.  Microsoft used this momentum to create an ever expanding suite of operating systems, software, and hardware.  You probably can’t put your hands on a single person who hasn’t used at least one of the following products:

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Power Point
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Access
• Hotmail
• Bing!
• Microsoft Zune
• Internet Explorer
• Windows (1.0, 2.0, 3.0 or 3.1, 95, NT, 98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, or 7)

For most of its history Microsoft has swung for the fences and leg the technological charge.  All that has changed in the last few years.  Steve Jobs’ 2nd stint with Apple saw a shift in power from Microsoft to Apple.  Jobs’ focused on creating sexy user centric products.  It paid off.  Products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad have cult like followings.

Jobs’ magic even extended to a device that Gates had little to no success with…the tablet.  Bill Gates first demoed a tablet PC in 2000. It never caught enough steam to matter.  In 2010 Steve Jobs introduced the iPad.  It was sleek, sexy, and exciting.  Many people (including yours truly) questioned its viability.  Many people (including yours truly) said there was no hope in selling a significant number of iPads.  Many people (including yours truly) changed their minds, ate crow, and then forked over the dough to get a magic iDevice.

As iPads flew off the shelves a new market was created.  Overnight the iPad became a necessary device.  Competitors flocked to the field.   Several Android devices entered the fray (the Dell Streak, Toshiba Folio 100, the Samsung Galaxy Tab).  Blackberry created the Playbook.  HP launched a WebOS powered tablet and then shuttered the device causing an unrivaled fire sale .

Noticeably absent from all the tablet hysteria was Microsoft.  Microsoft has waited and followed Apple into markets before.  The results were ugly each time.  The Zune had laughable sales and Windows phones have more problems than I personally care to write about.  In any event Microsoft was able to make serious money in both of these markets.

Microsoft is rumored to have a Windows 8 powered tablet in the works, but they’ve waited until Apple has locked down 68% of tablet market share.

What do you think?