sensible, sustainable business matters

Excellent Wharton article on Vigilant vs Operational
leaders... It touches on Ford vs Toyota (guess which type of leader is which) as well as
Coke vs Pepsi in India and the lighting manufacturers missing the switch to
LEDs. Essentially the article distinguishes between looking just at the
operational issues of lower cost production and matching the competitors
you know, vs looking outside at a broader range of influences and moving
earlier. Makes sense to me.

Want to see a product life cycle? Look at the humble hard disk drive. Invented 50 years ago by IBM, it has steadily dropped in size and price. A few years ago IBM sensed that the margin was gone and it sold out of the business. Nevertheless the market remains big with niches developing all the time. However it's hard to make money except by low-cost production and high volumes. HDDs also face competition from solid-state memory devices. Although HDDs are attractive in terms of price, performance and size, technologies such as Flash memory are robust, immune to the likely effects of shock and power loss and getting bigger, faster and cheaper by the day. Can you see a future for HDDs, or will they be overwhelmed by new technology? Sounds like a good essay subject to me.

Competive advantage is taking your core competence and making from it some key feature that gives you an edge over your competitors. It could be a fast, flexible and low cost supply chain like Dell's; or Toyota's ability to rapidly develop multiple new car designs and to manufacture them almost faultlessly. But what happens when, inevitably, the others catch up? The answers are many, but they include sharpening that edge continually or looking for new ideas from left field. This BusinessWeek article explores a few of those ideas.

The RBA has issued a press release on the subject of EFTPOS and capped fees. The fees will fall, reflecting the real cost of electronic transactions, to 5c or less (from around $0.20). Quite a fall. This is a reasonable thing... electronic transactions are meant to be frictionless, it is quite ridiculous to be promoting electronic banking on one hand and charging over the top for it on the other. Whilst normally competitive pressure would see it come down anyway, in fact a virtual cartel of banks has kept it high. You can guess their motives.

Apple has finally moved to show its hand - a little. CNET reports new iPods, at last, push the boundaries a little but mostly play catch-up with the market. Bigger capacity, funkier colours. iTunes gets Disney movies. And iTV promises a method of streaming PC video wirelessly to TVs. It's a home-based play, sure - and in line with the iPod consumer strategy - that bridges the PC to the TV. Whilst it makes sense it hardly shatters our perceptions. There must be more, surely?

It may not look like it but I have been busy. Apart from working for a living - which is not what you see here - I have been creating or updating a few blogs and image galleries... like...

My portals

• KlausenRussell.com
• gtveloce.com
• My mustknows

My Alfa pages

• The Rust-free Alfa Romeo page: guaranteed since '95
• All about Alfas, especially GTVs
• The car gallery

My bike racing pages

• Addicted2wheels, bicycle race wheels: my most popular blog
• Bike racing for almost anyone
• The bike gallery

My myths and Legends pages

• Myths, legends and weird stuff: Mythoblogia

My sustainable business pages

• The business of sustainable business
• My MBA resource blog - thespiel.com
• Out Out Damned Blog - a wilder ride
• The Offline blog for quieter web-rants

My overly long list of blogs

• Addicted2wheels, bicycle race wheels: my most popular blog
  
• The site that started it all for me in 1995, Colnago - the blogger
• The Rust-free Alfa Romeo page: guaranteed since '95
• My MBA resource blog - thespiel.com
• Myths, legends and weird stuff: Mythoblogia
  
• The Abecedarian Insult: A2Z, the blog
• Stuff I think you all mustknow
• All about Alfas, especially GTVs
• The business of sustainable business
• Bike racing for almost anyone
• The Offline blog for web-rants
• My all purpose writing blog
• The Class of 75 blog
• The gtveloce.com-munity blog
• My genealogy research blog
• Out Out Damned Blog - a wild ride

My image galleries

• DAP: the digital image gallery
• My mostly digital image blog
• DAR: the digital art gallery
• The aviation gallery
• The aviation image blog
• Trams, trains and buses... yet another gallery
• The bike gallery
• The car gallery
• The flora and fungus gallery (I kid you not)
  
• The New Fortian gallery
  
• The Original Fortian gallery
  

Community and networking pages

• My experiment with a php-scripted CMS
• My Squidoo page
• and my TagWorld page

Sponsors and other pages

• Buy my mugs and t-shirts from Cafepress
• Buy my books and images from Lulu
• The mustknows
  

Surely that's enough for now!

What a case study... start with a huge public service monopoly (the Post Master General or PMG) and split it into 2: Australia Post and Telecom (roughly 1976 or so?). Start cutting staff... reorganise... reshuffle .... sell excess property... trim it down and increase the potential for a high ROI. Rebrand the sexy IT bit - Telecom - as Telstra and sell it off to investors large and small. OK, the first tranche went well, so sell off some more at a higher price. Now smart investors new that threats like DSL and VoIP were already here but that didn't stop the less informed paying that over-the-top price. Oooops. Since then it's been going down... lots of competition, share price falling... so bring in a US exec with a proven record and... well it's been quite a ride. Here's a Forbes interview with Sol Trujillo for that US perspective. Then get busy writing that essay!