Vladimir Cole / Vlad Cole / VC

CrunchGear’s Matt Burns leaps to an interesting conclusion in his coverage of the news that HP has decided to kill their tablet project that would have run Android: “the best option won and HP is going with the webOS over Windows 7 or Android.”

What’s more likely: after HP paid $1.2B for the  acquisition of Palm, the only politically possible decision HP executives could make is to make damned sure that investment is put to work in the fullest possible way. Would shareholders have accepted any other decision?

Out of the many factors that HP considered in its decision (from technical to consumer trends to licensing considerations), it’s hard to see how the webOS price wasn’t the most heavily weighted factor in the decision.

If you work in or otherwise care about the future of digital media, this Netflix presentation is required reading.

Recently (since my last post, anyways) finished the following. I’d recommend the ones with stars:

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art *
• The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works–and How It’s Transforming the American Economy *
• Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour
• Outliers: The Story of Success *
• Thank You for Smoking: A Novel
• The Informant (Movie Tie-in Edition): A True Story *
• Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City *
• The Lost World (Arthur Conan Doyle version)
• Design Your Self: Rethinking the Way You Live, Love, Work, and Play
• Theory of Fun for Game Design
• Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster *

The subject lines of two emails in my junk mail folder right now remind me of one of my favorite books, Jude the Obscure:

1. “Tap her hole and drill her.”
2. “Specialize in X-Ray technology. Train to be a Radiologist.”

 In a critical moment early on in the book, Jude is walking along a public road and thinking about his progress towards his goal of becoming a great scholar, pondering the great authors he’ll read –Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus — when he’s hit in the ear with a chopped-off pig penis thrown at him by low-class girls who are washing pig offal in a stream and who call him “Hoity-toity.” One of these girls (the thrower of the pig parts) becomes his wife and completely derails his dreams of scholarship.

These two spam emails pretty much sum up Jude’s losing battle between pursuit of animal gratificatin and pursuit of high-minded scholarship. It’s fun (and maybe a bit sad) to note that not a lot has changed since Hardy published Jude the Obscure back in 1896. I’m wondering whether some cultural critic a hundred years from now will take a serious look at spam mail over time and come to the same conclusion.

This is a great business lesson *and* a great restaurant story all wrapped into one post.

First, I’m not usually the type to want to take a beef public. I believe that one should praise in public, criticize in private. However, Wild Ginger (a relatively expensive restaurant located in downtown Seattle) makes it impossible to send anything more than a few words at a time to them. Their “contact us” form rejects submission of comments that are too long and (even worse) gives the user no indication of why the form failed to submit.

So, because Wild Ginger’s comment form is broken, I must make the comment in public and LINK to it in their comment form. Isn’t that brilliant? I bet that that’s exactly the side-effect they didn’t have in mind when they told their web designer to limit comments to 150 characters (or whatever the limit is).

Here’s the text of the complaint I tried to submit:

I was having lunch with business associates at Wild Ginger (downtown Seattle) today and noticed that the crab cakes that we ordered as appetizers smelled strongly of ammonia. At first, I misidentified the source of the odor as the dipping sauce that came with the crab cakes (because the sauce did indeed smell of ammonia), so the server took away one of the two dipping sauces at our table and returned 20 minutes later to inform me that they had determined that the sauce wasn’t spoiled. By the time the server returned, I had rediagnosed the source of the odor as coming from the crab cakes themselves. I pointed this out to the server, and he took away one of the three crab cakes on the table (not the two remaining dishes of crab cakes, mind you, which would have been the appropriate response, even if the customer was just imagining the whole issue).

The server returned 5 to 10 minutes later to say that the crab cakes were indeed “off” and that he’d be removing the crab cakes from our bill. I expected Wild Ginger to make a better response than “We’ll take those off your bill.” Wild Ginger was serving spoiled crab! The restaurant should have assured me that they’d be taking the rotten crab cakes OFF THE MENU.

Subsequent to the meal, I did some research online and learned that ammonia in crab is a common symptom of spoiled crab meat. There is ample documentation of this issue online, but here are a couple of particularly enlightening links:

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/346785
http://www.ari1.com/id41.htm

Serving spoiled crab is not something I would have expected of Wild Ginger. I have been to the restaurant at this point a dozen times since I came to Seattle in 2006 and have always considered it a safe place for a business lunch. Now that I’ve been served spoiled seafood at Wild Ginger, and now that I’ve experienced an underwhelming response to the issue, I am questioning whether it is safe to order *anything* from the menu. Perhaps refrigeration standards are not up to par. Perhaps other hygiene issues exist. I know I may be overreacting because one bad experience in a dozen doesn’t necessarily mak a restaurant bad (especially after so many positive experiences), but I was particularly concerned that the waiter didn’t react more appropriately to the issue. At the very least, the waiter should have removed all of the spoiled food from the table immediately. He took away one single crab cake, not the whole lot. Second, I would have expected escalation to a shift manager who could apologize for the issue. Finally, I’d also expect not to see the crab continue to be served on other diners’ tables.

PS: Please fix your web comment form.

This article in the WSJ that spoke to me. Summary quotes:

“The deepening recession is exacting punishment for a psychological vice that masquerades as virtue for many working people: the unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status. This tendency can induce outright panic as more and more people fear loss of employment.”

“Like a drug, professional success can induce a feeling of ecstasy that quickly feels essential. Recapturing that feeling can require greater and greater feats, a phenomenon that — more than simple greed — explains the drive for ever-larger bonuses and conquests.”

Pretty good summary of typical careerist neuroticism. Not so sure that it’s a vice to be stamped out, though.

While a student in Wharton’s MBA program, I simultaneously served as EIC for the AOL-owned Joystiq properties, the largest video game blog network on the web. This was basically a full-time job on top of my MBA curriculum. For the most part, it was difficult to balance the two roles, but sometimes it lead to insights that wouldn’t have occurred had I not been deeply steeped in new journalism and MBA studies.

One idea that I built out for a class (including business model and all that MBA jazz) was the idea of going head-to-head against the likes of the Financial Times, WSJ, and NYT with an online-only business news publication. The company would not be saddled with expensive print and distribution operations, and would also allow its writers to live wherever they liked, so long as they were near one of the world’s major airport hubs and population centers.

The reason for this unorthodox structure was to keep fixed overhead costs very, very low so that (a) all salaries could be covered through even mediocre advertising, special publishing and syndication revenues; (b) the extra margins (to the extent that any existed) could be focused on talent acquisition, talent retention and brand building. Unshackled by the dead weight of physical operations, the business would be agile, fast, and ultimately deadly for the lumbering giants — even the Grey Lady.

Alas, I never went any further with the idea, but every new report on the collapse has me kicking myself for not building this out and trying to make it happen. It’s too late now. The timing would have been perfect two or three years ago. The physical news media are already reaching advanced stages of collapse which has some of them earnestly working to reinvent themselves (the LA Times, for instance, announced that digital revenues now cover newsroom payroll!). The survivors will be much, much stronger and will have their pick of talent.

It’s fun to watch from the sidelines, but I wonder how long I’ll have to wait to feel this sure about an opportunity to found a startup so clearly in my domain of expertise and passion. The collapse and rebirth of multi-billion dollar, multi-century industries doesn’t happen often (thankfully). I hope I’ve got the guts to pursue the next one.

I’ve been vexed by an Outlook 2007 bug that prevents me from deleting certain RSS feeds. It’s a completely annoying bug with an incorrect error message, but thanks to good citizen Grayson Peddie, I found this fix. I couldn’t find another way to thank him  (the forums where he’s active require registration to see his “profile”), so here’s my thanks in public, on the world wide interweb. On the off chance he ever searches for himself, I want to tell him this: Grayson: you saved me a ton of vexation. Thank you! Thank you!

You know it’s bad when all of a sudden college friends who’ve been working in investment banks for nearly 10 years are flooding you with invites to connect on LinkedIn. These people have shunned the internet’s most popular sites for years, and now that they finally fear for their jobs, they’re *finally* getting around to tending to their networks.