Microsoft’s Surface Pro Finally Coming

After months, Microsoft has finally announced a release date for the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet, and a price. They will start selling it on February 9th, and the Surface Pro will run you $899…a full $400 more than the Surface RT that’s already out. If you really want a good Windows tablet, this might be the ticket…it runs the full version of Windows 8, so you can do actual work on the Surface Pro…the hardware is said to be equal to that of an ultrabook. The Surface Pro will be available at Microsoft stores, Best Buy, Staples, and online at microsoftstore.com. You can add the cover with flat keyboard for another hundred, and even though it has a touch screen…if you really have to have one, there’s a mouse!

We Still Use Phones More Than Tablets

You’d think tablets were taking over the world, but at least in data use, they’ve got a ways to go before catching up with smartphones. A survey is just out, and of the top 10 data gobbling devices, 7 are smartphones, and 3 tablets. Technically, one is a phablet, but that’s really just a big smartphone. Researchers at Arieso, the mobile data analytics company, found that iPhone 5 users really burned through the data, downloading 4 times as much content as iPhone 3G users did. All the flagship smartphones…from Apple, Samsung, and HTC showed greater data use than tablets. With all the outrage when phone companies have threatened to throttle data hogs, they found that 1 percent of users chew through 40 percent of downloaded data.

Yes, ‘Tis the Season

With really only 4 days until Christmas, the malls around the Bay Area are jumping, shoppers are jamming the roads around them, and it seems to all the world like some of them only get in a car at this time of the year, and have forgotten all they ever knew about operating a motor vehicle!

With rain hitting the area the next 3 days, and a major storm clobbering the Midwest, keep those people in mind as you motor around…whether commuting to and from work, shopping yourself, or sneaking off for a long holiday vacation.

We won’t really know probably until January how good the holiday shopping season has gone, but all anecdotal signs seem to point to a pretty good one. After a rough last few years, don’t be surprised at your local merchants if they seem to be humming strains of Stan Freberg’s ‘Green Christmas.’

SF & Parking

With the World Series in town, here are some observations about parking in San Francisco that just scream to be made. Last night, for game 1, it didn’t look like the scalping parking lots quite broke through the $100 barrier for parking…one lot I’ve used relatively regularly…a 20 minute walk to AT&T Park no less, generally jacks up prices from $13 a day to $30 or $35 during regular season, and no doubt was getting $80 last night and tonight. This is either free enterprise or highway robbery, depending on how you look at it (and maybe both, where the lot is leased from the City.)

Speaking of the fine City and County of San Francisco, it was great the last couple of days seeing the teeming crowd streaming on foot from downtown along 2nd street to the ball park. Lots of people wearing orange and black, smiling and laughing, anticipating a great time at the series. The City, in its great wisdom, is now considering eliminating parking along 2nd, and taking away 2 lanes to make way for bike lanes and landscaping…presumably for pedestrians who have imbibed too much to have a place to relieve themselves, since that seems to be what happens with landscaping during big events. A city spokesperson says they’ll find spaces to make up the parking on the side streets and alleys. Note to city spokesperson…there already IS parking along those side streets and alleys…and it’s always full now!

It’s all well and good for a city to want to be more bike and pedestrian friendly. It’s also well and good that they want to encourage using mass transit. The problem is, there isn’t enough capacity on useable timetables from distant enough areas for many commuters to use said mass transit…so this just punishes people financially and time-wise who commute into the city by car by necessity. It’s likely that a fair number would choose to live in the city if the rent factor wasn’t one of the highest in North America! I would say this is a wake up call to the powers that be in San Francisco, but don’t want to cause too many readers to laugh themselves to death! Enjoy our beautiful city and all that comes with it…and please use the lovely ornate street rest rooms if nature calls!

A Thought on Future Medical Care

With all the great hand wringing about future medical care in this country…from those that see Medicare for all as the best (certainly that would be the cheapest…no overhead for sales and marketing, no profit…and yes, they characterize it differently, but non-profits have ‘profits’ and big bonuses for the upper management) or those who want Medicare privatized in the future (vastly more profits due to a bigger user pool for the insurers, and more money flowing into investment accounts for Wall Street to play with), here’s a thought that may not have been factored in to the equation.

In the past generation, there was a substantial percentage of wives in married couples…whether stay-at-home or work outside the home women…who spent their golden years taking care of their husbands. This is something a lot of us witnessed first hand…without Mom making sure her husband got his 25 pills a day on time, and taking him to the doctors at the drop of a hat, he certainly would have died 15 years earlier than he did. The victim of a stroke, this former surgeon was not capable of doing these things himself. The same was true in my family of an uncle who had a debilitating disease.

The issue is: with half of all adults divorced, and women much less inclined to wait on and attend to men in their later years than before, how will this affect the cost of health care? It’s common knowledge that most men don’t tend to their health the way women do anyway. How will all these either single or married and pretty well on their own men jack up costs when they wait until things are really bad before seeking care? It may not be emergency room care with its astronomical cost, but it will certainly be much more expensive than catching problems early and treating them aggressively.

This could be an unseen bomb just waiting to blow up costs down the road. While I am of the camp that believes universal health care is inevitable…all the developed countries in the world but the US already has it…this would be a fly in the ointment no matter which course we take.

Formal Meetings- Have Less, Learn More

After reading an article about a good place to work (as described by a CEO), it seems another viewpoint should be raised. This tech CEO was big on training, and had a rule that every manager had to meet with his or her people 1:1 on a regular basis. Apparently, one day, he found that a manager hadn’t had any of these in 6 months.

The CEO has a come to Jesus meeting and explains why he wants this, and says if it doesn’t happen he’ll have no recourse but to fire the people. Now that, of course, is his prerogative as the CEO…having things run your way always is when you are top management.

I haven’t been a CEO of a large company…but I ran a small one on pure positive cash flow for 10 years, and tripled sales and doubled gross profits. I rarely ever had a meeting. As a customer who had been at a large company, had a Ph.D and taught business courses in his ‘retirement’ noted, I practiced management by walking around.

This was true. Every hour of every day, I made the rounds. It’s simple, and works better than meetings. Go out on to the showroom floor and chat with the sales people. Head to the shop and talk with the technicians. Ask them how it’s going, and if there’s anything they need that will make things work more smoothly. You can’t always promise they’ll get those changes, but you ALWAYS know what’s going on, and they know that you are concerned and will try your best to get them what they need. Sometimes, jump in and help and get your hands dirty! Yes, I ruined more than a few dress shirts, ties, and slacks doing this, but the boost to morale was well worth it.

It’s not always true, but as a general rule, you learn a lot more and get a lot more done from management by walking around than from formal meetings. BTW, Mr. Tech CEO I didn’t name…a close friend of mine is a CEO of a company that sells goods that is 1000 times larger than your company and has been in business since the 20’s…guess what? He practices management by walking around too.

Playing With Fire…Works

It’s all too easy to look back at times past and not how much better things were in ‘the good old days.’ In some cases, it also happens to be true. Part of that is due to changing times, of course. Another is the changed perspective from a child to an adult.

The Fourth of July, our Independence Day, is a time for celebration and reflection. I hope you are celebrating in your manner of choice…be it a BBQ, pic nicking, partying, or watching the night works with friends and family. For kids, the food is one great thing, but the big attraction is the fireworks.

Many places these days have only ‘safe and sane’ fireworks, or may have banned them altogether. With all due acknowledgement of the danger or kids shooting off fireworks, that was one of the great high points of a youngster’s summer ‘back in the day.’ Whether it was a package of one and a half inchers, bottle rockets, pinwheels, or those snakes that left a permanent stain on the concrete (to the consternation of adults), THAT was the best part of the holiday for kids.

In our family, we often traveled to a lake in Missouri where my aunt and uncle had a home. Our families would BBQ, water ski, and then take the boat down to the dam to watch the fireworks from the water at dusk. For my cousin and myself, there was another guilty pleasure…a guy on the lake made a trip somewhere every June, and came back with a station wagon full of fireworks that weren’t even legal back then.

My cousin and I (around ages 12 and 13 I believe) would spend the princely sum of 20 dollars and buy a box of M-80’s to split. Nothing matched the excitement of tying those to a rock, lighting them, and tossing them into the lake from the dock…they’d send up a water column some 10 to 15 feet into the air. We were lucky of course–if you didn’t toss them in time, they could blow off most of your hand. That and the fire danger were and are certainly reason enough for them to be banned…but it sure was fun at the time!

Happy Independence Day!

The Supreme Court & the Individual Mandate

As has been widely reported, and is now being analyzed at length, the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act (otherwise dubbed Obamacare) this morning. The administration had claimed that it was Constitutional with three separate arguments: the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the Taxation Power (“lay and collect Taxes”.) Chief Justice Roberts, in delivering the opinion of the court, wrote that the law wasn’t supported by either of the first two, but was, in fact, Constitutional under the Taxation Power of Congress in the Constitution.

Although the Congress stated that it wasn’t a tax in writing the law, the Court sensibly saw past this language as a political decision to get the law passed. The expansion of Medicaid was struck down by the Court. Expect considerable discussion about overturning Obamacare from the right, and expanding it to Medicare from the left from here to the election this fall, and beyond. Let the games begin!

Managing Expectations

Today Apple rolled out a raft of hardware and software at their World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco (WWDC.) The company showed new Macbook Pros, a new Macbook Air, released a new Mac Pro, and demoed their next OS, Mountain Lion, as well as the next iteration of their mobile OS, iOS 6. Some computer commentators have said that the retina display Macbook Pro is a year to 2 years ahead of any PC laptop.

In the OS department, Apple showed their new Maps feature and updated Siri personal assistant software with increased capabilities. One figure was dropped on the crowd which is stunning when you compare it to the 901 million active Facebook users (as of April 2012)….Apple has 400 million CREDIT CARDS of users! Contemplate that for a moment!

Despite this large rollout of products, both soft and hard, Wall Street was ‘disappointed.’ Being a financial whiz is crucial to success on Wall Street, let there be no doubt of that. With that in mind, though, it might serve analysts in good stead to have some real world experience in companies that provide ACTUAL goods and services to our vaunted free market. Even better, if some of these folks had the experience of managing a company on pure, positive cash flow, they would REALLY understand American business. Main Street must be doing a collective face palm right now!

What I Learned On the Way to Look Up Something Else

When I was younger, the editor of our hometown newspaper wrote a couple of regular columns himself. He was a brilliant, interesting man, to be sure. His main column was S.A.’s, a play on both the word ‘essays’ and his initials. It was generally a topical column that any brilliant news editor might produce.

The other column he wrote, which appeared somewhat less regularly, was “Things I Learned On the Way to Look Up Something Else.” If you were around, looking up information in pre-internet days, did that ever happen to you? It certainly happened to me, and my personal database is considerably richer as a result. A confession: I do love the internet, and almost everything associated with it. Even though I do love the web, all the search engines like Google, Bing, and whatever else (if anything) people use really limit, if they don’t completely eliminate, learning other facts ‘on the way to look up something else.’

You don’t have to be an absolute generalist to appreciate the loss of richness in our learning that has occurred as a result of the lightning fast and digitally accurate searches for those crucial facts we are seeking when we do a modern day search. While I don’t advocate…or even personally want…to turn the clock back to the so-called ‘good old days’ before we had the wonders of computerized search, I do recommend cracking a non-fiction book from time to time. You may be surprised what interesting and useful information you’ll pick up leafing through them!