cybernetic yogi

8 04 2011

now for something completely different.  this is a comment i just left on leanmeanminimalist.com (and if he allows it to be published, i’ll be slightly surprised ;).  quote:

ok so i’m a bit late to the Lets-All-Realise-Everett-Bogue-Is-Suffering-From-Naivety-And-Megalomania Party. that’s fashionable, right?

i’ve been reading some minimalist stuff lately & it’s been impossible to avoid seeing Everett Bogue popping up everywhere.  so i read some of him too.  before too long, i couldn’t shake the impression that Everett Bogue is just another insufficiently read/educated GenYer who thinks he’s the first person to discover something, but had the nous to capitalise on it and get a bunch of Fellow Seekers to pay him to live The Good Life – for the time being at least.

congratulations Mr Bogue, you’re a the top of a tiny pyramid scheme.  you’ve successfully discovered the ‘secret’ of countless shonks before you.

my best friend spent a year traveling the world – minimalist style – in 1996, and maintain that low-possession-count lifestyle in two of Australia’s busiest & most capitalist/consumerist cities, until his untimely death a few years ago.  minimalism wasn’t anything new then, and it sure as frak isn’t anything new now, although for sure the lessons can be carried into the digital realm.

but inherent in that low-possession-count ethos was an underlying reliance on other people’s possessions typically via living in a room with other housemates WHO PROVIDED MOST OF THE FURNITURE. and fridge. and ice cube trays.  when we took a holiday in Byron Bay, who do you think brought the beach towels?!!

Everett brags about how little he owns on his site.  i couldn’t help but notice there’s no refrigerator.  or beanbag.  who supplies those?  i’m guessing someone else.  that’s not minimalism, that’s an externality of the likes that any economic rationalist would be very proud.

fuckminimalism.com ? no, fuck you, Mr Bogue.  i understood the core of (and resonated with) minimalism from one brief conversation with my best friend 15 years ago.  i didn’t need to (and thankfully now can’t) spend $17 on your ebook to tell me what can be gleaned – for free – from hundreds of honest, well-meaning people.

and us$47 for your Minimalist Business ebook? yer kidding right?  i haven’t bought an ebook for more than $15 from highly talented writers who had something NEW to say.  no surprise you ignored my tweet politely asking why Minimalist Business cost so much.  so much for Twitter being the best way to communicate with you.

as for this $25/month letter.ly cybernetic yogi shit, omg, that’s where you really lost me. as above, just another GenY kid so far up his own fundamental orifice he can’t see that he’s stumbled on what’s already been discovered long ago.  the abundance of nonsense cyber-infused new-age terminology won’t work on those who’ve seen it all before.  Facebook out – Twitter in?  fuck me, you sound like a vacuous fashion queen of the most objectionable kind.

Everett Bogue IS what i consider convergence; or history repeating itself, depending on how generous you feel today.

p.s. contrary to you bragging about your google rank for ‘cybernetic yogi’ etc, this (leanmeanminimalist.com) site and 4 others ripping you a new one, were the first 5 hits when i googled “cybernetic yogi”. i pray that when i click on Image search i’ll see a cartoon Yogibear who’s been altered by the Borg.

mwah!

 


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Categories : Consumer Fraud, minimalism, new media, stupid greedy white men, sustainability

the future of calendars

7 04 2011

“I’m not used to paying for calendars like you do here in Australia”.

Past

In one simple innocent statement, my partner highlighted the outstanding success of applying “pop-up retailing” to calendars, first brought to Australia in the mid-90s by Paul Breen, licensing the USA-based ‘Calendar Club’ brand and seasonal pop-up retailing concept.

Back then, and apparently still in many countries, wall and desk calendars were either low-value things that businesses gave away to their customers, a cunning exchange of vaguely themed utility for under-the-radar advertising; or “high end” products in niche retail outlets.

Nowadays, calendar retailing is worth several tens of $M (in Australia), forged in large part by Paul Breen’s tireless efforts to convince shopping mall managers to allocate open floor space for short term rental where – voila! – overnight in October/November a ‘kiosk’ appears at your local mall lined with every type of calendar you could possibly want.  They made easy gifts, Christmas ‘stocking fillers’ for those whom you just CBF’d buying anything more meaningful.  I’ve received a few over the years!

The trick to getting people to part with up to $25 per calendar, where previously they were free from your local mechanic / dentist / etc – is personalisation and self-expression.  The burgeoning range of wall and desk calendars catered to almost every social niche, from every breed of faithful dog and fluffy cat, to side-splittingly funny Gary Larson cartoons.  A calendar hung in the home or office signalled to others what you were ‘into’, and provoked conversation.  Oh, and you could also record what you had to do next week – if you remembered to look at it.

Present

However I believe that gravy train is slowly running out of steam.  I have no insider knowledge of sales or returns, but my hunch is they’ve been either plateaued or been slightly falling for a few years, a drop that’s either been masked by Calendar Club’s progress toward market saturation (geographically, the number of stores open each Christmas retail season), or unfairly attributed to the 2008 GFC & low consumer confidence statistics.  Or both.  I believe there’s another – perhaps bigger – culprit.

We’re nearly 4 years into the smartphone boom, heralded by the Apple iPhone first available in June 2007.  Until then Palm Pilot, Windows Mobile & Blackberry PDAs & smartphones were the sole preserve of geeks &/or geeky businessmen.  Among countless other things, a smartphone gives you a calendar that typically syncs with your desktop/laptop computer(s) including your corporate email/calendar/contacts system, and actively reminds you of imminent appointments.  Add the outstanding success of the iPad a year ago, followed by viable competition to the iPhone (Google’s Android, Palm/HP’s WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7) and “suddenly” a whole lot of people have a lot less reason to record their plans on a traditional calendar trapped on a desk or nailed to a wall, especially those intended for the office or home-office.

This ubiquity of high-tech calendars has only just begun, and I believe signals the beginning of the end for physical paper calendars.

Future

Sourcing calendars from publishers all over the world, Calendar Club is justified in having the tagline “The Best Selection Of Calendars In The Known Universe”.  But as the retail end-point for many calendar publishers and image banks, Calendar Club’s ability to capitalise on that imagery needs to move with the times – into the digital space.

Calendar Club needs to tackle the smartphone, pad / tablet / slate, & computer calendar reality head on.

Other than the same disease that’s beset most old-media for the past decade, there’s nothing preventing Calendar Club from creating their own software calendar ‘apps’, featuring the same imagery from their paper counterparts.  As a major multi-national paper calendar retailer, they already have the relationships with the calendar publishers & image banks necessary to garner trust to take this step into the digital domain.  It isn’t just Calendar Club who stands to rise or fall on this issue, it’s the entire ecosystem of paper calendar publishing.

Imagine a smartphone app that features all the crowd-pleasing imagery that modern paper calendars are known for, seamlessly integrating into the phone’s built-in calendar system (that syncs with your desktop/laptop computer or office groupware system).

People want to customise their smartphones for exactly the same reason they were willing to blow $25 on a dozen sheets of paper with cool pictures – especially given the ubiquity of Apple’s one-size-fits-all iPhone & iPad where there’s zero ability to ‘theme’ the built-in calendar app.  Part of the appeal of ‘jailbreaking’ an iPhone/iPad is the ability to customise the UI, and – for better or worse – Android and other smartphones offer that ability to customise.

If Calendar Club doesn’t take the lead and bring great themed imagery into digital calendars, someone else surely will.

 


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Categories : Apple, new media, Retail, sustainability

Seeing REDgroup – Part 4 – A Perfect Storm

8 03 2011

A Perfect Storm

The failure of REDgroup is ‘A Perfect Storm’ writ large.  They were saddled with major debt right form the start, have been financially squeezed from every corner, but more than anything else they’ve compounded their problems with a sequence of bad decisions made by “bovver-boy” managers installed at the expense of losing their inherited experienced staff, thinking that the book publishing and retailing industry would yield to corporate thug tactics, or that consumers would be the slightest bit interested in buying barbecues from Borders.  One could argue that PEP made a mistake even buying the beleaguered (Borders) chain in the first place.  Alas, 20-20 hindsight comes easily.

Books are a sacred miracle of human evolution, representing that quantum leap from storing information only in our heads to be re-told to our descendants in stories, song and teachings, to miraculous devices that are easily and cheaply copied with fidelity, allowing an author, perhaps dead millennia ago on another continent, to speak directly into our head.

But where we buy books (and many other things) from is anything but sacred – most of us don’t give a toss, we just want to pay a fair price, and if Amazon et.al. can sell & ship it to me for up to 50% less than Borders or A&R can, where do you think I’m going to go?  And if I can have a book without a single tree being felled… hello?!?

It was this ‘revolution’ in book publishing that was partly responsible for lifting of the veil of the Dark Ages, a fundamental shift in humanity’s course.  Why should a significant refinement in how books are made, delivered and read also not have a significant impact on society again now? It’s not like I have a vendetta against bricks-n-mortar book retailers, but we simply don’t need as many of them as we used to, and will continue to need less of them as more people buy online and switch to eBooks.  Blacksmiths and shoe repairers died out because we didn’t need them any more.  So too will many categories of brick-n-mortar retailers, and hopefully coal miners.  That’s unavoidable progress.

REDgroup isn’t the first retailer to face the 21st Century and fail.  It won’t be the last.  But relative to its book retailing peers, it fell *now* because it made a bunch of bad decisions by people who didn’t understand the subtle, respectable, low-profit-margin art of bookselling.

And I’ve learned a lesson in being dependant, albeit indirectly, on an Old Media business failing to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.  But I’ll talk more about that in a forthcoming post, whose working title is “The Future Of Calendar Club”.



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Categories : Retail, stupid greedy white men, sustainability

Seeing REDgroup – Part 2 – The Face Of Things To Come

8 03 2011

The Face Of Things To Come

I started ‘blazing’ the online consumer trail in 1997 – 14 years ago – when I bought books from Amazon.com, and a nice but obscure brand of chocolates for my chocaholic sister for Christmas that same year – which I thought was pretty nifty, but she thought was a little odd, gingerly tasting the first chocolate as though it might be poison.

Despite all the posturing to the contrary (by retailers & luddite consumers alike), there’s a heap of stuff you can confidently buy from reputable online retailers, Australian & overseas, many of whom DO offer genuinely good service, without needing to actually see, touch, try on, or spend any time whatsoever in mind-numbingly sterile malls offering the same narrow set of brands everywhere.

Until the early 2000s, Australian Customs *did* levy import duties on some stuff I bought overseas.  I don’t know what the dollar amount threshold was, but when combined with the cost of shipping from overseas, and the exchange rate below $0.60 to the US1$, it usually made it a more expensive proposition than shopping locally, and thus relegated offshore retail to stuff you just couldn’t get locally.

But that world is gone.  For unrelated reasons the US & AU dollar are virtually parity, international shipping can often be quite reasonable, and there’s now no import duty or GST applied to imported goods totalling less than au$1000.  Now I can go on a clothes or sneaker shopping spree – online – and have several hundred dollars worth of stuff (which would cost anything up to double from Australian bricks-n-mortar retailers) and have it all shipped to me for $20-50, still making it a clear financial win.

Is it wrong that overseas retailers don’t have GST applied to their sales?  Absolutely.  I mean c’mon!  In this globalised age where anyone can buy stuff from anywhere else on the planet so easily, why shouldn’t the Government apply GST?  A better question is why don’t they.  My theory is in the ideology of the GST itself.  The GST forced nearly every Australian business to become a tax collector for the Government.  It spread the administrative burden far wider (though about the same thickness for all), whereas the previous Wholesale Sales Tax regime involved at least an order of magnitude fewer Australian businesses and virtually no individuals.  Clearly corralling retailers across the planet into becoming GST collectors for the Australian government would be Mission Impossible (even if legal), so having it levied by Australian Customs at the import waypoint is the only practical option, basically slapping an invoice on every box before local delivery.  With such a cavalier attitude to turning every Tom, Dick and Harriet businessperson into a GST collector for the Government, it’s no surprise that the (Howard) Government wanted to divest itself of the administrative burden of applying and chasing import duties from a strongly growing citizen import tendency.  A decade ago Amazon was just a distant blip on the radar.  Now, with zero import duty/GST and a steadily strengthening AU$, it’s a serious bite out of not just local retailers’ income, but Government’s too.

But lets not make the mistake of thinking the lack of GST applied to consumer importation accounts for the attraction of buying from offshore eretailers.  It doesn’t.  As I said above, the price of much of the stuff I buy offshore can be nearly half that of local retailers.  Even the addition of 10% GST, or more, wouldn’t level that ‘playing field’.

In any nationally competitive industry, prices stabilise at a value that lets all the links in the retail chain make at least a workable profit.  Australia is a small population, spread out over a massive continent.  Out retail prices reflect primarily the ‘economy of scale’ of our comparatively tiny population, and often the cost of shipping product over our vast distances to tiny towns.  So when Europeans and Americans come here and bitch about the price of everything, well, that’s in large part because they come from a country/region with a much higher population, and population density, among other factors.  Get over it.

Maybe you’re more a Readings type of bookworm, one of the few who likes to go to a bookshop who actually reads through several pages of a book, shake hands with the author, AND then buys it from the shop at whatever price they decide to charge.I’m not.  I buy books based on recommendations from my social network, reviews, and occasionally author reputation, in which case I don’t need a physical shop to visit.  Seems I’m in good – or at least voluminous – company.

The reality is that so much of what we buy has become so commoditised, we don’t care where we buy it, “value adding” is often irrelevant, we just want it for a fair price, and we’d especially prefer not to pay the inflated price of faux-discount retailers who use expensive TV advertising.  How can all the existing bricks-n-mortar retailers with expensive mall rents, extensive multi-site IT & POS infrastructures, and a vast staff with structured management spanning a state or country ever compete with a website operated from an ‘invisible’ office-with-warehouse out in a cheap suburb with no public shareholders to please?  Ruslan Kogan is laughing all the way to the bank on this business model!



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To Suit Up, or Not to Suit Up?

25 05 2010

as i described in my last post, i’m giving serious consideration to income sources, with a view to making them transportable to, and hopefully independent of, the Northern Rivers area of NSW.

coincidentally, an entrepreneurial friend in Sydney has described one of his new endeavours, which tweaks my energy-efficiency & sustainability buttons, in this case in business IT, with a view to me being involved at my local implementation level.  it has legs, and in principle at least, it excites me to be able to blend my IT skills with something that “matters” in these global-warming times.

that catch is, the kind of clients they’re going for would likely require me to wear a suit, or at least collar-n-tie etc, and work amongst “corporate IT” types, and in much more complex IT environments, over which i’d have little control.  i flinch severely at that idea.  i’ve always considered standard business attire to be utterly absurd samian reductionism & never wanted anything to do with it.  i worked in & dressed for exactly this situation (thankfully only in those times while on-site with a client) for 4 years in Sydney before moving down here.

i’ve been a 1-man-band in small-business IT consulting for the last 10 years in Melbourne, serving the IT needs of a rarely-changing set of clients.  jeans, tshirt & sneakers are my uniform.  for the most part, so do my clients  (apparently last week a new employee at one of my clients who didn’t know my name referred to me as “that skaterboy”!)  i don’t have a string of MSCE creds to my name – i’ve rarely needed such to meet my client’s needs.  my “office” is a 2nd bedroom, so i don’t have the raft of bricks-n-mortar expenses that bigger fish have.  as such, i don’t charge anything like $180/hour that suit-wearers in this genre typically do.  it works well for us both.

there is a undetermined (& as yet undiscussed) chance i could continue meeting their needs via various remote access technologies from afar, using the services of a low-level hardware jockey for the relatively fewer times when hands-on-site is needed.  or maybe not.

and i’m investigating or considering other options, non-IT-consulting options.  all transportable, work-from-home up-north options.

but there’s also this debt to pay off, which will take at least a few years at status quo, or sooner if i engage other income sources – like this opportunity.  it’d be nice, but not essential, to move up north debt-free.

but the time & headspace to fit this in would likely leave little time to foster the transportable-income alternatives that i need to facilitate life up north!

is this something i should seriously consider, & put aside my disdain for The Suit (and everything that comes along with it), for an option that would further tie me to Melbourne & probably delay a northerly move, but be ‘expedient’?  or is this a diversion from who i am, and where i want to be in 1-3 years time?


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Categories : stupid greedy white men, sustainability

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