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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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I've been sitting here for a couple of hours trying to come up with a suitable
topic for today's commentary -- but there is nothing particularly inspiring
happening out there that I haven't already covered.
Days like this can be very hard work for an impoverished commentator who
has to grind out bright and sparkling prose on exciting new topics day
after day :-)
One thing I did notice on the
Telstra/Saturn Business programme
this morning (6:30am on TV1) was the noise people are making about the
compliance
costs associated with doing business in New Zealand.
(Note to TVNZ -- Why isn't the Telstra/Saturn Business program included on
this page where
most sensible people would expect to find it?)
While it's true that anyone starting a business for the first time in New Zealand
will probably be gobsmacked by the amount of paper that starts streaming through
their mailbox, at least we're not quite as badly off as some places in the USA.
Take for example the case of Huges Electronics, the company which operates
a large number of satellites positioned over 22,000 miles above the earth
in geostationary orbits. A number of these satellites just happen to be
operated out of Los Angeles County -- so the local tax assessor there
has decided that, since they are such valuable pieces of property, and since
they ARE effectively within the boundaries of his tax area, he's going to
levy an extra property tax (based on the value of the satellites) on Huges.
Yes, that's right -- the taxman has decided that, for the purposes of
tax liabilities, distance is no object.
How crazy is that? -- almost as crazy as claiming a cultural right to the
radio spectrum I suspect.
Microsoft Shows Its Age
Even the most powerful and successful companies have eventually lost
the plot and come unstuck by either not keeping up with technology -- or
simply going too far in the wrong direction.
The bigger and more successful you are, the more likely you are to think that
the market will adapt to your products rather than the converse. This is
why we will always see bright, innovative new companies overtaking their
larger, bloated forebears.
One such victim of this old-agedness is Polariod in the USA. It seems that
they've been unable to make the transition from film-based instant
photography to the newer digitally-based stuff. Word on the wires is that
Polaroid is so far down the gurgler that it may soon file for bankruptcy
protection.
I wonder if Microsoft isn't also starting showing its age and contempt for
the demands of the market as it prepares to roll out HailStorm.
Does Microsoft really expect the market to embrace a product/service to
which they will surrender some of their most valuable data when that
service is being delivered by a company with one of the worst security
records in the business?
What's more -- it's a company that has on several occasions shown that it
is incapable of quickly fixing their online systems when things go wrong.
Most recently we've seen this with the week-long outage of its instant
messaging system and previously it has left HotMail users high and dry
for protracted periods.
Just a word to Microsoft -- just because you build it doesn't mean they
will come. You're big and powerful -- but perhaps not so big and powerful
that people will accept that level of risk.
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
here.
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