Day-To-Day Nerdery
Travel
Life in the technology industry

The readership is small, but scrappy. Lately I’ve wanted to throw in a sales angle, since that’s how I make my living. I also want to take a swing at building a real audience. The big obstacle of course, is that successful blogs are updated many times a day, with quality material.

To that end, I have solicited a collaborator. Funny guy, we worked adjoining geography for a technology company that you’ve seen commercials for on basic cable up until last year. The price for his commitment was a freshly branded blog. So at some point over the next two weeks, posts will cut over to the new site (name TBD), and SweetMotherTexas will go on hiatus. I’ll move all active subscriptions over. The good news is that we will have double the content, and this guy is pretty funny. Until then I’ll continue to post affordable, medium-to-fair quality humor.

Really?  The motorcycle-mounted machine gun trick?  Painful…

Also note the side-mounted rifle scabbard.

“Excellent!  Where am I on the list?”

“…Number 32.”

…Which is what happens when you schedule a flight the day after a holiday.  Still, there are compensations for a crowded flight, below the jump.

Texas minus 30 degrees...

….Like not roasting in the hot Texas sun….

…The scenery is nice, although be assured the plane was prettier on the outside than it was on the inside…

…My cab driver was wearing warm leather gloves – either he is from some place hotter than Texas, or perhaps he was just feeling fancy.

…Downtown San Jose.  Hard to believe that the 21st century got invented in a place this lush, with no buildings taller than 18 floors.

Having chosen XBox 360 in 2005 while you were a  ”Sony exclusive”, I though I had lost you forever.  Then – Green shoots of hope as Bandai decided that Sony’s market share of next-gen consoles was too small not to include Microsoft – I ran out and bought you the first day you became available on my platform.

But alas, my hope turned to cruel disappointment, as I realized that I could never play you on the ridiculously clunky Microsoft game paddles and their stupid, oversized D-Pads the way I could on PS2 controllers.  It was bitter indeed to fumble clumsily through moves that I used to perform in a beautifully synchronized symphony of Japanese animated Kung-Fu violence.  And so again, I placed you lovingly in your plastic case and put you on a shelf, thinking we had again been irrevocably separated.

…And there you remain, but perhaps hope lives again.  Will this new “improved” game pad reunite us?  Will the below illustrated diagram of the newly functional D-Pads put us back on our path to mutual glory?  I don’t know.  But I hope.

It’s going to get better, but not by much.  Friction (the relative difficulty of delivering a good to the consumer’s hand) determines scarcity , and scarcity determines price.  The bottom line that the music industry is going to have to confront is this:  Most of the friction in music came from the media, not the music.  Now that the media is digital instead of physical, most of the friction is gone and is never coming back.  There really is no solution in the current business model.  The music itself wasn’t as valuable as the industry thought it was – the end.

News is going through the exact same thing.  News, like music is growing.  It’s infinite, in fact.  More people consume more news today than ever before in the history of man.  But newspapers and magazines are dying, because the friction was always in the medium.  Now the industry is begging for subsidies, trying to save the news.  But the news is fine – it’s just not as valuable as they thought it was.  They’re really trying to save paper.

Studios will follow.  They have  more time, because there’s still some friction in gigabyte movie downloads (as opposed to megabytes in music and kilobytes in news).  But it’s only a matter of time.  In the meantime, the edges of the physical medium begin to get weeded out.

Conclusion:  If you’re product can be digitized, then you had better make sure the business model can accommodate the loss of friction in the medium or prepare for a more modest profit line.  This I will call the Seth Godin Doctrine.

The natural question is:  Is there an industry where a decline in the medium didn’t mean a decline in value?  Answer:  Yes – software.

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Update:  Go here if you want the source of this line of thought.