07.23.07
Posted in General Management, Political, Small Business at 10:07 by lnxwalt
I am currently working out of state, over 2700 miles from home. On my daily phone call home, the kid says that he wants his best friend to go to an out-of-area college.
“Why?”, I asked.
“Because I don’t want him to get stuck here.”
That is a telling indictment of our local economy. This year’s high school graduates are making each other promise to leave the area and never return. They see what our elected leaders (and most businesses with locations in the area) do not see. Until we find a way to offer a decent living to substantially all of our local residents, this remote area we call home is toxic waste.
I resolve the situation by working mostly out of the area–locations like Reno, NV; Albany, NY; Binghamton, NY; and the unforgettable Pasadena, CA–but it is getting old. I would certainly take a look at an opportunity that put me in one place (such as the Atlanta area) that gave me the ability to truly launch my business because I’m actually going to be around to run things.
The sad thing is, this is not a bad place. It has its positives and its negatives like any other. But our leaders have consistently used taxpayer funds to try to attract large, out-of-area businesses to relocate or expand into the area. These corporations are not full of fools. They realize that they can play one area against another and win tax breaks, payroll subsidies, financing help, and even free land (well, $1 land). Then, these companies often pay their employees so little that it does not really even help the local economic situation.
If our local governments would only support (and not just with their lips) SLOBs, a lot of this could be reversed.
Use Local Governmental Funding
Our local governments spend thousands of dollars per year on brochures, trade show materials, and the annual “High Desert Opportunity” show. The problem is, the targeted companies are getting the same pitches from other areas all around the nation. If it makes financial sense for a large company to come to the area, they will come without a lot of dollar-waving. If it does not make financial sense, they may come anyway, but your cities and residents will have to absorb the difference.
Instead, we need to devote most of that funding to training and establishing small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) that already have an incentive to remain in the area. This might entail providing both technical (that is, industry-specific) and business (that is, general to any business) training and advice. It could also involve providing space in an incubator program to get businesses started.
Another way to help is to provide grants and loan guarantees to SLOBs for the formation & establishment or expansion of their businesses.
Leadership
Follow-Through
The most important factor, after the funding mentioned above, is follow-through.
In the early 1990s, I used to work for Carl’s Jr Restaurants. The best (most effective) manager I ever had was there. He came in one night at 1AM, while we were cleaning up the restaurant, then bent down and cleaned out a floor drain. If you don’t know it, a floor drain collects fluids so that they do not pool on the floor. However, a floor drain also collects solids, which must be removed so they do not clog the drain and pipes, and so they do not decay and fill the kitchen with foul odors. Because the solids have been soaking in fluids all day, cleaning floor drains is an unpleasant experience, so most employees avoid it.
When Vince, the manager, cleaned the floor drains himself, none of us could make any excuse. By cleaning the floor drain that one night, he assured that we would keep them clean afterward. A fantastic lesson. I later worked for a competitor where the philosophy was “I’m not paying a manager $20 per hour to sweep the floor.” Not surprisingly, only a very few employees would put much effort into cleaning the place.
If our cities really want to reap the benefits of SLOBs, they need to follow-through. When purchasing, seek small, locally-owned vendors. Ensure that they are selling you locally-produced products and services whenever possible. It does not really help the local economy when you buy software from a local vendor who forwards most of the revenue to an out-of-area company. Neither does it benefit your community when you hire an out-of-area contractor to build your roads if someone in your community can do the work at an acceptable level of quality and within an acceptable time frame.
Relentless Commitment To SLOBs
Just as selling your community to out-of-area businesses takes complete commitment (you just wait until a new sewer bond is about to be passed that will affect them!), so you have to be completely committed to supporting smaller, locally-owned businesses.
One fast food chain, for example, used to put large banners on the side of their buildings to promote the monthly special. The local inspector would come and issue a take-down order and sometimes a fine. One of the largest supermarkets continually had large banners on their building. (In either case, it was a local branch of an out-of-area corporation, so it is difficult to feel sorry for them.) However, it does show a curious problem: big corporations seem to buy laws to suit their desires, which somehow seem to have the most impact on smaller businesses.
If you want to heal our local economy, you’re going to have to stop spreading the city’s butt-cheeks to large corporate interests. If a SLOB cannot have a banner (or paint advertising on their windows), then neither should a big, out-of-area corporation be allowed to have a banner or paint advertising on their windows.
Meeting and talking with your local chambers of commerce is also important, as you are likely to find areas of concern. However, the very smallest and most financially vulnerable businesses are not likely to be members. You have to go out of your way to find them and to involve them in policy discussions both at the mayor-and-council level and at the city enforcement bureaucracy level. And that means modifying some policies that would otherwise appear to have general support, so that they are less harsh on SLOBs.
Summing Up
If we want the Victor Valley area to be attractive to the brightest and most ambitious individuals, we have to stop kowtowing to large out-of-area corporations and instead cater to the home-grown enterprises that will stick with the area through the hardships of life. We need to assist these locally-owned businesses with formation, with finances, and with regulation. We need to buy from these businesses and promote these businesses. We need to encourage these businesses to produce locally, with local labor and materials.
The crudeness was unavoidable. Sometimes it seems like our cities give corporations everything that they want while penalizing the smaller, locally-owned businesses that actually provide most jobs. If this makes you change your behavior, it was a good thing.
Permalink
Posted in Political, Small Business at 8:46 by lnxwalt
In CSUSB Needs To Lead Us, I proposed a regional economic development effort.
Ever since the late 1980s and early 1990s, there have been mild efforts to bring a genuine branch campus of California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) to the area. While we continue to discuss this, the Coachella Valley has not only proposed such a thing, but has gotten together and paid for it, and as a result of strong local interest, succeeded in reaching its goal: The former Coachella Valley Center of CSUSB is now officially the Palm Desert Campus of CSUSB. Meanwhile, residents of the Victor Valley and Barstow areas continue to drive thirty miles or more to get to the nearest state university campus.
I propose that the Town of Apple Valley make available some land in the vicinity of the Apple Valley Airport, preferably along Dale Evans Parkway, for such a campus. Closer to the I-15 freeway is better in this case, and the location is fairly central once the Barstow area enters consideration. Since this will definitely increase traffic, DEPkwy should be widened to a four-lane road (two in each direction), with turning lanes added for sites such as the Wal-Mart distribution center where a relatively large number of commuters need to turn. In fact, a traffic light may even be justified at the High Desert Campus.
The CSUSB College of Business and Public Administration is accredited by the NASPAA. Public administration is not unlike administration of non-profits, so how about a practicum, a hands-on component in which students help manage and raise funding for non-profits that are assisting in the effort to build up the community the university’s High Desert Campus?
One major add-on. In keeping with the grand vision in the earlier article, I propose that the State of California admits that the present petroleum-based economy cannot continue indefinitely and therefore slap a twenty percent tax on the retail price of petroleum products to be spent designing, developing, constructing, and operating alternative energy generation facilities and high-speed rail lines between residential areas and employment, commerce, and entertainment centers. On top of that, add another 5% tax for CSU and community college research, education, and training programs related to this development.
These taxes will hurt–a lot–but continued inaction will bring even more intense pain in the near future. If we act now, our pain will be diminishing when other areas first start to recognize that a forced change is at hand.
Permalink
07.21.07
Posted in Local News, Political, Small Business at 16:48 by lnxwalt
I am a proud graduate of our nearby campus of the California State University. I took Business Administration at CSU San Bernardino (CSUSB). I was there when the University’s College of Business and Public Administration received AACSB acreditation. It was a good school then, and it is a good school now.
CSUSB has its main campus at the foot of the San Bernardino mountains, near the intersection of the I-15 and I-215 freeways (the I-210/CA-30 is also nearby). It also has a branch campus in Palm Desert, funded through a unique partnership between local Coachella Valley businesses and governments with the state of California.
In the Victor Valley and Barstow areas, there are large numbers of people coming into the area, but relatively few employment opportunities for those residents. As a consequence, motivated residents tend to take a lot of classes at our local community colleges (Victor Valley Community College and Barstow Community College). Those who can afford the commute then wind up driving up and down the Cajon Pass to complete their Bachelor Degrees at the CSUSB main campus.
I propose that local government, local businesses, and the two community colleges sit down with the administration of CSUSB and work out a solution. Here are my ideas:
- Create the High Desert Campus (or campuses) on land near Southern California Logistics Airport (SCLA), Apple Valley Airport, or Barstow-Daggett Airport. This campus should include branch campuses of the two community colleges as well. Another interesting option is to get other state-owned universities (University of California-Riverside [UCR] and California State Polytechnic University-Pomona [CSPUP] come to mind) to also join in the effort.
- Research–the community needs research into alternative energy, conservation, recycling, mass transit, information technology & robotics, and low environmental-impact production processes. Let that be a focus of this campus, combining technology, business, and the sciences into a blended program that is both theoretical and practical. For example, developing residential (home/apartment-based) power generation systems that can then be installed throughout the area would both advance our understanding of the challenges of such systems and have practical effects of lowering the utility costs of local residents. Research into mass transportation systems to connect areas like ours to regional employment and recreation centers is another area of need. Research into ways to get more use out of the water we have (and ways to get more water into the area) would also be helpful.
- Technology–The community needs research and development of reproducible, BSD/MIT/GNU-licensed technologies for improved business processes. For example, programmable robots would be an option. Technologies that are developed with public funds should always be licensed under open-source licenses and be freely usable by taxpayers (at least those of said jurisdiction). This will enable the development of a zone for seeding low environmental-impact technology SLOBs. The best thing would be for the County of San Bernardino and the local cities & town to provide managerial and financial assistance in exchange for an agreement to stay in the area for up to ten years (if the business is still open by that time), hiring local residents for any open positions. This isn’t much more than what is already given to large out-of-area companies, except that those out-of-area companies tend to leave when things get rough.
- Vocational training–This would be applied technology taught in conjunction with the two community colleges. Since SCLA is just North of a large federal corrections complex, there would probably be some federal funding available for “rehabilitating” some of their inmates. Apple Valley airport is not too far from large retail chain’s area distribution center and I also believe the County of San Bernardino has a small correctional facility (or maybe youth correctional facility) a couple of miles North of the airport.
- Military re-entry & vocational rehabilitation–with so many of our young people going overseas to fight in wars, there is a large group of people that are or will be returning to this country without any usable civilian job skills. Many of them will have physical or emotional damage from their tours of duty. Building a large re-entry facility and offering to help the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs re-acclimate these individuals into society can only help our locality as well as the whole of American society.
- Foreign Languages–Assuming that the military re-entry program flies, there would be a pool of people who have been exposed to foreign languages and cultures. The area could utilize that to build competencies in international cultural understanding in partnership with local school systems. In addition to Middle Eastern languages and cultures (Arabic, Kurdish, Hebrew, Farsi, and so on), it would be great, for example, to bring in real Japanese residents to come and instruct high school and college students in Japanese language and culture. Ideally, each class would be a yearlong immersion, including a two-week trip to said country.
There is a reason why so many local graduates leave the area. However, with some serious effort by CSUSB, SB County, and the local town+cities & educational institutions, this can be a place that attracts ambitious people.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: economicdevelopment, education, high desert, victor valley, csusb, vvc
Permalink
Posted in Political, Small Business at 16:21 by lnxwalt
Definition: A SLOB is a Small, Locally-Owned Business.
SLOBs are the cure for many of the ills that America is currently experiencing. For example, the distortions caused by letting big companies take over the entertainment industries are behind the DMCA. As smaller companies that have fewer resources for “undue influence” of the political process take over the field, such anti-consumer legislation can be overturned.
SLOBs tend to employ local staff members, support local education and non-profits, and pay taxes to local governments.
SLOBs are closely tied to the local economy, so their owners tend to be in favor of things that they see as strengthening that local economy in the near and medium time frame. SLOBs are often family-owned businesses (FOBs), too.
We support SLOBs. We wonder why our government agencies, funded by taxes that SLOBs pay, do not support SLOBs. Perhaps big tax-evading corporations have too much influence in our political process.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: smallbusiness
Permalink
07.14.07
Posted in Political, Small Business at 21:21 by lnxwalt
For the first part of this series, check out “Can We Have Security Without Idiocy?”.
What is your business? What product do you make? What service do you offer? How has the increased focus on security and blame-tracking affected the way you do business?
Let’s think about this. Think about all the background checks that you probably do on your employees. What do they typically find? That your applicant drank a lot of alcohol during college? To be sure, there are times when a background check will turn up something unsavory in a person’s past. However, think about the spy rings that infested (and probably still infest) our nation’s military weapons industry (probably the most background-checked jobs on earth) and that of the United Kingdom. Which is not to say that these checks cannot be helpful, but they are flawed by the idea that one’s future actions are predictable by what one is known to have done in the past.
Think about your teen years and maybe even your twenties. If you are like many Americans, those were times filled with all sorts of exploration and experiences, doing things that you not only would not do today, but things that you don’t even approve of anymore. What if your daughter was to decide to do some of the exact same things (in whatever modern incarnation they go by) that you did twenty or thirty years ago? How would you react?
Exactly.
You turned out okay. You have not killed anyone or robbed any banks. You work hard, maybe a little too many hours. Then you go home and try to spend a few minutes with the kids before bedtime and then you try to finish some leftover work before you also collapse, exhausted, into bed.
The point is, people are dynamic — we are ever-changing. While you are capable in theory of drinking a quart of schnapps at one time again, you know that you really cannot do it anymore. If someone were to categorize you as an alcohol abuser based on what you did during your college years, that person would do you a disservice as well as waste his or her time trying to monitor your (greatly-reduced) consumption.
I knew someone in high school who had an interesting father. The dad had fled from his homeland after participating in a “national liberation” movement. Yet, here in this country, he married and had children. He wrote poetry. He bought a little house where his kids could play in a treehouse in the backyard. PAST=violence; PRESENT=harmonious family living. Even after his former country won its independence, he stayed in America where he had the lovely family thing going on. I never knew him to be a threat, and I believe that two of the three kids went into law enforcement.
There was a young guy named Kevin who became well-known for breaching computer systems. In fact, rumor has it that the movie War Games is loosely based on one of his adventures. After a prison term, he was forbidden to touch or use computer or network equipment. The question is, how much of his old technical knowledge is relevant today? How much of a threat is he, and could we not put his knowledge to positive use instead of trying to block him out?
Side note: I would not be able to conform to this kind of punishment. My natural interest and curiosity for all things computer would compel me to learn about both current and upcoming technology.
He has been able to start a security consultancy, based on the non-technology skills that he used to accomplish his former feats. Still, he might be an even more effective security consultant if he had been able to maintain and update his technical skills.
Are there some things you did when you were in high school or college which you do not wish to see on the evening news? How would you feel if one of those silly acts suddenly blocked you from advancing in your career or possibly even cost you your job?
In other words, when you look at someone’s history, you also have to look at the person’s present. If they do not appear to line up, it may be that the history is no longer relevant. Now if we can only get certain policy-makers to understand this.
Permalink
07.08.07
Posted in Local News, Small Business at 21:48 by lnxwalt
I realize that the entire country is now aware of California’s extraordinary drought conditions. In our area of Southern California, we already have a desert, so there is a more or less permanent drought going on. Even so, conditions are quite a bit drier this year than usual.
There are plenty of things that we can and should do to reduce our water consumption. However, before I advise you to cut your water use, I want to warn you that sometimes mandatory rationing is done as a percentage cut of the previous year’s consumption. If that happens, people who have already been conserving will be expected to cut just as much as people who have been wasting water.
This was brought to mind by an article in the weekend edition of USA Today (July 6-8, 2007). One thing that is happening during this extended hotel stay is that I’m reading the dead-tree version of the newspaper most days. Right on page 1A, the front page of the front section, there is an article entitled “Ease up on the faucet, residents told”. You might do well to read it.
There are a few things that we can do during this period, and even more that need to be done over the long term.
Short Term
- Limit watering of lawns, the most water-consuming part of a normal home, to just enough to keep the grass alive. The only parts of the lawn that should be green are human-use zones. That is, if you walk and play on the grass, water it. If you don’t, let it die.
- Car-washing: skip the hoses and drive-through washes. Get a neighborhood teen to use a bucket and towels to wash your car each week. Many of them have tight budgets and unlimited wants, so a regular cash-flow might be welcomed. Better yet, do it yourself and get a little exercise.
- Turn faucets / spigots all the way off when you are not using them. If they still leak, repair them. Make sure that any watering that you do goes on the plants you want. If you have water runoff or wind-blown mist, you need to change something about your watering.
- Shorter showers can save gallons of water each day.
- Wait until you have a full load to do your laundry.
- Offer to help elderly neighbors repair leaks. On triple-digit days, be sure to visit them and ensure that they have cooling. If they do not, bring them to your home or to a mall or to an emergency heat relief center. I first heard of these last year. Apparently California has some designated places where people may go to cool off during heat waves.
There are more things you can do as well, but this will help immensely.
Long Term
- Rip out lawns and other high-water-requirement landscaping. Replace them with drought-tolerant and native plants, even if they will need a little extra water the first couple of years. The only place where lawns should be in the desert are walking and playing areas.
- Install drip and other low-waste watering systems instead of using the old hose and spray nozzle. Set them on an automatic schedule that avoids common high-wind and high-temperature portions of the day.
- Remove ponds and other ornamental waterflows.
- Get low-flow fixtures.
- Get on the phone promptly when you see water flowing down the street or across desert lots. Some local areas have older iron pipes that break repeatedly. The water company “can’t afford” to replace these pipes, so they put these metal straps on to stop or at least slow the water loss. Other flows will be caused by someone overwatering.
- Advocate for a Southern California desalinization plant to bring several million gallons of purified seawater daily to areas from San Diego to Santa Barbara to Barstow to the Imperial Valley. This will help reduce the North-South tension in the state as well, by making the South less dependent on taking water from the North.
- Advocate for solar and wind power generation, including home-based systems designed primarily to reduce household dependence upon the “grid”. These plants have less need for evaporative cooling than coal and natural gas generators, saving water for other uses.
- Sweep your driveway and sidewalks, rather than hosing them off.
A final thought: one of the reasons so many people are coming to the Victor Valley (and throughout the High Desert and Inland Empire areas) is housing affordability. However, this brings the problems associated with commuting and also increases water use in areas that are already in overdraft.
When we build small, profitable, owner-managed businesses and enable our neighbors to give up their commutes to Los Angeles and Orange Counties, local residents of those counties will be better able to obtain jobs in their own areas that pay enough to meet their needs.
We need to continually remind our local governments that small, owner-managed businesses are on the right side of just about every social issue. Rather than kow-tow to large out-of-area corporations that will dump the area at a drop of a hat, our town and city councils and county boards of supervisors need to support and promote locally-owned and managed businesses that have an incentive to stay and make things better for everyone.
Blogged with Flock
Permalink
07.05.07
Posted in Political, Small Business at 4:06 by lnxwalt
During the course of human events, power and wealth often become concentrated in the hands of a small subset of the population. When they are allowed to have inordinate influence in the governance and economy of the land, this becomes self-perpetuating. At this point, the unscrupulous and dishonest begin to have long-term prosperity and the honest, hard-working, and productive become a permanently subservient class in that society.
This evil, when it occurs, must be firmly and quickly corrected, lest society collapse from within. When the rewards for hard work go solely to the wealthy, then employees and others who are not wealthy begin to curtail their output. Society in general begins to suffer.
In some countries, without a long tradition of using civil means for seeking change, disorder and violence are the result. We thank God we have not had that here.
We, the people that own, work for, and aspire to own small businesses here in the United States of America hold these truths to be self-evident:
- That smaller, locally-owned businesses provide more jobs to more people than the big corporations
- That smaller, locally-owned businesses are more involved in their local communities, providing not only money, but time, skills, personnel, leadership, and advocacy for the needs of local non-profits, educational institutions, individuals, and local government agencies
- That locally-owned businesses and locally-based workforces are more likely to be concerned and involved in economic, social, and political situations in their communities and to share the local perspective on relevant issues
- That locally-owned businesses are more likely to stay in a community during a downturn, being better neighbors than huge corporations that come and go as their own interests dictate
- That local government and residents need to be aware of the benefits that come from locally-owned businesses and to seek out locally-owned suppliers for most of their needs
- That locally-owned businesses provide local jobs for local residents and that therefore choosing to patronize locally-owned businesses brings beneficial employment (with its social and economic effects) to their local communities
- That many of the pressing social issues we face today are partly effects of the preference for large, out-of-area corporations over locally-owned businesses
- That solving these pressing social issues will necessarily include overturning the preference for large, out-of-area corporations in favor of supporting the locally-owned businesses that have the strongest incentives to help solve these problems
Therefore, we request that local governments (city, village, town, township, borough, county, parish) and state governments work to prefer small, locally-owned businesses for all of their outside spending and simplify their purchasing and contracting processes so that smaller, locally-owned businesses can more easily meet their requirements. We request that our leaders turn down special requests by large corporations that may have adverse effects on smaller, locally-owned businesses as well as local residents. We request that our leaders turn down election campaign funds from large, out-of-area corporations and publicly announce which ones attempted to use their money to influence the course of local events.
Small businesses are not all led by the dildoes that resent any proposal to improve life for working Americans and local residents. While we have limits on what we can afford, there are many so-called “small business coalitions” that are secretly funded by large corporations that are trying to avoid their paying their fair share. They will fight any requirement in the name of “protecting small businesses from burdensome regulations,” while they secretly export more jobs to overseas workers without our system of legal protections. While smaller, locally-owned businesses are crucial parts of the tax infrastructure, many large corporations work the backrooms and play the loopholes in order to avoid paying taxes.
Ignore these ersatz small business coalitions and talk to individual small, locally-owned businesses in your own communities.
Instead of spending thousands or even millions of dollars to attract out-of-area corporations (which somehow wind up expecting tax incentives that are paid by increasing the taxes on local residents and the smaller locally-owned businesses that are already supporting the area), spend economic development funds helping to train and finance the local entrepreneurs that will hire your local high school graduates and help out in your local elementary schools. Instead of trying (generally unsuccessfully) to attract large, out-of-area corporations to invest in our inner cities, decide on a strategy that places the creation and building of smaller, locally-owned businesses at its core.
Do these things not because they benefit us, but because by benefiting us they also benefit the individual residents and citizens that live in our communities.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: politics, small business, independence day
Permalink
06.23.07
Posted in FLOSS, Small Business at 0:33 by lnxwalt
I have spent the past few days trying to get a co-worker’s new Toshiba laptop, powered by Microsoft’s Windows Vista, set up. Being over 2700 miles away from home (and even further for my co-worker), it is essential that the laptop works with the hotel’s WiFi network. While my Dell, powered by Linux Mint, works reliably, his does not.
Apparently, some of the changes that Microsoft made to their TCP/IP stack are incompatible with some implementations of DHCP. In simple English, if you buy a computer with Vista on it, you may need to buy new networking equipment in order for the computer to connect reliably.
After all of this–try this fix and try that fix, including registry fixes and temporarily disabling the built-in firewall–there is still not a reliable way to connect his computer to the wireless network (and from there to the larger Internet).
I am sure that Microsoft will have a permanent solution to this within a month or two. They are pretty intelligent people, so they know about the problem and are working on a solution for it. It is too bad that they felt the pressure to push it out the door unfinished.
Still, if you have a small business that uses networked computers, your best bet is to insist on Linux-powered computers and standardized network protocols and file formats. If your people spend a week or two in a hotel, unable to connect to the network (and hence, unable to reach your VPN), you may lose a substantial amount of productivity with those employees. Instead of throwing your company’s money into a giant corporation’s “one-point-oh quality” product, so that you can be free tester to help them work out the bugs, check out the polished Linux distributions that are available for the desktop / client.
In our country, we have seen that larger companies, as they gain power and influence, tend to turn it against their employees, their customers, their neighbors, their communities, and their smaller competitors. It becomes a game of trying to use their money and influence to benefit themselves while transferring all costs to the rest of society. Often, if society as a whole “spanks” a particular corporation, it decides to be a good citizen and good neighbor, at least for the next several years.
If you still want the Microsoft blessing, look at Xandros for the desktop. Xandros is a small Linux distributor that has signed a blessing agreement with Microsoft. If that is not important to you, or if you explicitly wish to avoid the “blessing,” take a look at Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora for the desktop. (For non-technical users, we recommend Mint or a Ubuntu-family [Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu] operating system.)
Permalink
06.05.07
Posted in Small Business at 1:53 by lnxwalt
One area where I think smaller businesses have plenty of built-in advantages is in the foodservice industries. Restaurants, cafeterias, fast food quick-service restaurants, coffee shops—anywhere that customers will crave something that is somehow unique or different from the norm. Large chains of restaurants, good as they may be (Mac Grill!) sooner or later begin to taste like everything they make is the same product.
This was brought into focus for me when I went to a quick-service fish place, but I really only wanted shrimp and french fries. It turned out that they had something roughly fitting that description, but it all tasted exactly like their fried fish patty. The experience led me to avoid them for some time, but I noticed that after you have eaten in restaurant chain X several times, all of chain X’s products tasted the same. This is the impetus behind the monthly special temporary products: “Would you like to try our new chicken sandwich?” Then, before you can get tired of the chicken sandwich, it is gone, replaced by another temporary product.
In a smaller business, you realize that people who choose you have probably driven past the large corporate competitor to do business with you. It frees you from the horrid slavery of trying to keep up with the corporate competitors’ constant changes. You can dare to be different–because you are already different–and refuse to change your offerings just because they do.
Last year, I was in a place (Binghamton, NY) where they have a local food product called the speedie. I was there during the annual speediefest, but I was working too many hours to participate. When you consider our area, where we have little in the way of local specialties, it was fascinating to see just how much the existence of locally-identified products and services can give focus to efforts to make your area stand out.
I am currently in New Jersey, about 2700 miles away from home. As I look around for places to eat each day, one thing stands out to me. A large number of the eateries are the same brands I know from home. The problem is, I was tired of those eateries before I came here, so I certainly do not want to eat there now. So I am more likely to try a place if it is a small, locally-owned business rather than a chain or franchise.
So for all of our small-business readers, I recommend that you stop looking at your business’ size as an obstacle. Look at it as an advantage, because you can afford to focus on your market and to adapt to your locality. Your larger competitors can not afford to give so much attention to L10N (localization), because their business models depend upon them being able to spread their costs and choices over a larger volume. Make sure that your customers can clearly see a difference between your business and BigCorporateCompetitor, Inc.
Permalink
05.02.07
Posted in News and Announcements, Small Business at 7:07 by lnxwalt
Erwin’s StarOffice Tango » Locked-in by a potato
One month prior to the expiration of the PBR certificate in December 2004, Europlant ceased maintenance of the variety, even though its registration on the national list was valid until 2009. This means that no one else could take over maintenance of the variety because it was still under PBR at the time — meaning Europlant had the only rights to produce the variety. So Linda was marked for deletion from the German potato market.
PBR, or plant breeder’s rights, appears to be a kind of exclusive rights period, similar in concept to US plant patents. Shortly before PBR expired, when no one else was allowed to cultivate it, the vendor pulled a popular variety of potato off the market.
Now imagine having software that uses vendor-specific file formats or network protocols. Shortly before competitors are able to make a work-alike product, the market-leading vendor is probably going to do a shift in file formats or protocols for no other reason than to block competition, even though the competition is good for the purchaser or end-user.
Smaller businesses especially have little need to spend large sums of money on software applications with generic functionality, such as office application suites. As a user, I have seen almost zero improvement in office software since I purchased WordPerfect Office Professional 7 in 1997. Microsoft had almost caught up in functionality with their Office 2003 product six or seven years later. However, since Microsoft probably has over 90% of office application software purchases (thousands of people download OpenOffice.org and similar zero-price suites, but actual purchases of non-Microsoft products are a fairly small slice of the market up until now), there has been almost no improvement in the product area.
What has happened is that they have become adept at making minor, slightly-incompatible changes in their file formats from version to version, forcing users to purchase upgrades when their existing software still meets their needs. This happens because they do not use an open and cross-platform , vendor-neutral, standardized file format for the products–they could not play those games any more and their prices would have to be reduced.
I found the documentary fascinating because I, probably for the first time, realized that open competition and vendor lock-in are a key issue of the food sector as well and thus everybody should care. Sure, if a vendor takes your favorite potato from the market, you can easily switch to a different potato type because I’m not aware of any “potato addictions”. This is very different for software where vendors oftent ry to lock in customers via proprietary file formats and interfaces, which often make switching to different products costly or even impossible.
This shows clearly why you should never go with a single-vendor solution. You should always insist on multiple vendors’ products and a standardized set of vendor-independent file formats and network protocols to connect them with.
In office software, you should insist that your software comes with built-in support for OpenDocument Format (ODF), the recognized standard formats for office documents. If your vendor cannot or will not support ODF, you can download OpenOffice.org or contact Sun to find a reseller of StarOffice. Your personal or company data may depend upon it.
technorati tags:ODF, lock-in
Blogged with Flock
Permalink
« Previous entries · Next entries »
