World’s Worst Tax Collectors
RANT: The networks are being jerks about the iPad
Time Warner cable may not be available in your neighborhood so you may not have a dog in this hunt. To catch you up, TWC offers a free iPad app that allows you to stream live video TV feed to your device. You would think that the networks would have no problem with this. Let’s list the reasons:
- You must be a Time Warner customer to use the service.
- You must be a RoadRunner customer to use the service (RoadRunner is the brand name for TWC’s cable modem service).
- You can only use this service at the specific IP address of your RoadRunner account. You cannot be at the Starbuck’s down the street. You cannot be at your neighbors house that also has TWC and RoadRunner but a different IP address. You cannot be traveling to a hotel in a far off city.
- TWC’s terms of conditions on their service already allows me to plug as many TVs into my cable feed as I would like. I can have a TV in every room and closet in my house.
Evidently, some networks don’t get it. They won’t let me have a TV called “iPad” in my house. I can plug a TV made by Mitsibushi or Sony into my living room but I cannot stream that same content to my iPad.
Therefore, if my wife wants to watch an evening soap opera such as “Desperate Housewives” I cannot go into my living room and watch the Discovery Channel. To make matters just as bad (so that ABC doesn’t get a break here), we cannot do the reverse and have her watch Desperate Housewives on her iPad while I hog the TV in the family room for Discovery. Instead we have to record one of the shows on our DVR and watch it later.
Let’s build on that last point. Instead of watching live TV that forces me to sit through commercials, the content providers are forcing me to record the show on DVR where I am certain to fast forward through the commercials. So by enforcing this rule that costs them no money, they make less money.
RANT: TO ALL OF THE CONTENT PROVIDERS ON TIME WARNER CABLE, WHY DON’T YOU THINK JUST A LITTLE BIT BEFORE YOU MAKE A STUPID RULE THAT HURTS YOUR ADVERTISERS AND YOUR CONSUMERS AND COSTS YOU ZERO MONEY!
Below is the email from Time Warner Cable explaining the situation.
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Top 5 Ways To Accidentally Become a Spammer
I just read a great article over at The Marketing Tech Blog that I think anyone in sales or marketing should read. In fact, I think everyone in business should pay attention to number 3! I am not going to quote the entire article on this site but I will give the 5 bullet points. You can jump over to the original site and enjoy the full article.
- The generic private message
- Preemptive Disclaimers
- Abuse of carbon copy
- The Soft Opt-In
- The Random Cause Invitation
Number 3 is most interesting as so many people violate the simple rule:
Only use carbon-copy if you are 100% sure that 100% of the people on the list know each other well AND would appreciate the chance to immediately Reply-All AND would immediately appreciate any Reply-Alls.
Have you ever violated the principle of #3? I know that I have and I know that I get at least 5 work emails a day that violate this rule!
Tax plan just doesn’t seem to be fair
President Barack Hussein Obama has been talking about his new plan to invigorate the economy and move us out of a double-dip or very long recession. I have to admit that I am confused by his logic.
First, a bit about myself. I hate taxes. I know that I need to pay them. I know that I make a good living (not from this blog mind you) and I need to pay into the system more than some others that don’t work as hard as I work. I get all of that.
In general though, I don’t want to pay taxes and I definitely don’t want to pay MORE taxes. I would much prefer that the federal, state, and local governments do a better job of using my money wisely. I would also appreciate that my money is not transferred to someone that won’t work (strong distinction from “can’t work” and “can’t find work”). In fact, if an adult WON’T work then I am perfectly comfortable with that adult starving to death and dying. Probably my only regret in that scenario is that my tax dollars will likely have to go to bury his sorry body. I realize that this isn’t a very Christian attitude but, frankly, God gave that adult man or woman 2 legs, 2 arms and a brain to use to work – not to live off of the generosity of others.
Now, back to the President’s proposals. I just don’t get it. Something doesn’t make sense. According to CBS News:
President Barack Obama will call on Congress to pass new tax breaks that would allow businesses to write off 100 percent of their new capital investments through 2011, the latest in a series of proposals the White House is rolling out in hopes of jump-starting economic growth ahead of the November elections.
An administration official said the tax breaks would save businesses $200 billion over two years, allowing companies to have more cash on hand. The president will outline the proposal during a speech on the economy in Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday.
I understand that part on a simplistic level. It makes perfect sense to me that if businesses don’t have to pay taxes on capital investments, they will be able to justify more money (the original money plus the tax money they didn’t have to spend) on capital investments. They might even spend more money on that as the internal return on that investment would be a little bit better without the tax overhead. This would potentially mean more purchases of goods by businesses which, in theory, would spark more jobs to be created.
However, according to the Washinton Post:
Corporate America is hoarding a massive pile of cash. It just doesn’t want to spend it hiring anyone.
Nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, roughly one-quarter more than at the beginning of the recession. And as several major firms report impressive earnings this week, the money continues to flow into firms’ coffers.
This means that the businesses are doing well, even if people are not doing well. So the President’s message is that we need to give these rich businesses an incentive to have them spend the money and that incentive will be taxes. I guess that makes sense. How about doing the reverse though? Why not tax them on the cash that they leave laying around and don’t invest? That way the US coffers don’t go down but actually might go up if they don’t spend it AND we get the benefit of increasing capital expenditures. In fact, we might get MORE business spending with my plan. Why not heavily tax any cash that is in excess of last year’s cash reserves for the company.
It gets a bit more confusing. When it comes to people, the President feels the exact opposite as he does on businesses. He is fully okay with taxing a person more if they make more money. He wants to increase taxes on those that make a certain amount ($250K seems to be the magic number right now). This is exactly the opposite of what he is doing for businesses. For people he isn’t incenting them to spend more money to jumpstart the economy, he is simply taxing them for making more money.
If a person last year made $220K and then had a great year and made $275K, the President wants to sock it to that enterprising citizen. He wants to charge him more for the right to be a US citizen and live in this great land. That 25% increase is going to drive that individual to pay a much higher rate of income tax. But not the company that is in the same city as the individual. That company has increased its cash by 25% (according to the article cited above) and it is receiving a tax break, not a tax bill.
How about a similar offer to people, Mr. President? How about you say that you don’t have to pay taxes on anything that you buy that generates manufacturing jobs in the US. Buy a car – get a tax write-off for your down payment. Buy a house – get a tax write-off for your down payment. Replace the windows in your house – no taxes on that money. Buy a pizza – that isn’t taxable either. Even your latte at Starbuck’s should have no taxes if you treated people like you treat corporations. Buy a TV or computer manufactured in China though and you pay income taxes. Sorry Best Buy and Apple – you get screwed in my plan but not really since it just remains status quo for you. The people that benefit are the people that live within the borders of the land of the free and the brave.
Like I said above, I don’t like taxes. I know that there has to be some taxes because I want to have those brave soldiers that rescue ships that are attacked by pirates. But how about a little common sense and fair play when it comes to the tax burden.
When will paper books be dead?
A decade ago, I was traveling with one of the founders of the company that I worked for at the time, Timm Martin, and we arrived at the discussion of electronic books (ebooks). I said that I thought ebooks were the wave of the future and I wished that I could figure out how to start a company that was a part of that change. Timm, who was the technology visionary of our company, seemed to cautiously agree with me at the time and I think we both worried that the portable platform had yet to be created that made that prediction a certainty, at least in the near term.
Now with products like the Kindle and the iPad (and the several others that have come on to the market that will likely fail), we have either arrived at or have become very close to the age of the digital book. It seems quite unlikely that the cost of the ebook reader will go dramatically higher over time. It is more likely that the cost of a good quality ebook-reader will drop below $100. The price maybe goes to under $50 if the ebook reader can be successfully locked into one type of proprietary book format that locks the reader to one type of store (so that the store can subsidize the cost of the reader in return for future book sales). Of course, many authors do now sell their work as ebooks as they are easier to produce and much cheaper. Some authors even sell digital downloads from their websites by using FastSpring’s e-commerce platform.
Crunchgear recently ran an article with the prediction of the end of paper book. It is a good article and worth reading.
Here are my predictions:
- within 5 years most (more that 51%) students will not be required to buy paper based books at their college.
- within 5 years I give it 50/50 odds that ebooks with an ISBN number exceed the sale of paper based books with an ISBN.
- within 10 years, I give it 90/10 odds (meaning I would take a 10:1 bet)
The risk in my argument is there may be a rush to non-proprietary standards. Unlike the music industry where it was quite easy to take a CD and convert it to a musical file (and thus was born MP3s and Napster), it is quite difficult to convert your paper based book to an electronic version. So the strength of a non-proprietary standard is not in place. This means it is in the interests of the book industry to lock everyone to their proprietary standard and give away the reader so that they can control the sales of books. I think that Bezos says he gets 10 ebooks from every Kindle, if he can make the math work to get enough ebooks per Kindle to offset the cost down to $50 then he would be fool to not do that.
The recent dropping of the price of the Kindle are a perfect example of giving away the reader to sell more books. Jeff should hire a bunch of marketing guys from Gillette so that he can learn about razors and razor blades. The low cost of the razor is offset with the refill of that razor. He could also hire some folks from HP/Brother/Lexmark as their printer market is also driven the same way.
If the standards become ubiquitous, it is difficult for the books to offset the cost of the reader. The manufacturer of the reader must sell the reader for greater than the cost of manufacturing. This is not true of the book readers on the market today. Nearly all book readers on the market today can open only one store’s books and therefore there is a symbiotic relationship between the success of the store and the success of the device.
The flip side could also be true. I could see Steve Jobs doing the reverse tactic that may be even more effective. Jobs is in the business of selling computers (although that is arguable considering the amount of money that the iTunes store makes on music). With books, he has the ability to change the argument since there are no ebook MP3 equivalents. He could say, “Buy my reader (iPad) and I will give you 20 ebooks for free out of this limited list of 250 ebooks.” If I was an author and Steve came to me and said, “Let me have your ebook for $1 royalty and I will make it one of the 250,” I would jump at the opportunity. For Steve, this would be a cost of $20 but for the buyer of the iPad, this would be a benefit of $200 to the user. I am not sure that Bezos can make the same deal since his real job is to sell books, not to sell Kindles (which is why his Kindle software sits on so many other platforms). Bezos wants to make the reader proprietary so that he personally can sell more books and his competitors like Barnes & Noble can’t compete with him on selling books.
Steve Jobs should be pushing for the creation of standards and he should be giving away his ebook format to anyone that wants to use it. Then, he can beat his fellow reader manufacturers and making an insanely great reader – something that his company is uniquely setup to accomplish.
Interestingly, the publishers of books have more to fear from Amazon then they do from Apple (unlike the music publishers). Amazon is sitting at a perfect point to lock up a commanding portion of the market and dictate terms to the publishers. Apple on the other hand will have a much more difficult time in doing to the book market what it did to the music market (by making the iPod the King Kong of music players). While the iPad has the ability to be the commanding presence in the emerging tablet market, it is not nearly as well positioned to be the commanding presence in the book market. There are rumors of an upcoming iPod Touch that is an inch or so larger than the current format so that product may be the horse to ride in the dominance of the ebook marketplace.
For a lover of reading and company strategy, the next 5 years are going to be very interesting. Will my prediction come true? Eventually, I am certain of this, it is really the timing that is in question. I am also certain that my ability to start a company that would ride this wave is probably gone. It will now be fought by multi-billion dollar corporations like Apple, Amazon and the various book publishers.
BTW, if you want to know more about Timm Martin, the founder of the company that I referred to above, check out his blogs on technology at DevTopics and CSharp411.
PS to Steve Jobs: Steve, if you are reading this article and are willing to include a book that I write in each iPad and pay me a buck for that book, please call me! I will have the book written within a month!! Heck, I might even get it done for 50 cents!