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| Tuesday, February 27, 2007 |
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Lesswire 
| | Greenville Online: House backs free Web for all. That's the South Carolina house. Still, the idea is hardly what you'd call neutral: The idea is to leverage the state infrastructure and work with private Internet providers, Loftis said. A basic level of service would be free inside the state, but the providers would still charge fees for faster speeds... And I don't mean that as a position on Neutrality, either. Just to illustrate how hard it is to come to an Understanding here — not only about what the Net is, or what the Web is (the headline, fwiw, confuses Web with Net and both with wireless), but about exactly what roles governments and businesses should be playing here. Read the comments to find much the citizens also know. One should think carefully before making new laws here. |
| | Anyway, catch it before it scrolls behind the paywall. |
| | By the way, if you care about this subject (or these subjects) — and you should — please try your best to get to F2C (Freedom to Connect) in Silver Spring next Monday and Tuesday. Last year's was outstanding, and David Isenberg has put a lot of work into making this year's better. I had planned to make it (even bought plane tickets), but conflicting local obligations will keep me home. Still, I'll be listening in for the whole thing and participating as best I can. |
Where it's worse than you have it now
| | Thanks to Ethan Zuckerman for the pointages. Ethan gets my vote for the Best Blogger on (as well as of) Earth right now. |
The sole of Starbucks
| | Companies have souls. I said that in a speech I gave to a retailing conference in Lucerne on September 20, 2000, not long after Cluetrain came out. They have human purposes that transcend mere economics. These purposes have little to do with short-term opportunities, and nothing to do with cashing out or starting another business.* For example, Nordstrom has the soul of a shoe store. Wal-Mart has the soul of a five-and-dime. (That's something Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, told me after attending that very speech — and agreeing with it.) |
| | With this in mind, read about the kick in the particulars that Howard Schultz is giving to Starbucks, which is becoming the McDonalds of coffee (plus hip nostalgia music, and breakfast muffins, and baguette sandwiches, and games for kids on the road, and...) |
| | That last link, in AdAge, is full of jive about "crispness of experience", "maintaining the authenticity" and so on. But it's simpler than that. Starbucks has the soul of a coffee shop. That's what Howard Schultz is saying, and demonstrating, when he says his chain needs to "get back to the core". The core is coffee. Not CDs and sandwiches. |
| | What bothers me most about Starbucks these days is that the chain started by creating and serving a taste for good espresso-based drinks, and then milked-down the product as it built up its huge roster of stores. As a result, most Americans who go to Starbucks actually think a cup of hot milk with coffee flavoring is actually a good cup of anything. This is a perversion of the Italian original that verges on the tragic. |
| | * No, not all companies. Verizon, I would argue, has no soul. (Or, if it does, it's akin to that of Frankenstein's sewn-together monster, but with lots of "work". Note to Verizon employees: I'm not talking about you personally.) In fact, I suggest that any company that relates to its customers only through surveys, or seeks constantly to minimize and aggregate contact with customers and users has a soul in peril, if it has one at all. (I got two survey calls from the same company today, and up until then I thought I had a personal relationship with it.) Anyway, that's all another thread. |
| | So, to help Howard and company get back to their core, here are a few small suggestions. |
| | 1) Turn down the music. I've heard that stores use loud music to drive two things: a) sales of CDs and b) idle customer asses out of the store. I doubt the latter is true, but in many stores the music is unbearably loud. So please: stop. |
| | 2) Get the milk/coffee ratios back to the original Italian values. Today even an order for the smallest cappuchino ("tall") is still likely to be way more than 50% milk at most Starbucks stores. This is wrong and needs to be fixed. |
| | 3) Go back to real commercial espresso machines. Too many Starbucks now feature automated machines that any idiot can use. I don't know what you call these things, but they are made to move customers through faster, and probably do a decent job; but they're not the same as the kind where you grind the coffee, tamp it into the portafilter, twist it onto the group head, and extract the coffee with the push of a button or the pull on a lever (the latter being quite rare these days). I know this involves a capital expense of a high order, but the payoff will be worth it. |
| | 4) Give your employees better training around what makes great espressos and cappuchinos. (Lattes are too milked-down to serve as a reference point.) Don't hire them if they don't grok the basics. |
| | 5) Get more involved in local communities. Peets puts on workshops that educate customers on great coffee drinks. That's a good model. Do the same. |
| | I need to get to a meeting now, but I'll add more later. |
Be there now
| | Great lunch talk going on right now (12:45pm EST) at the Berkman Center. Matthew Pearl gives the literary vision of copyright. Copyright was drawn around a mess. Kipling, Poe, Twain, Cooper, Whitman, Dickens... Very interesting stuff. Here's where to find the webcast. |
Busyness
| | Got home Sunday afternoon and, as usual, Santa Barbara had nicer weather than everything else I saw under airplanes in three thousand miles that stretched from Boston to San Francisco before arriving at SBA, one of the nicest little airports (with one big runway) in the country. |
| | We had an Oscar party at our house on Sunday night. Ellen DeGeneres was an outstanding host — better than any since Billy Crystal, I believe, and maybe better than him too. The results were mostly predictable, but we still had fun. The only downer was having to watch a low-def show on our high-def Sony flat screen. The only ABC source we could get was our local affiliate, KEYT/3, which radiates from a mountain we can't see from here, so the over-the-air signal sucks. But we do get it via satellite over Dish Network, so it ironically makes a 50,000 mile trip from the station studios, which we can see across town from our house. KEYT also isn't running hi-def on its assigned UHF channel (27) yet anyway. And we can't get HD from Los Angeles either (too far away, too many hills and mountains on the signal path), so the only high-def ABC station we can get "normally" is KGTV from San Diego. It comes in about half the time, and we didn't luck out on Sunday night. |
| | Early on, the Dish receiver also crashed. It does suck that digital satellite and cable TV systems are all closed. With Dish, all I can get is a Dish-built and -branded receiver/PVR. I got the top one, but it's still slow to respond to the remote, has a moderatly clunky UI (meaning it's not opaque and is mostly usable) and crashes often. The only consolation is suspecting that the alternatives from the cable company and DirecTV are worse. (Last I checked they were, but at this point I don't know.) |
| | Anyway, yesterday was all errands and catching up with family business. I'll be back in the saddle today. |
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