Is seating space a big issue for you? Would you pay, say, 5% more for extra legroom in standard economy, instead of the high rates currently being charged for premium economy? Which airlines have given you the best deal on space – have allowed you to sit in an exit row without extra charge, for example? Which airline is the best or just “feels” the best for seating space?

The 5% figure just won’t cut it. Assume the difference between 34″ and 30″ quoted in the article is approx 30 seats – i.e. 20% reduced capacity. Assuming the airline is running at or near capacity, that means they need to charge 20% more to EVERYONE on the plane. I actually think this is a reasonable thing to do, as the current situation is a joke for probably 20% of the population (i.e. anyone over 6′) and growing. We spend more making things disabled-friendly.

Whilst an extra few inches might make a difference for some over 6′, it won’t for all. So you end up not capturing the long tail, but sticking to people between 6′ and probably 6′4 as your target audience. I think 6′4 is a much more reasonable ‘outlier’ than 6′, so is sensible in a policy sense. You still need a policy for the exceptions though.

If you were taking a full user-pays approach, that extra 20% leg room used by only 20% of the plane would mean lo and behold you double the price for those people (approximately what the deal is now).

I think a better system would be to acknowledge the height distribution of the population and provide different (varying by as much as 30%) pitches that do cost more, but are only available to people who are taller, and possibly their companions. Of course, if you find yourself in the situation where shorter people are lining up to pay more (up to 30% more, but probably better capping 20% extra room & 20% extra price, 30% if you’re greedy to make extra profit on the basis of better segmentation), then you know it’s time to deck out a whole plane that way, without risking profits. If not, then the varied pitch strategy will work.

DISCLAIMER: I am 6′2″ and always try to claim an exit row seat that is a) not next to the window, as these often cramp even a 5′nothing person and b) not behind a wall, as these provide more sitting room but NO stretch room.

We address backup from multiple dimensions:

1. Prevention
2. Technology
3. People
4. Risk Events
5. Recovery Times
6. Economics
7. Communication

1. Prevention
We use software RAID1 under Linux on commodity PC hardware. We also use different branded hard drives as this decreases the probability of simultaneous drive failure. We use hard-drive based backup (with monitoring to detect imminent drive failures) rather than tapes because of increased reliability. All our servers are under maintenance agreements and monitored (and yes, this is affordable for small businesses due to our process innovation). All of this means the likelihood of something happening to destroy your data in the first place is drastically reduced.

2. Technology
The technology used in your backup matters. Are you using tapes? They can have up to 70% failure rates when you attempt to recover from them! Are you backing up your whole system or just files? Do you know how long it will take to recreate your server from scratch with all the undocumented hacks your IT person has made? Are your backups actually working – are you doing test restores? How are you handling off-site backup? Does your backup software deal with open files (like your Outlook or Exchange databases)? Is all your data stored in one spot?

This makes backup much much easier. Are you using RAID5? On a hardware RAID device? You’ll be sold one of these if you ring up Dell and say you need backup, but do you realise that this scenario makes you MORE likely to lose data and incur considerable expense in attempting to recover it (as compared with RAID1, particularly software-baseder under Linux). Your Operating System matters too – Windows and its applications are a lot harder to back up and generally require more expensive hardware to run on too (which often means recovery time is slowed whilst waiting for replacement parts, or that you pay much more for fast warranty replacements).

3. People
People delete data. Deliberately or accidentally, it doesn’t matter. Design your backup system around this fact and you’ll be much happier. For example, some automated backup solutions simply mirror what’s on the fileserver. This includes mirroring any delete operations! Many companies only find out this was a limit to their system after the fact. Too late.

We automate solutions where possible, because leaving backup to busy overworked staff members is a sure way to guarantee it won’t get done, or won’t get done properly. Ask your IT person next time when the last time *they* backed up was. Chances are if they’re using a manual system it was months ago, and they supposedly care!

4. Risk Events
Consider the risk events you are exposed to. The most common are:

• accidental file deletion
• hard drive failure
• other system component failure
• virus/hacker attack
• disgruntled employees
• failure of your backups

The rarer, but still deadly events can include:

• fire/flood/theft
• dedicated hacker/industrial espionage
• … and all the other weird and wonderful events you can dream up!

You need a plan to address each and every event you can think of. You have a choice of:
accept – you accept the risk of it happening and lose data
mitigate – you put processes in place to reduce the likelihood or occurrence and/or reduce the
cost of recovery when it does happen (ideally do both)
offload – offload the risk to someone else, e.g. an insurance company. N.B. This is tricky with data

5. Recovery Times
This is often overlooked. Assume you have a perfect backup, how long does it take to recover? Windows servers in particular can take days to recover. Even with an image (snapshot) of the whole server and separate file-based backup, you’ll run into trouble if you don’t have near-identical hardware lying around to restore the image to. This is particularly a problem when your server is more than 12 months old and you can no longer buy replacement parts for it.

What about off-site backup? How long would it take you to download 100GB of data from your off-site backup or to drive and get it? The list of acceptable recovery times needs to be correlated with the list of risk events. For example, if your building burns down you might accept everything taking a week to get back up.

But if your hard drive fails, you want your recovery to be in a matter of hours. Ideally this type of failure would have been prevented with RAID1 and drive monitoring.

5. Economics
Often overlooked, this is considering what’s worth backing up, how, how often and how expensive and time-consuming the retrieval process is. It’s not possible to have 100% secure data (although sending it to the moon $10,000/hard disk at a time might be worth it to some!), so considering the economics of what data you have and its value to the organisation is important.

6. Communication
As Mal said above, the disaster prevention and recovery process (of which backup is a part) needs to be communicated and understood by business owners. All too often we see half-baked backup solutions that we know will fail under so many situations, but the business owner is blissfully unaware. In my opinion, this is worse than no backup at all as it provides a false sense of security.

• Great post on today’s generation that echoes my sentiments
• If you want to know about VCs’ role in the world
• Semantic Web (possibly Web 3.0) – watch this space
• The evil power of the “default”
• Recommendations vs Ads. Obvious, but they still don’t learn…
• Google as the next Microsoft, from the more-often-right-than-wrong department of Bob Cringely
• When will everybody realise Google only has one good product?
• VCs? Get with the program
• These people will rule small business in the 21st Century
• For the more down-to-earth of you who would prefer a “real job”, Marc’s posts on Career Planning are gold

There, this blog post is now more informative than the sum of all blog posts before it

Companies create objects or services that they hope consumers will desire. They also must create, to truly succeed, a space, mental and physical, for the potential client to form a desire. The easiest way to do this is to understand desire at the conceptual stage of the project and push to match that desire. It’s remarkable how often exigencies distract from this process. In the space of desire, there are still many unfilled holes. The ideal mobile phone for instance. While perfection is asymptotic since desire is never satisfiable (whatever you are presented, desire is always elsewhere) bring on the businesses that shoot for what the consumer wants to buy, not what can merely be sold.

In the PDA world, that used to be Palm. It is no longer. They succumbed to forcing their products on people inherently unsuited to their way of thinking. In order to keep this new group happy, Palm had to change who it was and what it did. Instead of a loyal Apple-like followship (which it had), it now subjects itself to the wider market with an ever-diminishing list of unique features (case in point: recent move to Windows Mobile-based devices); an ever-diminishing ‘core’ market of users and an insufficient marketing* budget to address this expanded, diluted trigger-happy market.

* where marketing is defined holistically as the process of figuring out what your customer wants and delivering it.

As I’m in this space, I think I can say with some personal experience that the reason this happens to companies like Palm is the vast majority of the business world is ill-equipped to deal with the hard, risky decisions that come as part of a startup. Palm hit a natural equilibrium in the market defined by its core market times its average marginal benefit. This roughly equates to its economic surplus or profit. Where you face decreasing marginal returns and relatively unchanging costs of capital, economics tells you to start looking elsehwere for your profits, usually in the form of diversified investments (to eliminate systematic risk). What it doesn’t teach you, at least not directly, and what you have to learn is that some risk is a good thing. For Palm, the risk of being a small player in a larger market would have been a good one to adopt. Apple has been doing that for the last 20 years quite profitably, with a few Amelio-esk exceptions. For the directors and senior managers at Palm, most likely with significant degrees of hidden incompetence, keeping their high-paying jobs and cushy lifestyles and not having to make any particularly hard decisions (the kind that either get you sacked or make you a truckload of money), the road less travelled is the dangerous one. Unfortunately for the company and its shareholders, it’s usually the only long-term viable one.

This problem is a manifestation of the Agency Problem, but it intersections nicely with market economics. Few companies realise let alone strategise for the fact that their shareholders and customers have choice. By being open and resolute about who you are and what you do, you abstract away the individual desires (inherently illogical/unpredictable) of your shareholders and customers and shift the choice back to the market, allowing you to focus on your most profitable intersection: size of customer interested in your core offering x marginal benefit of that core offering to those customers with respect to the competition. A large company should be doing this in parallel over and over again across different industries and products, leveraging a common operational base. A small company should do it just once (then sell and start again elsewhere or use the operating surplus to rinse and repeat). I’ll write more on this some day, but in time it will be shown that this is a far less risky strategy to adopt than attempting to predict where the market will go. The only difference between most product/sales operations and share traders/fund managers is that everyone knows the risks of doing the latter. Fewer than 10% achieve super-market (sorry, couldn’t help myself) returns. What the hell are the rest doing?

Anyway, for companies like Palm, the problem is essentially one of existential choice. The rational economic decision may be to stay the same size (in which case, how are those options going to grow quickly so the executive can get a quick cashout?) or to start up new business (in which case, how is the executive going to get a quick exit when the new venture probably won’t show its mettle until years down the track?). The agency problem can be eliminated but it requires compromise on the capital structure front. It’s inefficient for owners of capital to actively work their capital, and it’s ineffective as the intersection of capital owners with business managers is but a subset of this overall market. Small is the new big. For these reasons and many more, small business is the way of the future. That is, of course, until we figure out some new structure (think project matrix organisational structure mixed with some as-yet-unknown capital structure) that maintains both the flexibility and risk-adopting attitude of successful small businesses.

I predict we will look back in 50 years at our current capital structures and think “What the hell were they doing? That’s just so obviously wrong!” the same way we look back at underpaying workers and miraculously expecting productivity gains. But by then, like now, the game will have changed. Today we have technology and service-based business. Tomorrow we will have access to cheap and plentiful capital, and an increasingly diminishing need for it. This is already changing the game rapidly. A start-up can be done in someone’s spare time on an average salaried income. Sure, maybe only 0.1% of this capital-poor type succeed, but there are millions trying. A startup used to take millions of dollars in hardware and hosting just to be able to handle the load of scaling globally. Now we have services like mosso.com which aim to give you your fair share of that for US$100 per month. Or mediatemple.net for US$20. Sure, these services are in their infancy and have plenty of problems to deal with at the moment, but the point is they’re examples of disruptive technologies that change the nature of the game. Reinvigorate.net is able to compete product-wise with Google Analytics with the addition of $20/mth worth of hosting cost. Sure, their market sizes are orders of magnitude apart, but market size is not what will dictate the profits of the 21st Century.

Watch this space.

By now some of you will have heard my talk about my latest project – A Global Obligation. Well the good news is it’s open for all (Web 2.0-compliant beta mode of course!) Please do your part for humanity and check it out. If you have any feedback or bugs, please let me know. Of course, don’t let that stop you from sharing the word once you’ve donated!

Click the image below to donate!

If you can’t see it, you can access it via this URL instead.

Yes, we’ve got referrals tracking working, so refer all your friends, add a banner to your blog and make the biggest dent in the Universe you can!

I echo those pains! John and I are constantly complaing about it: particularly Dell. Apple is nice and easy to follow. You can even run Windows on their MacBooks now

My advice to people is thus:

1. If you’re buying a PC laptop, stick to the BUSINESS range models, as these almost always have far better industrial design and durability. e.g. Dell has two product lines: Latitude and Ispiron. The latter have heaps of features, but are hunks of junk. The former are pretty stable and reliable (although I’ve seen exceptions).

2. Either buy extended warranty, use a Gold credit card that gives you $warranty+12 OR buy the base model of something
e.g. Apple MacBook circa $1,500 will cost you ~$300 to make up 3 year’s warranty. Even given Apple’s high notebook resale values, the machine won’t be worth more than $400 in 3 years’ time. So warranty makes sense if you:
- can’t afford the risk of it failing in months 13-24
- buy warranty on everything else you buy
IMHO, if you NEVER buy extended warranties, you’re better off. It’s essentially self-insuring. But with the (e.g. ANZ Visa Gold) credit card bonus warranty, you can get the best of both worlds. ANZ Gold cards are $87 per year. NAB had a $0 first year special, ANZ probably have one too. Worth getting.

3. Factor on at least $300 per year in security software and PC technician costs per Windows computer. And that’s just to keep it working. (Obviously you can do this yourself)

4. Factor in another $300-$500 to get home wireless working reliably when not using Apple equipment. If you’re willing to put up with frustration and manual reconfiguration you can get around this, but these last two notes are for the uninitiated.

5. Buy a Mac
I used to be pro-Mac, then I was ambivalent (particularly when Macs were demonstrably slower), then impartial (”it depends…”) now I’m so totally pro mac that it’s not funny. Particularly with Boot Camp and Parallels. The hardware is better; the support costs (financial or otherwise) are significantly reduced; the ease of use is significantly enhanced.

6. Don’t touch Vista.
Nobody trusts Microsoft with an OS they’ve had 6 years to perfect. I’m recommending a 12-month wait on Vista (in which time we’ll see SP1, SP1a and the announcement of SP2 rush past). Then it will at least be acceptable to run.

Also note that the major reason for upgrading to Vista is to make your swanky new computer look swanky. Which means don’t buy the Home version, or you miss out on the swanky Aero interface. It’s no coincidence wanky is only one letter off…

Please support us in our quest to rid the world of mediocrity and incompetence.

Some things that immediately come to mind:

• Pure incompetence
• What a b****
• Perhaps they should use specialised mailing list software…
• Perhaps they should issue an apology…
• Cool! Now I know how to scab free seats!
• “Hi, Anne told me I could have a free ticket. Yes, that’s right. She sent me an e-mail this afternoon…”

Update

Yes, oops.

Apologies for yesterday’s email regarding Borat, which was meant to be an internal email to our staff rather than broadcast to you all at “sun mailing list.”

For the record, the email was sent as we were taken a little by surprise when the Friday night preview of Borat sold out, and we turned dozens of people away. So for Saturday night we wanted to make sure that anyone who came wanting to buy a ticket didn’t miss out.

Regards, The Sun.