Yule Log Jam

Do you really know how goods get to your local retailer for you to purchase for Christmas? There really is a “long boat to China”, or FROM China, and it brings the pretty packages that we buy during the holidays, as well as all year long.

But that boat from China has to dock somewhere, and someone has to unload those packages, and some trucker or train has to deliver them to distribution centers and retail outlets. What we don’t realize is that we are running out of time and space to complete import business as usual, especially for the holiday crunch.

“The Los Angeles-Long Beach ports handle 43% of America’s imports.” This holiday season, 137 ships came sailing in, and only 94 of them could fit into the harbor, and some who docked had to wait as many as eight days to unload, which is twice as long as normal. These ports are the only ones large enough to handle the big ships, some with more than 4,000 containers on board. Combined, they handle “62% of all shipments to West Coast ports from Asian exporters.” [Read More!]

Publishers Make A Splash with Beach Reads

Click the title to hear the audio article.

“Five New York publishing houses are teaming up with an exclusive [nature] resort [Little Dix Bay in the British Virgin Islands] to get new books in the right readers’ hands early.” Visitors to the resort will get an opportunity to read upcoming books before they are publicly released. Guests can order books, like room service, and return them when they leave.

“Word of mouth is the best way to sell books, and it’s the hardest to create. But if you’re sitting by the pool and you see other people reading a book that’s free for the taking, you might just pick it up and discover a new author.” That’s especially true since there has not been a pool there until this year, and there is absolutely no television on site. [Read More!]

Murdoch’s Air War (DirecTV has taken off like a rocket)

British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, allows 7.4 million Brits to place an onscreen bet on a soccer game, and switch camera angles to better watch his favorite soccer team. Sky owns almost 70% of the pay-tv market in England.

Rupert Murdoch has taken over DirecTV (from Hughes Electronics, a unit of GM), and plans on upgrading it to the same level of interactivity of BSkyB. DirecTV has added 14 million viewers, 600,000 of which were cable viewers. Satellite is completely digital, whereas cable is still trying to upgrade its customers with digital systems. However, cable companies aren’t sacrificing profits today for possible customers tomorrow, as Murdoch is. He’s able to out spend them, and it’s paying off – right now. [Read More!]

GM’s Saturn Problem

14 years and 15 billion dollars later, Saturn hasn’t made one cent. Saturn was originally created as a “different kind of company” so non-GM customers would purchase GM cars in disguise. Plastic dent free bodies, and very high customer satisfaction rankings kept it going, but there were no profits for GM, the parent company.

Competition from Japan and Korea weren’t figured into the equation. All auto operations are running in the red. So what is GM going to do to get out of this financial quagmire? Unload Saturn? Of course not – they are going to sink 3 billion more dollars into Saturn – and make it just another GM car, sort of.

The name won’t change, so hopefully the customer loyalty won’t change (because 70% of Saturn buyers won’t even consider purchasing another GM car), but the designs and parts will be wholly GM. It will be another example of one car created with slightly different variations under different names – but all basically the same car by one manufacturer.

Why not just get rid of Saturn? [Read More!]

The iPod people have invaded Apple’s stores!

By Andy Serwer, Fortune, December 2004

Hardware companies can’t do retail? Says who? Not Apple. Not with the iPod sales spiraling almost out of control. There was a line of people waiting to pay $300 to $400 for an iPod. That says a lot about their product – or is it their marketing?

Apple has sold 6 million iPods to date, with 2 million being sold just in the last quarter. Within 14 days, Apple increased their projected sales by 30%, gauging it by early customer responses and sales. And Apple’s stock has more than doubled this year.

Next move? A mini-mini-iPod which only holds 60 songs but costs $150. It’s a generational thing in many ways. Older generations think of Apple as something weird – the younger generation thinks of Apple as hot, which could affect Mac purchases eventually. [Read More!]

Fabio Trades Book Jackets for Jackets

By Julia Boorstin, Fortune December 2004

Fabio has moved from modeling for romance novels to selling coats through Walmart’s Sam’s Club, which can’t keep them in stock. Fabio says he was always interested in the fashion industry, and learned from his mother that women had the buying power, “even if men have the illusion of running the world.”

The question was “Why coats?” His fans complained about the scarcity of fashionable clothing outside of big cities. When he approached Sam’s Club about it, they were very skeptical, saying that coats were the hardest thing to sell. They test marketed in 2 stores, to see if they could sell 400 in three weeks. They sold 6,000 almost immediately, and Sam’s Club ordered coats for all 600 of its U.S. stores. [Read More!]

The Big Benioff - Software On Demand at Salesforce.com

By Daniel Roth, Fortune December 2004

Salesforce.com is changing the way you think about software – well, as long as you want to be connected to the internet. What he does is create software that you utilize online, instead of resident on your computer. Why would you ever want to pay someone a monthly fee for a program you could keep resident on your computer? That is the question Benioff is waiting for you to ask.

Step back and look at the bigger picture. Don’t just think of it as a program you pay for as long as you live, think of it as a program that you pay to use, but don’t ever have to worry about updating or upgrading. Think of it as a program that has an increasing number of software add-ons that work seamlessly with this program, and you don’t have to worry about compatibility. This is called Software On Demand.

Benioff’s method of attention-getting has included hiring protesters “to demonstrate outside of archrival Siebel Systems’ events – and even hired fake news crews to “cover” them. The B-52’s performed at Salesforce.com’s launch party (at that time the company had no customers). David Bowie sang at a fundraiser sponsored by the company, and Arnold Schwarzenegger helped kick off an update of the service. [Read More!]

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