Cointoss

Sometimes I toss a coin. Should I get KFC or McDonalds? Should I quit my job?

If I can't make a decision then I'll just toss a coin. Why? Three reasons:

1. If I'm prepared to go for a coin toss then the decision is a pretty close-run thing. Even I make a conscious choice, the result is as much chance as the flip of a coin.

2. As I throw that coin into the air, I often find myself hoping it comes down on one side. That moment reveals what I actually want to do. I ignore the coin result and do what I wanted anyway. The one-second window often reveals what a few hours or days of mulling has failed to uncover.

3. Action is better than inaction.

Appraisal

I've been living on my wits since 2008, the last time I had an employer. I was on a graduate scheme at a large accountancy firm in London - working a 9-5 in an office, commuting an hour each way from Slough. I've just rediscovered a self-appraisal from early that year, a time before I decided to leave. I still thought I'd qualify as an accountant, make partner and live happily ever after.

Sometimes I feel that I haven't achieved anything much so far in terms of a career. But re-reading this appraisal has reminded me that I now work on my own terms. I can have as many post-it notes as I like. And I can leave out the trademark when I write post-it and not worry. I can have one, two or, fuck it, even three pot plants on my desk. In short, I fixed it all - and my employer wasn't part of the solution.

Here are some of my responses on the appraisal:

Career Progression

I look around the department and feel depressed. There is no colour, no personality and no feeling. The walls are white and bare, tall white dividers cut across every row of desks. Post-its are banned, desks are to be clear and the sun is banished by blinds the moment it breaks through. The only colour comes from four pot plants, the odd rebel post-it note and some profitability pie charts. Functional is the most apt word to describe the environment. Spending on social events is virtually non-existent.

Day-to-day work is largely administrative - my job title is administrator and this accurately reflects the work that I carry out. It is a mixture of data entry, purchase ledger, secretary, and to an extent, data analyst. There is no problem solving and very little communication; I would estimate I spend over 90% of the day in silence. The various parts of the role, when looked at broadly, are of interest and could be challenging, but the actual work involved is not. As an example I would point to the realisation of assets: One role on a job is to realise the assets in the most beneficial way possible, which should require some thinking and could be thought of as a distinct project. The tasks involved, however, are roughly as follows: instruct an agent (manager has telephone conversation, I draft a letter), receive a valuation, decide on offers (manager has telephone conversation/emails), receive cheque (fill in form), receive agent's invoice (fill in cheque req, draft covering letter). Though there may be variation, as with most areas, my activity is made up of writing letters and filling in forms.

Motivation

I feel that my motivation is bipolar. I am extremely motivated by work that interests or challenges me, by the industry and by thinking creatively to solve problems. I am not motivated by much of my day-to-day work. I am an innovator by nature and I find it difficult to work in an environment where innovation and efficient practices are not really used. Our fees largely depend on time spent, so there is little incentive to streamline our processes, move towards efficiency or develop new methods of working. I am motivated to solve problems and make improvements, neither of which is an area of this role.

Drive

I am driven to be the best at what I do and to show my capability. I know I am able and that I can achieve positive results. I find this drive to be a hindrance as I want to learn quickly and progress to a role which is more suited to my ability. I do not feel pushed to succeed, in fact I feel that I am held back. I fully appreciate that there are good reasons for this and that there is a well-ordered hierarchy which is largely based on a steady progression rather than a pure meritocracy.

Resilience

I do not feel that I have a problem with resilience in this role, though I often leave work demoralised. My time keeping has suffered as a result.

I was unhappy.

One day I flipped a coin. Heads - I hand in my notice. Tails - I stay. It was heads. I was gone two weeks later.

Does this sound like your day? Are you are skilled and without huge commitments? Flip a coin tomorrow morning. You'll know the answer before it even lands.

The men who don't fit in

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.

by Robert Service

Born in England to Scottish parents, Robert William Service held down a variety of jobs before emigrating to North America in 1894. He drifted from job to job for several years before finding employment in 1903 with the Canadian Bank of Commerce. In 1905 the bank transferred him to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

In less than five years, Service had gained worldwide fame as the storyteller of the Klondike gold rush. He wrote and published his first book of verse, "Songs of a Sourdough," in 1907 to almost instant acclaim. "Ballads of a Cheechacko" was published in 1909, shortly after the bank transferred him from Whitehorse to Dawson City. During this time he also began work on his novel, "The Trail of Ninety-Eight."

Although he left the Bank in 1909 to devote full time to his writing, he never again published a book about "The Land that God Forgot." He left the Yukon in 1912 to become a war correspondent and Red Cross worker. He married a French woman, settled in France after the end of World War I, and over a long and productive life published two memoirs, six novels, and more than 45 collections of verse. He died in 1958.

Designer?

Last week I created an icon for a car spring and listed it at The Noun Project. They approved my icon and now I am listed as a designer! I'll never sell a copy but it's a nice feeling.

Looking at the icon, I wish I'd gone with a flatter bottom.

Sadly I can't figure out how to embed an SVG into this blog.

To the last man standing

Brick and mortar retail has been declining for a while, and we've been unsure what the future landscape would look like. What would be on the high street and in the shopping centres?

With the recent failure of Comet, I think the reality can be seen fairly clearly now, at least in the UK. There will remain exactly one large brand in each of the retail sectors. Here's progress so far:

Books: Books Etc. / Borders / WH Smiths / Waterstones

Entertainment: Ourprice / Music Zone / VirginMegastores / Fopp / Woolworths / Zavvi / Blockbuster /HMV

DIY: Focus DIY / Wickes / Homebase / B&Q

Electricals: Powerhouse / Currys / Best Buy / Comet / Dixons

Sportswear: All:sports / JJB Sports / JD Sports / Sports Direct

The lists are in order of failure (or predicted failure). Italics indicate that a brand is already leaning close to collapse. My prediction for the winning brand is in bold.

Some of these brands have be reincarnated multiple times but a clear trend is that the surviving brand never drops into any form of insolvency.

Rather than the high street being obliterated, we'll see one business with the ability to set prices. Want it in your hand today? Then pay what we ask. Want to wait for it? Pick from dozens of online retailers. These surviving businesses will enjoy lack of competition, lower rents due to the surplus of units left behind and the pick of their failed competitors' prime sites.

There are unknowns - clothing, bric-a-brac pound retailers. And all the sectors face some competition from supermarkets who stock a narrow range of their products.

I'm curious about the longevity of mobile phone retailers - middlemen by definition in a technology driven business. Virtually every shopping centre contains (sometimes multiple): o2, Orange, Vodafone, Three, T-Mobile, Carphone Warehouse, and Phones4U. I cannot see this persisting.

Disclosure: I hold shares in Kingfisher - the parent company of B&Q. I was the founder and editor of Insolvency News.

This post was migrated across from my old blog. Please excuse any horrible formatting. If it is unreadable then let me know.

Accessibility

A friend was over for Christmas and his iPhone's camera LED flashed when it rang. I thought it might be a jailbreak hack but it's actually one of dozens of features in the accessibility section. Which I'd never looked at - go and take a look if you haven't seen it. It's a phenomenal piece of work, and one that Apple, and any other manufacturers who have taken similar care, deserve recognition and praise for.

Here are some things I discovered exploring:

• Some deaf people like video-calling because they can use sign language - so front-facing cameras have been revolutionary for them. Others prefer texting - iMessage, WhatsApp and BBM have dropped this cost nicely.

• The iPhone can be connected to a braille display (an amazing device in itself) and blind users can interact without seeing or touching the screen. Just think how incredible that is - it's a device which is defined by its TOUCH SCREEN, but can be used by people who neither touch, nor look at, the screen. It's mindboggling - see this video to see this in action.

• Siri and voice assistants have really opened up touchscreen devices for the blind. Setting an alarm or a calendar appointment is now effortless (when they work).
  

I tried out the VoiceOver feature while squinting my eyes. I think it's intended for the partially sighted rather than the completely blind as you still need to aim your fingers onto targets but text is read for you. Try it out Settings > General > Accessibility > VoiceOver.

The basic mechanism is that you tap an item (eg. an icon on the home screen) and it is highlighted and its label is read out loud. You can then double tap anywhere on the screen to open the icon. There's a nice touch when you highlight the Calendar icon - it reads out the date as well as the label. I had to look up how to scroll (swipe three fingers up the screen).

This post was migrated across from my old blog. Please excuse any horrible formatting. If it is unreadable then let me know.

Advertising

I am not a believer in the effectiveness of most mainstream advertising. Even though I pay attention, I can rarely recall any adverts after a day.

The UK advertising industry turns over £16.8bn annually. That seems a huge number but it's only £264 per person.

Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. - Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad

I first read that quote a few years ago and liked it from the angle of unremarkable businesses having to pay to get attention. But more recently I've appreciated it from a different angle. Advertising is a tax. It pays for services that we, the public, want. Big Brother, Downton Abbey, Facebook , commercial radio, free newspapers on the tube - all paid for by the tax of advertising.

I'd be interested to see independent research on the effectiveness of ads though. It seems to me this is an industry with enormous vested interests in the status quo. Publishers, advertisers, agencies, audiences, the state - all have an enormous incentive to perpetuate the idea that advertising is effective. There really isn't anyone who benefits from saying it doesn't work. The only conflict is between different forms of advertising for share of budgets - and I think this will become more commonplace and we'll see the likes of Google and Facebook going head-to-head with TV.

This post was migrated across from my old blog. Please excuse any horrible formatting. If it is unreadable then let me know.

Ctrl-alt-delete

I have decided to give myself a longer life for Christmas. So from now on I'll be up at 6am and I am going to try to write a post every day.

My main inspiration is Fred Wilson. He writes every day at about 5am and what he writes is consistently incisive and to the point. There's cause and effect there - writing every day for years has improved his writing, and also his mind and understanding. So I'll be doing that.

I will import my old Wordpress blog into here at some point and those posts will appear earlier. But this is the start

This post was migrated across from my old blog. Please excuse any horrible formatting. If it is unreadable then let me know.

Apple's patent battle - it's about the back of beyond

I'm in France. I've been off the beaten track a bit - towards the border with Belgium. Today I looked at the rows of tablets for sale in a provincial supermarket. Has 'tablet' as in electronic device replaced 'tablet' as in pill in our general vocabulary yet?. Anyway, there were at least 12, of various sizes. Samsung and Asus were dominating there. Now of course they were all rounded rectangles with a black surround and usually some kind of metallic bezel. I couldn't really pick them apart, and I had to look hard to be sure that the iPad wasn't hidden amongst them. It wasn't.

Now, I wondered, why would I encounter the biggest selection of tablets I've ever seen at a supermarket in Saint Quentin? Obviously they are profitable to sell.

"WHO THE FUCK BUYS THESE?" I raged. They were virtually all priced at €399 or higher. Basically iPad money. But what else are customers going to buy? There's no iPad to be found. Now of that €399, I reckon €100 is going to the supermarket - maybe more. That's why they're giving up valuable baguette space. And so I made the leap from patent-infringing rectangles to distribution channels.

Here's what I realised - the patent lawsuits aren't about Apple keeping the Galaxy Tab out of Best Buy in San Francisco. Or PC World in the UK. It's the vast, vast majority of the world that's beyond driving distance to an Apple store that they are worried about. The places where Apple don't ship. The people who don't shop online. The patents are being used as a weapon because Apple's direct retail model isn't delivering the mass-market share that they need.

Don't forget, the iPhone was sold using network operators. But the iPad doesn't have much network support - and when you get 100 miles from an Apple store it starts to look mighty tempting to buy that identical looking tablet, even if it's the same price. And look at what tablets have become - stepping stone devices onto the internet. By default their target market isn't going to be ordering and comparing prices online.

So what does that mean? Apple are using their patents to try to slow down the sales of competing devices. But this can only ever be a temporary measure. In the long term they need to either: drop prices to prevent Samsung offering €100 margins to retailers, massively expand the Apple stores presence, or start giving giving retailers a similar margin to Samsung.

As a shareholder I don't like any of these options. As a customer I prefer reduced prices.

This post was migrated across from my old blog. Please excuse any horrible formatting. If it is unreadable then let me know.

The Innovation Lull

There's talk of bubbles. Of bubbles bursting.

But I feel like we're in an innovation lull. The dominant themes of the last five years or so have matured and I don't see an obvious successor for the next few years.

Mobile

Let's note immediately that I am talking about the developed world here. Smartphones have been heavily adopted, but are still underutilised. By that I mean that most people now have them, but many people are not actually employing smart capabilites. I'd argue that this is partly because many people don't need those capabilities - they want to use Facebook, send messages, listen to music, take pictures, look at maps and perhaps play the odd casual game. All these are done and done - available on all the brands and virtually perfected on Android and iOS.

It's what we haven't seen that alarms me. Mobile games are still casual puzzlers, $0.99 originals or $4.99 ports of existing franchises. Where are the immersive games? The new franchises? So far launching 2D birds across the screen is the best that's been achieved - in FIVE YEARS.

And on the hardware side, I don't expect much. A bigger screen, a thinner phone, longer battery life. Dull dull dull. I sat eating my lunch outside an Apple reseller yesterday - the poster in the window said 'The new iPhone 4S - Dual Core A5 processor, 8M pixel camera'. Well if the best hook it has is some processor gobbledegook then we're close to flattening out on innovation. I don't expect the iPhone 5 to be game-changing in any respect.

Social

Facebook's won for now. Twitter is plodding along. While both have performed phenomenally in terms of user adoption, neither is delivering the sort of financial returns that the markets want. But more worryingly, there's nothing exciting coming from them. FB apps, credits and the open graph are moderately successful, but again, they are iterations rather than revolutions. The idea of people taking their social network with them across websites has failed to bear fruit - we just aren't sharing enough.

Cloud

This one has a bit of distance to go. Dropbox has pushed the concept of cloud into the consumer mainstream - and monetized it. Google Docs is increasingly being adopted - despite Google's lack of any innovation on that product for years. Chrome OS has gone nowhere. The concept of thin-clients hasn't really worked out.

What's next?

I think mobile and social are complete and fully adopted. Cloud has a good foundation and is now ticking up in terms of usage.

The living room - I've said it before and I'll say it once again... There is a MASSIVE market for a device that bridges a TV, console and media centre. Ouya has proven there's still the demand for gaming in the living room. Visitors are still blown away by a simple XBMC setup at my house. "Where can we buy that?" they ask, reaching for their wallets. "You can't, unless you're a jailbreaking, command-lining fucking ubergimp."

I'm not sure what else. Education and publishing seem fairly ripe for the pot. And I think Google can be challenged on an enormous number of fronts - I don't know what the fuck they are doing, but Gmail, Docs, Maps, Local Business - all completely static for multiple years.

This post was migrated across from my old blog. Please excuse any horrible formatting. If it is unreadable then let me know.