Spectacles are back again. Earlier this year on this blog, I wrote about Snap’s disastrous over-commitment into Spectacles inventories, and subsequent difficulties in selling the items, as thousands of inventories piled up. I argued that their sales figures were in fact not terrible in comparison to the first generation iPods, but it was the capital expenditure on inventories that crippled Snap’s venture into hardware. So, after Snap is back again with Spectacles 2. I cannot really figure that if the new designs of Version 2 are any better, but Snap definitely seems to be making some better operations and retail decisions. Here is coverage from Verge: Both the Veronica and Nico styles are available starting today (ed: Sept 5,…
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Last April, I wrote about a whimsical Tesla analyst call. I had briefly mentioned three issues: (A) personality of the founder vs. personality of the firm (B) over-exuberance about Tesla before they could start making cars in scale. (C) cautious optimism about Tesla eventually fixing things for better. It seems like those were much simpler times, but who knew? That April call was a Donnie Darko style foreboding of many bizarre things to happen later. Since then Elon Musk’s twitter feed and other interactions only got stranger, beginning with an undergraduate-level banter on Karl Marx and capitalism, dissing people, creating tent-city and night outs at the factory, relaxing at a podcast, eventually leading to the costly “420” tweet that was fined…
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I was in Japan this summer and met some wonderful Wharton alumni. Of course, fulfilling a childhood dream, I also had a chance to take the Shinkansen (Bullet train) a few times. Of course, in these days of disrepair of public transport systems such as the MTA and Amtrak, Shinkansen is an engineering marvel. But more than the engineering feat, what is impressive (of course, as an operations prof) was the nearly flawless operations of the Shinkansen. Shinkansen bullet trains leave south from train tracks in Tokyo every 7-9 minutes. This frequency is nothing short of amazing. If you consider the fact that the Hakari express takes 3 hours to get to Shin-Osaka station outside Osaka, there are 20-26 trains…
Leave a CommentMea Culpa first. The Poiesis blog had slowed down during the summer, mainly due to unfortunate injury to my right hand, which in turn first stalled and then slowed my typing and writing. I will be gradually back to the intended pace. The “break”, however, revealed few observations: (1) The volume of textual communication (emails, texts, notes) are written without much thought. Writing polite and laconic responses is hard! (2) How AI on voice-activated typing is still behind the curve for voices with accents! For short phone messages and texts, the voice app was fine. For longer word documents, the voice-activated typing was awkward and slow, but doable. For typing technical documents (latex, programming codes), one might as well think…
Leave a CommentIt has been slow at the Poiesis blog, as the end of semester duties draw to an end. Meanwhile interesting operations events have occurred at our horizon of interest. Notes will follow on this topics, but here are some quick thoughts. Amazon released its annual report. Now AMZ is a 177B company. Looking at Bezos’s letter, there is an emphasized continued focus on the e-commerce challenge in India. In fact, India is the only “geographic” bullet point among the highlighted bullet points in the report. Amazon has moved into India and my prediction remains strong that Amazon is likely to win this battle out and will soon be the biggest retailer in India. (Contrast this with China). An interesting tidbit: Bezos…
Leave a CommentTo cover 400 years of American business history or capitalism is a daunting task. Fortunately, the author Bhu Srinivasan is up to the challenge. Penguin Press, 2017. Bhu Srinivasan, 500 pages. Srinivasan, from what appears from the blurb, is a successful venture capitalist. He evinces genuine admiration for both writing and capitalism. However, the book does suffer from what any attempt to trace 400 years of American capitalism would be constrained by. The absence of a strong overarching thesis. To get around this constraint, Srinivasan devices a set of themes and chapters. (Without much ado, I reproduce the chapters classified under themes. The chapters that I thought were strong, I highlighted in bold.) Chapters: Venture, Tobacco, Taxes, Cotton, Steam, Canal, Railroads, Telegraph,…
Leave a CommentThis is third (and final) in the series of posts thinking aloud about the Facebook Kerfuffle. See the first post on the nature of Information Leakage, and the second post on FOMO and how networks fall. In this post, I spend some time mulling about societal, not social, aspects of the network, the compliance, and the complicity of everyone including researchers. I suggest some operational changes that could be helpful. This is a complicated platform problem; There is no magic bullet, but a hodgepodge of contextual solutions, but I try to frame them in an over-arching narrative. — Thinking about Facebook, I recollect a conversation that I had with a researcher on networks, and a good friend (in real life), …
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