Airing Dirty Laundry

Consolidating Blogs - Orginally posted: 8/15/07

As a marketing guy, I know that the best time to spin your bad news is when other people are spinning theirs - and especially when theirs is worse.

I have the feeling that what we're seeing in the markets right now is a result of companies coming clean on a bunch of dirt that they've been hiding in the books for a while now. However, now these companies have an excuse - the market - for which to blame. The result of course is that projections which had been falsely rosey a week ago, will now come tumbling down.

The good news is that I have the feeling that once this hidden laundry has been unearthed, we'll have a resurgence in the market. But we need all the shoes to drop before that can happen.

Bring Made in USA back...

Consolidating Blogs - Orginally posted: 8/15/07

Recently, I read an article in Wired that detailed the different countries that were involved in making a single product (computer or car? I can't remember). The article showcased a nice graphic of the world with pushpins showing all of the countries that shipped different parts. The point of the article was that it takes a planet to raise a product.

Point taken. I get it. Manufacturing is cheap elsewhere. Because of the cheapness, more people get products that they want. Product designers get bigger budgets for R&D with less money being tied to the manufacturing process. Awesome. I just was able to buy an incredible LCD TV that would have cost 10 times as much was there not a world factory.

I would love to be the guy that is cool with not having the latest and greatest. The guy that buys Zenith TV's and shops at Farm and Fleet for American products. That guy isn't even in my world. He's the guy with a Buick (Yuck!) and 20 year old electronics. He probably likes Jeff Foxworthy and votes Republican.

But I am the guy that wants the latest and greatest. I am an early adopter. I convince people to buy the same crap that I do. And it's all made overseas. This is the problem.

Most importantly, how do we rebuild our manufacturing base so that America can build great products in our borders?

• First step, get rid of unions.
• Second step, revise patent law.
• Third step, utilize cheaper marketing platforms to cut marketing costs.
• Finally, do we even need all of this crap?

I'd say one thing that needs to happen fast is for import taxes to increase, and apply those dollars to SMALL business manufacturing concerns and loans for new companies.

Why small businesses? Because our top manufacturers are the ones that are outsourcing everything and already have the deeply entrenched world wide pipelines. They are never going to shift unless smaller companies - local ones - that are more agile become a threat.

A few years ago I read about a manufacturing plant in Mexico where they were making XBOX's. They could shift this plant on the fly to be reconfigured for different products. These are the sorts of plants that we need in the US. Or, we need to annex Mexico as the 51st state and get back all of the plants we built through the ever wonderful NAFTA plan. (Ross Perot, how right you were...)

Enough ranting. I'll be using this blog to detail Manufacturers that are looking to bring production back to the US, as well as to vilify companies that continue to produce over seas.

Please contribute. To get these ideas exposed to those that have a chance of doing anything we'll need to be loud. Thank you.

Is a Spell Checker another name for a Wizard?

So spell checking. Can anyone tell me why this isn't done natively in the operating system as you type. Think about it. Whenever you type on your computer - the operating system - not the application - should natively spell check what you write. Why have all of this redundancy in applications that spell check within the application? My operating system should simply be checking everything as I go....

Someone tell Microsoft and Apple for me.

Ace