ToneHall

CNN: Clinton to Speak Tuesday at Democratic Convention, say Sources

Hillary is booked into an important speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention.  But it appears not to be the position of the vice-presidential nominee.  The VP nominee traditionally speaks on Wednesday.

Here's the piece from CNN:

"Sen. Hillary Clinton has agreed to speak on the second night of next month's Democratic convention, headlining on the 88th anniversary of the day women earned the right to vote, sources say.

Two sources close to Clinton said the former presidential candidate will speak August 26 with all female U.S. senators on stage with her.

"Tuesday night is Hillary night," said one supporter.

That night is the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote."

Random Catch: Hi Steve, Couldn't Reach Your Apple Store Peeps by Phone

Hi Steve:

You probably don't remember me, since we've never met.  But even though I use a PC (XP. Die, Vista!), I bought an iPod.  OK, it was actually a gift for Suzanne and she didn't want it, but I've got one.

Called your store in Los Gatos today.  I got a robo-voice telling me various things to do.  I went through the phone tree twice, then disconnected myself. 

Just because I like your products doesn't mean I have to put up with your bad retail manners.  And I don't care that you made a fake Apple store to test customer flow and other stuff before you opened the store.

It's stupid to make it difficult for me to talk to your peeps in Los Gatos.  I'll go into the store tomorrow.  And I'll tell them you've got bad manners, Steve.  Guess I won't be the first.

Don't worry - I still love you.  Just clean this up, eh?  Thanks.

Love, Marsha

p.s. - Please change your phone message.  It still mentions the 3G launch and that was eons ago.

Random Catch: Things We Do in Fitting Rooms

I spent my evening shopping in Nordstrom and after repeated visits from my salesperson, Jan, shuttling out the rejects and bringing in new items I had to laugh.

Is there anything a retail salesperson hasn't seen?  I've never seen this woman before in my life, and here I am standing there in my underwear trading clothes back and forth.

Just seemed absurd.

Fortunately, as always, they had just the right thing.  Which is lucky.  Because I'm wearing it to get married.  On Saturday.

Wall Street Journal: Fed Moves Indicative of Steady Rates Ahead

Would someone please pass me the aspirin? Oy vey.

"The Federal Reserve’s decision today to extend loans to investment banks into 2009 is one more hurdle to an eventual tightening cycle that now appears unlikely to begin before next year.

It’s not an insurmountable one, Fed watchers said, especially if inflation were to worsen further. But like the November elections, it’s the type of symbolic barrier that would put officials in a tight spot if they tried to raise interest rates before the end of the year.

“The presence of these facilities does not absolutely prevent the Fed from tightening, because the Fed has made some separation between its monetary policy tools and its liquidity tools,” former Fed governor Laurence Meyer and former Fed economist Brian Sack, both with Macroeconomic Advisers, wrote in a research note. “However, in our view, it leans the Fed in that direction.”

In a statement, the Fed cited “continued fragile circumstances in financial markets,” adding “these [lending] facilities would be withdrawn should the Board determine that conditions in financial markets are no longer unusual and exigent.”

“There’s some intellectual case to be made [that] they can’t be tightening when they’re declaring that financial conditions are bad,” said Stephen Stanley, economist at RBS Greenwich Capital Markets. He expects the Fed to start raising rates next April."

Reuters: 'Jaded' Californians See Quakes as Part of Life

The report of today's SoCal earthquake reminded me of the big one in 1989 that devastated the Bay Area.

I was on the fifth floor of a building on Market Street in San Francisco designed by architect Albert Pissis in 1898.  It was on October 17 at 5:04 p.m. that it hit. I watched the long hallway on the executive floor of the Emporium undulate in waves as if it were water.

After collecting my things, I went past my manager's office noticed she wasn't there and called out her name - she was under her desk and wouldn't come out.

I walked home all the way up Market Street with a friend who lived a few doors down from me.  People spilled out of every bar, 10, 15, 20 people deep in the street, glasses or bottles in hand, downing their drinks as fast as they could swallow. 

An entire subculture of people who worked and partied at night and usually never saw the light of day appeared, Goths and BDSM people punctuating the scene.  It was hard to believe the amount of damage because I could see the odd brick or decoration that had fallen, but not much more.

I walked from downtown San Francisco, to the Castro, then to my girlfriend's flat in the Richmond.  After watching the same news clips looped together for a couple of hours or so, much of the adrenalin had worn off and I was ready for bed.

I wasn't filled with terror, but that night we slept with our clothes on just in case.

Work was closed for a week as they checked the building.  I cried as we drove through the Marina and saw the pancaked homes and cars.

Here's how Reuters saw Southern California today:

"LOS ANGELES, July 29 (Reuters) - It was the Los Angeles area's biggest earthquake in nearly 15 years, but for many the tremor felt like business as usual.

A 5.4-magnitude temblor at lunchtime on Tuesday sent office workers streaming from their downtown Los Angeles high-rises and led many to reach for their phones to check on friends and relatives.

But after it was all over, with only minor injuries and damage reported, many Southern California residents simply shrugged it off.

"We're jaded earthquake people, we've been through it all," said attorney Linda Hsu, 35, who walked down 38 flights of stairs from her downtown office following the quake. "Because we live in Southern California, we are all used to it.""

Read the full story here.

Strategy: Nilofer Merchant, Silicon Valley CEO

A serious hoot.  That's what I thought of the two links mentioned below.  Then I thought again of the upheaval, the excitement in a startup, the fear, and - for these companies - ultimately, the failure.  Kind of a tone of terror, when I think of it.

Nilofer infers if we're not solving a customer problem, we're not really in business.

She gets it - we got distracted by our own adrenaline.

"Harry Max sent these two links, here, and here. on web-based failures yesterday and they had me going down memory lane. From lamo things to Beenz to worthy ideas like WebVan. It is both funny and sad to see.

And so I remind you/me/everyone the simple lesson we must hold onto. Every successful company has to have a clear customer pain/problem that they MUST solve. No company, regardless of the zany notion or the fantastic technology succeeds without that."

RealDan: PR Rule #1: People who are telling the truth about themselves do not insist on being 'off the record'

Dan Lyons did a great take on what's going on over at Apple.  The arrogant tone is wearing thin and could just come back to bite them.  Frankly, arrogance bores me.

Dan gets it right.  I've seen many companies that were incredibly hot try this tack.  It works for awhile - it may even be considered amusing by some.  But once they get cold - and everyone does - they've used up their pool of goodwill.

Oh, by the way - there's no 'off the record' anymore.  Never, and I mean never, say something to a journalist that you don't want to see in print.  If you do, you're fooling yourself and being unrealistic about the journo's job.

Here's the excerpt....zip down for the link...

"Best part of Joe Nocera’s article from yesterday’s New York Times (“Apple’s Culture of Secrecy”) was, of course, the quote from Steve Jobs, the one where Nocera picks up the phone and Jobs hits him with this opening line: “This is Steve Jobs. You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

In other words: Classy.

And just the kind of thing you’d expect from the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, right?

One thing that stuck with me was the expletive. I keep wondering, which word did he use? My picks, in no particular order, would be dick, prick, fuck or fucker. Maybe he used something bland, like bastard, but from what I’ve heard about Jobs, I doubt it.

It also struck me as classic Jobs, in that what he said was rude and obnoxious but also, oddly enough, highly perceptive. In one sentence Jobs managed to speak the essential truth about himself and Joe Nocera.

How many times do you think Jobs rehearsed that opening line before he dialed (or had Katie Cotton dial for him)? I’d say he practiced it one hundred times. And I’d say Katie was definitely on the line with him, though she probably pretended not to be. Furthermore, I’d bet a signed dollar bill that Apple recorded the phone call, just in case Nocera decided to run the stuff that Steve gave him under their “off the record” agreement."

Full post here.

MarketingVox: Ex-Googlers Attempt a Search Engine

The tone you're hearing from me on the Cuil launch is a yawn.  Tried it.  Didn't like the results.  Pretty poor quality, slow, with thumbnails that have no relationship to the topic searched.  Just what I don't want in a search engine, really.

My take?  It's half-baked.  Possibly the $30M + of VC money they've got will be used to improve the product.  The name, Cuil, is pronounced 'cool.'  If you're using that as the name, your product had better be....and this isn't.

Hard to believe these folks are former Googleites, with the lack of product quality for a world-wide launch.  Here's an exerpt from MarketingVox on the Cuil launch:

"A mutiny of ex-Google employees, and one from IBM, launched Cuil ("cool"), a search engine whose name comes from the Gaelic word for "knowledge" and "hazel," reports the BBC. Founders include ex-Googlers Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier; as well as Tom Patterson, who worked on search and storage technologies for IBM.

Cuil bears some similarities to its rival. The homepage is sparing (black to Google's cheerful white), the company name is quirky, and a link to the privacy policy is prominently displayed. (Google made a fuss about adding a privacy link to its own page earlier this month.)"

More here.

The Economist: Inflation or Deflation

There were bright spots in the economy over the past couple of weeks, but overall - especially with today's drop in the stockmarket - it wasn't a pretty picture. 

The tone is becoming increasingly pitched as some of the solutions floated by the Treasury department continue trying to find their footing.

From The Economist Market.view, Inflation or Deflation?:

"The first two weeks of July were dark indeed, as investors feared that high oil prices were both heralding recession and preventing central banks from taking action by cutting interest rates. That environment was pretty bleak for risky assets, with equities falling and credit spreads rising. The repeated falls in the share prices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added to the sense of crisis.

Two things then changed the tone. The first was a fall in the oil price from its $147-a-barrel peak. The second was the rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and some better-than-expected results from the banking sector. The market's economic and financial worries were eased at the same time; equities rallied sharply (particularly bank stocks) and credit spreads narrowed again. The ten-year Treasury bond yield rose in a week from 3.83% to 4.15%."

Strategy: Nilofer Merchant, Silicon Valley CEO

Strategy has 5 Structural Elements - power distribution, decision-making, idea generation, ideas, process and people. Miss tuning one and you’ll fail. Add items that don’t blend and you’ll fail.

Decision-Making

The way decisions are made in organizations determines how ideas are generated, and which ideas get considered.

The way decisions are made also influences how these ideas will get carried out later.

Does decision-making in your organization flow top-down or bottom-up? Who are the holders of the power to decide which ideas advance and which get eliminated?

If ideas are valued in your culture, there’s a strong likelihood that it might not matter who generates the ideas.