Recently in In My Opinion Category

If you read my blog or twitter feed you know I am a unhappy United Airlines Premier Executive customer and from time to time I share my concerns and stories about how bad flying them has become. But I can't claim to have ever been very creative about my posts and certainly not as funny as this video.




Check out the details behind the video at the Wall Street Journal Site
Musician Dave Carroll's website and history of the ordeal

Truly great moments in business come around very seldom. If your present when one occurs its something you remember. I was there when my business partner Ron Powell returned from a trip after meeting Bill Inmon and it changed the course of our magazine's coverage leading us down a very successful path. I can't help but wonder if the same is true of the bad ideas do we really take notice? Or do they happen so often that they have become common place?

Can you imagine being in the meeting when someone suggested the following:

I have a new way to increase profitability lets lie to our customers and tell them we'll deliver our service (insert hotel room or seat on a plane here) lets reinforce the lie by issuing a confirmation number that we know in the end has no real meaning. But in the background we'll actually sell more of the rooms or seats than we actually have. We can call it "over booking" this way it will have an official sounding term and the customers will just except it as policy. We can insure our plane/hotel is full and we'll increase profitability. Now I realize we'll probably screw up client business trips and family vacations but heck we'll all get rich so who cares!

At some point this conversation took place at companies like Frontier Airlines (who minutes ago informed me that my flight was over booked and Hilton hotels who simply didn't have a room for my family this past weekend after booking well in advance and calling to confirm from the road the same day as the reservation. The conversation wasn't as satirical as my version but bottom line these polices exist so why didn't some MBA educated professional jump up during this meeting and scream ARE YOU KIDDING ME THIS IS THE DUMBEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD! Because some companies are driven by greed not service.

I take a simple stance on how I run my business. I try to deliver what we promise, we don't lie to our clients and we do most of our business based on relationships. We've been successful and by most accounts we are respected by our peers so it makes me wonder how policies like the one above even make it into a meeting let alone are actually acted upon.

Overbooked....its a good thing.....if your a hotel chain or an airline.

I was listening to my favorite podcast program today (This Week in Tech - TWIT 183) and writer, new media expert Corey Doctorow put a fine point on how media is evolving. He talked about the way that technology can force a chasm and then perhaps acceptance. And that the old media delivery systems tend to get folded into the new. The first published newspaper was the The Boston News-Letter, a weekly which debuted in 1704 I'm not sure how it performed from a financial perspective but it did spawn an industry that is now evolving away from its roots landing publications online or on devices like the Amazon Kindle and iPhone.

Perhaps the future of newspaper may in fact parallel that of other media that came before it like opera and poetry which are generally not a profitable today and in the case of Opera are often funded by the wealthy. In a future world the idea of a viable newspaper model may be something printed on a expensive cloth, ironed by the butler and delivered to the rich weirdo in the penthouse.

I think it draws an interesting parallel to what is happening in our industry. The old delivery systems are getting folded into the new. Early on reporting seemed to have significant value it didn't even need to be pretty it was just great to have. Reporting, while still valuable is giving way to Performance Management and the ability to respond verses observe this is the value many companies need from BI today. The systems of today are focusing on mass adoption, A-ha moments that allow users to deep dive and explore and added value from unstructured and semi-structured sources not previously part of the equation. What are these technologies going to fold into? Is it Real-time access, SaaS, Embedded Business Intelligence, Open Source? Which of these will force the irrefutable chasm that will spawn the next age of business intelligence?

So the question remains,  is the business intelligence system you have today best suited for rich weirdo's?

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Richard Hackathorn sent me this link. if you use Second Life you will laugh for sure.