Bob Rosenbaum | The MarketFarm

Buy good equipment; take good care of it

Call this Rule #1 for life. Maybe it’s not the most important rule; it’s not the Golden Rule or even the Rule of 72.

Let’s call it the Hard Goods Rule: Buy good equipment and take good care of it.

Nothing provides better affirmation and aids in a better outloook than moving through the details of the day with equipment that works easily, well and with the rarest of failure.

If you need to buy a printer for your office, don’t settle for the $25 model that comes along as a premium with your computer. I’ve learned that lesson too many times. Go out and spend what you it takes to buy a durable, solid printer that runs and runs. Buy the features you need and just pay the price. If you find yourself leaning toward a cheap compromise, imagine yourself being late out the door and suddenly remembering a document you forgot to bring along. You’re in your winter coat and boots, leaning over the computer, the dog is barking because he thinks you’re going to take him for a walk, and you get a paper jam, or a message that the printer is out of magenta. With a cheap printer, this seems to happen 1 out of 2 times (thought it’s probably more like 1-in-5).

Visualize this and you’ll spend the good money.

A corollary to this rule is the Hard Goods Corollary: More power/fewer features.

Here are some tools and equipment to which the Rule of Hard Goods and Corollary apply:

Computer printer
Power tools (A drill shouldn’t drill just some stuff. For an extra $60 you can get a drill to drill any stuff. That’ll amortize to about $1.50 anytime you need to drill something really hard over the next 10 years).
Lawnmower
Computer (The reason people pay more for a Mac.)
Camera
Snowblower (If you want to wrestle with a piece of equipment, you’ll spend less and fare better against a snow shovel.)
Winter coat
Washer/Dryer (It’s all about power. Features break over time; a powerful machine runs forever.)
Stapler (Unless you never plan to staple more than 4 sheets at a time.)
Sporting goods (Whatever your passion – golf, tennis, baseball, sailing, jai alai – equipment that doesn’t go all the way just saps the fun. You may as well stay home to figure out what’s wrong with that g-d- Scanner/Copyer/Fax/Printer/Stickintheeye.)

There’s a place in the world for cheap stuff. If you’ve never been camping, never want to go camping, but you absolutely have to go camping just this once for one night with your son and the Cub Scouts, then go to Wal-Mart and buy the $39 two-man tent. You can buy a good tent for the next time you go.

Microsoft Internet Explorer: Power to the Peeps

According to a report in B2B Magazine, the next edition of Microsoft Internet Explorer – IE9, to be released during 2011 – will include a feature that enables users to block 0nline tracking of their internet browsing by marketers.

Thank you Microsoft, for taking our privacy out of the hands of the calcified Congress, and putting it back where it belongs: with each of us. If you’re not careful, people might start to like you again.

The worst of both worlds

I had breakfast with an entrepreneur who is at that point where his young business ought to be gaining traction. But he’s bogged down in building the next generation of software that supports the business.

The problem is that he and the software developer – to whom he has given equity in exchange for the development work – disagree on their vision for the 2.0 version. They’ve been deadlocked for six months as competitors begin to pop up around them.

I suggested he set a two-week deadline to either achieve a shared vision or amicably end the partnership.

Good people become entrepreneurs because they want to get things done without the slow and layered process of corporate decision-making.

Good people work for corporations because they want to get things done without the cash-flow constraints of a small business.

Either is fine. But if you find yourself in a position where you can’t move forward and you don’t have cash, then you need to change position.

A bit more on the royal nuptials

A direct quote from the 9 a.m. ‘news’ segment of NBC’s Today Show:

“Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for since the announced engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton: the day and location of their wedding. So mark your calendars for April 29…”

As if NBC isn’t going to remind us.

The royal engagement and authenticity in the media

Why do the breathless reports of Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton have such a negative impact on me?

I have no ill will toward the couple; they are charming, attractive and – considering the circumstances – appear humble and likeable. In England, where the royal family is some kind of national treasure, I might understand such over-the-top, second-to-second pursuit of each detail as they proceed toward a royal wedding.

But here in America, Will and Kate are not our own; interest in their nuptials strikes me as being borne of respect for our longstanding relationship with England as a friend and ally. Does it require sending squads of journalists to stand outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to get weepy and about the storybook nature of their love?

Simply: No. It doesn’t have the same meaning in England and America. There it’s a fairy tale; here it’s a pleasant news item. The mass media’s effort to transport the fairy tale aspect of it across the ocean and across cultures is not reporting; it’s editorializing.

It’s not journalism; it’s distortion. And it’s part of that problematic blurring between news and entertainment that seems to have infected all for-profit media.

Who’s really behind Steven Slater’s spectacular resignation from Jet Blue?

Once you get past the viral thrill of rehashing Steven Slater’s “bailout” from a career as a flight attendant that he could no longer stand to hold, the debate – to the degree that any debate is required at all – quickly gets to the question of who was more wrong?

Was it Slater, who cursed at his passengers, deployed the emergency slide on the Jet Blue plane to which he was assigned, and (worst) stole two cans of beer before escaping?

Or was it a still-unnamed woman passenger, whom he accuses of berating him and hitting him in the head with either the door of an overhead compartment or one of the bags in that compartment?

How about this third option: It’s the airlines.

They have to accept responsibility for helping to turn passengers into snarling beasts with overbooked flights, endlessly punitive fees, optimized fares that make no sense to consumers, and a practice of setting flight schedules that they can’t possibly maintain. Then they exacerbate the effect of all these insults by bombarding us with irreconcilable advertising campaigns to convince us how much we’re going to love the experience.

Further, they have to accept responsibility for their role turning flight attendants and other customer-facing personnel into recalcitrant and uncaring bureaucrats. The tools? Serial layoffs, confrontational union negotiations, low pay and a general disregard for their value. (When stranded near Chicago O’Hare during the 9/11 crisis, I met a dozen flight attendants from a handful of airlines – all of whom told me the hotel and meals were on their own dime during the unscheduled grounding.)

I’ve flown enough to know the truth of the matter. Some passengers, maybe even many, are simply boors who shouldn’t be out in public. And some flight attendants should probably find another line of work before they give their next safety briefing.

But for the rest of us, the airlines need to shape up. I can only imagine how complex and difficult it is to operate in this industry. Executives throughout the industry make incremental decisions that help the bottom line, and they are skilled at justifying why these decisions are in the long-term best interest of the customers.

But it’s simply not the case; there is no justification for selling a ticket and then notifying the passenger a day later that the flight is overbooked and an extra $25 will guarantee he isn’t bumped (this has happened to me a handful of times).

It’s simple really: Each airline needs to figure out a way to make money while treating passengers and employees like something other than refugees and wardens, respectively.

Vuvuzela: The story behind the buzz

Those irritating vuvuzela horns that South Africans (and now everyone else, it seems) like to blow from the first minute to the last of a soccer match seem to have taken much of the world by surprise.

But they are, and always have been, readily available in the United States. They’re sold as school-spirit items (School spirit stadium horn), novelty items, stadium contraband (May be banned in a stadium near you!), and curiously even as magic accessories – with a collapsible option, perhaps for sneaking them into stadiums under your game-day jersey (Madhatter Magic Shop). Nobody seems to wholesale them for much more than $2.35 apiece.

Wikipedia’s history of the vuvuzela traces them from Mexico to Brazil and, only in the last decade, to South Africa. Not mentioned in that history is their longstanding use, as I heard on a radio call-in show yesterday, in stadiums of the Canadian Football League.

And am I the only person in the United States who remembers being able to buy them at baseball and football games in the United States in the 1970s and, perhaps, early ’80s? At some point, they were regulated out of existence here – apparently for the same reason that many 2010 World Cup spectators want them banned: They’re really loud and really annoying. But I clearly remember my dad buying me a stadium horn one time; I think he shelled out $3.50 for it in the days before the blessedly quiet and equally ridiculous giant foam finger became the must-have for loyal fans in Anywhere USA.

The manufacturer of the “authentic” vuvuzela (www.vuvuzela.com) offers them in their original form, or sheathed in a removable fabric sock of your favorite World Cup team’s colors (the sockzela). You can get them with a beaded sheath, in a miniature size (for an easy getaway when you blow it in the ear of the wrong football hooligan), or in a curved antelope-horn shape, called the zazu and looking suspeiciously like a shofar.

Vuvuzelas reportedly sell at World Cup venues for about $3, which seems about the right price for creating a worldwide phenomenon capable of driving television sound technicians to an early grave. But if your only exposure to the vuvuzela is what you see and hear during this short blast of World Cup coverage, then you’re missing a little bit of a treat. Perhaps as a gesture of international goodwill, the folks who run the official vuvuzela website have provided us with this intriguing video of a zaza choir.

It’s got that Paul Simon/Rhythm of the Saints feel you expect from South Africa, and it’s good enough to make you take those giant foam fingers out of your ears – if only for a couple minutes.

The zaza as you’ll never hear it at a soccer match

Air travel now closer than ever to a root canal

For a fee, Frontier Airlines is now allowing people to bring their caged pets into the passenger cabin to fly along. In doing so it joins United and Southwest in liberating dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters and small birds from the dark chill of the hold.

It’s all part of a larger strategy. Between narrower seats, reduced legroom, baggage stuffed in every cranny, elimination of in-flight meals and every other nicety, the airlines are getting closer to their end-game.

For yet another additional fee you’ll soon be able to buy a seat and meal service for your beloved pet, and forgo the noise and discomfort of the main cabin with your own spot in the cargo bay.