Casual Fridays

Seth Godin has displayed four curves depicting typical product life cycles. He’s asked for names for each. Below, I’ve given my titles, descriptions, and names for each curve:
The Phenom
Unusually talented and charismatic with incredible exposure. But it’s not just hype. There’s substance that allows it to endure.
Names: Michael Jordan/Elvis Presley (I […]

I had a presentation this week and wanted to have nice color prints made as handouts. I decided to run over to Fed-Ex/Kinko’s and have them print out the presentation for me. I walk in the door and stand at the counter for a few minutes. One of the employees is working […]

I was talking with my brother-in-law a while back and we were talking shop. He is a manager within a large software corporation. Somehow the conversation lead him to discuss how their consumer software has changed over the last few years.
Over the course of time we just kept adding more and […]

In our last article, we discussed the longevity of a product affecting how that product is promoted and sold. Art Kleiner wrote an interesting article for Strategy&Business concerning a product’s death cycle. Kleiner laments the decline of product quality since the 1980s. As quality declined, so did durability, and so did expectations. […]

We don’t mind subscribing to services (phone services, Internet access, cable TV) or publications. These have become traditional subscription items. So, an even greater obstacle than the aversion to subscriptions is the established traditions. And as Seth Godin states, traditions rarely change quickly just because the alternatives are better. This is the hurdle that Napster-like services have to overcome.

At the Milken Institute Global Conference, Safeway’s CEO gave his reasons for reducing the company’s responsibility of health care coverage for employees. Interestingly enough, he referrenced the airline industry as a warning of where his company was headed without such a change.
“I would say we were six to seven years away from […]