Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Yesterday was a long but fun day. Like I mentioned yesterday, I woke up early and did some work. Then I got ready for the day and went to get breakfast at the hotel. The food was great. Since it’s Europe there were really good breads and cheeses. And really good tea. After breakfast, was walking to work. It was about a 30 minute walk with some rain and frequent wondering, “Are we lost? Is this the right street?” :-)

The city is very beautiful, lots of old buildings with great architecture and overall very clean. The Google office in Zurich is pretty nice. Their break room has huge bars of good Swiss chocolate. I wish I had a room like that.

I was in a design meeting all day, presenting most of the afternoon. The jetlag was making it hard to concentrate, but the day went well. After work we walked back to the hotel. The sun finally came out and the walk back was terrific. After dropping stuff off at the hotel, we walked to a traditional Swiss restaurant. I had an amazingly good caprese salad followed by a traditional Swiss fondue.

I actually didn’t like the fondue. I thought there was too much wine in it. Though if you like wine, I suppose it would have tasted really good. I also started getting annoyed at how leisurely the meals are here. The whole dinner took around 3 hours, and I was sleepy before we even started!

Dinner ended with a terrific chocolate mousse. I was tired but content; I had my first traditional Swiss meal. :-)

So far today, the weather looks great. I’m planning on taking a slow walk to work to take pictures of all the cool things. Hopefully, I can get out of work early. All the stores close starting at 6:30 pm and I have lots of souvenirs to buy. :-)

Well, I finally made it to Zurich yesterday evening (local time). The weather was extremely rainy. So , I decided I would just take a cab to the Hotel rather than take the train and then try to find my way around the city. The cab ride was uneventful, except for my slipping in and out of sleep. By then, I had been awake nearly 36 hours and was getting cranky. The driver dropped me off at my hotel, the Bar Hotel Rossli, which turns out to be a lot nicer online than in real life.

I suppose I’m used to American style hotels with larger rooms and real furniture. But the bed is cozy and that’s all that really matters. After I checked in and took a shower, I went out to dinner with my coworker at a nice Italian restaurant. I really liked it, except for the smoking. Why do Europeans smoke so much? Don’t they know it’s really bad for you?

The dinner was fun. My apple juice was slightly sparkling which was weird. The menu was all in German and that made ordering fun. Also, things like the bread basket, Parmesan cheese, and pepper mill were communal so the waiter kept passing them from table to table. And most of the wait staff was Indian. The pasta was so good! The sauce was nice and spicy, and the noodles were cooked perfectly. Unfortunately, I wasn’t that hungry and only ate like half of it.

I had meant to write this post after dinner but I was too exhausted. So instead I did a little work, got my Blackberry working, and went to bed. For some reason, my body only let me sleep for 8 hours, so I’m up early (local time) writing this post.

Unfortunately, I think I caught something on the plane and can feel a cold coming. This is bad, since I really want to be able to explore the city after work today and tomorrow.

Also unfortunately, instead of the 70 degrees and sunny skies the weather forecast promised me, Zurich will be in the high 50s with 80% rain while I’m here. I flew halfway around the world and found Seattle. :-)

I’m supposed to be in Zurich for work, but my bad luck with airports seems to be continuing. My flight from Seattle to Amsterdam went well (as well as a 10 hour flight can go), but my Amsterdam to Zurich flight got canceled because KLM, the “Royal Dutch Airlines”, didn’t have a crew for the plane. Which is understandable, it’s not like KLM operates a lot of flights or anything; how would they know that they need a flight crew for the plane? With modern marvels like distributed computing, nano-technology, and peanut butter and jelly in one jar, I can see how you would assume a plane can fly itself. Sheesh.

Anyway, after the cancellation announcement, we were all asked to “sit tight” while they figure things out. An hour later they announced that they were able to get a bigger plane for a later flight to Zurich, so we could all get on that flight. The outcome was that my 2 hour layover turned into a 8 hour layover. And what was to be my one afternoon to explore Zurich, would become a long stay in the Crown Lounge at the Amsterdam airport.

On the plus side for the few people in the world that read this blog, this gives me lots of time to write.

On the Seattle to Zurich flight, I didn’t get bumped up to business class, but I did get “coach select” privileges which lets me use the lounges at the airports. Since the Seattle flight left at 1 pm, I didn’t really feel the need to sleep while on the flight, so the tiny coach seat was adequate. Instead, I read a little of Blink, thought a lot about life and stuff, and watched 3 movies (though I wasn’t paying much attention): Rush Hour, Wag the Dog, and Kingdom of Heaven. I’d seen the first two, but it was my first time seeing Kingdom of Heaven.

I remember seeing previews for Kingdom a few years back and thinking, it’s Ridley Scott directing, Liam Neeson acting, and there are lots of swords; I have to see it! Now, I’m very happy I never paid money to see it. It was really bad. Really bad. It could have been good, but the plot had no flow and it seemed like huge parts were missing. A plot element like “royal father finds and acknowledges bastard son, deep bond forms, father dies, son assumes mantle of responsibility” usually takes time, but in this movie 5 minutes are all that we get. We didn’t even get a montage of the son learning warfare. I guess it just sort of happened magically.

On the plus side, it did pass time. And speaking of passing time, I’m going to go see what they have to eat around here. Hopefully next time I write something, it will be from Zurich.

Continuing on the theme of amusing business ideas, a few friends and I have been joking about starting our own business consulting company. Our promise is that we can triple your company’s revenue in a year, guaranteed!

The strategy is to take advantage of loss leaders. Loss leaders are items sold below cost in the hope of selling a more profitable item later. A famous example, the Gillette model, is how Gillette sells their razors for cheap (or gives them out for free) and makes up the money when people buy the high-margin replacement blades.

It’s also how the Xbox and Playstation business models work. The companies lose money on the console and hope to make it up on the game sales. Nintendo, however, makes a profit on both the console and the games.

A number of companies use the loss leader to brag about “huge revenue growth” during analyst reviews, while remaining quiet about the lack of profit. This gives the impression that the company is doing great while the verdict is still out on whether they can recoup their losses. I had always found it strange that some companies always talked about revenue, but rarely talked about profit. But once I realized that it’s easy to make revenue look good, I figured out what was going on.

So back to the business consulting idea. Basically the recommendation is that you set up a loss leader situation or in other words, “Sell $100 for $20″. Revenue goes up, so the investors are happy, and the stock goes up. :-)

Once you’ve saturated the market with the loss leaders like the video game consoles, people start buying games. Eventually you reach a point, where in a fiscal quarter console sales have slowed and game sales have risen so you actually have a profit. Then you can announce “We’re profitable!”. Never mind, all the losses you took in the previously quarters, this quarter was good! So again, the investors are happy and the stock goes up.

Of course, over time you could earn back all your losses, but sometimes you don’t. Especially in fast moving markets, you may be releasing a new console while still trying to recover costs of the old one.

And yes, loss leaders are a very legitimate business strategy. But notice how similar it is to this stupid idea:

• Give people a $20 bill for 15 $1 bills - Revenue is $20 per transaction.
• Soon you can announce record high revenues and watch the stock go up. Keep going until you spend most of your venture capital funds.
• By now, you’ve cornered the market on $1 bills. And demand on $1 bills goes up since people can’t make change without them.
• Offer change with a 5% service charge - the profit is 5% per transaction.
• Announce your first quarter of profitability and watch the stock go up again.

Sure, there are a few reasons that this won’t work. But substitute “dollar bills” with disposable razors or video games, and it just might. :-)

As I mentioned a while ago, I decided to was time to get rid of stuff we don’t use and, in some cases, forgot we even owned. Last summer, I sold a bunch of stuff on eBay for about $650 after shipping, listing fees, and other incidentals. This summer I decided to use Amazon Marketplace. The key differences from eBay for me are:

• Easy to list stuff - just find it on Amazon’s site and enter the quantity, condition, and asking price. With eBay you have take a picture, upload it, write a description, and click through 2 screens of up-sell features you don’t want.
• No auction - just put the price you want to sell for and, if people want, they will buy it. Since I’m mostly trying to get rid of stuff, I just list my items for 10% less than the next guy. Amazon provides a nice view to see if people have undercut you, so I can adjust as necessary. And if it doesn’t sell, I can lower the price until it does. Yay for free markets!
• Simple status - Basically once it’s sold and the payment clears, you get an email to ship the item. With eBay when the auction was complete, you would need to send an invoice, wait for the payment to clear, and then ship the item.

Since it’s so easy to list things, I’ve been doing pretty good so far. I’m at almost $600 net and that’s without really worrying about getting the cheapest packing supplies and cheapest shipping. I could have probably saved $50 more, but it wasn’t worth the hassle.

The best part of this isn’t the money. There’s something very therapeutic about getting rid of stuff you’re not using. I really love the feeling of walking into the post office with my arms full of packages. It’s nice to know that the things that have been sitting around collecting dust will get a chance to be used and enjoyed.

A few people asked, “What are you selling exactly?” So far, it’s been video and computer games, various electronics (old cameras, mice, memory cards, cables), and lots of books. I had a number of programming books that aren’t useful to me anymore, but apparently useful to lots of other folks.

Another benefit of selling the books is that it frees up some much needed space on the shelves in my “library”. My next step with the library is to sell the books that I haven’t touched in the past few years, since that’s a good indication that I don’t want them anymore. If I can sell a few more, I won’t have any more books stacked on the floor. :-)

The next wave of stuff I need to sell will be more lucrative; lots of reasonable quality computer parts. The gating factor is that I need to figure out what exactly some of the parts are so I can list them for sale. I wish manufacturers would consistently put the part number on video cards. Really, how hard would that be?

In what now can be considered an ongoing joke, my co-workers decided that my recent time off (for Crissy’s and my one year anniversary vacation ) was spent hooking up with Britney Spears. Apparently there was some big celebrity breaking news while I was gone about Britney, so again, I returned to work to find the latest copy of US Weekly with that story on the cover.

They had planned to paste a picture of me over the guy with Britney on the cover. This would have been hilarious, but they never got around to it. While I give them bonus points for the idea, you sometimes just have to execute on a good idea. :-)