Don’t think they get it

The Wall Street Journal’s iPad issue pricing: $3.99 per week, $17.29 per month
[Via MacDailyNews]

The Wall Street Journal today announced its new Wall Street Journal for iPad app is available…

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This is more expensive that the dead tree/static web page version of the WSJ. Is anyone really going to pay that much more for some bells and whistles when it comes to financial news? R=There had better be something else in those bells and whistles.

And this price also includes advertising.

Time is even worse, costing $5 an issue. $260 dollars a year for something that you can get a dead tree version of for $20 a year! Plus you have to load it each Friday No purchase within the app.

These guys have a bad business model. Seems like someone should be looking to take their business.

Maybe because Alan Mullaly actually has built things

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by stevoarnold

Alan Mulally — Making Ford a Model for the Future
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an article about why Ford has the potential to become a company of the future. It had just come off reporting a $14.6 billion loss for 2008, its fourth losing year in a row.

One year later, Ford reported a profit of $2.7 billion. Yesterday the company reported March sales up 40 percent. GM, by contrast, was up 22 per cent, and Chrysler was down 8.3 per cent.

There are many reasons Ford has achieved such an extraordinary turnaround since Alan Mulally took over as CEO in 2006. After observing him in action, talking with him and spending time with his senior team, I’m convinced Mulally is taking an old-school industrial company and turning it into a model of how a modern company ought to be run.

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Perhaps because Mulally is an engineer who actually built things at Boeing, rather than just a sales/marketing MBA, he has a firm understanding of how to get people to do creative things, even at an automobile manufacturer.

Innovation, and the creativity that drives it, does not come from short term metrics and 9-5 mentalities. Mulally had a huge influence on Boeing’s success against Airbus and is now doing something similar with Ford.

I wrote about some of these approaches before. It looks like Mulally has continued on this path.

Some we have heard before. ‘Rally around a mission.’ ‘Long-term strategic planning.’ ‘Be fearless.’

All great aphorisms but execution is what makes them work. Observe how he creates a culture of truth-telling and transparency:

Finally, Mulally has created a culture in which telling the truth, however painful it may be, gets rewarded. Every Thursday morning, he presides over what he calls a “Business Plan Review.” The heads of Ford’s four profit centers around the world and its 12 functional gather to report on how well they’re meeting their targets and on any problems they’re having. They’re all in together.

To broaden transparency, Mulally invites outside guests to sit in on the meeting each week. The day I was there, one Ford executive described a significant shortfall on a key projection. No one cringed, including Mulally, and the executive calmly outlined his suggested solutions. Then he invited others to share their ideas.

Not only does he have everyone in it together and makes sure his own approach of finding solutions to problems, not blame, but he includes outsiders with no ax to grind or domain to defend. These observers provide a perspective that keeps the focus on finding answers.

And I bet they often ask naive questions that can sometimes explode into creative ideas.

I think that they have a great chance to adapt to the changing markets in ways others can not.

Remember acid rain and the ones who thought it was a myth?

by banspy

From promoting acid rain to climate denial — over 20 years of David Koch’s polluter front groups
[Via Climate Progress]

This week we learned that Koch Industries outspends Exxon Mobil on climate and clean energy disinformation. And we saw that a Smithsonian exhibit funded by David Koch whitewashes the danger of human-caused climate change.

Yet this is but the latest effort in a nearly quarter-century effort to misinform the public by the billionaire polluter, as Lee Fang reveals in this Wonk Room repost.

The corporate-backed front group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is again leading the charge for industry against environmental protections. Earlier this month, AFP kicked off its “Regulation Reality Tour” — a roadshow through the states of pivotal senators pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency not to regulate carbon emissions, as outlined by the Clean Air Act .

The campaign is part carnival, part sophisticated K Street lobbying. Attendees are welcomed by an inflatable moonbounce for children, free food and drinks, and AFP staff dressed as “carbon cops” distributing freebies to the crowd. The rallies serve as a platform for AFP to scare voters with stories of bureaucrats regulating churches and “radio controlled thermostats.” Moreover, operatives from AFP collect names and train attendees on how to lobby Congress to defeat clean energy reform.

The founder and chairman of Americans for Prosperity is oil baron David Koch, who is one of the richest men in the world because of his oil, chemicals, and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries. Koch Industries is a major polluter with an atrocious record of sloppy operations. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the US and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. They were fined a record $35 million dollars and an additional $8 million in Minnesota for discharging into streams. But AFP’s recent crusade against the EPA is just the latest in Koch’s twenty-year campaign to have unrestricted power to pollute. Below is a timeline with snapshots of Koch’s long running campaign to distort science, orchestrate fake grassroots campaigns, and defeat environmental protections. Click MORE for the timeline:

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There is more and more information detailing the connected nature of the groups that fought against acid rain legislation, smoking regulations and, currently, climate change science. And Koch seems to be there at each point, with a wide open wallet.

Follow the timeline to understand how Koch Industries could have spent almost $50 million since the late 1990s to spread disinformation. Its influence goes back to the early 1980s when it tried to stop legislation applying cap-and-trade regulation to the pollutants that caused acid rain. A spin-off group tried to claim that acid rain was a myth and that it was actually good for the environment (Sound familiar?)

Of course, they were absolutely wrong and the cap-and-trade regulation actually worked, reducing emission of sulfur dioxide, greatly reducing the destruction of acid rain and saving many of our lakes and rivers.

These Koch-funded groups still exist, having been involved in disinformation campaigns against cigarettes and against air pollution, organizing tea parties and generally spreading what can only be called lies.

It is very hard for working scientists to effectively communicate their research when they are shouted down by extremely well paid shills who have been doing similar ‘work’ for the last 20 years. These groups are not interested in any greater understanding of our world. They simply want to distort or destroy any research which makes it harder for them to do business, using any and all means.

And $50 million can buy a lot of means.

The iPad is a clock

by ironchefbalara

Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)
[Via Boing Boing]

I’ve spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn’t come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it’s come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public’s eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.

Danny O’Brien does a very good job of explaining why I’m completely uninterested in buying an iPad — it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution” in which “content” people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I’d have a lot of AOL shares.

And they wouldn’t be worth much.

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Cory writes very strongly from one point of view – that of a technophile geek. Everything he talks about represents the obsessive wants of such people. I know because I have been right there with him, diving into old comic bins, performing chemical reactions at home, building crystal radio sets, taking things apart and modifying my own hardware.

But the iPad is not for tus. It is for those, the majority, who do not do any of those things but who can find a lot of usefulness in a device like the iPad. They are for people who have a shop change their oil and change their spark plugs, even though they could do that themselves. They are for the people who do not understand how an internal combustion engine works but just wants theirs to always start.

I used to change my own oil and spark plugs. I haven’t in 20 years because it was a pain in the butt, there were shops that did it quickly and cheaply, and I found I had other things to do than to muck around with the car.

Same with computers for most people. That is the market for the iPad. It is for people who hate to change too much because it might alter their workflow. They just want things that help them get work done easier and faster, not something they have to fiddle with.

The people who read Boing Boing or Engadget, including me, like to muck around, see how things work and modify them. We are the ones who took clocks apart, even if they did not have screws.

Most everyone else just used them to tell time.

[Listening to: Dreamville (Live) from the album "The Live Anthology" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers]

Something Cortez also did

by visulogik

Apple highlights iPad-ready, Adobe Flash-free Web sites
[Via AppleInsider]

A number of major Web sites have prepared their content for Saturday’s launch of the iPad — in part by embracing HTML5 video — and Apple has highlighted a number of them.

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As one person said, Apple has always moved the industry ahead by following an ancient principle that prevents people from wanting to return to the ld ways – burn the shps. They did it with floppy drives, SCSI, ADB. etc. Flash is just the latest.

And now they are giving people credit for helping to clear the new land. Having sites move to open standards like HTML5 rather than stick to proprietary formats will be better for all of us in the long run.