Google as economic indicator. The latest search advertising numbers are out, and while Google continues to bomb their competition, their year on year growth rates are off dramatically for the second month in a row. Henry Blodgett has numbers and relays possible interpretations from Mark Mahaney of Citi: "1. Google's ongoing efforts to improve both lead quality for advertisers and the user experience for searches.
2. A macroeconomic dampening of commercial queries by searchers." While Google's always tweaking the algorithms, I'll take door number 2. Over a decade back, when I was at CompuServe, we carried all of Visa's card swipe traffic over our network. We didn't have to guess how good the Xmas season would be, we knew within a few days of its start, from the overall transaction volume. Likewise Google, now at about 2/3 share in search, doesn't just represent the market; it is the market. It seems perfectly reasonable that economic slowing would show up not only in advertiser spending, but in users not clicking on ads for purchases they are going to postpone. Of course, Google's revenue is sort of like California real estate, where people start whining if they don't get double digit growth.
Mobile Web Bubble. Jeff Nolan shares my conviction that mobile Web is over-hyped and over-invested. It's one of those "it's a wonder it works at all" sort of things, but the experience just isn't rewarding enough to justify the cost for most times and uses. Carriers, as usual, are their own worst enemy when it comes to costs and performance. I pick this one to remain a niche. It's well worth clicking through for the ensuing intelligent discussion among Jeff and his commenters. RTWT. (Here's the report of Mowser's demise that brought on Jeff's reflections: "...the mobile traffic just isn't there. It's not there now, and it won't be.")
Not Comcast This Time! The Instaprof reminds us of one of the bigger consumer hustles out there, overspec'ed and overpriced audio and video cables. I ran into this recently when a Radio Shack clerk tried to talk me into buying you-know-who's gold plated audio patch cord over their house brand. This stuff just fattens up the store's and manufacturer's margins, and likely the clerk's incentives as well. You don't need fancy cables for modern systems. Unless you've got an old turntable in your setup, the signal levels coming out of your components are already high level. Digital standards already include error detection and correction codes to deal with any noise, so fancy copper is even less necessary now. If you've got low level analog signals that need to be protected from noise (satellite dish signals) or high level RF signals that might generate noise, make sure they run in shielded cables. Coax and phono cables are all shielded. Anything more elaborate just fattens someone's margins. I've got 25 year old cables that once starred in my Apple II+ setup, now part of my surround system. They still work great.
Warranty Economics. The Popular Science article linked above also mentions one of the other margin builders, extended warranties. Due to a stint examining the business model of a long dead bubble-era startup, I know a little about the economics of these warranties: On the average, what you pay for the coverage is about twice what the warranty company expects to pay in claims, whether it's electronic gear or automobiles.
When comparison shopping or dickering for a major purchase I always ask about the pricing of the extended warranty. First, it makes the salesman hopeful that he will make some margin on the backend, and so possibly gains some leverage on the item's price. Second, divide the number in two and you've got a rule-of-thumb estimate for repair costs in the out years. Combine that with the reliability rating from Consumer Reports (you checked, right?), and there's a rough indicator of how likely your new purchase is to become a PITA.
Ned for MSFT. This one has already been linked all over the blogosphere, but I'm going to do it too, because it's tone perfect and funny. I'm reminded of this makeover video of a couple years back, which turned out to be an inside job.
