Ten Reasons Why

On a whim I drove by the Apple Store in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, VA, after grabbing an omelet at Pete’s Diner this morning. The Clarendon Apple Store is in a little shopping center called Market Commons that has a through it. There’s almost never parking in the loop, but I told myself if there was no line at the Apple Store and if there was parking in the loop, I’d buy myself an iPhone.
I figured I was saving myself some money by making that deal.
Oops.
The loop’s one way, so you have to drive all the way around it to get to the Apple Store on the east side. I could see there was no line outside the store. As I rounded the corner of the loop, I saw an SUV pulling out of a parking space right in front of the Apple Store. Yes, I got a space less than 10 feet from the door of the Apple Store. I got out walked in and walked straight to the demo table where the floor samples of the iPhone were set up. As I walked up, another guy walked away and with a grand total of zero seconds waiting time, I was playing with an iPhone.
It really took only a few minutes to confirm that I wanted one. I checked a few websites, played a song, flicked the contact list up and down, badda bing, badda boom, turned around and walked the eight feet to the front counter where there was no one in line and bought an iPhone (8GB model).
I would have been out of the store in under 6 minutes, except as soon as the cashier handed me the box, I realized the iPhone doesn’t come with a belt clip of any kind, so it took another four minutes or so to grab a simple, inexpensive belt clip and get back to the cashier — still no line — and buy the clip.
Total time elapsed from getting out of the car to getting back into the car with an iPhone — less than 15 minutes.
I had to text (from the old Sony Ericsson) my friend, Bug (a nickname, but he answers to it) and gloat a bit. He’s an Apple diehard — the man has three 30″ Apple Cinema Displays on his desk, and I lost count of the number of Apple computers he owns. He did some intermediate (read: hours, but not double digit hours) line waiting yesterday evening.
Gloating was unnecessary. He was at the Bethesda, MD, Apple Store getting his second (or third maybe) iPhone, and having the same speedy experience.
Should anyone really have expected any different? I’m sure it might be different in some of the densely populated areas like NYC or geek-heavy regions like San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but Apple is not like Sony delivering a new playstation. Apple doesn’t have to under-manufacture the hardware to manufacture demand through scarcity, because they are expert at creating demand before the release.
So the iPhone is activated now and going through the first sync with iTunes which is nearly done, so I’ll finish up this post and write a full review later.

Technology & Internet

It’s hard to feel sorry for James Hong. As one of the two co-founders of HOTorNOT, the oft-copied photo rating site, he’s raked in the dough. For years, HOTorNOT was run leanly, with little investment in development and lots of advertising revenue. Hong himself describes it as a cash cow.
Recently Hong has been re-inventing the aging HOTorNOT, and he has written about it on his blog.
It’s a good read in general, but this is the part that made me groan out load. He describes their initial strategy to re-invent the business:

[O]ur original vision was to become an incubator and to enable our employees to work on new ideas, and let them spin those off as separate companies.. basically let our employees graduate into becoming funded entrepreneurs at a time when funding was hard to get. Our first and only attempt at this was back in 2003 when we hoped to work with Steve Chen and Mike Solomon to start Yafro.com, which was going to be a social networking site with media sharing applications built on top. [Emphasis mine. -greg]
In the end things did not work out because some members of our board were uncomfortable with the idea of giving the employees of a spinout majority share and control… so Jim and I agreed with Steve and Mike that it was a no go.

Sounds reasonable until a couple of years later when you realize you punted on funding a social media-sharing service being pushed by Steve Chen. Yes, that Steve Chen.
I’m sure the tens of millions Hong has raked in from HOTorNOT allays the pain a little, but still . . . damn, that’s gotta burn!

Technology & Internet

Some new thinking up over on the work blog.

Education