The BBC on an address by Royal Mail’s Moya Greene:

“I am fearful that competition, if it does not have conditions imposed, will soon begin a spiral of decline in Royal Mail that will be very difficult to staunch,” she warned.

Royal Mail has warned that allowing competitors to cherry-pick profitable areas of the business will challenge the sustainability of the universal service.

Talk about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. The Royal Mail’s door-to-door delivery business is already in a death spiral, and it’s alarming to see Greene talk about it as if it’s something that might happen, rather than something that is happening today.

Postal volumes have declined drastically in recent years, falling 4% last year alone. The cold hard reality is that over time, less and less will be sent through the mail, with both companies and people favouring e-mail. The cost of operating door-to-door delivery is largely fixed, meaning that as volumes fall, prices have to go up. As prices go up, it becomes less and less attractive to send anything on paper anymore, and so the cycle accelerates.

Door to door postal delivery is dead. As a society just haven’t realised it yet. Cherry picking competitors will just accelerate the process of decay, not start it.

To survive, the Royal Mail needs to focus on what happens next.

(Source: BBC)

From Farhad Manjoo for an article in Slate (via, inevitably, John Gruber’s Daring Fireball):

How can you possibly beat the iPad? Well, not on price. Even before the new iPad, rivals were having a hard time matching Apple’s prices while still making a profit. Now that the cheapest iPad cost $399, they face an even tougher road. Because Apple has used its plentiful cash to corner the market on key tablet components—like touch-screen displays—many competitors will find that the only way to make a tablet with comparable features but a lower price is to sell it at a loss. You can’t do that unless you have some other way to make money, like a big digital media store.

This to me is why all the apple shareholders calling for Apple to pay out a significant proportion of its cash as dividends are missing the point. That cash is precisely what has made apple as valuable for shareholders as it has been. That cash has allowed them to corner possibly the most important new market in consumer electronics today.

My guess is that cash will also be absolutely essential in breaking into the TV market. The LCD screen manufacturers are struggling at the moment. A big cheque from Apple for a few tens of millions of 40” screens would probably be hard to resist right now.

I’m probably so far behind the times here, it’s just not funny, but just used the BBC iPlayer app on the PS3 for the first time. The app itself works great, but the install had me scratching my head, at least on OS version 4.0, so here’s the instructions for the benefit of Google and/or my future self.

1. Run a software update, get the latest operating system changes.
2. Go to the ‘TV and Video’ column in the home screen. If there isn’t a TV and Video column, scratch your head, then read on.
3. Log into PSN
4. Launch Playstation Home from the PSN column, not because you want to actually use it, but because this somehow magically ‘fixes’ the ‘Video’ column to become ‘TV and Video’.
5. Go back to the TV and Video column, choose ‘My Channels’, and select ‘iPlayer’, and you’re done.
6. Sit down, relax, and watch whatever you missed first time around. In my case, this was the rather good A Night With The Stars with one Professor Brian Cox.

Really pleased to see this over at the Crowdcube blog:

The Rushmore Group, owner of three members’ clubs in London, today secured £1 million investment from 143 investors to fund the development of an exciting new venue in the heart of London, early next year. The investment, raised in only four weeks through the equity crowdfunding website Crowdcube, sets a new record for the largest amount of money raised using a crowdfunding website.

Awesome. Looking forward to seeing how Crowdcube and peers grow. I’ve got some significant concerns about the long term viability of stock markets as we know them, and it’s great to see something a bit different see success.

From Engadget:

RIM and Porsche (of all companies) have just taken the official wraps off of the Porsche Design P’9981 BlackBerry, a frighteningly beautiful new slab that offers up a forged stainless steel frame, hand-wrapped leather back cover, sculpted QWERTY keyboard, and “crystal clear touch display.” It’ll ship with an exclusive Porsche Design UI and a bespoke Wikitude World Browser augmented reality app experience, not to mention the “premium, exclusive PINs that help easily identify another P’9981 smartphone user”

Frighteningly beautiful or not, why is a company that is under assault from all sides buggering around with gimmicks like this? How much money did it cost to develop that ‘Exclusive UI’? Surely that money could have been better deployed elsewhere, say focussing on making core products that people actually want?

From Ade McCormack @ The IT Beacon on cellular organisation structures; i.e. organisations that shun hierarchical command and control:

Cell based organisations will give you competitive advantage today. Tomorrow they will be an entry condition, whether the arena is war or business.

It’s an interesting pitch. Whether you buy the idea that it’s ‘cell or die’, if your company doesn’t have a cellular structure, you’ve got to acknowledge the threat that you might be competing with others that are.

One interesting example of a cellular organisation is Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, who operate largely as a fleet of independent businesses. Cells are born, and cells die - several of Branson’s businesses have failed over the years. But the group as a whole moves on, and Virgin Group’s revenue in 2010 was $21.3 billion. Not bad for a privately held business.

Another example, perhaps more poignant given today’s news: Despite Apple’s dictatorial/perfectionist leadership team, Apple is largely a cellular organisation. Teams are (relatively) small, and work largely independently of one another, often in secret. Microsoft, Dell and all the rest on the other hand are largely bog standard hierarchical organisations. At time of writing, Apple are worth a shade under $350 billion (and are arguably undervalued). Dell a shade under $30 billion, and Microsoft $220 billion. Which would you rather be?

From Barb Darrow @ GigaOM.com:

Bloomberg News reported today that the HP board will meet to consider [ousting Apotheker] in the wake of widespread unhappiness over how Apotheker — and the board itself — has managed the computing giant over the past year.

“Both Leo and the board should be fired, no question,” one long-time HP partner with tight ties to other HP execs told me. “This transition has been mishandled from the beginning.”

I have to say, I think the board and shareholders shouldn’t really be surprised by the direction Leo is taking HP in. He’s the ex-CEO of SAP, one of the world’s largest enterprise software companies. Is it any wonder he’s pushing HP in the same direction?

Steve Jobs at his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary

Every time I hear this, it gives me butterflies in my stomach. His full address is available on YouTube.