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My coworkers often laugh at me because of the number of Amazon.com boxes I receive. I buy everything from books to toilet paper to golfballs from the site. It’s possible that I’m the company’s single best customer.

So it might surprise you to hear that I haven’t purchased a Kindle Fire yet. Why? The answer’s pretty simple: I know it’s going to get better. And cheaper. And it will head in both of those directions quickly. So why not wait for the next one?

If you’ve purchased one of the other non-iPad tablet devices on the market, you may be the only one who has. They are each (in some order) thicker, heavier, slower, duller, or just generally crappier than their iPad competitor. Having a down-market product is fine in and of itself, but the companies then seem to exacerbate the problem by having prices that seem to imply a lack of simple logic (case in point). Remember, the iPad starts at $499.

But clearly the Kindle Fire will be different, because Jeff Bezos and company have no interest in charging a premium price for a product that they essentially expect to be a virtual USPS mailbox for their growing inventory of digital goods. Amazon worries about the long-term only and, as the NY Times noted, they actually mean it.

So while the question, “What happens when the Kindle Fire costs $0?” may include a bit of hyperbole, it’s not hard to imagine a day when the Kindle Fire: (1) has progressed to being a truly capable tablet that covers 90% of the iPad’s functions capably, and (2) costs a trivial sum, maybe $49 or $79. What happens then?

If we’re to believe Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and expect this market to follow other technology markets in history, Apple and the iPad will not be able to simply innovate with ‘sustaining’ features that incrementally drive the state of the art forward. Apple will need to continue to introduce disruptive innovation into the tablet market just to compete with their lower-price, down-market competitors.

In other words, a slightly better browser, camera, or email application won’t be enough to fend off the Kindle tidal wave. It will need to be marrying the iPad with a hovercraft skateboard, a frisbee, or maybe a hot plate stovetop (don’t laugh, think about how handy that would be!). Jokes of course, but you get the idea. It is a lot to ask, but Apple has been developing magical products for quite a while now, so perhaps the disruptive innovation will continue.

In either case, I’m bullish on Amazon’s prospects in moving to win the non-iPad segment of the tablet market. If I see another $499 tablet from any number of poor Apple competitors, I’ll lose my mind.

A friend came by for dinner last night and we eventually started talking about his experience visiting The French Laundry, the iconic Yountville Thomas Keller restaurant. This morning, I opened up my browser and was greeted by a page from the The French Laundry website, left over from the evening:

Every day we create two unique nine-course tasting menus – chef’s tasting and a tasting of vegetables – each a series of smaller, focused dishes. No single ingredient is ever repeated throughout the meal. What we want you to experience is that sense of surprise when you taste something so new, so exciting, so comforting, so delicious, you think, “Wow” – and then it’s gone. We want the peak of sensation on the palate to be all that you feel. So we serve a series of small courses meant to excite your mind, satisfy your appetite and pique your curiosity. We want you to say, “I wish I had just one more bite of that.” And then the next plate arrives and the same thing happens, but in a different way, a whole new flavor and feel and emotion.

I found that description and mission to be incredibly compelling, not just as a (hopefully!) future customer, but for the business itself. The experience that French Laundry seeks to build for its customers is beyond excellence – it seeks to provide emotional stimulation in its work. Surprise. Curiosity. Longing.

If Thomas Keller’s more accessible restaurants (Bouchon, Ad Hoc) are any indication, I’m positive the dishes at French Laundry are unreal. But the craftspeople at French Laundry are really pursuing a mission more substantial and lasting than their employment and the quality of food that they prepare. The creations are just vessels for a deeper experience. And in that way, the institution becomes more meaningful than just the food that is plated.

I think we all want the work we pursue in life to be that meaningful. We want the pursuit to be more profound.

One thing is clear after using Google+ for about a week: the company is pretty serious about Google+. Unlike Google Buzz, which always felt like a bolt-on, annoyance in my Gmail inbox, Google+ feels like a thoughtful annoyance across all of my Google experiences.

Heading to google.com to find out who played Omar on The Wire? Visiting Gmail to respond to my dad’s email? Running to Google Finance to see how my investment in CRM is doing today? On all these properties, I’m greeted with a (newly-redesigned) gray bar that includes an impossible-to-avoid red number.

If you consider how sacred the pixels on google.com traditionally were to the company, it’s clear that Google is all-in here.

On a tactical level, it’s a logical approach to use those properties as a distribution club. It’s a blunt object that Google can swing to push out Google+ in a way that no other “new” social network could reproduce. A distribution lever like this is a necessary component for Google+’s success, but the challenge is that it is not at all sufficient.

I used the term ‘annoyance’, because the core value of Google+ is so orthogonal to my intention on the various Google properties that it is jarring. I’m on Google Finance thinking about my stocks and wondering if NFLX will continue to go up – I’ve come to that page without any intention of seeing what my friends have shared on Google+. The red number is incredibly “outside” of that experience.

It’s the only item in the top bar not just giving me access to another property, but actually calling for my attention. Note that Google has never gone to these lengths for Gmail, though it would make as much sense functionally. It’s because they know email is not a threat.

And at a macro level, that’s the story here. Despite growing revenue to almost $30B in 2010, Google sends a strong message with Google+ that it is paranoid about its position in “Social.” It is so paranoid, that I wonder if anyone in Mountain View realizes that they’re now bundling their new shiny social network with their properties in a way that resembles Microsoft.

Don’t Be Evil was always a handy mantra at the Googleplex to describe the company’s aspirational moral goals to value its users. In practice, it was much more of a way for the company to point out unfair advantages that other companies had.

Apple has a closed App Store for their iOS products? That’s evil and we won’t be like them.

Facebook has 700 million monthly active users, but won’t let us build one-click pipes to get all of that data out for our use because we’re way behind in Social? Evil.

Microsoft used its massive customer base from its operating system to drive users in the direction of IE and other applications through bundling? Unfair competitive advantage. Evil.

But Google using our massive base from totally unrelated properties to drive users in the direction of our new social network because we’re so far behind Facebook? Hmm.

Maybe its time to change the ‘Don’t be Evil’ message. Because when you leverage an unfair advantage to compete, I think most of the time that should just be called smart.

These are new days for Stanford Football.

• A legitimate top-five national ranking
• Two consecutive top-two Heisman candidates
• Potential (and likely) BCS Bowl bid
• The truly bizarre sensation of SEC, Big East, Big-12, and other games we used to watch with an independent eye now actually affecting Stanford’s fate

And of course:

• The impending reality of a “Post-Harbaugh” football program.

If you read the news, Jim Harbaugh will be leaving Stanford to go to Michigan, University of Miami, the 49ers (my personal favorite, for obvious reasons), or some other NFL destination. It’s such a point of worry for Stanford fans that even Alvin Rabushka at the Hoover Institution has written a few thoughts on how we might be able to get Harbaugh to stay.

As I noted in my comment on that blog post though, getting Jim Harbaugh to stay at Stanford would take much more than a market-rate salary. Considering it’s questionable whether Stanford would even pay up for that simple prerequisite, the whole campaign feels like an inevitably-lost cause.

Take the simple fact that we Stanford fans (including myself) are so elated to be getting into a BCS Bowl game. That’s to be expected considering I never in my wildest dreams actually thought it would happen. But by definition, that means our program is not consistently competing for the Pac-10, much less the National, Championship. Coaches in the Big Money college sports don’t stay at a school like that.

Now you might say, “But he can be the one to build the Stanford program into that!” That is true. He could stay at Stanford and build a Mike Krzyzewski-like legacy, progressively turning Stanford into a national power on the level of USC, Miami, Michigan, Alabama, Notre Dame. It would take literally decades and he would be a legend for it… If he was able to do it.

But for every Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, Mark Few, Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno, there are many more Tyrone Willinghams. And to be clear, Tyrone Willingham did not capture the level of success or level of interest from other schools/teams that Harbaugh has. But all it took was one.

And if we’re really honest with ourselves, Harbaugh has popped up in enough NFL rumors over the past couple of years, resulting in enough smoke, that there is definitely fire.

That’s not an important point because so many teams are interested (because it only takes one), but rather because it means Harbaugh is interested. And I think every time Harbaugh runs onto the field at Stanford Stadium with a Top 10 team and a 30% filled building, I think he asks himself: “Why isn’t this place filled? A team this good at Michigan/Miami would be selling out a building twice this size.” (As an aside, maybe the fact that basketball stadiums are so much smaller also makes it that much easier for Krzyzewski to stay at Duke.)

So yes, it is technically possible for a coach like Jim Harbaugh to stay at a school like Stanford. It would take a team consistently contending for Pac-10/12 championships, the opportunity to have a legendary legacy, rabid fan support, top facilities, and market-rate compensation. Most of all, it takes the kind of coach who is interested in committing decades to that pursuit and likely not the kind who (understandably) wants to compete at the highest-profile professional level NOW.

And even that might not be enough because, as Stanford fans remember, we thought we used to have all of that with Mike Montgomery (18 seasons!).

And look how that turned out.

I’m finally getting around to reading The Innovator’s Dilemma from Clayton Christensen, though I’ve heard the branded term enough to understand the general gist of the book.

Two pretty choice quotes that I’ve liked a lot from just the first few pages of the book:

There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

And a similar, though perhaps more descriptive, quote:

First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies. By and large, a disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market.

The continuing saga of the BP oil fiasco is a simultaneously depressing and absurd episode. It’s as if a car crash was going to occur at a particular intersection outside your office window every day for 6+ weeks.

This disaster has all the key ingredients to fan populist anger. Think about it:

• Technical hurdles that sound simple, leading to public Monday Quarterbacking
• Corporate ineptitude
• Corporate arrogance and finger-pointing
• Massive environmental impact
• Opportunity to use the crisis for political gain or grandstanding

To top it off, the repeat failures just seem to give all the interested parties multiple opportunities to go off (“Missed it? There’s another train leaving tomorrow when BP screws something else up.”).

Assuming that the ongoing leak/spill does get resolved and that expensive clean-up slowly happens (and it’s telling that I even have to write ‘assuming’), I wonder what will happen to BP’s brand. Brian thinks it’ll recover like the Star Wars kid, but as I wrote there (copied below), I would be concerned about too much lasting damage to the BP brand. Maybe it won’t matter in this case, but if this lasts long enough, people may just start to associate BP with general ineptitude and take their business across the street.

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From a business perspective, I would be incredibly worried about my brand if I were them. Even without a corporate death penalty for them, I’m failing to remember a case where a company had such a crisis that just did not go away.

You’re right, the continuing nature of it is harmful. Most crises happen once, horribly, and then there is clean-up [product recall, oil spill clean-up, apology, etc.]. This one has continued long enough to reach multiple news cycles, to the point where the public is having the perceived ineptitude/arrogance actually reinforced: “Wait, this shit is STILL going on? WTF?!”

It’s as if Toyota had a problem with brakes on one model of the Prius, and then every few days (for months) it was announced that another vital part of the vehicle (or other vehicles) were also having issues (“And today, we find out the Camry’s windshield wipers will snap, break through the windshield, and stab passengers in the eyes. Oh, and Toyota has yet to apologize.”).

You’re right, even Jack in the Box recovered from undercooked beef killing several children, but it took years and years. I wonder what happens when a company’s brand hammered so continuously for such an extended period of time. Maybe it won’t matter for a gas company that relies less (?) on brand loyalty and more on distribution channels and retail location. Maybe?

Big anticipation among NFL fans for the Colts-Patriots game tonight. Best current rivalry in football. The game’s two biggest stars. Amazing plays all night. And an unreal finish. 35-34 Indianapolis.

I’m a big football fan and I think I’m very knowledgeable about it, but I’m certainly not qualified to question any of the coach’s decisions from a football standpoint. But from a pure decision-making point of view, I find it humorous how fans and analysts alike are ripping Belichick’s decision to go for it on 4th-and-2 from the Patriots 30. Just check out all of the “Belichick’s so DUMB” comments on ESPN.

It was an aggressive decision, but was it unreasonable? Here are the pertinent facts from before the play:

1. Patriots were up 6 points.
2. Down was 4th-and-2 on their own 28-yard line.
3. Patriots had moved the ball pretty much at will for most of the game.
4. Peyton Manning had just led his team on two LONG touchdown drives that each took less than 2:08. The last one was 1:37. He hadn’t used a timeout on either of those drives.
5. It was the play immediately before the two-minute warning, so no booth challenges.
6. Patriots had no timeouts (had used the last two before the play), so no challenges for their benefit, period.

There is a “conventional” decision, which is definitively to punt in this situation. It’s the “safe” decision (for some reason). Almost every coach in the world is going to punt (apparently save for one). Should they? I would argue that simply saying, “You’re supposed to punt” is dumb.

As any good poker player will tell you, what matters is making the best decision with limited information. Football has the additional component of execution (whereas ‘execution’ in poker usually just means the random sequencing of the cards), but that doesn’t mean the right decision shouldn’t be made. How’s the decision supposed to be made?

1. What is the probability that you will convert that 4th-and-2? If you convert, let’s assume you win.
2. If you don’t convert, what is the probability that you can stop the Colts from scoring a touchdown?
3. What is the probability that you will stop the Colts from scoring a touchdown if you punt? Let’s assume that if the Colts do that, then the Patriots lose.

If you aren’t considering those questions, even on a gut or impulse level, then you’re not doing your job as a coach. Let’s place some estimates.

1. Let’s say the Patriots think they convert that 4th-and-2 60% of the time.
2. Let’s assume the Patriots think they have a 10% chance of stopping the Colts if they don’t convert.
3. Then, consider that the Colts are moving the ball *really* well. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that they have, say, a 40% chance of taking the punt and scoring a TD to win the game. I don’t think that’s totally crazy.

If you take those numbers into account, then it’s clear what you should do: go for it. 64% of the time, you’ll win by going for it. 60% of the time you’ll win by punting.

Now I’m not saying those are the numbers. Maybe a 40% chance of Peyton scoring is crazy high. Is it? I don’t think it is. And hey, maybe a 60% chance of converting a 4th-and-2 is crazy low. After all, over the last three years on 3rd and <3 or 4th and <3, Tom Brady is 23 of 29 (79.3%) for 221 yards.

At the end of the day, I think Belichick actually made a pretty reasonable call. I think it was the right call, even. If I was coaching the team and only worried about winning the game (i.e. not worried about losing my job), I would have made the same call. And if he was playing poker and lost the hand, he would be just considered unlucky.

Now, if you want to get on Belichick and Brady for wasting two timeouts before the play, meaning they could not challenge the spot, then be my guest. But, given Belichick’s usual decision-making, I think this can just be chalked up to results not reflecting the decision. After all, as all good poker players know, good decisions are not correlated to short-term results.

And by the way, I come out of that game (especially after also watching his press conference) liking Belichick a lot more. He clearly thought they had a better than 80% chance of converting, so he went for it. That’s belief in the system and his players.

Originally uploaded by smallchou

The view from the aisle at Alicia And Asian Paul’s wedding in the
Presidio.

Originally uploaded by smallchou

View from our Season Tickets at Candlestick, just before the Seahawks game in Week 2.