All Things

With calls for yet another government bailout, right after the last one, it’s hard for Americans not to be really frustrated about the state of the domestic car industry. I’ve been watching its decline my entire life. It’s kind of like watching the slow decline of Sears (starting maybe a decade later), which was so big and dominant, it’s taking a very long time, but when it comes the end may be pretty ugly.

For a business starting out so high on the totem pole, it can be quite a challenge to acknowledge a severe turn of events. This happened in the car biz by the late 1960s, but I really think Detroit is still - after four decades - in denial. They’ve never had their Sputnik moment, their Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Instead, they’ve been like the frog in the pot that’s slowly warmed up.

Congress has made sure the frog stays reasonably comfortable, but for how much longer? American cars have improved quite a bit in recent years, but do GM, Ford & Chrysler get it yet about how relentlessly competitive the auto biz is nowadays?

They need to entirely overhaul their company cultures, because it’s not going to get any easier by just surviving to 2010 or whenever. Detroit automakers must get rid of their quick-fix mindset and adopt company cultures that embrace continuous improvement and place engineering & quality above marketing. Otherwise all the king’s (president’s?) men aren’t going to be able to put humpty-dumpty’s brand back together.

Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh really hit the nail on the head recently when he pointed out that a company’s culture and its brand are really two sides of the same coin (Video, quote at about 9:20). Detroit doesn’t seem to get this. Unless they overhaul their entire businesses, then their brand message is never going to stay aligned with reality for long.

Cadillac is just one example. Way back in 1990, the GM division won the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, and appeared to be on its way to establishing a quality reputation for its product line. Sadly, the other day I was looking at the current Consumer Reports, and several of Cadillac’s most prominent models are listed as not recommended by CR because of less-than-average reliability.

Maybe today’s Cadillacs are quite a bit better-made than those of a decade or two ago, but so are Toyotas, not to mention Hyundais and even Kias. Consumers are smarter, too.

I know there’s some folks in Detroit who’ve been working really hard for a long time trying to make things better and I’ve been rooting for them as much as anyone, but until the leaders there get past the idea of just surviving the current crisis and start thinking strategically, any government bailout is probably just money down the drain. It’s the culture that’s got to change.

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.

I’ve been reading about the rekindled Microsoft/Yahoo talks; perhaps it’s a good sign. It just seems so obvious that Microsoft doesn’t yet understand the internet, and so inevitably can’t really take it seriously enough. It’s got a dozen years of half-hearted efforts under its belt and not much to show for it, other than the dominance of Internet Explorer, which continues to slowly lose share to Firefox.

A BBC report quotes one analyst, Matt Rosoff, as saying, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don’t want to work for Microsoft." Well, that really says it all!

Nowadays, there are a lot of people who are trying to get away from Microsoft. After 27 years of being their customer, and 23 years of using a Mac, I’ve learned to pick and choose their offerings, rather than just drink their kool-aid and swallow the whole enchilada. I don’t at all want them to go away, but it would be really nice if they would be honest with themselves, accept what their true strengths and weaknesses are, and stop trying to be all things to all people, in order to keep most all the pie to themselves. That strategy is just not working anymore, and after years of disappointments, the reality is starting to be generally acknowledged.

As I’ve noted before, I thought MSN Spaces (where I have my personal blog) was one of the better things they’ve done, but they’ve made it increasingly Windows-centric as the Live Spaces rollout has continued, which has made it clunkier and more difficult to use, at least for non-Windows/IE users. I don’t expect Microsoft to be Apple, but after all their years of vaunted usability testing, they still don’t get basic design principles.

Everyone knows that Toyota’s cars aren’t that stylish, but they’re well-made, and Toyota (as it has recently) will put the brakes on to ensure a consistently high-quality product. Microsoft isn’t going to have the style of Apple, but they need to develop some decent processes like Toyota, so they can produce a quality product that meets customers’ needs.

Quality is a long-view strategy. In the short run, Toyota sells a bit fewer cars because they last longer, but in the long run, they sell a lot more, and pretty soon even more than GM. Bill Gates once said that his favorite business book was Alfred Sloan’s My Years With General Motors, but the days when one company could dominate a global market and put out mediocre products, in a strategy of planned obsolescence, are long past.

At least Microsoft is reaching out to a company that has some insight. I’ve always thought Yahoo was a bit clunky itself, but they are innovative and do understand the potential of the internet. Maybe Microsoft is at last acknowledging that they don’t get it, and that their culture needs to change.

I suggest that they start by returning to a more inclusive strategy on their online offerings. Don’t automatically expect users to be running all Microsoft software (e.g. IE and Windows), and so don’t penalize users who are using some MS software, just because they aren’t using all Microsoft software! In an era of open source and global markets, all that strategy will do is ensure that eventually no one will be using any Microsoft software.

Microsoft has to accept that they can no longer expect to get the whole pie, except for the crumbs, and that they better be glad for whatever share than can get, without coercion. They still have a lot of talented people; if they revitalize their culture and get their processes right, they could still do really well, and I hope they manage to pull it off.