resistance to persistence

Apple’s New York City store

a very interesting article at CNNMoney about how well Apple’s stores are doing and how much effort was spent on perfecting the shopping experience.

“People haven’t been willing to invest this much time and money or engineering in a store before,” says the Apple CEO, his feet propped on Apple’s boardroom table in Cupertino. “It’s not important if the customer knows that. They just feel it. They feel something’s a little different.”

And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus.

The most striking thing, though, is what you don’t see. No. 1: clutter. Jobs has focused Apple’s resources on fewer than 20 products, and those have steadily been shrinking in size. Backroom inventory, then, can shrink in physical volume even as sales volume grows. Also missing, at the newest stores, anyway, is a checkout counter. The system Apple developed, EasyPay, lets salespeople wander the floor with wireless credit-card readers and ask, “Would you like to pay for that?”

2nd week of NBC’s The Apprentice. I love this show. It’s hilarious! Sam is my favorite because he’s a born loser. He’s been up to be fired 2 weeks in a row and has squeeked out of it again. The Donald is awesome. His straight faced delivery of firings is priceless. I couldn’t hack working for him though…I’d be a heartache case and my stress levels would be through the roof. Nick impressed me at the end of the show. I hope he’s on there for a while.

The Omarosa vs Ereka (or should I say Omarosa vs everyone) battles are annoying. I hope Katrina and Kristi get more airtime and stay on there for a while - hot! Is Jessie even allowed to talk? They haven’t showed her at all. Probably not missing much. Mark Burnett, you’re a genius. Survivor, Eco-Challenge and now this. Keep ‘em coming.

If you think you’re not getting paid enough and are poor, check out where you rank in the world. Go to globalrichlist.com, punch your salary into this site and you’ll see where you are relative to the world’s population. Scary to see that even if you think you’re not doing so well, you might just be in the top 1% of the world’s richest. Read about it at Wired. Here’s a scary fact - “The world’s 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That’s equal to the combined annual income of the world’s 2.5 billionpoorests people”.

Dave Johnson did exactly what I would do if I was outta work for a while. Write some software in between time spent searching for a new job. If the market is totally dry right now, prepare yourself for when an opportunity comes along in a couple weeks or a month. Write some software, learn new technologies and implement them, showcase it, and put it on your resume. Blog about industry related topics and how your work on this wiz-bang software is going. I think blogs are becoming the new resume.