Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers! In the modern consumer mythology, Thanksgiving – a uniquely American celebration – is a day for Turkey and Football, usually starring the underwhelming Cowboys who coincide with the decline of the NFL. But, all traditions are fluid in America, as we always welcome and add new changes. Now, there is the dreaded Turkey Drop, where college freshers “drop” their high school sweethearts. There is the much-derided Tofurkey which has become a vegetarian thanksgiving tradition. Even the resistance is upended into tradition. Those naysayers who devotedly, every year, circulate Wednesday Addams videos, proclaiming their iconoclasm, only join and expand the tribes of people who celebrate Thanksgiving in their own way. Because Addams Family — a whimsical thanksgiving movie —…
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It increasingly appears that Amazon has chosen to split its second headquarters between Long Island City, NY and Crystal City, Northern VA — essentially locating a large portion of their upper management closer to the political and cosmopolitan classes (DC and NYC respectively). My favorite internet and business raconteur Scott Galloway – the author of the excellent The Four — had opined that it would always be New York. How did I do with my prediction? Earlier this year, my own guess was Nova/DC/Maryland area (although I had also hedged it with North Carolina). Amazon’s next biggest challenge is in running their AI platform. The biggest challenge for all platforms is regulation, which makes locating in the DC area as the perfect…
Leave a CommentIn the last Tesla post on Musk fans and naysayers, I had expressed cautious optimism about Tesla’s Model 3 production growth. There are some legitimate concerns about the process management within the Tesla Fremont plant. Much of the production planning problems have become opaque and also a matter of academic and practice debate (kanban cards and micro-management), ever since Tesla’s move away from Toyota Production principle. In any case, it seems that Tesla’s gradual transition to the make-to-stock model of production continues unabated. Tesla’s Q3 Sales figures from 2018 (Source: Wired) in a snapshot view, look very good. They finally appear in the top-20 models sold in the US and rank fourth in the luxury car segment. In fact, the sales…
Leave a CommentSpectacles are back again. Earlier this year on this blog, I wrote about Snap’s disastrous over-commitment into Spectacles inventories, and subsequent difficulties in selling the items, as thousands of inventories piled up. I argued that their sales figures were in fact not terrible in comparison to the first generation iPods, but it was the capital expenditure on inventories that crippled Snap’s venture into hardware. So, after Snap is back again with Spectacles 2. I cannot really figure that if the new designs of Version 2 are any better, but Snap definitely seems to be making some better operations and retail decisions. Here is coverage from Verge: Both the Veronica and Nico styles are available starting today (ed: Sept 5,…
Leave a CommentLast April, I wrote about a whimsical Tesla analyst call. I had briefly mentioned three issues: (A) personality of the founder vs. personality of the firm (B) over-exuberance about Tesla before they could start making cars in scale. (C) cautious optimism about Tesla eventually fixing things for better. It seems like those were much simpler times, but who knew? That April call was a Donnie Darko style foreboding of many bizarre things to happen later. Since then Elon Musk’s twitter feed and other interactions only got stranger, beginning with an undergraduate-level banter on Karl Marx and capitalism, dissing people, creating tent-city and night outs at the factory, relaxing at a podcast, eventually leading to the costly “420” tweet that was fined…
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I was in Japan this summer and met some wonderful Wharton alumni. Of course, fulfilling a childhood dream, I also had a chance to take the Shinkansen (Bullet train) a few times. Of course, in these days of disrepair of public transport systems such as the MTA and Amtrak, Shinkansen is an engineering marvel. But more than the engineering feat, what is impressive (of course, as an operations prof) was the nearly flawless operations of the Shinkansen. Shinkansen bullet trains leave south from train tracks in Tokyo every 7-9 minutes. This frequency is nothing short of amazing. If you consider the fact that the Hakari express takes 3 hours to get to Shin-Osaka station outside Osaka, there are 20-26 trains…
Leave a CommentMea Culpa first. The Poiesis blog had slowed down during the summer, mainly due to unfortunate injury to my right hand, which in turn first stalled and then slowed my typing and writing. I will be gradually back to the intended pace. The “break”, however, revealed few observations: (1) The volume of textual communication (emails, texts, notes) are written without much thought. Writing polite and laconic responses is hard! (2) How AI on voice-activated typing is still behind the curve for voices with accents! For short phone messages and texts, the voice app was fine. For longer word documents, the voice-activated typing was awkward and slow, but doable. For typing technical documents (latex, programming codes), one might as well think…
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