Office Max!

Office Depot and Office Max are reported to be testing the concept in a limited number of their stores.

That’s a problem only in that the market for the cash cows is growing more saturated. Already, Microsoft admits that its biggest competition for Office business software is earlier versions of Office itself.

The stapler is ignoring the hole puncher. They haven't been talking much these days. There was a lot of paper work to be sent out recently, I've been raising the stapler's profile. In turn, It has become arrogant with its newfound fame. Poor old hole puncher. Looking pretty dismay in its current plight. It has been through a lot, I can tell - dust settling in inconspicuous areas, the vibrant red suit ravaged by the ruthless hours. I wonder when their friendship grew cold and if they would ever speak again. But I guess life's like that; people move on, environment change... its all part and parcel of life.

Hot-Desking is the sort of incredibly stupid idea that happens when the money people make decisions that adversely direct those who teach. Tear down the offices and make one giant work room. We don’t need cubicles. We only need desks! A giant sea of identical desks as far as the eye can see!

Its like the perennial debacle with photocopying machines. We have to make a lot of photocopies (these kids pay 40 bucks an hour, they deserve their own copies) and toner cartridges cost about 100 bucks a pop. They only send one when the other is dead. Well, what are we supposed to do while waiting? One of the heads of the company told us teachers to ask them to send two. He was stunned to find out we DO ask for more than one at a time (we aren’t morons ya know) and the main office refuses to send them. Talk about wires crossed. The photocopier is dying again, but we might be working out a toner refill scenario on Monday. If not, all photocopies on the fax machine, which is highly unfeasible.

Our day was pretty quiet. I spent much of the day cleaning off my computer desk and reorganizing drawers. I think I’m about halfway finished with what I need to get done. I’ll spend time on this over the next week during the evening and see if I can’t get more working space as well as make much better use of the storage spaces on the desk. Nina has been sorting through letters and papers and has made all kinds of lovely finds (including finding a $100 bill … money that we had forgotten about!). It’ll soon be the case that the only boxes left downstairs will be my boxes and my junk.

There is a deluge of media portals that have opened up recently. General news channels like NDTV and Zee News have also sprouted business channels like NDTV profit and Zee Business to compete in the business news space with CNBC-TV18. With all this activity in the TV space, radio and print are not far behind. With the recent legislation of allowing more private FM players into the market, maybe we will soon have a city based radio news channel as well. The print media has seen brand new papers like Mumbai Mirror and DNA in Mumbai and the entry of Hindustan Times into the Mumbai market. With the economy of Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad also booming, it won’t be long before many news papers start making a foray into these markets as well. Finally, the greatest revolution in news media is going to be in the internet space with the Blogosphere gaining popularity as in your face kind of journalism. The plethora of ideas and vastness of the coverage that the Blogosphere is made up of cannot be ignored. With the world moving towards a pod-casting, RSS- Really Simple Syndication and Push Button Publishing kind of a market, the content is not only going to get diverse, but also very customer specific.

True, I never managed a McDonalds, but remember, the salaries paid to our employees here are equivalent to those of Microsoft higher mangers in the west. Not astronomical, but definitely much, much more than you can make legally anywhere in the country. We are supposed to be hiring the best and the brightest. Even if they are not- even if our human resources management is very poor- you’d expect them to be at least average, since they are all literate and only 30% of the population is literate (maximum).

UPDATE: Brand new technique discovered. Let the iPod sit on your desk for 1.5 months while you contemplate ordering a new hard drive to try to install following directions you bookmark on the internet…. Then… knock it off your desk onto the floor by accident. SMASH. Then - Voila! One fully operational iPod.

So I am trying to get my home office set up and trying to get this old fax machine to work. It hasn't been used for at least 2 careers, well I think maybe I made a copy on it 3 years ago. I'm ready to scream, it's a dusty piece of crap.

But just days ago, Microsoft said it had signed a five-year pact with Apple to continue to develop versions of its Office business software for Macs.

I was really nervous about it, but wasn’t getting anywhere with Windows Mobile so I tried it. I went to OfficeMax, bought some notecards and made a holder out of duct tape. It isn’t a completely pencil-based solution. I use GTD Tiddlywiki to print out computer based todo lists on index cards, print out a daily calendar from Microsoft Outlook onto index cards and also use pages from the Do It Yourself Planner which features downloadable PDF index cards. It’s a really nice system. It’s very efficient. If I lose them I can just print out another set and works very very well.

The Office 12 story isn’t as clear cut as that for Vista, but a slick new UI won’t change the fact that office suite software is a mature market in which Microsoft holds all but a minuscule share. Office servers and the use of Office as a front-end for business software are too small or too new to change the results. Net: Information Worker results will be basically flat as usual.

Chesbrough and Rosenbloom illustrate the importance of the business model with a case study of Xerox Corporation’s early days in the copy machine business with its Xerox Model 914 copier. (Before changing its name to Xerox Corporation, the company was known as the Haloid Company and then Haloid Xerox Inc.)