InfiniteCompetition.com

Almost everyone has bills to pay, and most people still receive at least some of their bills as paper statements or invoices.  Businesses spend VAST amounts of money on paper, envelopes, printing, sorting, stuff, and mailing these things out.  What a gigantic waste of paper, effort, energy and money.  Of course consumers and businesses end up paying for this one way or another in the products and services they buy.

Many companies are relentlessly ‘encouraging’ consumers and businesses to accept electronic (typically e-mail) delivery or notification of new statements or invoices.  Instead of the companies saying they’re trying to save money though (that would be too obvious), they ’spin’ it in other ways, telling people to ‘go green’, ‘go paperless’, etc.  But most companies couldn’t care less about you, they just want to save money (and increase profits)!  Perhaps companies would have more success if they gave consumers a DISCOUNT for going paperless.  Between the paper, the printing, the stuffing, mailing & postage, and logistics, perhaps it costs company $1 a bill to send out.  So give people a $1/month discount on their phone bill if they go paperless!  Perhaps a lot more people would switch.

Google’s rise to search dominance has been accepted and embraced by the masses.  Why?  The infinite surge in information on the internet meant people needed a SIMPLE, fast, and reasonably accurate way to find relevant and timely information.  Google met the need!

But search goes so much beyond what google does, with needs approaching infinity.

Where’s that picture I took?  On the internet?  On my hard drive?  On an external drive?  On my phone?  On a DVD somewhere?

Where’s that document I wrote?

As much flak as Vista has taken from ‘experts’ and the public (mostly because people don’t want to learn something new after having used XP for too long and because signed drivers weren’t available for old hardware initially), the search capability in it is really good.  Click the flag logo (bottom left of the screen usually), and unlike XP, a search box is always present at the bottom of the menu that appears.  Type anything in there, and Vista immediately tries to find files, web sites, programs, e-mails, and more, that match what you typed!  It’s VERY well done.

In a world of infinite information and data, we need a great search tool.  A tip of the hat to Microsoft for getting this right.

With so many people out of work, the competition for the few open jobs is now enormous.  As competition for jobs approaches infinity, the importance of a great resume is higher than ever.

Most people are not great writers and do not know how to create a good, let alone great, career resume.  So to help people, a seemingly infinite number of web sites are springing up offering people a way to improve their resume.  Most of these sites will take an existing resume, edit it, and give it back, for a  fee of course.  Fees range widely, as apparently do the skills of these service providers!

Many appear to be in far off lands with probably little clue about a customer’s job market or even culture.

A friend, as well as an experienced and successful recruiter, recently launched EmploymentBOOST.com, providing resume improvement services.  He knows what employers respond to and what they don’t.  He is even getting customers who have used other services already (and did a terrible job!).

Don’t be fooled by low prices, use a service with a real background in HR and recruiting.

In a job market nearing Infinite Competition, your resume is CRITICAL!

The TV news story is repeated so often we all know the script.  It goes something like this:

News talking head (NTH): “We now go to Bob Smith at the local mall to tell us how the retailers are doing this holiday season.”

Bob Smith (BS): “Yes, as you can see, the huge SALE signs are everywhere, from 25% to 75% off pretty much everything.  This is Carol Jones who is out shopping today.  Carol, what are you buying?”

Carol Jones (CJ): “Just some things that are marked way down like clothes and a few other things.”

BS: So these are things you’d be buying anyway, but you’re just taking advantage of the sale?

CJ: That’s right.  The prices aren’t that great on other things.

BS (to NTH): There you have it, retailers are trying to entice buying with big discounts but they’re not buying anything beyond that which doesn’t look good for this shopping season.  Back to you.

And thus the ‘in depth’ analysis of ALL retailing is summarized.  But wait, there’s more.  ONLINE sales are STILL skyrocketing.  Millions and millions of online purchases are being made by consumers from the comfort of their homes, offices, or cell phones and laptops anywhere.  And for the most part, the brick and mortar retailers can’t compete.

It’s not just about price.  Consumers like brick and mortar stores for the social experience (going with relatives or friends for example) and actually seeing the merchandise.  But that appeal is offset for many by the traffic, parking, crowds, and more.

It used to be that you’d go to the store to get TRUSTED ADVICE on a product.  Now, with the vast amount of product and service reviews online, and the pressure to train and pay store employees LESS to save money, advice from the store is about the least reliable or trustworthy.

So for many, if the deal isn’t as good, the information not as good, and the hassle is greater, they simply will avoid brick and mortar shopping if at all possible.

And this trend will continue.  Brick and mortar stores will continue to decline.  Who benefits?  UPS and FedEx!

Manufacturers have become so good at making millions of highly reliable vehicles that the world is awash in them.  And this was true before the recent financial melt down, and is still before China begins producing and exporting decent vehicles (only a matter of time).

Not only are there way too many new cars coming on the market, but since cars a few years old are still incredibly useful, new cars must compete with these used cars too.

With so many manufacturers, in so many places, competing for so few buyers armed with so much information, we are approaching infinite automotive competition.

What does this mean?  Great deals for consumers.  Brutal business conditions for auto makers with no end EVER in sight.  Vehicles are truly a commodity, with a vast over-supply.  Only the strong will survive.

Manufacturers will have to clearly focus on one or at most two of the following: product, price, or service.  No one can win in all three for any given brand.

A good time to be a consumer.  A very bad time to be in the auto business.

Who knew that Icelandic banks were doing the same kind of investing in mortgage backed derivatives as U.S. banks, and that U.K. consumers banked at Icelandic banks, and U.K. local governments invested in Icelandic bank investments.  And who knew that Iceland’s banks became vastly bigger in deposits and obligations than the Icelandic government could support?

The BBC has written extensively on this mess and what it means.  Iceland’s banking system and government could well declared bankruptcy which would set that nation’s economy back years.

It is but one tragic fall out of the world of infinite banking.  Where investments become infinitely complex, and in most cases unregulated.  Money is moving at infinite speed around the globe, in millions of transactions per second.  How can ANY government regulate or monitor this?  And that is without considering all the CRIMINAL movement of money.

Speed ‘governors’ will probably be needed to slow down the movement of money around the world, so that alarms, indicators, and firewalls can be put in place to warn and potentially stop things getting out of control.

It will need the best financial and mathematical minds to work together to come up with new standards.  Will it happen?  Who knows.

The current financial crisis has been a long time coming.  The country is now reaping the results of decades of effort to evade economic cause and effect. Some government debt is understandable and often desirable as a means to accomplish a lofty goal (like borrow money to build a highway and pay it back through transportation tax income).

But the U.S. Federal government took things to a whole new level in the 1990’s by demanding that banks make loans to unqualified low and no income persons.  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae supposedly would buy all these loans off the banks until one day they couldn’t!

With the government backed Freddie and Fannie distorting the market, Wall St. and in turn banks around the world, created distorted and outrageous financial derivatives around all these millions of mortgages, offering ‘great returns’ and great ratings, even though those ratings were not based on reality.

Well, the house of cards fell, bringing down not only the major investment banking scoundrels, but also many large and small banks that went along for the ride, caught up in the “well if they’re doing it I guess I need to be doing it too, to compete!”

The U.S. government created near INFINITE COMPETITION in banking and financial markets which is why NO ONE can understand the extent of what has happened.

The resulting mess and scrambling by governments and banks is a desperate attempt to stop the holes in financial dams everywhere.  Meanwhile, the general public has lost trillions, even those who played by the rules perfectly, and paid their bills, put money down, held a job, and did what their financial planners told them to do.

What a mess.  It will leave the U.S. economy broken for a long time, and the solutions just leave the U.S. government in even more debt.

Consumers today have almost infinite choices where to buy goods and services.

Customers in high volume ‘discount’ stores are no longer just those with low incomes.  Consumers with plenty of disposable income choose to shop at stores like Sams and Costco.

Millions of web sites like Amazon.com compete with brick and mortar stores for your business.

What has this done to margins?  Not surprisingly, margins on the actual goods and in many cases services too are tiny.  This is a great win for consumers and is what Capitalism is all about, bringing the best products for the lowest prices in an efficient competitive marketplace.

Smart retailers have found ways to add margin back however.  Best Buy is a great example.  So you buy that flat screen TV for a great price.  You’re psyched to go home and hook it up.  Oh wait, you need a new type of cable to connect it.  Hmm… it says $20 for a cheap one, $30 for a good one, and $50 for a supposedly great one with thick insulation, gold plating and some patented shielding.  Cables are one of the HIGHEST MARGIN ITEMS in Best Buy’s stores.  Their cost of goods is tiny, the margin is HUGE.  So they don’t mind the low margins on other items.  Same with batteries, ‘adapters’ (such as connecting an iPod to your car audio system), fashion cases for iPods and cell phones, and much more.  These impulse items are where the big profits are! Read the rest of this entry »

Infinite Competition, enabled by efficient communications, computers, and transportation, has brought many developing nations into the global marketplace that were not in it before.  Many of these nations have become, on a relative basis compared to earlier, fabulously wealthy.  Now all this ‘infinite money’ doesn’t just want to sit around, it wants to make more money, or rather the people whose money it is do!

Vast sums of ‘infinite money’ went seeking easy returns in the marketplace.  Much of it went to back global mortgage investments which were seen as relatively low risk with high return.  But, there was so much demand for this easy money that investment firms were running out of mortgages to ’sell’ as investments.  So they lowered the qualification bar for getting mortgages, to a ridiculous point where people could in essence borrow whatever they want with no qualifications.  And with all this easy money for borrowers, demand for homes skyrocketed, along with, no surprise, home prices.  And around and around it went.

This global pyramid scheme, like all others, was inevitably destined to collapse.

An excellent NPR (National Public Radio) audio stream about this can be found by clicking here and then click Full Episode on the left.

How many ways do you communicate? E-mail? Web forms? Blog? Paper? Instant messenger? Text messaging? Cell phone? Faxes? Postal service? POTS (plain old telephone system)? Advertising? These are just a few and you probably use most of them and more.

If we don’t yet have quite an infinite ways to communicate, we are moving toward an infinite number of channels among the ways and the quantities today are staggering between internet traffic, cell phone minutes and messaging, etc.

Besides all the ways you communicate, how MUCH are you communicating or at least trying to deal with?  Does a text message or IM or e-mail ever come at a bad time but you feel compelled to respond to it?  Do you get tons of bad jokes from friends and people you don’t know which you feel bad ignoring but you do anyway.  And then there’s spam.  One person’s treasure is another person’s spam!  Again the quantities are STAGGERING.

So what is infinite communication doing to us?  Leave a comment!  If you have time…