Charles on… anything that comes along

An interesting discussion on how much it costs to fill your car’s petrol (or diesel) tank at Andrew’s blog crystallizes something I’ve been thinking about for the past few days.

Andrew comments: As I understand, there is much less price elasticity in the USA simply because taxes are so low. If the price of crude shot up to $100 a barrel it would double at the pumps too. But I find it much easier to imagine a world without many cars than a world without cheap and ubiquitous transport of goods. The latter would clearly be the main effect of any drastic energy shortage or attack of green prudence.

My thinking is that this is going to happen, and that replacements (like electric cars, or hybrid fuel-celled cars) aren’t going to come in anywhere near fast enough to replace them.

Which will mean that we won’t have cheap and ubiquitous transport of goods. Oh, we might have plentiful and not-too-expensive electricity, if the government(s) can get their arses in gear quickly enough to build a lot more nuclear plants - after all, if the alternative is constant power blackouts (and the electricity companies will help in the PR for this) then I think that most people will be won over pretty quickly.

But while you’ll have the leccy coming out of the wall, you won’t have cheap stuff in the shops. The corollary is that we move to a world where you make things last. You don’t buy new. Second-hand rules. It’ll be a little like being at war, except that the “opponent” is ourselves, and we’ll be at war with a planet that refuses to provide any more resources for “nothing”.

Give it 10 or 20 years. It’s in your lifetime. And it’s either that, or mass social breakdown. I think I’d prefer parsimony.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• What causes fires at petrol stations? It's sort of obvious (28 March 2005; score: 51.33%)
• Osama has won (sorta), why the music biz secretly hates downloads, and how much should petrol cost? (25 September 2005; score: 35.89%)
• More on PKRSER, aka Partygaming, and the credit card data it wants - and where you got scammed (28 February 2007; score: 33.9%)

Seasoned readers (I mean really seasoned) will know that I’ve got a long history involving Alan Sugar, which actually goes right back to the first Amstrad IBM-compatible PCs, as it happens. (I also wrote a long piece about Amstrad for Business magazine in 1989.)

That said, I don’t have any animus against him - let’s make that clear. And I must say that I’m enjoying the BBC2 show The Apprentice, which is the UK remake of the US original with Donald Trump, enormously. Every week is completely compelling, because the people in it are so horrible that it’s clear cooperation for them comes next to capitulation.

This week’s task involved the two teams cooking up soups from raw ingredients to sell at market stalls - which Sugar must have enjoyed tremendously, as he got his start in business selling boiled vegetable (I think it was rhubarb) off a market stall. Funny he didn’t mention this as he grilled the losers.

(And ask yourself: how would you do it? How would you work it so that you set up a market stall and make the maximum profit? The answers are obvious if written down here, but not if you’re just standing there, unless you’ve got experience of making stuff to sell.)

The unasked question though over the whole thing is quite what the winner (lucky? unlucky?) will do in Amstrad. Design videophones? Negotiate with rock-hard Chinese equipment suppliers?

Anyway, there must be at least four more episodes to go. I’ll have to interview him just to find out quite how much he enjoyed it. Or perhaps I’ll drop him an email.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Browsers, and search terms (28 April 2005; score: 56.34%)
• Oh god, The Apprentice is *so* compulsive (2 April 2008; score: 28.57%)
• Why I didn't commission anything ahead of Terminal 5's opening (30 March 2008; score: 11.62%)

Aw, crap. Just when it was getting good: Official statement from Spin Bunny: “

Spin Bunny received a gagging order last week from solicitors representing a UK PR agency offended by a Bunny story, and seeking recourse to Bunny’s sources. The order prevents us from naming the PR firm.

The team behind Spin Bunny has done its utmost in negotiations over the last week to keep Bunny alive and reach resolution out of court. That effort failed this morning and Bunny’s only option now is to shut down the Spin Bunny blog in order to protect the anonymity of its contributors and its sources.”

Could I just say I enjoyed it while it lasted? Flipping lawyers. There should be a law…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Spin Bunny: the biting edge of PR blogging (and about time too) (1 November 2004; score: 90.09%)
• These things I found interesting.. 10 September 2005 (10 September 2005; score: 46.2%)
• Browsers, and search terms (28 April 2005; score: 36.78%)

Interesting to compare this post (about iTunes losing features with each new version) with this history (about what features have been added to iTunes with each new version).

Swings and roundabouts? Taking with one hand, giving with another? Ed Bott says All I can say is, if Microsoft did anything like this, it would be on the front page of Slashdot.

Certainly I wrote a column a while back noting that iTunes 4.0.1 (gotta love those hundredth-point increments) must be the only “upgrade” that was an unequivocal downgrade. These days, the downgrading (mostly to defeat efforts to defeat iTunes DRM) is sugared with improvements of one sort or another.

In the end though it’s all DRM, which means you’re getting less than you would with, say, a CD. You’re paying for the convenience of not having CDs cluttering. But then you back up the files.. to CDs.

Anyway, must go. Got a piece to write about the music biz.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Chapters in podcasts: OK, that's smart (30 June 2005; score: 54.89%)
• These things I found interesting.. 8 September 2005 (evening) (8 September 2005; score: 54.19%)
• Microsoft packages, and fixing the iTunes Music Store (someone else did) (11 March 2006; score: 51.93%)

My column this week for The Independent looks at whether anyone is using their mobile to download songs, given the amazing restrictions on moving and listening to your music on a phone compared to a computer (you can back it up to a PC, but only play it on the phone; and each track costs £1.50 compared to 79p).

Start with the price of a track: £1.50 on Orange, 79p on iTunes or Napster. Why does it cost so much more on Orange? “We charge a premium because if people want to buy something immediately, then we have the solution for that,” says Julian Diment, head of brand and commercial partnerships at Orange. “When people won’t pay £1.50 then we won’t charge it.” Arguably, the dramatically low take-up compared with internet use suggests people are already not paying it, but leave that aside for now.

The problem for the phone networks (besides the licensing costs of WMA/AAC/etc over GSM) is that they have to pay for all the bandwidth to the phone, instead of online, where they just have to get it online, after which various middlepeople take up the costs (the infrastructure isn’t free, but isn’t all paid for by Napster or Apple); and that phone interfaces still aren’t up to the job of navigating huge amounts of content. Ever tried navigating your calendar on your phone if you lead a busy life?

For that reason, it seems to me that the mobile companies aren’t going to displace the iPod et al any time soon - even when phones with hard drives come along. Though they might meet the iPod generation halfway.

Bonus links:
The Future of Music, a book being developed online about the way the music business is moving: “The record industry as we know it is dying. But the music industry is healthier and more vibrant than ever with limitless possibilities for change and growth due to the Internet and the digitization of music.“

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• G4 perform 'Creep' on the X-Factor: is there a tree high enough to hang them from? (12 December 2004; score: 73.06%)
• Record labels! Want rivals to overtake iTunes? Remove the DRM (30 August 2005; score: 48.31%)
• Peter Cochrane forecasts VoIP spam.. you know it makes sense (9 September 2004; score: 46.54%)