Convertible boot. Macro test shot, 100 mm, f/2.8

Charlie's eye, macro test shot, 100 mm, f/2.8

Remarking later to my sister about the experience, I jokingly said that aside from using their showroom to test-drive various products, I had no real reason to go there again.

A few years after that, my sister and I decided to buy my mother a new TV for her birthday. Needing to get something quickly, we opted to buy a TV online at Best Buy’s website, and then pick it up in the store. I paid for the TV, but I wanted her to pick it up for me, since I had to catch a flight the following day. No option was available online to let someone else pick up the order for you, so I called the store to ask. I was transferred to a female manager who very curtly replied, “NO, we can’t do that, you have to pick it up yourself and BRING ID.” Then she hung up on me.

Fast forward to now, with this wonderful article from Forbes. Larry Downes has hit the nail squarely on the head with regards to Big Box chains.

Quoted for truth, from page 4:

[Amazon.com's] Phone support is instant, responsive, and knowledgeable. Returns are simple and unburdened by restocking fees and other gotchas. Inventory is precisely managed in a single system that spans all distribution points and third party partners.

Best Buy could have done all of this years ago, and done it better. It had decades of experience in retail, in customer service, in distribution, in forecasting, in marketing and sales. It had, one presumes, computer systems that could have been upgraded to integrate with a new online front end. It had expertise in the electronic products it sells, and potent leverage over key manufacturers to ensure favorable terms and access.

But Best Buy squandered all of those assets. And now, along with many of its big box peers, the company is caught in a death spiral.

It seems that the boxes have never really figured out. We don’t like going to your stores, we don’t like dealing with your incompetent staff, we only do it because of supposed convenience, or, in the case of Best Buy, exclusivity arrangements with manufacturers. And when you continue, year after year, to make those experiences even worse, customers will continue to reject you in favor of better experiences.

Amazon, on the other hand, gets it quite clearly. When they heard from customers that they wanted faster shipping more often, they introduced Amazon Prime. Flat yearly fee, and you get upgraded to free 2nd-day shipping on almost all items, nearly negating the biggest downside of ordering online, the wait. They’ve also started local delivery, having more distribution centers closer to their customers, allowing delivery the next business day without exorbitant overnight fees. Meanwhile, it took Best Buy over six years before they offered the option of having someone else pick up the item for you. And even then, they don’t have the items ready for you, the process takes forever, and often they bring out the wrong item or simply can’t locate it in the store.

Best Buy will go the way of Circuit City before we know it, but it won’t be soon enough.

Of course, taking a step back might make one wonder why such gadgets are necessary. And the answer is startlingly simple — driving is not easy. In fact, it’s extremely hard.

Driving remains one of the few tasks that is done every day by millions of people simply because there isn’t an alternative. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard from someone, “I know I’m a bad driver, but I can’t do anything about it, I have to drive.” Even extremely intelligent, productive members of society, fantastic doctors, educators, lawyers, are often not good at driving. But unlike other seemingly mundane daily tasks, driving is unique in that it’s simply not something you can afford to be bad at, because driving involves putting your own life, and the lives of others, at risk every single time you do it.

Hundreds of thousands of cars hit the road every day, driven by inefficient humans who are often terrible at spatial relationships. Even small cars these days clock in at nearly 1300 kilograms (almost 3000 pounds), which means an average driver is moving a tremendous amount of mass around. Combine that fact with the number of traffic rules a person has to obey at any given time, and then factor in the mind-boggling statistics on distracted driving — people driving drunk, or while eating, using phones, applying make-up, playing with the radio or MP3 players — and it’s no wonder that in 2005, there were just shy of 6.5 million car accidents in America. On top of that, driving remains most dangerous than flying and taking trains by over a factor of ten.

The host of technological measures built into cars these days are all there in an attempt to make the car smarter, as we pay less and less attention to our surroundings. But no matter how many chimes, buzzers, warning lights, radio blackouts, etc., that engineers add to cars, the fact remains that unless a driver is paying attention, there’s only so much that can be done. The car still needs a human behind the wheel.

According to the US Census Bureau, the number of Americans who drive to work is staggering. As of 2005, an estimated 87.7% of US workers drove to work, with a full 77% driving by themselves. Driving, therefore, has become a de facto norm in America. Public transportation might as well not exist if you’re even minutes outside of a major US city, and those who walk and bike to work drops off dramatically outside of a few select cities. (Boston tops the list for pedestrian commutes, Portland OR tops the list for cyclists.)

This is why projects like the Google Driverless Car are just so damned important. We need to move, aggressively, toward cars that are driven not by humans, who can’t be bothered to put down their food & cell phones, but instead by computers. Computers can easily anticipate all road conditions and drive cars without human interaction; they can drive closer together and far more efficiently, thus eliminating both accidents and traffic jams while dramatically increasing fuel efficiency. Computer-driven cars could make use of substantially more efficient traffic light systems, drive in poor visibility conditions without issue, enable the elderly and handicapped among us to travel with ease despite physical impairments, and save countless lives. Google’s car has been driven all around the west coast, and, thanks to lobbying by Google, they’re now legal in Nevada for public roads as well. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Google Driverless program is that the only accident that the car has been in, after over 250,000 kilometers of flawless driving, was caused by a human.

I truly feel that this is one of the most important programs under development right now, because of the dramatic, life-changing impact that driverless cars would have on my country and the world. Just as the automobile saved the horse from the wrath of humans and the exhaustive, dangerous work conditions they endured while pulling coaches, driverless cars can save true fun driving for the track, and let everyone else get on with their lives. This is something that my generation will see in our lifetimes, and frankly, it can’t happen soon enough.

3 hours of online shopping later…

Never one mind the implications for Motorola’s devices, the upcoming Droid Bionic, the next Nexus device, etc., and focus on what this buyout really means. This is a throwback to the nuclear arms race, or in other words, mutually assured destruction, by means of software patents.

The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

And when they talk about strengthening their portfolio, they’re not joking. Back when the Nortel patents went up for auction, Google was outbid by over USD $1 Billion for them, and all 6000 patents went to the Apple/MS/RIM consortium.

In comparison, Motorola has over 17,000 patents, a bounty nearly 3-fold over the Nortel portfolio.

This is ramping up to absolutely ludicrous levels, with all of the giants trying to level one another with a patent battle. If this isn’t reformed soon, it will eventually wind up taking down the industry here in the US.