USEDCARSALESMAN

Usedcarsalesman Meets the New King

As all know high and far, Usedcarsalesman was just a mere observer, never an investor, in the new Web and E-commerce build-out in the 1990s. Concerned that people would question his rationale in later years, Usedcarsalesman kept "hand-written journals" during that time that contained his opinions on web-related developments and society, in general, since, of course, there were no weblogs and he didn't see the point of running his opinions on a "Web" page (ie. "...Wait, if you think their are things wrong with business on the Web, then why are you using a Web page?" :) As you can probably imagine, Usedcarsalesman was, in the 1990s, pretty out of step with life in the United States, for better or for worse.

What did Usedcarsalesman do instead of help roll out the Web like many bright kids in his age-group? Well there was always professional school or a profession -- law, business/MBA, stock brokerage heck, maybe even medicine. But, there, Usedcarsalesman was also obstructed by this new "Web" thing. See, to him, half the fun of going to a professional school or entering a profession was the professional monopoly you were going to have when you enter the field: ie. You go to med school and everybody has to come to you to get a prescription for drugs, go to law school and everybody (at least if they love efficiency) has to come to you for legal advice/representation, become a stock broker then everybody has to come to you to trade securities.

                

In the 1990s, Usedcarsalesman started to see the aforementioned "monopoly dynamic" fly out the window with those professions. Everything that used to be the province only of professionals was now available to the general public: ...Want legal information/forms, go on-line, want to trade stocks, go on-line, want medicine/medical advice, go on-line. Professional school lost some of its luster for Usedcarsalesman in the 1990s.

So Usedcarsalesman thought about going back to basics. His father was a TV/Film man and Usedcarsalesman didn't ever really see himself falling far from that tree, so to speak. But, again, the Web of the 1990s seemed even to jeopardize the solidity of this career pursuit. For example, Usedcarsalesman looked in to the houses of many people and saw that no longer did they have just a bunch of TV monitors and VCRs. They had these new computer terminals hooked up to the Internet that slowly, very slowly displayed web pages which people seemed to relentlessly "consume" like pancakes at a slow-paced competitive eating contest.

                      

Usedcarsalesman saw that people's attention were now divided: Film and TV didn't own people's entertainment lives at home or when in recreation, anymore, it seemed. As a matter of fact, it seemed the Web was consuming more of peoples' free time than TV/Film was!? Usedcarsalesman thought, "Where was film/TV going? It was still going to be around, but was the Web going to incorporate it, bringing on some kind of interactive element with the public?"

So, it seemed that anywhere that Usedcarsalesman looked, "The King was Dead," or at least seriously on the defensive (the "King" in this case being the way of life in the world he had know since he was a child). Usedcarsalesman saw that he needed to make friends and develop alliances with the new King: "The Web." This was no stretch for Usedcarsalesman...He had been regularly using personal computers since he was a little kid in the 80s and had been around the Compuserve Bulletin Boards when the big news was the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

             

So Usedcarsalesman thought making peace with this new King "Web" would be no problem. But, he was wrong...He introduced himself and found he was speaking to a slow, retarded King even when his highness was coming to him through a T1 line! And strangely, the public was throwing billions at this new King!? It all made Usedcarsalesman want to shave his head and mustache!!

But, finally, 1999...The advent of relatively inexpensive Broadband for the home user, better servers, decent connection speeds in most places Usedcarsalesman was at. It was as if the new King had secretly had a head transplant (and strangely, this is around when all the capital investment in most web-related public companies fell off!!!). After the turn of the millennium, Usedcarsalesman could now make decent video calls on broadband, he could download music and movies pretty quickly, he felt like he was aligning with a King that was truly going somewhere and that this new world was starting to move with Usedcarsalesman's pace (or vice versa).
         

So why is Usedcarsalesman writing all this now? Well, because, it kind of provides background as to where he is coming from in upcoming articles, when he talks about the Web, circa 2006, and the reason for his excitement about the foundation of certain new web-based companies (a huge deal with the public in the 1990s, but not so much now)

Web Forums: Fertile Ground to Grow the Best CEOs in the 21st Century

If you are a CEO, probably the last thing you want to do is walk in to a large room full of your customers, the people that buy say, your company's hypothetical Nose-Hair-Trimmers (...Usedcarsalesman has a mustache and does a lot of grooming to look sharp, so he is familiar with such devices :)

Why? Loss of control. You know you can keep all of your customers happy some of the time or some of your customers happy all the time. You also know that your ability to keep a handle on things in such a scenario has the potential to go out the window. And, you know that rather than talking about the work you've done making the new "Grizzly 5000" Model Nose-Hair-Trimmer you can fall in to some kind of quasi-political contest where you address a lot of questions from customers that you'd never get in the boardroom, from the press or even from shareholders (I mean, the corporate board, the press and shareholders don't even necessarily have to use the products you make, right? For them, their relationship to you might be just a management or rhetorical exercise for perks/money, or even just an investment).

As such, Usedcarsalesman has to say that he salutes the new-breed of "Crocodile-Skinned" CEOs who regularly "dive" in to the Web Forums related to their respective company's products. Why? Most web forums aren't filled with corporate board members, members of the press or even probably have a majority of members who are stockholders of any sort. But, they are generally filled by the most critical, demanding and knowledgeable customers of any given genre of products.* 

So for example, when a "Nose-Hair-Trimmer" CEO comments in a hypothetical "Facial-Hair Forum," its like he is going on American Idol, his product is his "song" and he's potentially facing a tough audience: 1,000+ Simon Cowells who may directly tell him his products stink and that they're going back to using heirloom nose-hair scissors :). Obviously, to stay on top, CEOs who go on consumer forums had better have their sh$% together, better know everything about everything, and better have a heart as big as a house! And, the CEOs that I have seen pull this off in forums generally do.

Now, what is different about the aforementioned CEO's? That I can tell, they are often times younger folks in their 20s-40s or older CEOs who seem to diligently follow the new consumer norms of younger folks. Also, these CEOs are people running businesses -- ones occasionally publicly traded -- that would barely make a hypothetical Fortune "50,000" list.

However, these CEOs -- when they dive in to product-related web-forums -- take a lot of risk and earn respect, big respect from forum members. In fact, Usedcarsalesman believes that the CEOs who have made and continue to make the effort in Web Forums are showing themselves as the future top corporate leaders in the 21st century.

* After some review, Usedcarsalesman thinks that this analogy may be a little off. In fact, its the people on the forums who may be the crocodiles; the guy sticking his head in to crocodiles' collective maw and bravely managing to survive is the new-breed CEO.

I'll Have Some of What Fox is Having, Please

Usedcarsalesman was in a territorial mood last night. So he decided to look at real estate using a map of North America. Focusing on California, he realized, again, that there is this giant peninsula called "Baja" hanging at its bottom. Actually, it's called "Baja California" and it's in Mexico.

Well, Usedcarsalesman doesn't directly own any real estate in Los Angeles or anywhere else in Southern California so he was kind of looking around to get a feel for prices in the area; of course, the prices in LA were higher than Rick James partying in a U2 Spy-plane (actually, higher than that :). So, Usedcarsalesman looked further, searched on this World Wide Web-thing and saw there were actually listings for real estate in Baja California. Heck, they were even listed by familiar sounding real estate companies like Re-max, Sotheby's, and so forth.

So Usedcarsalesman checked out the prices and pictures. Here's one example: "Beach-front cottage, 35 minutes south of San Diego, gated community, new appliances, $89,000!" Usedcarsalesman was impressed. Obviously he doesn't always judge books by their covers, but such a place on a beach-front in LA, OC, SD would probably run 10-20x as much, minimum. $89,000 was right in Usedcarsalesman's price range (vs. Baja, $89,000 in LA just means you get to live out of a nicer car, "used" of course :).

But, Usedcarsalesman was still a little cautious, thinking, "Its in Mexico, man... don't you want to have a place around familiar things and in a growth area?" Then, Usedcarsalesman read a really interesting thing in the real estate listing: "it's (the beach-front cottage) just minutes away from Fox's Baja Studio..." Yeah, as in 20th Century Fox. So, I'm like, "Fox has a studio in Baja?" (Usedcarsalesman currently lives right up the street from Warner Bros. Studios and gazes down on acres of studio lots that are some of the most valuable real estate in Los Angeles).

Usedcarsalesman investigated further and found that Fox established a studio on 40 acres of beach-front in Baja to save money/capitalize on favorable exchange rates when shooting the top grossing film of all time, Titanic, in 1996-7. Needless to say, Fox kept the production in California as the Unions demanded, just that it was in Baja California (grumble, grumble :)

Well Usedcarsalesman has a lot of respect for the historical real estate investments made by studio founders in Los Angeles. These guys bought acres of real estate in Los Angeles when it had the population of Pig's Knuckle, Arkansas and was in a state just a few decades old. But, they did it for concrete, defensible reasons:

• a) its warm and generally nice here, which means they could produce their films outside more consistently than elsewhere
• b) despite a few things that were not as convenient or safe as in Chicago or "Back East" they could still get the job done
• c) Dude, it was frigging cheap, man!
• d) Not like NYC with those pesky Kodak patent lawyers. Needless to say, Fox's Baja Studio was probably established along those same lines (except for the part about the patent lawyers). The added benefit was that it was on the water, making it less likely that Fox would take a bath shooting a risky Water-flick.

What does this mean for me and you in terms of real-estate, today? Well, I gotta admit, the prices in Baja are low and the beaches looks like Malibu. And, as we all know, Fox and the other Studios helped build Los Angeles, pulling people to it for work and a new life. Will they do the same for Baja? Based on their investment history, if Fox likes Baja and has operated a studio there successfully for 10 years, one that's just 30 minutes South-of-the-Border, then maybe they are on to something (just like they were when they established themselves in Los Angeles in 1913).

Looking at "War in Iraq, 2004" Post

Maybe you can look back to help get an idea for where the future is leading. So to do just that, Usedcarsalesman recently read through a post he did on November 7, 2004, titled "War in Iraq, 2004" (deep in the November, 2004 Archives)

In that 2004 post, in addition to getting a little ticked off, Usedcarsalesman broadly questioned the performance of the U.S. military command apparatus as it related to Iraq. He compared the relatively low casualty levels from the Desert Storm, circa 1991, with the more than 1000 U.S. soldiers that had been killed to that point in Iraqi Freedom thus far. He questioned the lack of appropriate armor for U.S. troops and their Humvees. And, he questioned the military intelligence community, who had apparently failed to "game" the invasion of Iraq down to the proper detail level, if at all.

Well, about a year and a half has gone by since that post. The current number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq is apparently at 2400 persons, according to antiwar.com; this means an additional 1400 persons, predominantly male combat personnel, have died in Iraq since November 2004. Does this, however, mean we are on track to lose about 1000 U.S. soldiers a year in the sunny, sandy home of ancient Babylon for the foreseeable future? Maybe, maybe not.

In defense of the U.S. military, our troops have, in the last year and a half, been equipped with better armor, as have their vehicles. New revolutionary "Dragon Skin" armor now offers some U.S. troops flexibility, light-weight, and protection against multiple rifle-round hits (something that a Kevlar vest could only do when equipped with heavy ceramic plates, a heavy burden in the Middle East).

U.S. Humvees have been fitted with armor packages that resist IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), RPGs (Rocket-Powered Grenades) and high-caliber rifle fire. And, classified technology has apparently filled in a few weak spots elsewhere, such as the blocking of insurgent transmission signals to IEDs. So, U.S. troops on patrol in Iraq appear to be better-equipped for their hostile environment.

Unfortunately, the insurgency (the enemy in Iraq and elsewhere) is in the business of attacking weak-spots. Usedcarsalesman is forced to surmise that If the U.S. has strengthened its initial weaknesses by making U.S. combat personnel in Iraq harder targets, then the insurgents will attempt to hit U.S. soft-spots elsewhere.

Usedcarsalesman does fear that, as U.S. forces in Iraq become, essentially, more unassailable to insurgents, that said insurgents may attack, in the name of their cause, outside of Iraq (or Afghanistan). And, yes, they may attack where U.S. persons do not commonly wear "Dragon Skin" and drive Armored Humvees: Here in the States.