Mooreover / Blog

What can more boring than talking about not writing? Let’s leave it at that.

Being unable to sleep has made me highly productive this morning. I got a workout in this morning and returned home before anyone else had woken, which meant that I was able to shower and dress and get to the coffee house for a little reflection before the onslaught of work begins.

There are two men – one on each side of me – reading the paper. I don’t think that I’ve seen two people reading a paper in years. I know that my parents still read the paper, and while their rural location doesn’t lend to finding information quickly online, I believe that even if they had a good internet connection it wouldn’t replace the tactile relationship that they have with the local paper and a hot breakfast. Kami and I ordered the paper for six weeks when we first moved to the Seattle area, but we were so overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of paper that we canceled our subscription before we were forced to line the hallways.

There are two large market papers in Seattle – the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (or the Seattle PI). Oddly enough, they’re owned by the same company. They tried to sell the Seattle PI a few months ago, but with no success. So they’re going to be forced to move to an online-only format, which means that bloggers are becoming the paper, and papers are becoming blogs.

While I regret that employees of the PI will be without work, I can’t help but think that it’s little wonder that the PI wasn’t profitable. My relationship with the local papers is not a fond one – in a recent newsletter to my clients I pointed out their duplicitous nature – selling papers with a dramatic headline that the body of the article seemed to refute. As with most anything, I think that when a company becomes more concerned with the sales of their product rather than the quality of their product, their business will suffer. I have two examples on opposite sides of the issue that readily come to mind: GM and Apple. I remember about six years ago the CEO of General Motors apologizing to his customers for 20 years of shoddy craftsmanship – which was a trend not easily reversed, if their present day concerns are any evidence. Apple Computers has had slow growth in comparison to their competitors, but I know that they’ve always been concerned with quality design and quality products, and over the last eight years they’ve reaped the benefit.

The last example has become very practical to me lately. Although I wanted a MacBook Pro notebook computer, financial prudence compelled me to order a Dell computer at 1/2 the price. In short order though, it became readily apparent that Dell’s mission was less consumer-centric than Apple’s, and I’ve since cancelled my Dell order so that I can order a computer that I want. I need to practice what I preach after all: you get what you pay for, and while I could have gotten a discounted product with discounted customer service from a discount retailer, I’m voting with my dollars for a company and a product of quality.

By the way – the order that I cancelled with Dell – they shipped it anyway. They didn’t mean to, and they shouldn’t have, but they did. Which means that I have to go through the hassle of processing its return and waiting two weeks for them to reverse the charges to my credit card. The Dell computer should arrive today – I’ve never looked forward to returning something so much in all my life.