That John Martin

Gordon “Butch” Stewart, the founder of Sandals Resorts, on dealing with a hotel close to the airport in this month’s Inc magazine:

Everybody thought we’d be out of business the first month because the hotel is very close to the airport. We came up with the idea of everyone waving to the people that were leaving in the plane, and kissing the one you love when a plane flies by. I don’t think we have five complaints after that.

And then the Concorde started flying to Jamaica once a week:

[The Concorde] made more noise than any airplane I’ve ever heard. The buildings shook. So we turned all the beach lounges to face the airport, and that magnificent airplane would get up right in front of everybody on the beach. Guests would come rushing in: “Has the Concorde taken off yet?” We made a promotion out of it.

Clever.

I publicly thanked the folks at Fog Creek for kindly switching our account subdomain for us (due to a company rename), so when the Beanstalk guys did the same thing, and upped the ante by allowing us to nominate a time for it to be done, I thought I should extend my thanks to them. So, thanks Chris!

BTW, if you’re a startup and buggering about maintaining your own Subversion installation, configuring websvn, and integrating with things like FogBugz and Campfire… you should seriously think about giving Beanstalk a go. We pay just $25/month for 20 users.

Ahh, life in the cloud.

We’ve had some shitty customer support experiences lately — I won’t name names — so when we asked the Fog Creek folks if they could change the subdomain of our hosted FogBugz account and then woke up to find it done and dusted in a little over a day with the perky email confirmation below, well, we were chuffed.

Your wish is our command.

Your website is now [new co].fogbugz.com.

Let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you!

We even forgot for a moment that the FogBugz wiki doesn’t surface a text-based markup language! (Markdown support would be so sweet.)

Thanks Eric!

Dick Costolo talks about the power of free in his first Wizard post of the year:

Look, there are plenty of great business models based on charging a subscription fee. It’s also the case that we’ve all been burned by “now it’s free, now it’s not” services in the past (think ATM’s, for example….it’s free until we’re all using it, at which point it’s $2 per withdrawal). Nonetheless, it would appear that models in which revenue and earnings accrue to a company as an indirect function of its free use are the models that have the most powerful impact on the Internet today, and you work against that trend at your own peril. This is probably true even where specific industries continue not to admit it. When you add costs to using a product/service, you add friction to customer adoption (he said, stating the obvious). If somebody else comes along and figures out how to make money on such a service by providing it for free, then it’s not so much fun to be you because your competitor’s lack of friction is going to make life harder for you. And time and time again on the Internets, we see that somebody ultimately comes along and figures out how to make a lot of money by offering for free a service for which somebody else is charging.

Via Daring Fireball, lots of interesting bits in this Fortune article on Apple. Their sales per square foot is hard to fathom:

And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 — tops for electronics retailers — while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

But the thing that caught my eye was the genesis of the Genius Bar:

“When we launched retail, I got this group together, people from a variety of walks of life,” says Johnson. “As an icebreaker, we said, ‘Tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.’” Of the 18 people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course: The concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there to help. “We said, ‘Well, how do we create a store that has the friendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?’” The answer: “Let’s put a bar in our stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice.”

I don’t normally think of Apple being a company that would use a lot of market research. In fact I’ve read several times that they make a point not to. (And wasn’t the Newton largely a product of focus groups?) I guess the distinction here is that they are researching general market attitudes, not fishing for reactions to a design, which, as Gladwell has argued, is frequently misleading. It would be interesting to see how many guerrilla research projects of this type they conduct.

I wandered over to BarCampSydney on Saturday and it was much more fun and stimulating than I had expected. The number of startups represented was roughly equal to the number of attendees, or so it seemed.

Joel Pobar did a session on Google style scaling. It looks like those guys have put together a slick MapReduce implementation in .NET, all from a garage in Brisbane, no less. I wonder, though, whether it’ll be prohibitive tying a technology such as that to an operating system with a non-zero licensing cost.

Ben Hogan, an old colleague now part of the ThoughtWorks brotherhood, delivered a sermon on agile. I’m still not sold on forced pairing, I tend to defer to Mr Yegge on matters agile, but it was a class presentation, and loads of fun to catch up afterwards.

Mike and Marty gave a talk on all things startup. Marty was good cop, Mike was bad cop. It was loose and interesting and full of anecdotes. The one thing that stuck with me was Mike’s comments about keeping pricing simple. In industries that have complicated pricing structures, a simplified pricing scheme becomes a feature. Possibly even something remarkable, literally. iTunes with 99c songs, all-you-can-eat food and phones and bandwidth, the FreshView guys with email marketing tools at 1c per email. Definitely something to ponder…

More BarCampSydney observations here, here, and here.