Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

From Jeremy Keith's notes on Jared Spool's AEA Boston talk:

You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.

Holy smokes. Maybe I'm dense or out of the loop on these things, but while I figured there was a volume advantage to Amazon, I didn't realize that this cycle-based plan was the key to their profits.

Barn and I were talking about this a little over IM today, and this gives a lot of fun fuel with which to speculate about all things Amazon...

Continue reading "Waxing Speculative about Amazon’s Business Model"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Simplicity has been at the core of the web's philosophy of design for the last five years. Whether it's a major part of the visual approach, with large amounts of negative space, simple color palettes, and a focus on strong typography; the interface approach, with fewer things on a given page; or the product approach, with products that do "one thing well"; nearly everyone has carried the banner of simplicity at one point or another.

But while this approach has indeed helped us make products on the web that can appeal to a mass audience, it is starting to show its limitations. After a few months (weeks?) of using a simplicity-centric product like Basecamp, you start to run up against its limitations: it may facilitate the way that the creators work best, but you're not quite like the creators. Maybe you've outgrown the simple feature set and need more for your modestly-growing needs. Maybe you no longer have a few months' worth of content in the system, but now have years of content, and managing it all has become a bear. Simplicity is beginning to fail.

Part of the problem is that simplicity is the solution to a problem poorly-identified. Life is complex, and tools to conquer life's complexity need to instead embrace it, rather than ignore it.

Continue reading "The Shackles of Simplicity"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

The W3C has been working on a specification for a geolocation API, and has reached the point where it's starting to firm up and come together. That's good news, as it allows browsers to tell websites, through a JavaScript interface, where the browser is located.

The better news is that we're going to be able to use these new APIs sooner than you might have thought, given the relatively new nature of the API draft spec. Opera has implemented the spec in builds for several months, and it will be implemented in the release of Firefox 3.5. More recently, it's become evident that Mobile Safari in the new iPhone 3.0 software provides a geolocation API, and it appears (outside of the NDA realm, at least) that it is indeed compatible with the W3C API.

What does this mean?

Continue reading "Geo: Soon to be Legit"

Jackson Fox - User Experience Designer :

I’ve been using OmniGraffle as my primary tool for wireframing (and most everything else) for about 3 years. In that time I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at using it efficiently, but I do try to keep an eye out for new tips and tricks. Recently, I’ve been following along as the documentation geniuses at EightShapes have developed and released their InDesign-based documentation system called Unify. I was intrigued by one idea in particular: keeping wireframes and wireframe documents as separate files.

Continue reading "Managing Wireframes More Effectively in OmniGraffle"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Since my post about line length on the web got a bit of attention, much of it calling for more research, I figured we could help out with that a bit.

We've written up a brief reading comprehension test that can help us figure out if there are conclusions to be made about web text readability in different conditions. It's fast, it features a fun and quirky Cory Doctorow story, and it needs your input.

So head on over to the readability test and spend 10-15 mins to help us gather some great results. While you're at it, try to get everyone you know to take it as well, eh?

Once we've gotten a decent sample, we'll post the results here, so stay tuned.