Misaligned Systems

After marring my wife who is a 1^st grade teacher at a public school, I have been able to see just how misaligned public schools are.  Teachers are reviewed on how well their students test. However, teachers have no way to make students study or incentivize students to do well. Each year at the end school students take a test and it is the same to them if the make a 100 or don’t get a single question correct because the reward is the same either way, the student moves on to the next grade. However if a teacher can be place on probation if the students do not preform and if the teacher continues to have bad test takers for consecutive years the teacher may lose his or her job all the while the students, the actual one taking the test receive no replications because of their scores. If this were practiced in a manufacturing it would be the same as punishing the production team for the sales department consistently under selling.

I believe that the public education is seriously misaligned in regards to the review system that they currently use. I say review system because test scores is really a review of how well the students perform. Because of the way that the system is currently structured, there is no way for teachers to have a serious way to provide incentive to their students. The students need to be held responsible for the scores that they make. By restructuring public education and giving the power to teacher to hold back students when not passing tests. The new system would help align the incentives of the students and the teachers so that teachers are not overly punished for the failed preparation of students. 

Playbook 2.0

Rim is releasing the blackberry Playbook 2.0 which is their version of a tablet. The previous tablet offered by blackberry failed. One of the reasons for this is because of the distinct lack of apps that are available on the blackberry market. To fix this problem the playbook 2.0 will allow developers to submit their android applications and they will run on the new blackberry operating system. 

  To lure developers to submit apps to the blackberry marketplace, RIM is offering a free Playbook 2.0 for each developer and has created a process that takes approximately 30 minutes in order to submit the android application to the blackberry marketplace. A developer can easily license an app for blackberry without changing the code that allows the app to run on android. For example, an app to change operations systems i.e. android to IOS, the app has to be rewritten to in a different programming language. This requires the developer to acquire new skill sets and spend time redeveloping the app.  By offering hardware and allowing an easy way to transfer an already completed app to Blackberry

The model that this applies to is the value curve. Customers see tablets only as valuable as the apps that are available to run on them. Executives at RIM realized that developers didn’t want to develop for their operating system and came up with a solution that piggybacked on an already thriving environment of Android. By allowing developers to use the same app on their operating system, they decrease the cost to developers to create apps for them while increase the value of their product by increasing the number of apps available. In the end the value to both developers and customers both increase.

Oklahoma Recruiting

National Signing day for college football is the first Wednesday of February. This year the university of Oklahoma changed its strategy for signing recruits. In the past the university of Oklahoma would focus on signing the best prospects in the state of Oklahoma and getting the best possible prospects for the state of Texas. This strategy would usually result in 70-80% of recruits coming from these two states. This year however Oklahoma recalibrated its strategy to finding the best recruit in the nation for their current needs. This year OU signed 4 recruits from Florida, 3 from Oklahoma, 3 from California, and 5 from Texas. Overall OU signed players from 11 different states.

The positives of this strategy is that when OU is successful in obtain a recruit the quality of that recruit will be better. A possible downside of this strategy is that they will be more competition for the recruits because instead of getting the best in one or two states they are trying to get the best in the nation. This increase competition means that OU could possible miss out on fulfilling a need.

As I think about this in regards to the competitive advantage model we talked about in class. OU seems to have moved from differentiated narrow market to a differentiated broad market. I say that they are differentiated in the terms of college football because they a brand that very few other teams can duplicate. I believe that they have changed from a the narrow market to a broad market because they have changed from recruiting in a narrow market -Texas and Oklahoma- to a broad market-the entire nation.

Profit Pools and Barnes and Noble

My thoughts today are about profit pools and Barnes and Noble’s idea of spinning off the Nook e-Reader part of its business. First off a profit fool is where a company looks at its services and looks for high profit areas and expands on them to gain greater profits.  Currently, Barnes and Noble is facing financial difficulties and is looking to raise cash in order to fund “other operations”. In order to raise the cash that they want Barnes and Noble is looking to sell their e-Reader business.  I believe that if Barnes and Noble were to spin off this part of their business that they would lose the opportunity that the e-Reader profit pool provides.

I think that e-Readers provide a huge profit pool especially for a brick and mortar store like Barnes and Noble. No other e-Reader has a store where you can browse through books. Kindle provides all their material digitally and Apple does not have hard copies of book available in their stores. Barnes and Noble could make special offers such as buy a hard copy of a book and get a digital copy for a nominal cost $1-$5. Because of the relatively small cost it take to obtain a digital copy of a book, this extra service would have very high profit margins. This is something that other e-Reader services would not be able to offer.  This is just one of many promotions or deals that could take advantage of the brick and mortar stores as well as e-Readers and digital content that Barnes and Noble can provide.