Month: September 2003

Maurice H. Hartigan II interviews Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich in The RMA Journal.

So while a product company concentrates on the product itself, I quickly discovered that in financial services the product is actually secondary to the way in which it‚s distributed. In financial services your product is actually service. The majority of banking products are virtually indistinguishable˜a commodity. It‚s the delivery of the product that creates differentiation, and the critical element in delivery is your people. Most brand managers who came from packaged goods didn‚t understand that it‚s the interaction of your sales and service with the customer that is critical to success, not your ability to differentiate the product.

He goes on to comment on the budget crisis in California — citing some numbers I hadn’t heard before:

During the Internet bubble, incredible tax revenues were generated in California essentially by stock options ˜ $18 billion in 2000. About 33% of California‚s revenue in 2000 was generated by 44,000 taxpayers. That‚s not a sustainable model. If we saw that in our business, we‚d be very concerned.

Daniel Weintraub posts an item on his excellent Sacramento Bee weblog this morning about Senator John Burton’s SB.2 bill which purports to require employers of more than 20 employees to provide health insurance to their employees. One effect of this legislation would be to put the state into the business of deciding which employer health insurance plans are acceptable, which aren’t, etc. Another will be to provide yet another incentive for California companies to seek employees elsewhere, offshore, etc. Just what this state doesn’t need at a time when every job really counts. Venture investors, are you listening?

The Sacramento Bee’s Daniel Weintraub is doing a fabulous job on the California recall election. Here’s one of his latest postings:

Here is a bit of history on the debate over the recall at the time of the American Revolution, from a New York lawyer who wrote a master’s thesis on the subject…. [California Insider]

SJ Mercury: Spamming sleazebags ruining e-mail. Dan Gillmor. The responsibility for this debacle is everywhere: malevolent creativity by those who take advantage of lousy software and the Net’s open nature, not to mention clueless users, systems administrators and Internet service providers. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Ray Ozzie wrote a while back about the “post-email” age. Spam is driving us to it very, very quickly.