GM Collections… Doomed to Fail!

I just read that General Motors is setting a plan in motion to create superstores is some major metro areas that will carry every GM brand. They are going to be called GM Collections. This is a plan that will fail. This plan will result in fewer car sales overall for GM, and will degrade the premium brands.

Think about this quick scenario. Three people each walk into three separate dealerships. One goes to a Pontiac/GMC dealership looking for a mid size, 3 row SUV. He has a chance of buying a GMC Acadia. The second guy goes to a Buick dealership looking for a mid size, 3 row SUV. He has a chance of buying a Buick Enclave. The third guy goes to a Saturn dealership looking for a mid size, 3 row SUV. He has a change of buying a Saturn Outlook.

Now you have GM Collections that has all three of those cars competing against each other for those same three buyers. Which cars will they have a chance of leaving with? What salesman is going to know the difference between the three SUVs and the hundreds of other cars available? How much extra time will a salesman have to spend on the customer looking for a mid size, 3 row SUV since they may want to see all three? How many 3 row SUVs does GM have? The three above plus the Cadillac SRX, Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy, GMC Envoy Denali, Chevrolet Tahoe, GMC Yukon, Chevrolet Suburban, GMC Yukon XL, GMC Yukon Denali, GMC Yukon XL Denali, Cadillac SRX, Cadillac Escalade, Cadillac Escalade ESV.

O.K. I went pretty far making my point. A lot of those SUVs are truck based, and not mid sized. But those are still a lot of SUVs for a salesman to know about. Besides, how many people looking for a Cadillac want to shop for vehicles next to the guy who what’s a basic transportation Chevrolet HHR. Can the sales staff know enough to treat the Cadillac buyer in a way that he won’t want to run to a BMW or Lexus dealership.

The point is when you have that many brands and models competing against each other in the marketplace putting them under one roof is just going to confuse customers, strain salesman’s knowledge and alienate buyers that expect premium treatment. GM Collections will fail.

Apple Announcements… BORING!

Normally I like to hear the announcements that come out of MacWorld. Not this time. Lets see…

iPod Touch & iPhone gets new apps – So the applications they removed from the iPhone (e-mail, stocks, weather, etc.) are now available for the iPod Touch… for $20. Ooh! And you can now customize the “home” screen of the iPhone for those that don’t need to track stock prices, check weather and look at maps every time they use their phone. Yippie! Don’t even get me started on WebClips, saving part of a web page as a shortcut.

Time Capsule – An AirPort Extreme with a hard drive. So, Time Machine will only work with an external drive or a Mac Server. Few Mac fanboys have a Mac Server at home. So, in essence, Time Machine only works with external drives. Until now. To put it another way, Time Machine (the backup software in Mac OS X 10.5) is really just something to get you to by Time Capsule, a $300-$500 hard drive with a wireless adapter. Rip Off. Why don’t they let Time Machine backup to any network share on any machine, or any other NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. Now that would be an announcement I could get into.

MacBook Air – This “is the world’s thinnest notebook.” So, take the smaller than most MacBook 13″ and make it smaller, lighter, less powerful… oh, and more expensive. They couldn’t come out with a decent business class laptop with a 15.4″ screen for the same $1,799. I would rather hear about a toned down MacBook Pro with reasonable graphics and a nice size hard drive (for dual booting into Windows) for mainstream and business users. A laptop that could be gobbled up my the masses. Nope! Instead, they introduce another premium priced computer that fills an even smaller niche than the MacBook… that is already one of the lightest in its class. Yawn!

Movie Rentals – Wow, I can rent any one of 1,000 movies for $3.99 but only have 24 hours to watch it. I’m so excited. I can even download movies directly to my Apple TV without a computer. I still have to pay for those movies, which means I should get the Apple TV for FREE. They still don’t let you copy your own movies to the Apple TV so you can have a media library of your movies in one location. In fact, they still don’t let you rip movies in any way. If anyone could do this right Apple could… but doesn’t.

Maybe next year we will get better announcements.

Cadillac CTS Coupe

I just came across this and could not resist posting it.

I got the picture from Autoblog here. I am pretty sure I will have to get a four door when the time comes, but this sure looks like it would be a sweeter ride than a G37 Coupe.

Zuned

I was checking my statistics for this site and noticed I have not posted much since getting my Zune 80. Sorry! I have been extremely busy playing with my Zune. I am completely going through my entire music collection and organizing everything. I will not put everything on my Zune, but almost. At this exact moment I have 2,977 songs on my Zune. I started with my entire CD collection and now I am going through all the music I have downloaded over the years. I figure I will hit about 4,000 songs, but that may be a stretch.

I am really enjoying listening to music that I have not heard in a long time.

A friend said I could never listed to it all. Maybe not, but I will be close. Let’s do some math. Figure an average of 4 minutes per song. I do most of my listening at work. If I listen for an average of 5 hours a day (definitely a reasonable average) that’s 75 songs a day. That’s less than 40 days to cover every song (so far). Since I put all my CDs on my Zune I can listen to whole CDs or skip the filler songs. I figure I can cover most everything in about 30 days at work. Maybe less if I get aggressive and listen for closer to 8 hours of my 8 hour days, meetings not withstanding.

I am going through all my downloaded music alphabetically. I am on the E’s. As I finish each letter I tend to listen to music from that letter both from CDs and downloads. Some letters take a long time (the B’s were grueling because I love so many artist that start with B), while others go fast (D’s were a piece of cake and only took an hour or so one night.

Regardless, this is one toy I will get a lot of use out of. I even watched the first 40 minutes of Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan at lunch today. How cool is that?

Blue-Ray vs. HD-DVD… The Winner Is…

For any of you wondering which will win the high definition video disc format war I have the answer. Yep, I know exactly which format is going to win. In fact, it already won. Which one is the winner? Listen to this…

The other day my wife asked me if I was going to get Blu-Ray. That means Blu-Ray has already won. When the general public knows enough about the name of something it has already won. I don’t think my wife knows what HD-DVD is, but if you asked her she would quickly figure it out as a high definition version of DVD. But she didn’t ask me if I was going to get HD-DVD. She asked if I was going to get Blu-Ray. I am sure she thinks Blu-Ray is a better version of DVD, and therefore doesn’t think of HD-DVD when the subject of a new kind of DVD is brought to light. She thinks Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray won because it is in the vernacular of the general public. Sorry HD-DVD, it was nice not knowing you.

Best Day Ever – 1,342 Hits

Yesterday, Jan 7th, this blog received a new record… 1,342 hits. In fact, my traffic has spiked a bit since the 1st of the year. I went over 1200 hits on the 1st, and have been averaging about 1200 hits a day since then. Prior to 2008 my record was just a tick over 1100 hits in one day.

Why the increase in traffic? My guess is that a lot of people got new computers over the holidays and are looking for answers to getting Outlook 2000 running on Windows Vista. If you look to the right you see I have a page dedicated to this topic. And… this is really cool… if you Google “Outlook 2000 on Vista” my blog is the first two links. How cool is that?!?

Camaro is still the biggest search topic to get traffic to this site, but that doesn’t jive with my recent increase. If you want some info on the upcoming Camaro you should at least check Chevrolet’s Official Camaro Site.