Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

Comsumers in the US are the nicest and honest consumers. Majority of them don’t exploit consumer-friendly business policies. I think this is why consumer businesses in this country can make money and guarantee high degrees of consumer satisfactions.

Here is a real-life example. Some Netflix members by accident damaged the DVD’s that they have rented from Netflix. Since Netflix has a policy that will replace any damaged DVDs’ due to shipping errors, these Netflix members could have reported their DVD’s were damaged during the shipping. But no, they did not do that. Because these honest consumers believe Netflix should not eat the cost that was caused by their mistakes, they paid for the damaged DVD’s.

If the same scanario were happened in some Asian country (e.g., China), I think the consumers’ reaction would have been totally different. They probably would not pay for the DVD’s just because they can get Netflix to eat the cost. They probably would think “since no one is forcing us to pay for the damage, we should not have to pay for it”.

CNET News: “When Sun Microsystems releases Solaris as open-source software, it plans to provide legal protection from patent-infringement suits to outsiders using or developing the operating system–one of several ways Sun hopes to make Solaris more competitive with Linux.”

I think this is a very smart business move by Sun. Many open source developers are “lone coders“. In this patent feeding frenzy world, many of them are afraid of developing software that may lead to patent law suits. By backing these people up, Sun encourages Linux developers to switch to Solaris. I see lights in Sun.

San Francisco city officials are considering charging grocery stores 17 cents for each grocery bag to discourage the use of plastic bags. I think this is a good idea, and the state of Maryland should start doing that too.

Whenever I go grocery, I always come home with tons of bags and don’t know what to do with them. Most of the people that I know here usually just throw them away as trash. Back in Hong Kong, grocery bags are usually used as garbage bags at homes. We don’t use super-sized garbage bags in Hong kong because we don’t typically collect a lot of trash in house before we throw them out. The typical kitchen size in Hong Kong is much smaller than the ones in the US. Not collecting a lot of garbage in the house is for sanitary reason.

Talking about the grocery stores. The grocery stores in Hong Kong are very cheap about giving you plastic bags. Usually, they don’t give you extra bags unless all of you bags are stuffed. Some people may dislike this kind of treatment. But, I think it makes a lot of sense if you know giving away too much free bags will increase cost and create environemntal problems.

I say, it’s time for the US government to encourage people to use less plastic bags. Meanwhile, we as responsible earth inhabitants can do these to help.

PVRblog talks about this web site called PVRCompare.COM, which runs PVR (Personal Video Recorder) reviews and comparison articles. I read through some of the review articles and found them to be very useful. If you are thinking about buying a new PVR this X’mas, this is the web site for you.

The Visual Thesaurus is an interesting use of the “spider-style” graphical layout (try it yourself).

Do you know there are at least 15 ways to describe the sound of laughing?

I know taking a nap in the afternoon can increase productivity. However, I would never think that someone can actually build a business that exploits this knowledge.

The Wired News reports that since May 2004, MetroNaps has offered 20-minute naps in specially designed, futuristic-looking pods in a suite in the Empire State Building.

“The US currency dropped as low as $1.2940 against the euro.“

This is a bad news to those who are planning to visit Europe in the near future. Of course, it is a good news to the European travellers.

It’s time to add some foreign currency into your investment portfolio. Given the political and economic uncertainties in the US, I think Euro will be stronger in 2005.

I’m upset that Kerry has lost but not too surprised that Bush has won. Todd S. Purdum wrote in this NYTimes article,

“It was not a landslide, or a re-alignment, or even a seismic shock. But it was decisive, and it is impossible to read President Bush’s re-election with larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country - divided yes, but with an undisputed majority united behind his leadership.”

I agree with Purdum. I’ve been in this country for more than 10 years and lived in different regions of the country — the West Coast, East Coast, and Mid-West. After meeting many people from different cultural backgrounds, I found that a majority group of people in this country have few things in common: (i) they don’t care about the international issues as much as the local issues, (ii) they have limited knowledge about other coutries and cultures, (iii) they live in the same towns or cities where they were born and have never travelled abroad, and (iv) they are less open-minded about accepting other cultures and traditions. I called these people Category I people.

Of course, there are people who are just the opposite of what I have described, but that group of people remains to be minority. I called them Category II people.

I think the Category I people likely have voted for Bush, and the Category II people likely have voted for Kerry. Another way of looking at the exit polls — top 20 states have voted for Kerry, and the bottom 30 states have voted for Bush.