Letters to the Editor
Gwool
Published Letters: 366 Editor's Choice: 40
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Classic Business Modeling
[Read the article: Why Blockbuster is gaining on Netflix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]An old Mentor of mine used to say you can always tell the market pioneer as he is the one face down in the trail with an arrow in their back found by the second to market.
Wang created the word processing market. Apollo created the engineering workstation and where are they know.
Netflix created the model, yet lacks the bricks and mortar component that some will find desireable. The barriers to entry for Netflix to compete on that level are prohibitively high. The barriers to entry for blockbuster to enter that market was some simple web programming and added inventory at its regional distribution centers. It had an infrastructure throwing off cash to fund the logical diversification strategy into DVDs by mail.
In either case both companies are now racing against time to develop the DVD-by-download model. Cable companies have the wire now and charge more than the Blockbuster/Netflix rates for their limited distribution. Few home users have the savvy to download onto their PCs through traditional methods and then use their HDTV as a monitor to play movies back. (Gateway took a crack at this a decade or so ago and crashed and burned.)
That's the next frontier.
Me? I still troll the local blockbuster store. I evaluated both mail packages about a year ago and found the lateness of their new releases relative to what was available in the store unsatisfactory. Then again, I still try to hit the movie theatres about twice a month with my wife on a weeknight when it's $5 a head as a cheap date night.
Likewise, having tastes ranging from a preteen girl, to teen boys, to middleaged boomers, the queue would be a nightmare to manage.
I'll bypass mail order and go straight to download when it's mastered.
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She Ain't Got the Ring, So She Can't Do A Thing ... doo-wa, doo-wa
[Read the article: My brother left his girlfriend with a 5-month-old baby]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In a relationship for 15 years. Things are a little dull. You add a kid. Life changes even more and for the worse. Not married? You get to walk with few if any strings attached. Married and you ponder the need to carve up assets, hire a lawyer, go to court, get nasty with one another, give up half of what you own, and throw up in your mouth when you look at the legal bill.
My wife and I had been in a relationship for 7 years and MARRIED for 5 before we spit out a critter. There's absolutely no way to prepare for bring home a child from the hospital. Before getting married, you can kick the tires, so to speak, by living together with nary a peep from society these days.
But a kid? One minute you are able to pick up and go out and do whatever you want on a lark (with the increasing physical discomfort of the pregnancy a small limitation), and the next minute you are chained to something about the size of small roasting chicken that does little more than convert breast milk into baby shit while disrupting your sleep habits.
Throw in episiotomy-induced celibacy, and you have the makings for one miserable little time in your life.
It was not until 5 years later that my wife and I each admitted we had BOTH felt as though we had made a huge mistake having a child. We don't fucking learn from our mistakes, as we had three more of the little bastards, three of whom are now teenaged sons who have taken the depth of our despair to new lows.
It therefore doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the LW's brother and constant companion of 15 years have hit a few bumps in the road. It's human nature, as it is one incredbly huge and, yes, difficult adjustment to a couple to add this new dimension during a time of sleep and sexual deprivations. I mean, who the hell wants to sign up for THAT duty? It's why my wife calls the pleasure of sex and the pains of pregnancy and child birth "Mother Nature's Cruel Joke."
So these two do not have the traditional ties that bind from the legal construct of marrige. They aren't necessarily gordian knots, but they are there to hold people together when the moral obligations are easy to rationalize away because of short term misery. There's a few LEGAL obligations, established by society with some dispassion for the moment, to compel people to think things through. You really want to walk? You have a legal obligation in the eyes of society to accept responsility for that which you hath wrought.
Alas in this instance the LW's brother can simply skip out, no fuss, no muss, and come by to visit his kid as needed the way a wealthy person might visit a horse boarded at someone else's farm. Fifteen years is a long time, so the old common law provisions might kick in to put the financial screws to this guy in a way he might not have imagined when he grabbed his toothbrush and headed for the exit. Depending upon what he did to the bridge when he fled over it, he may not be able to turn back should the consequences of his quitting the relationship come home to roost.
As I have said time and again, between the financial ramifications, Aids, and the movie Fatal Attraction, I continue to see my wife as the most beautiful woman in the world. Of course, the fact that she still turns me on doesn't hurt, either.
This guy packed it in because it was easy to do. Four months is hardly a long enough adjustment period with a child. As the song goes, "She ain't got the ring, so she can't do a thing..."