Today I shook hands and exchanged business cards with a gentleman whose personal worth exceeds $2 billion.
Kindle, part 1
Ahoy, dear readers! I’m awfully busy at the BIO show in San Diego. But rather than leave you without your daily dose of my ramblings, I thought I’d post this e-mail I wrote a pal in response to his query of, “How do you like your Kindle
I like the Kindle, but I’m a strange person. The screen is just fine for reading, and battery life hasn’t been an issue. Some people may have issues with the fact that all books are in the same typeface, or that they can’t tell how long a book is (there’s a row of dots on the bottom of the screen that show your progress in the book/article). I experienced that with Lord Jim, which I thought was a brief novel (Heart of Darkness length), but which I eventually realized was around 300 pages long.
The great advance is the Kindle store, which lets you buy books on the fly. On Sunday, at 5:30am, waiting at the gate in the Louis Armstrong Airport in Louisiana, I decided I’d like to read Netherland, the new novel by Joseph O’Neill. I looked it up on the store, bought it, and had it on the device within a minute. The store selection isn’t good enough for my oddball tastes (they have very few of the Pevear & Volokhonsky Russian translations, for example, sticking instead to the old Garnett or Maude ones), but for new(ish) books, it’s perfect.
Even better is the “try a sample” function, which sends the first chapter (approx.) of any book in the store to your Kindle. You can access the store either from the Kindle itself (kinda clunky, but fine when you’re not around your computer) or through your computer, since the Kindle is synched to your Amazon account. I can’t say enough about this sampling function. It’s similar to the 30-second samples you’d find on iTunes, but 30 pages is so much more worthwhile in figuring out whether a particular book is up your alley. Plus, the sample remains on your device; that is, it’s not a streaming, time-limited sample.
Pricing for new books is generally $9.99, with older ones much cheaper. There’s also a huge selection of public domain books at manybooks.net, formatted for Kindle. You can download those to your computer free (they accept donations), and then put them on the Kindle via USB. I picked up a bunch of classics that way, so I’ll never get trapped in a foreign country with nothing to read (you can’t access the Kindle store outside the U.S.). Last year in Milan, I got caught bookless after finishing books by William Gibson and Tom Stoppard, and the only bookstore I had time to get to had a minuscule English-language section, mainly of Penguin Classics. The upshot was that I finally read Middlemarch. Now, I’ll have a ton of choices waiting on the Kindle.
I don’t have to travel as much this year as I have in recent ones, but I’m still quite happy that I won’t have to lug multiple books in my carry-on anymore.
It’s better to travel
My flight to San Diego was supposed to leave Newark at 7:30pm, but the terrible weather coming across the east delayed the inbound flight. I got wind of that early in the day, and saw the flight was pushed off till 8:53. Still, I got to the airport about 2 hours early, so I could avoid driving in the crappy weather. As I waited for the airport monorail, the departures board changed from 8:53 to 9:44. Sigh. Well, with the 3-hour gain, I wouldn’t be getting in too late.
I figured I’d spend some time in the Presidents Club, but it was warm, humid, and there were two-year-old twins running in circles around the place, screaming.
So I headed over to Gallagher’s for a nice steak dinner around 7:15, feeling I’d earned it. I made my order, and checked my iPhone for messages and e-mail. Why, there’s one from Continental! My flight is leaving at 7:45pm and I need to be at the gate!
I got up, grabbed my bag and my carry-on, and found my waiter. I said, “My flight might be here early, but I’m not sure. I have to run over to find out. I’m really sorry!” He told me not to worry about it as I hurried out; in his hands was a plate with my salmon appetizer.
I got to the gate, and found a lot of puzzled passengers. No one knew why we were suddenly listed as a 7:45 takeoff, especially since the gate indicated a 7:45 takeoff . . . for a flight to Las Vegas. Still, the main departures board had us listed at 7:45 and, since there was not a single rep from Continental at the gate, we waited.
Eventually, a stewardess walked up to the desk. We asked her what was up, and she said, “Well, I’m supposed to be working that flight to San Diego, and I don’t know why they just posted this time. The incoming plane isn’t here, so there’s no way we can be leaving at 7:45.”
The passengers, many of whom were biotech executives and scientists waiting to get out to SD for the big conference, were exasperated. Then the two-year-old twins showed up, with their parents and two more kids. One of the twins was well-behaved, but the other was screaming her head off.
I said to the stewardess, “Y’know, I was making my dinner order at Gallagher’s when I got that 7:45 notice.”
“Did you get to eat? Gallagher’s is great!”
“Nope. So, can you do me a favor? In the off-chance that they bring in another plane or something and decide to board us in the next hour, can you please give me a call on my cell and let me know, so I can get back here?”
“No problem!”
So, yes, on my first night away from my wife, I technically did give a stewardess my number.
With that, I headed back to Gallagher’s, and discovered that they’d kept my table for me, right down to the half-empty glass of water! I found my waiter, who said, “I didn’t think you’d be back! Let me get your salmon, and we’ll start your steak order.”
We added a G&T to the order, and I was a happy man. Even when the restaurant’s Muzak system decided to play James Taylor’s Fire & Rain. In an airport.
I headed back to the gate around 8:30 to check on the flight. It had changed back to a 9:44 departure. I’d been checking on Continental’s PDA page, which is an awesome idea, even though it showed me that I was #20 on the first-class upgrade list.
Around 9:15, we got word that the incoming flight had been delayed because of weather, and had been re-routed to Cleveland. It was going to arrive shortly, and would be brought over by 9:30, with a boarding time of 10pm. The board above the gate changed times to 10:13. As we got closer to 10, the time on the board changed to 10:25. Then it changed to “DELAYED” with no time of departure. That’s when we were informed that the plane had originated in Mexico City and thus needed to land at the B terminal and clear customs before getting towed over to the C terminal, where we waited.
When 11pm rolled around with no sign of our plane, passengers began calling their hotels to make sure their rooms were going to be waiting for them. I’d done the same early in the day, figuring on weather-delays. Of course, I didn’t figure on hitting 11pm with no set time of departure.
We were excited to see a plane roll up and passengers disembark, but one of the other stewards told me, “That’s not our plane.” They felt bad that the passengers were getting excited over this arrival.
Midnight eventually hit, and we were the last flight in our area of the terminal, except for an El Al flight to Tel Aviv, which was cordoned off from the rest of the gate area. They finally cattle-called us on to board, eschewing the Elite/everybody else split. The family with the two-year-old twins was ahead of me, and managed to block up the line for quite a while with clearing up the tickets for all of their family members.
Of course, the screaming one was in the row in front of me.
And, boy, could she scream. It took all the Xanax, gin, Bose noise-reducing headphones and illicit (we were below our cruising altitude) iPod use available to drown her out.
Fortunately, once we got off the ground, a stewardess asked me and the gentleman sharing my row (only two of us for three seats, thankfully) if we’d switch over to the exit row; the family of three there included a 13-year-old, which was against regs. We headed back, and passed the 5-hour, 40-minute flight in relative quiet, landing at 3:15am. The movie was Definitely, Maybe. I looked at it a little but didn’t listen in. I had two thoughts about it:
a) Abigail Breslin is adorable and I hope she has a long career ahead of her
b) Ryan Reynolds appears to have no interior life whatsoever. I have decided to call him Big Empty.
Then, touchdown! Since I had no checked luggage, all that was left was getting to my hotel and getting some sleep!
Not so fast, Mr. Roth! In fact, all that was left was finding a way to my hotel from the airport, since there was only one cab at the taxi-stand and no dispatcher.
I considered going all GTA and jacking a car, but realized I was in no shape to drive. This is rare for me, since alcohol, Xanax and loud music usually make me invulnerable to insight, but I knew I was flying on autopilot.
I decided to call my hotel (thanks, iPhone!) and ask them for their cab service’s number. Then I called the company and said, “Airport. Terminal 2. Late flight. At least 25 fares are standing on line. More coming out of baggage claim. Send help.”
And they did! I got to my room at 3:45am, slept(ish) for 5+ hours, and managed to get to the convention center in time to get my badge, set up our booth, and blow off tonight’s dinner plans with my coworkers.
Thanks for listening.
Unrequired Reading: June 13, 2008
Mobil Eyes
I didn’t take any pix yesterday when I went to NYC to interview an exec at Pfizer, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see any neat stuff. In this case, I discovered the Mobil Building, a block or so southwest of Pfizer’s HQ. A gent named wallyg posted a neat pix of the building (and the nearby Chrysler building) over at flickr:
Photo by wallyg, who appears to have some other really wonderful shots up at flickr, too!
Full circle!
I’ve long goofed that the Wall Street Journal’s standard headshot drawings look like they’ve been put through The Drew Friedmanizer. Today, the WSJ has a headshot by none other than. . . Drew Friedman!
That sad part of my “Drew Friedmanizer” reference is that Mr. Friedman hasn’t used his pointillist drawing style for more than a decade. But far be it from me to develop new material!
Anyway, the article is an interview with AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega about his view of the future of wireless (centered on the iPhone, of course).
Taleb and Taliban
I enjoyed this profile of Nassim Nicholas Taleb by Bryan Appleyard. I haven’t read his books yet, but I’m sympathetic to his notion that the radically unpredictable will trump your bitch-ass plans no matter how farsighted you think you are:
Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. Bankers and economists scorned and raged at Taleb. He didn’t understand, they said. A few months later, the full global implications of the sub-prime-driven credit crunch became clear. The world banking system still teeters on the edge of meltdown. Taleb had been vindicated. “It was my greatest vindication. But to me that wasn’t a black swan; it was a white swan. I knew it would happen and I said so. It was a black swan to Ben Bernanke [the chairman of the Federal Reserve]. I wouldn’t use him to drive my car. These guys are dangerous. They’re not qualified in their own field.â€
Reading the profile reminded me of a post I wrote about Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban
The book is also a product of its time, of course. One of the “problems†with Taliban is that oil was priced around $13/barrel in the years leading up to its publication. That fact was a key to his understanding of Russian and Iranian policy, and it’s completely understandable; who would even entertain the notion that oil would someday trade for 5x that price?
Of course, the black swan that I missed was that oil would soon trade for TEN TIMES that price. The profile is filled with some pretty neat anecdotes about the way our sophisticated models — especially the financial ones — can’t stand up to reality. Or, as Mr. Appleyard puts it:
He doesn’t make predictions, he insults people paid to do so by telling them to get another job. All forecasts about the oil price, for example, are always wrong, though people keep doing it.
Condescend much?
A few days ago, Sam Zell’s Tribune Group announced cutback plans at its newspapers. The announcement sparked an uproar because it mentioned the number of pages produced annually by reporters at different papers. The idea was to contrast how writers at some papers — the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant — each averaged 300+ pages a year, while those at the LA Times produced an average of only 51 pages a year. The Tribune’s goal is to reach the magical 50-50 advertising/editorial ratio (which I always manage to miss in my own magazine, coming closer to a 43/57 split. Seriously. I keep track of this stuff).
The rationale as I understand it is that most newspapers are wasting their time and money on national and international news, given that most readers get that sort of news from the internet. Instead, the Trib plans to focus on local news. According to that NYTimes’ writeup:
In his note to employees, Mr. Zell wrote that Tribune papers would be redesigned, beginning with The Orlando Sentinel, on June 22. Surveys show readers want “maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats,†he wrote. “We’re in the business of satisfying customers, and we will respond to what they say they want.â€
I guess I get where they’re coming from, but I’ve never been a fan of the “shrink to grow” mentality. Cuts may lead to profitability, but they don’t usually create opportunities for growth.
Today, the Times followed up with analysis of the strategy, interviewing publishers and editors. Rather than quote from that, I’d like to share this passage from the NYObserver’s analysis of the Times’ analysis:
“Most readers of newspapers really only consume a small fraction of what the newspaper produces,” [Neuharth] said. “Can you give them the stuff they want, even though there’s less of it over all? I think you can.”
But then again, Neuharth is the founder of USA Today, so we can’t really take advice from that.
Vanity (press), thy name is Observer. Please keep in mind that this newspaper was losing $2 million annually before its purchase by Jared Kushner. No word on how much money it’s losing now.
Kushner’s dad recently served time in federal prison for tax evasion and campaign finance violations, as well as hiring a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband, videotaping the hookup, and sending his sis a copy of the tape, in retaliation for her cooperation in an investigation of the aforementioned tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
USA Today isn’t hip or NYC-relevant like the Observer, but its ad revenue was up 2% in 1Q08, despite a drop in overall ad pages.
(Update! Here’s a big-ass interview with Jared Kushner, in which he says that the Observer’s revenues were up 61% in 1Q08. It’s privately held, so he could just be lying, or he could be inadvertently showing how truly disastrous the paper’s numbers were before. Anyway, here’s an excerpt —
People are hysterical about the death of newspapers and I would say they’re not dying, they’re just kind of reinventing themselves. What the ultimate body count is in reinvention is still to be determined, but the difference between a weekly and a daily is that my product is a country home, whereas a daily is your primary residence. You need a primary residence so people may choose one primary residence over the other, and internet and the newsprint to some degree are interchangeable for certain people. You’re only going to buy a country house if you know you’re going to use it. You’re only going to buy a country house if you want to go to it. You are only going to subscribe to the New York Observer if you’re going to make time to read it and if it adds something to your life that’s kind of special. The way I look at it is, there’s obviously a lot competing for readers’ attention these days, but the goal of the Observer is to be something very unique. It’s a hyper-unique product. I’d like to think that our editorial mission is to give our readers every week one or two things that they just can’t get anywhere else that would make them smile, or a little bit smarter. We have the smartest readership probably in the world of any publication.
— in which he ignores the definition of the word “unique”.)
Miller Bear
Bear Stearns’ sale to JP Morgan was approved by shareholders yesterday. As a buildup to the vote, the Wall Street Journal ran an epic three-part article (1, 2, 3) chronicling the sudden collapse of BS. I know most of you aren’t as interested in the machinations of business and finance as I am, but I think Kate Kelly tells a pretty amazing story, not least because it supports my thesis that Miller’s Crossing can be used to explain almost anything.
In this case, I’d like to contrast this passage from Ms. Kelly’s series of articles —
The brokerage’s sudden fall was a stark reminder of the fragility and ferocity of a financial system built to a remarkable degree on trust. Billions of dollars in securities are traded each day with nothing more than an implicit agreement that trading partners will pay up when asked. When investors became concerned that Bear Stearns wouldn’t be able to settle its trades with clients, that confidence evaporated in a flash.
— with this moment when Tom Regan confronts crime-boss Leo with the precariousness of his position after the great Danny Boy scene:
Last night made you look vulnerable. You don’t hold elected office in this town. You run it because people think you run it. Once they stop thinking it, you stop running it.
I make light of it, but it’s truly frightening, how huge a role perception plays in finance. Once the loss of confidence is even a rumor, an 85-year-old company can collapse within days.
(You could argue that BS’s collapse was actually an internal rot that took several years to manifest itself, like an elderly cancer patient who puts of going to the doctor until it’s far too late. I don’t think there’s a Miller’s Crossing analog for that, but I can go check.)
Then there’s the great passage when JPM is negotiating to buy BS. JPM originally offered $8-$12 per share, then came back with an offer of $2 per share — the final price turned out to be $10/share, down from $131.58 last October — reminding me of Tom’s negotiations on the phone with Bernie Bernbaum, the shmatte kid:
I figure a thousand bucks is reasonable. So I want two thousand.
Seriously, I think these articles are pretty important, if you’re looking for perspective on how the seize-up in credit markets is impacting, um, everything in our day-to-day. If they’re registration-required, lemme know and I can e-mail them over to you.
Bottoms up
Sorry I didn’t post earlier in the day, dear readers. I was just building up my courage for the plunge into our annual Top Companies Report, where I profile the top 20 pharma companies and top 10 biopharmas. I just have to tell myself, “Come July 2, it’ll all be done.” It used to be daunting, but the past few years of awful pipeline progress have made it awfully depressing, too.
This morning, I sat down with Pfizer’s 2007 annual report to run the basic numbers on drug revenues, and realized that two of its drugs that went generic dropped a combined $3.3 billion in revenues, while one of its biggest up-and-coming products just got banned by the FAA (in pilots and air traffic controllers) because of a variety of messed up side effects. The company’s biggest seller (the top-selling drug in history) was flat for the year, now that similar drugs have gone generic. I knew they have a tough slog ahead, but the numbers make it even starker. I thought, “I really should’ve started with another company.”
As it turned out, the next 7 or 8 companies on my list weren’t in great shape, either. The European firms got a little boost on my chart because of the exchange rate (I always put in a disclaimer that shows results in local currency, because I’m all about value), but I have a feeling I’m going to be hard pressed to find good stuff to write about in their profiles.
“Come July 2, it’ll all be done.”
On the positive side, I’m just about done with my review/ramble on the Kindle