Michael Girdley: 10/01/2004

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hmmm

Hoops

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Bad ankle

worse ankle

basketball is for kids not old people

Super twisted ankle hurt badly

booth

My booth at the college fair

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Two hours later i get to vote

upon request

nashville

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Visiting grandparents in law and nephew in ohio

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Visiting grandparents in law and nephew in ohio

ohio

Ohio high school football baby

ohio

Ohio foliage in october

An Idea for the Old-School Airlines

The old-school airlines like American Airlines and United are toast. Their cost structures are too high compared to the low-cost rivals like JetBlue or Southwest. There is no stickiness to their product: I'll fly whoever is cheapest and 99% of people paying their own way will do the same.

The funny thing about the airlines is the in-the-box thinking. (Personally, I have a theory that the industries that are hurting in America suffer from a lack of talented people entering them. For example, how many Harvard Business School grads went to work in auto manufacturing last year? http://www.hbs.edu/mba/yourcareer/statistics.html ... In Japan, they get SMART people to work for Toyota.)

The one strength of the old-school airlines is their comprehensive network. You just can't get certain places on Southwest no matter how hard you try. So, the old-school airlines should attempt to shift the industry by going to a completely different sales model that leverages this strength. The idea is that they introduce a pricing model that allows customers to purchase "miles" of flying. So, for example, you could purchase 5000 miles of flight for some amount that would allow you to fly domestically anywhere on American using those miles. You'd obviously pay more for international miles.

Upsides: better cash flow (people pay ahead of time or as monthly installments!), leverage their strength of network, better lock-in ("I've got 1200 miles left on United, let's fly them.")

Downsides: doesn't do much for irregular travelers, can't get as much revenue from the big-dollar paying expense account people (are there any more left, really?)

This idea may not work, but anything is better than what the airlines are currently doing (which is doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result!).

minor league hockey

BEA Stupid

I hate to say it, but my former company does some pretty dumb things:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=BEAS

If I'm reading that right, the new Exec VP hired was granted 100,000 shares at a par value of $.01 a piece. Whatever happened to giving someone options so atleast they hung around for a year or two before they made a fortune dumping the company's stock?

(I'm not even going to get into the senior execs playing the "who can sell their stock the fastest" game since 2001...)