Semantic Nonsense: Minding your business

Business is hard, but there is hope.

Sometimes, it’s easier for a person who lives outside your box to clearly see solutions and opportunities. After all, that’s why consulting does so well for itself.

Out of the goodness of my heart, here are some can’t-miss suggestions from the world’s premier treasure hunter consultant: Me.

Trust me.

EA should by Gamestop

Put down your ballots for freezing cold take of the year and her me out.

It’s hard to compete selling games. Everybody and their brother want to get in on the Steam money, and the churn is constant. With one breath Discord is opening its own storefront, and with the next Razer is closing thiers.

EA’s Origin store has persisting mostly because it’s mandatory for EA’s games. It works, but it’s not appetizing enough to other publishers for them to let EA make money of other people’s games the way Valve does with Steam. With Epic joining the fight at a very competitive rate, things look even worse for Origin’s growth potential.

The opportunity everybody is ignoring? Sure, settling for a piece of the digital marketplace is easy and makes some money. But right now an enterprising company has a chance to also get the entire retail pie.

Gamestop devours its competition long ago and has been lumbering along ever since. But while they have very valuable merchandise, the business model has gone stale and faltered. Gamestop has been courting buyers for a year, and there are certainly interested parties. The banks, however, are not interested whatsoever in Gamestop’s asking price so they remain unsold.

Now, EA has had their own stock stumble recently, but it’s not really anything THAT troubling; their mountain of cash is doing just fine, thanks. It’s enough to get Gamestop at fair market value twice over without borrowing a cent. It would just be a reinvestment of their current investment profits, really, which traditionally have been in the red for EA (they are no stranger to going on spending sprees) but paid dividends this year.

Now just imagine what EA can do when Origin is the only store that exists in both the real world and the digital one. The cost of entry online? So tiny there’s a content stream of contenders. The cost of opening up a new chain to compete with the brick-and-mortar version or Origin? Extreme. Untenable. And there’s only one already deployed. Other publishers might be able go without Origin with no problems, but pulling their titles from Gamestop would be unthinkable.

Seize this moment, EA. Buy Gamestop and realize a vertical integration the likes of which have never been possible before in video games history. The opportunity is right in front of you. Are you strong enough to take it?

Apple should do everything I’ve ever told them to do on this blog

This is moreso just a nod to the fresh rumor that Apple is going to make large notebooks again. First and foremost in the rumor mill: producing a laptop with a screen size larger than 14.9” for the first time since 2012. The rumor also includes Apple finally following up their Thunderbolt “cinema display” that hasn’t seen an update in even longer, so things are started to get interesting for the long-beleaguered power-users.

The scuttlebutt even includes a refresh of the iPod Touch line, if you can believe that. While I’m personally skeptical of this “everything old is new” pivot being the real deal, it would probably do Apple better than their long worn-out strategy of “thinner at any cost.”

The GOP should take the money and run

Okay guys, you placed a huge bet and landed it. You got a big tax cut for big businesses.You got two conservatives on the Supreme Court. You really have accomplished more in two years than most are lucky to get in two terms.

But those words, “bet” and “luck,” have a way of haunting you. I know you’re tempted to let your money ride when you’re getting some big payouts, but never forget the only rule of gambling: The house always wins.

The longer this goes, the more you’re pressing your luck, and you will at some point lose everything if you don’t cash out first. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And things will be worse than ever for you if you carry on long enough to see the result of the equation trying to balance itself out.

Give yourselves some high-fives, then get either 25th the guy or primary him to preserve your winnings. Stretching it out is only strengthening the backlash. You may be winning now, but hen politics turns into little more than an endlessly escalating curb-stomp battle, we’ll all lose.

Facebook should sell itself to anybody rich enough and stupid enough to buy it

And while we’re on the subject of cashing out…

It’s been a good run (financially — everything else was shit), but I think it’s time for everybody there with half-a-brain to put on that golden parachute and let it all be somebody else’s problem.

Have you seen how happy MySpace’s Tom is with early retirement? This, too, can be yours. All you have to do is put that blinding ambition down and have an unobstructed view of reality.

It’s much too late to die a hero. But you don’t have to be the villain you’ve lived long enough to become any longer than you have already.

Kit-Kat flavor of the week: Strawberry

The flavor is solely in the casing here… and I wouldn’t dare accuse it of being strawberry-like. It’s almost like an AirHead, really. So I suppose the business angle here is to sign an integrated brand promotion deal with AirHeads similar to what Oreo does with Swedish Fish.