Filed under: Products and services, Launches, Apple Inc (AAPL), Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Marketing and advertising

Altogether now:

I’m a new soul
I came to this strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit bout how to give and take

Well, if Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has been listening to Yael Naim singing in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)’s MacBook Air ads, I hope it concentrated on the above first part only when it decided to bring a new soul to the ultra-thin portable notebook personal market.

The Voodoo Envy, which is about 0.7 inches thick and weighs some 3.4 pounds, was introduced at an event in Berlin today. To compare, the MacBook Air weighs three pounds and its sloping design makes its thickness varying from 0.16 inches at the thinnest part to 0.76 inches at the thickest. Both have a 13.3 inch display and while the Mac starts at $1799, the Voodoo starts at $2099.

The company also unveiled a new version of a touch-screen desktop Personal computer, an all-in-one Personal computer and 16 notebooks for consumers and businesses, including the EliteBook notebook for business users, which has a heavy-duty, scratch-resistant case.

So it seems H-P might have indeed learned something from Apple — just enjoy it did at the time from Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), or rather its mistakes — and is perhaps set to give the consumers a desirable product and even take some market share. Now as long as the last part of the song, Finding myself making every possible mistake, doesn’t come true, I think Hewlett-Packard can put a positive check mark next to this one.

La, la, la, la

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Filed under: Products and services, Wal-Mart (WMT), Marketing and advertising

When I lived in Southwest Virginia, my home was about a mile from a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Even though I had shopped at Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) for years, the convenience of the massive store made it into my go-to place for everything from oil filters to rutabagas. I became a Wal-Mart junkie.

One of the things that I swiftly noticed about the Squalor Mart was the fact that it is a perfect example of capitalism in action. In my years of shopping at the store, I noticed that obscure products would show up regularly. Sometimes they’d stay, sometimes they’d leave; it all depended upon how well they sold. For example, when the area got a big influx of Latin Americans, the store dedicated an entire row to dried chilies, beans, hot sauces, tortillas and whatnot. Similarly, as more and more yuppies began frequenting the store, I noticed a definite spike in organic convenience foods. In both cases, Wal-Mart offered better prices (and superior service) than the small stores that specialized in these obscure items.

Wal-Mart’s problem lies not with what it can offer, but with what it can’t: intimacy and a small scale. This, of course, is why many areas have fought so hard to keep Wal-Mart out. They don’t want to lose their cute tiny neighborhood stores to the large, bad capitalist behemoth, which leads to an inevitable question: can Wal-Mart, the ultimate superstore, offer a shopping experience that is anathema to its time-proven formula?

To a certain extent, Wal-Mart has already done so with its “Neighborhood Market” outlets. At roughly 40,000 square feet, these stores are about 20% the size of the ubiquitous supercenters, and are designed to cover the same product lines as a standard grocery store. Recently, the retailing giant began unveiling “Marketplace” stores. These shops are much smaller, and their focus is on fresh food, prepared meals and quick service.

On the one hand, Wal-Mart Marketplaces could definitely fill a niche that the monstrous supercenters can’t. With their smaller size, reduced offerings and emphasis on service, they could provide a way for Wal-Mart to penetrate markets that have closed themselves off to the retailer. Moreover, there are no lack of harried purchasers eager to pick up good, fresh meals with a minimum of fuss. On the other hand, can a company that has made its mark with deep discounts and pave-the-earth warehouse stores really offer an intimate neighborhood venue?

My money’s on Wal-Mart!

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Filed under: Products and services, Competitive strategy, Marketing and advertising, Entrepreneurs

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

The original Montgomery Ward retail strategy focused on selling quality merchandise over long distances. Aaron Montgomery Ward had a vision of providing first-quality goods, at reasonable prices, to rural customers who might otherwise not have had such merchandise available to them. The first Montgomery Ward catalog appeared in 1872 as a single sheet of paper, listing 163 items for sale, with ordering instructions.

By 1883, the Montgomery Ward catalog, dubbed the “Wish Book,” had grown to 240 pages and 10,000 items. It wasn’t until 1896 that Montgomery Ward faced any serious competition in the mail order field. That was the year Richard W. Sears fielded his first catalog and the fierce competition between the two companies began. By 1904, Montgomery Ward was mailing as many as three million, four-pound catalogs to its loyal customers across the country. In 1908, the company opened a 1.25 million square foot distribution center and headquarters north of downtown Chicago.

In 1926, Montgomery Ward opened its first retail store in Plymouth, Indiana, while continuing to operate its catalog business. The company rebuffed a merger offer from Sears in 1930. All was well until the early 1950s when the vehicle gave birth to suburbia, and Montgomery Ward held the city ground while its competitors moved out to the strip malls. By the mid 1960s, the company’s catalog sales began to weaken and the company struggled into the 1970s after a merger with Container Corporation of America. In 1976, the company was acquired by Mobil Oil, and an aggressive restructuring buoyed the company. However, its catalog operations ceased in 1985, as its retail outlets underwent transformation from department stores to specialty stores. A leveraged buyout then took the company private in 1988.

Montgomery Ward sputtered through the 1980s and 1990s, moving always one step forward and two steps back. The company history indicates that it could never quite regain the leading edge. On December 28, 2000, after a poor holiday sales performance, the company announced its intention to halt operations, and by Might of 2001, Montgomery Ward stores had all closed.

Today, Direct Marketing Services Inc. (DMSI) is bringing back Montgomery Ward in name only, trying to rebuild the brand under the old trademark banner. It would appear that DMSI has a desire to totally resurrect the Wards name. However, the new incarnation of the company has no other connection to the original Montgomery Ward beyond the trademarks it bought.

Let us know in the comments what you miss about Montgomery Ward. And be sure to check out other Companies That Have Vanished.

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Filed under: Finance, Office, Productivity

Are you a freelancer, a student, or someone who just really likes to bill people by the hour? You might get some use out of Project Calculator, an OS X app that helps you keep track of how much time you put into each of your projects. It lets you run a timer or enter your hours manually, and then does all the calculation you need to send someone a bill. You can output your Project Calculator in a number of formats, including PDF, HTML and plain text, so your clients will never give you the old “I couldn’t open the file” excuse.

We nearly balked at the $20 pricetag for Project Calculator, but after trying it out, we realized that this app can save you a lot of time for the money. Keeping a spreadsheet from scratch is ok, but having everything set up for you and organized by customer and by client is a lot easier and less fiddly. Appropriately, Project Calculator frees up some time for you to actually work on projects.

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