Earth to Woolworths. We don't want to be your unpaid staff.

Over the weekend I went to do the weekly shopping at Woolworths.

I was surprised to find a couple of checkouts had been converted to a new type of automated checkout, it had a conveyor and was obviously designed to allow people to do the checkout thing with large amounts of shopping.

Now when they implemented automated checkouts that were designed for smaller amounts of goods I tried it once…you could tell this was technology designed for the benefit of the store, not the customer.

These new checkouts are more of the same.

Note to Woolworths management: You want to make my shopping experience better, implement RFID so that a scanner will pick up the contents of my basket/trolley without me having to do the barcode swipe thing. That improves my life.

What you’re doing now is making me an unpaid employee of your company, I don’t like that, and I’ll bet that the next thing will be a ‘service charge’ that will be levied if I have the temerity to not use the new tech and actually want someone from the store to scan the goods for me.

If I wanted a career at Woolworths I would have pursued one; I didn’t. So don’t try to force one on me now.

Woolies may be the ‘fresh food people’ but they’re also the ‘rank technology people’ as well.

RIM proves the Deadbook is…well…dead

RIM announced that, for a limited time, they are taking $300 off the price of their tablet.

Now that type of deep discounting isn’t a sign of a healthy market for a product.

RIM thinks the market doesn’t recognise the brilliance of their products, the market knows that RIM’s products are about 5 years too late.

Sorry guys you missed the boat.

Shoot RIM and put them out of their misery.

RIM is finished.

Blackberry 7 devices are too little too late, except for those companies and users that are too slow on the uptake.

Recently I was talking to a guy who was waxing lyrical about his new Blackberry. It was great, it was wonderful, it was the best Blackberry he’s ever had. Unfortunately, the best Blackberry ever isn’t as good as a middle of the road Android or iOS device.

RIM is a living (?), breathing (?), example of a company that built itself on a successful business model that has been bypassed by everyone else.

When RIM made big impacts in the marketplace they had applied the pager model to email…brilliant…since then all they’ve done is more of the same while the rest of the industry has looked at ways to bypass being wedded to a proprietary infrastructure.

RIM were either too arrogant or too stupid or too busy following the adventures of Jim and his desire to buy an ice hockey team to notice that their opposition were changing the way people looked at smartphones.

New OS, cool looking handsets and everything else aside, RIM has another massive issue. The carriers that are their bread and butter don’t need them any more. They can get email to users across their own networks without having to pay RIM for using their proprietary backend systems that are no longer as reliable as they used to be.

Add to that and Blackberry’s have lost their cachet as a cool device so there’s no real incentive for carriers to promote a Blackberry.

Blackberry stood still and got passed by while they were too busy bathing in their own reflected past glories.