Don’t fix it if it’s not broken!
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Sampo, one of the biggest Finnish banks, did a major systems “upgrade” over the Easter weekend. They added some Java-based “security” features and revamped all their online services to get in line with their new parent, Danske Bank. Mind you, their “old” system was working quite well and had been for a number of years, so technically there would’ve been no need whatsoever to make any changes.
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But change they did. When the new system opened up on Tuesday morning, well.. it didn’t really open up. It had some issues: the website was down much of the day, some customers were having problems making purchases at the store, some were unable to withdraw money from ATMs, some saw account details of other people(!), the Java application they use doesn’t improve security but collects all kinds of unnecessary data (i.e. spies on you), the new site is vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks (an extremely elementary security blunder), the web bank had lost some information and lots of the functionality doesn’t work yet
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And yet they have the audacity to call the switch a “success”. Quite a redefinition for that word.
Help protect our plastic mock-ups!
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This glass showcase here on the right can be found from a mobile phone store in Espoo. I wasn’t looking for a phone, but if I had been, here’s what I’d want from a phone store: the ability to fiddle with all the models. Real, functioning models. In this store, however, all they had were plastic mock-ups. That alone would’ve been bad enough as you really, really can’t get the right feeling from those, but they were also locked in a glass cabinet! Oh come on. If you’re so worried about customers stealing your stuff that you have to lock down even useless mock-ups, maybe you shouldn’t be in retail..
Obsessed with the sun in the land of the midnight sun
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This is something I’ve talked about before, too. Finland gets so little sunlight during much of the year that its scarcity power is way, way too big. After the winter darkness, it’s always grown to the point that the whole nation is obsessed with the sun – a rather ironic situation in a country that’s called the land of the midnight sun. For some reason, it’s never called the land of the midday darkness, which is true for an equally large part of the year.
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Anyway, back to scarcity power. What it means is that on those rare days when the sun is out, there’s this unnatural urge to run outside and enjoy it while it lasts because you know that any minute now it could be gone. It’s like you have to get out in the sun. It’d be morally wrong to waste the precious hours. I love the sun, but I hate that feeling.
How to get a profit margin of of 95% or more
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During this year, there have been multiple Finnish “cent bid” sites popping up. It’s an interesting business plan; it’s a bidding system selling a very limited number of products (a few at most) at any given time, all with a starting price of 0.00eur and a timer of a few minutes; when the timer expires, whoever placed the winning bid gets the product. Now, you can place a bid which always raises the price by just one cent – but placing the bid costs you from around €1 to €2 each and the timer is reset. So while someone can in the end get, for example, a €1,000 product for €50, whoever is running the system gets €7,500 from the bids alone.
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I will not provide links to them because I think the business model from the collective consumers point of view resembles that of a lottery – an additional tax for those bad at math. It’s a system that works by attracting large masses of people to fight over a very small number of potentially very cheap products, thus quite effectively exploiting artificially created scarcity power. As far as business models go, from the surface of it, it is innovative. But when you think it, it’s also a rip-off and nothing more than gambling done in a new way.
