Only slightly bent

When in the US, e-commerce was pure bliss already ten years ago. Stuff was cheap, came to your door fast and reliably and the whole shopping experience was just good. In Finland, to understate a little, things were not so good. Relatively few companies had (or have) an online store and the prices were in line with the brick-and-mortar stores, i.e. absurdly high. Especially the shipping costs (largely thanks to the Itella-monopoly, no doubt) were just insane. Some improvement has happened in recent years, but there’s still a long way to go.

Anyhow, I was expecting Australia to fall somewhere between Finland and US in terms of online commerce. And most of the times it does, but at times the experience is even worse than in Finland – a big disappointment. First, relatively few companies are online here. There is increasing, but still low, awareness of how to do e-commerce properly (let alone m-commerce, let’s not even go there). Second, shipping, while cheaper than in Finland, takes surprisingly long even from “nearby”. Third, by coincidence or not, it was an Australian online merchant who happened to be the first one to ever lose my credit card details which forced me to get new cards after fraud attempts.

Now, years ago e-commerce really took off with books first, so here is a case study from yesterday about getting a book. I wanted to buy this book. By nature, I first checked Amazon US: $25 AUD plus $17 AUD for expedited international shipping, so $42 AUD total and I could expect to get the book in about 10 days. That doesn’t sound too bad for a big, 750+ pages, hardcover book.

What about the local competition? First up, Borders: sticker shock of $89.95 AUD and a delivery time of 10-12 days. Angus & Robertson was in the same ballpark. Only Dymocks was significantly cheaper at $55 AUD, but still more expensive than Amazon. None of the Australian vendors charged explicit shipping costs, but the high initial price and shipping times of 10-12 days explain why that is so. As a comparison, the book would have cost about $50 AUD including shipping if bought (with)in Finland with a delivery time of 5-15 days (annoyingly wide scale).

Let’s take a look at the figures again:

Remember that Borders, Dymocks and Angus & Robertson are all local, Australian companies and the Amazon US order is shipping from literally the other side of the planet just for me. If one bought more than one book, the figures would be even more favorable for Amazon.

Whenever an individual can import goods from halfway across the planet, while paying for individual express air cargo, for up to 50% less than the domestic companies are charging, some aspect(s) of competition and/or efficient markets are clearly missing.

It’s time to note down some cultural impressions I’ve made about Australia; in particular, I will focus on a few things which strike me as somehow strange. Just to clarify, I treat these mainly as rhetorical questions as the reasons are clear enough for most of them.

Isn’t it strange..

• .. that Australia has the biggest houses in the world^[1], while simultaneously being the country that most increases the time spent outdoors for expats?^{[2, 3]} With a culture geared towards the outdoors life and a climate to match, why would people need the biggest indoor dwellings in the world?

• .. that Australia has one of the best solar power generation potential in the world^[4], yet produces over 80% of its electricity with coal?^[5]

• .. that Australia have some of the best-managed and sustainable fisheries in the world^{[6, 7]}, plenty of fresh produce and even wine locally available – i.e. a good potential for an ideal Mediterranean diet – but Australians are still among the most obese (if not the most obese) people in the world? ^{[8, 9]}

• .. that people in Australia are generally friendlier and more willing to help (my subjective experience, of course) than in Finland, despite Finland scoring quite a bit lower on the Hofstede’s individuality index?^[10]

• .. that people consider USA the great “melting pot”, even though only 11% of people in the USA are foreign-born, compared to over 25% in Australia?^{[11, 12]}

Resources

1. Australians live in worlds biggest houses
2. HSBC: Expat Survey
3. HSBC: Offshore offspring
4. Desertec Foundation: Australia’s Concentrating Solar Power Potential
5. Australian Coal Association: Electricity Production
6. Marine Stewardship Council: Certified fisheries
7. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry: Fisheries resource management
8. Stewart, S: Australia’s Future ‘Fat Bomb’
9. NationMaster: Obesity Statistics
10. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: Finland and Australia
11. US Census Bureau: State & Country QuickFacts
12. Australian Bureau of statistics: Over one quarter of Australians were born overseas

Last weekend we went on our first real road trip here in Australia, driving the Great Ocean Road and back via the surrounding countryside. The trip was great and a few photos will follow later, but the topic of this post is some traffic-related thoughts stemming from the trip.

Australian roads unique how?

All cars built locally here in Australia are advertised as being “Developed for Australia’s unique road conditions” or something along similar lines. So it’s only natural to ask what’s so unique about Australian roads?



The answer is not much, at least in Victoria. We drove on roads ranging from as big as they get to as small as they get – and I mean half-a-lane-wide-and-in-the-middle-of-the-forest-according-to-the-GPS-small. As a rule, big highways were in excellent condition and most of the smaller roads were in decent shape also. The smaller the roads were, the worse their condition. If the area was flat, the roads were straight. If it was hilly, the roads were windy. This, by the way, is exactly how roads tend to work in all other parts of the world also.



Maybe the ads are referring to the 100km-stretches of straight roads in the middle of nowhere, the heat in the summer (both of which you can get in, say, Arizona) or something, but as of yet I’m unconvinced that there’s anything particularly unique about the roads here.

Guess the speed limit

See this road here? What do you think the speed limit is here?



The correct answer is 100km/h and the correct reaction to that is: oh come on! I mean the highway (or freeway as they like to call highways here) is in perfect condition with great visibility, plenty of lanes to choose from and very mellow turns. Is there really a case for not having the limit at, say, 120km/h or 130km/h?



For the sake of the argument, let’s say 100km/h is a good speed limit for the road above, which it might very well be safety and all considered. Fine. Then let’s take this road here:



Judging with the same criteria that set the highway speed limit at 100km/h, this road – which is generally in a good shape, but with hairpin curves and shoulders the width of 1cm – should have a speed limit of 40km/h or max 60km/h. But no. It’s 100km/h. What the hell?! You drive this at 100km/h and your car can soon be found at the bottom of some gorge.



That is so weird. On road #1 the speed limit is set to bore you to sleep and unduly lengthen the trip, on road #2 it’s set to kill you. That is, umm, inconsistent at best.



Tiny roads having a relatively high speed limit also has the weird consequence that our TomTom GPS unit, always on the lookout for the quickest route, seems to prefer to direct us through some hay-fields on single-lane country roads (which, to their credit, were in pretty good condition) as opposed to the above-pictured freeway to shave 2mins off our travel time over 200km.

Pun intended

Can somebody please explain to me why the Australian media has such an affinity – an obsession, really – to playing with words? There seems to be an editorial requirement that articles need to appear witty or have some clever (or not) wordplay in the headline. Some examples from this week:

• Desal plant figures don’t hold water.
• A surgeon who draws bad blood
• Sun shines on solar plane’s flight
• A corner in Brighton you can bank on (A property leased by a bank auctioned for loads of money)
• So you think you can prance (A Ferrari review)
• Fear and loathing in Aspen
• Qantas acquisition fails to fly

Ha ha. Seriously, why? Sure some are funny and some even clever, but by no means all. Many are downright forced.

Why pay less when you can pay more?

Perhaps the ad agencies also need to spend more time proofreading the ads instead of coming up with clever quips.

Apple needs a better App Store

I’ve been an iPhone user for a couple of weeks now and am loving the device. It’s great. I’ll save the device comments to another post, but I have some issues with the App Store. As extolled as it is, it’s just not very usable as the number of available applications has passed 100,000. Specifically:
• The fact that all apps aren’t available globally sucks. It’s downright evil having applications limited geographically; reminds me of the DVD region code debacle – Australia at least had the sense to put a stop to that (by mandating that all DVD players sold here must be region-free), so what’s with Apple getting away with doing essentially the same thing?
• The App Store user interface is bad; for one, it doesn’t scale well to the iTunes window. Did someone forget to tell Apple that having a window that needs scrolling both sideways and up-down is lame?
• It’s unclear what the categorization is based on what; who decides what goes into “New and noteworthy”? Are they new, noteworthy or both? With 10,000 new app submissions every week, just having “new” apps area doesn’t help much.
• What are the Top charts based on? Downloads? Ratings? I want a way to clearly find the top-rated applications and I want them categorized; most apps are games and I want to browse the catalog without being bombarded by entertainment apps.
• Why can’t I sort the lists by rating? Why can’t I see Amazon-style “People who bought this, also bought ..” recommendations?

The App Store has been a runaway success by any measuring stick, but I foresee some serious scalability and usability problems as the apps keep on piling. Even currently the best method for application discovery is using external Internet sites that classify, review and list the best apps; then you just search & download what you need from the App Store.

Needing a 3rd party for basic app discovery is a clear sign of some trouble.

As sort of hinted in the previous post, here are some night photos of the city. For any viewpoints higher up, there are two observation decks in the city’s skyscrapers; one at the tallest residential building in the world, Eureka Tower, and another at the Rialto Towers. Though at a lower level, the Rialto Tower is better for photographic purposes – not only does it have two outside observation decks instead of one, the outside decks also have wide enough fencing for a DSLR lens to fit through. The Eureka tower has a boring tight mesh that always intrudes into photos.

Anyhow, without further ado, some night photos (click on the photos to get a bigger version):

.. as opposed to Melbourne by night, which is coming up a bit later. Anyhow, I finally managed to gather a few shots of the city, so here goes the first rough batch. (click on the photos to view a bigger version)

The CBD – or the “city” – is a nice and compact area that is quite walkable; photography-wise, however, the skyscrapers are a bit dispersed and distributed on both sides of the river in three or four clusters. Therefore, getting comprehensive skyline photos is more challenging than it is in many other cities.

One thing that there are plenty of in Melbourne are cafes. And the cafe culture is starting to grow on me, too – to the great surprise of everyone, including myself. I have drank approximately 10 times more coffee over the past month than in my entire life before that. I kid you not.

There’s also lots of interesting architecture in Melbourne. Federation square, one of the happening places downtown, is one example:

Flinders Street station and the old city circle tram in the foreground represent a somewhat older style of the city; none less compelling, the sporadically preserved older architecture make a nice touch to the feeling of the city.

The Southern Cross railway station, on the other hand, is yet another example of cool modern architecture. It’s kind of like the Pasile station in Helsinki, only much nicer

There really isn’t a subway system in Melbourne as such, but there is a “city loop” with stations mostly underground via which some local area trains travel. The local trains are quite nice and the tram network is pretty extensive (even though we live outside of it), plus there are buses – overall the public transportation is quite good.

As far as shopping goes, it unfortunately seem Melbourne is a very good city to do some serious shopping. We’re (un)lucky enough to live within a 15-minute drive of the biggest shopping center in Australia, Chadstone. The place is positively huge with over 400 shops and it looks pretty nice, too:

While these don’t even scratch the surface of what’s worthy of taking a photo, I expect to get some pretty nice shots of all kinds of things as time goes by. There is no shortage of subjects for sure.