How Data Changes the Idea of Insurance

The more we know the less we need insurance.  The whole idea of insurance is to protect oneself against an unknown potential loss.  Insurance works because of pooled risk.  A group of people with diverse risks contribute into a pool.  The funds paid by those not experiencing a loss are paid to those who experienced the loss.  Along the way the insurance company gets paid a bit for managing it all.  This applies to all insurance of course.   Hear are some thoughts about health insurance.

People were much more willing to accept this structure when they were reminded daily of the risks inherent in life and their general inability to avoid those risks.  Insurance companies were much more likely to be satisfied with this arrangement at a time when they had no way to know who presented the greatest risk to the pool.

All of that is different now.  Many people believe they have enough data about their exposure to risks -- that they may not need insurance at all.  When employees pay their full healthcare premium they can easily see that they are paying out more every month than they are getting in benefits.  Combine that with a sense of security regarding potential risk and you get a pretty good explanation for some of the 50 million uninsured in the US.  The fact that 27% of those aged 18-29 are without insurance and 28% of those making under $36,000 go without insurance -- compared to the national average of 16% -- leads me to believe that many of the uninsured could afford insurance.  A study conducted by Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Kate Bundorf of Stanford, concluded that nearly three-quarters of the uninsured could afford coverage but chose not to purchase it.  (this last sentence was lifted from this article on the Cato Institute web site).  

The greater ability to analyze data has given insurance companies the hope of making money off of every customer -- instead of the pool.  This can be done through the all too common tactic of just denying every claim -- which ends up contributing to more individuals opting out.  It can also be done by gathering more and more data about the risk associated with each additional insurance customer and customizing the pool to have as little risk in it as possible.

As we progress down this road, we leave the realm of insurance and enter into the realm of expense management.  Maybe if we just let the industry evolve on its own, we will end up with more and more individuals responsibly managing their health care expenses on their own.

Would You Pay $4 Per Hour for Healthcare?

We do.  I suspect just about every other company in the US that is actually trying to provide healthcare to their employees is paying over $3 per hour and many probably pay even more than the $4 that we pay.  A high wage individual may be willing to pay more for healthcare than a low wage individual, but the cost does not change as income levels change.  So this is a much bigger issue for low wage earners than the others.  Most employees don't think about this all that much because they don't participate very much in paying the bill.  Many economists argue that if healthcare costs go down, wages could go up.  If that did happen, the low wage earners would benefit the most because a $1 per hour increase for someone at minimum wage is a 13% pay increase.

It will never happen because there is no one in DC representing the interests of the employee.  Our government cannot control healthcare costs because they don't want to.  They are beholden to the very people (health insurance industry) that would be hurt by cost containment.  It is never going to happen.

The only shred of good news in the whole story is our government is also highly unlikely to pass any reform, so we may be able to avoid a whole bunch of pork piled on our broken system.

US Savings Rate: Headed Over 10%?

For a long time we have had one of the lowest savings rates in the world.  Even now, we are just about 4%.  

What drives the savings rate?  Are we motivated by what is better for our country (to own our own government debt instead of China)?  Of the nations tracked by the OECD, the savings rates ranged from 17.9% in Spain to 1% in Australia.  If you sort the list by savings rate there is a direct correlation to the stability of the economy and government.  Translation:  people save more when they have low confidence in their government.

So great news for the US, our savings rate is going up! 

Book Review: You are not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

Rant, Rant, Rant, Definitions, Octopus. It is an unual pattern for a book, but I absolutely recommend "You are not a Gadget" for anyone who thinks about technology and its impact on our lives. I have heard some critics say that this book answers a non-problem. Well, some time ago the problems we face today were not as obvious as they are now.  We are lucky to have people like Jaron Lanier to shine a light on issues we are creating for ourselves.  This book has caused quite a stir and many great reviews have been written (see links below).  Here is what I got out of it:

The Rants:  There is no question that the first half of the book is quite a rant against the way we are subjugating ourselves to machines.  It may go on a little long, but it is absolutely necessary.  An issue must first be described before it can be addressed.  In short he points out that computers are far from, and never will be, human.  The notion of artificial intelligence and more importantly our attraction to it is a threat to humans reaching their potential.  He gives many good examples and none of the companies in the web 2.0 world are spared.  You can try to argue against this idea, but right in the middle someone will pass by you speaking into their iPhone in the only idiotic sounding language that the Google voice to text machine can understand, and you will see the point.  We are willingly reducing ourselves to a composition that the much inferior computers can relate to. 

Definitions:  Lanier then gets into some definitions.  Despite the validity of the rants, I was pretty glad when we arrived at this part of the book.  Computationalism is defined as: "...the world can be understood as a computational process, with people as a subprocess."  Logical Positivism: "is the idea that a sentence or another fragment -- something you can put in a computer file -- means something in a freestanding way that doesn't require invoking the subjectivity of a human reader."  Realism: "...humans, considered as information systems, weren't designed yesterday, and are not the abstract playthings of some higher being, such as a web 2.0 programmer in the sky.  My take away:  The last one is the authors recommendation to not get sucked in.  Since we have to elect to become subservient to the machines -- we should have the the power to avoid it.  Thus the reason for the rants -- because unless we see the problem we are unlikely to wish to avoid it.

Octopus:  Lanier then goes on to talk about how our brain interacts with odors, how that differs from sight and sound, and how it will be a long time before computers can smell.  Then on to finches and how they sing alot more once they achieve assured mating, and a bit on how language interacts with the brain.  This leads to a discussion of Neoteny: the extent to which a species can survive from birth -- essentially 100% nature, or conversely must rely on learned behaviors after birth -- nature plus nurture.  OK, so on to the Octopus.  Here the author describes the incredible capabilities of an octopus to conceal itself by such elaborate camouflage where its entire skin is a canvas painted with great detail to match its highly complex surroundings.   All of this is accomplished by the brain of the octopus understanding its surroundings and then somehow conveying the image to its "display" surface in a blink.  Even more amazing when you consider that the octopus is 100% nature -- not learning anything from mom after birth.  Just try that you web 2.0 developers!

Overall I am taken by Jaron Lanier.  He is a good writer, knows volumes about a wide variety of subjects in a true renaissance way.  I was lucky enough to hear him speak in person and I would recommend that as well.  We are fortunate to be reading his book at a time when computing has not yet advanced to the point where it is even harder to perceive the problem.  Sure it seems ridiculous now to allow ourselves to be defined by Facebook, but a few Moore's law cycles from now we may find we have met the machine halfway -- and that would be a shame.  One last quote:  "At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school."  Let's at least resist the urge to go there.

Other reviews I recommend:

Slate

Wall Street Journal

New York Post

New York Times

To buy the book on Amazon

Science vs. Spray and Pray

The recent decline in advertising spending is not only attributable to the great recession. It is also evidence of the marketing industry getting serious about pursuing measureable results. The days of spray (money) and pray (for increased sales) are fast coming to an end and this is a good thing.

The companies that figure out how to measure every step from campaign to revenue are going to have a very large advantage over the others.  By developing a measurement construct that can be trusted, marketers will get the ability to employ a process that looks more like the scientific method.

The scientific method:  develop a hypothesis, invent an experiment to test it, conduct the experiment, and evaluate the results. In the end you get a conclusion about the efficacy of the hypothesis – and the experiment can be repeated to produce the same results.

When applied to marketing campaigns such a construct proves its value because resources can be invested in creating and testing of new marketing ideas.   And when something works it can be repeated and scaled.

Unfortunately, marketing departments that do not have a trusted measurement construct, meaning they cannot measure each step from campaign to revenue, must resort to measuring whatever they can and it often works like this: look for something good in the numbers, look for a marketing activity that could have created the good thing in the numbers, and quickly construct an argument demonstrating the connection between the activity and the outcome. Unfortunately, this does not produce repeatable results.

Worse yet, it creates the illusion of real measurements so progress towards a trusted measurement construct is drained away.

The central challenge to anyone wishing to be more scientific about their measurements is that the initial investment in building the trusted measurement system does not in itself produce any revenue for the company.  With good leadership it can be done and the companies that do so will be well rewarded.

The Economist: Is America Ungovernable?

Last week the Economist magazine posted the question to its readers:  Is America Ungovernable? 

Their main point was that the party in power had more power than any administration in memory and still could not get anything done.  The comments back from readers followed the lines you would expect:  the R's blame the D's and visa versa.  The Economist circled around and said that in fact the government is working.  A very interesting debate indeed.  

I would say that we are generally not worried enough about the future of our country.  Properly motivated we know we can solve any problem.  Each entity involved today is mostly focussed on getting some for themselves -- the political parties want more power, the politicians want to be re-elected, industries want the paying field tilted in their favor, and companies really cannot do anything but look out for themselves.  Everyone must know the trend is unsustainable, but so did everyone when they were buying tech stocks in 1999 or real estate in 2007.  Sure it will end someday, but I will get mine and get out before it happens.  

We can only hope that we will wake up to the precariousness of our situation and turn our attention away from personal greed and to fear for the survival of our country.  Then we can get down to the business of governing.

New York Times Death Watch

I love the New York Times.  It has been my newspaper of choice for many years.  I used to pay $50 per month for 7 days a week home delivery, but in the past few years my travel schedule caused me to cut my subscription to Sundays only which is $30 per month.   For a while I also read it on my Kindle for $13 a month (in addition).  But when I broke my Kindle I had to cancel that.  I was crazy enough to buy one of those, but not two.  I also love the NY Times Reader – which is free to all subscribers.

All of this is to say that when the NY Times puts up its paywall in 2011 – I will clearly pay whatever it costs.   However, the increased revenue from me and others NY Times fans like me will not save the paper and the decline will start.  The only question is how long it will take for them to reverse the policy – I for one cannot imagine them riding the thing all of the way into the ground.

The big question for me is will they ride it down far enough to lose the columnists.  Here is the sequence of events that I see:

1)      Paywall up (now to include the NY Times Bloggers too):  Sometime in 2011.

2)      Readership down, revenues up:  Hard to dispute this, there is no way a paywall will increase readership and it will generate some revenue.

3)      Print readership down, online readership down:  There is no way the paywall will cause me to go back to daily delivery of the print edition – and if they are not getting it from me, they are not getting it from anyone.  At the same time everyone who now links to stories will stop doing that because they don’t want to send their readers to a subscription page.  I never link to WSJ stories for this reason.

4)      Advertising revenue down:  As soon as the advertisers realize they are reaching fewer people, they will stop advertising, or stop paying as much to advertise.

5)      Columnists defect:  To me the NY Times is Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and sometimes Frank Rich – who knows why he gets twice the column inches of the others – but that is a story for another day.  Columnists want to be in the conversation.  Once behind the paywall they will be removed from the debate.  The times will have even less money so even if the columnists would stay for more money, the NY Times will not be able to pay it.

6)      Columnists go, I go.

The timing of this will be very interesting.  Who knows what contractual obligations the columnists have, but if I were the publisher of the Post, or the LA Times, or any other paper, I would be talking to these incredible assets right now – and they probably are.

Book Review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Micheal Lewis continues to be one of my favorite non fiction authors. His book Moneyball is not new (2004) but I just got around to reading it. A film based on the book starring Brad Pitt got sidelined in mid last year and aparently the producer is looking for ways to cut the budget. Funny thing, because the book is all about how the Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, did more with less money than anyone else -- so maybe Columbia Pictures should call him!

There are too many great stories in the book to recount and the creativity and new thinking they applied to baseball can clearly be instructional for business. Here are my take aways:

• New Ideas Can Work: Baseball has been around for a long time and has tradition and momentum enough to stop even the most persistent innovator. If these guys could change the thinking in baseball, the sky is the limit for people that want to innovate in business.
• New Blood: Billy Beane brought in people from the outside. The less experience they had in Baseball the better.
• Measure Everything: Even if you don't know what you are going to do with the numbers. Question all of the existing numbers and figure out new ways to collect data on activities.
• Don't be Rational: Eventually the outsiders figured out how to reverse engineer runs. They tinkered and tinkered until they got a formula that they thought would work and then they applied it to the past to test it. They were able to suspend their own rational thinking long enough to try things that on the surface just did not make sense.
• Don't Let the Facts Turn Into Excuses: The A's knew they had no money, if you can call a $40 Million payroll no money, and they got over it and moved on to finding solutions. So at the same time they faced the facts (constrained budget), they were not willing to use the facts to lower their expectations of themselves.

Here are some other reviews:

Forbes 

NY Times 

Here is a link to the book on Amazon.

On Speaking: The Take Away

This is the second in a series of posts about public speaking. The first was: On Speaking: The Frame. In this post I will do what I can to shape The Take Away.

There is a conflict in any presentation between the need to be entertaining, and the need to make your point. Variety is entertaining, and repitition makes a point. The trick of course is to have enough variety to keep your audience awake, but not so much as to cloud up your take away. I find it helpful to imagine myself at the exit door of the venue asking everyone to tell me the one thing they took away from my presentaiton. The goal is for them all to have taken away the same message. So we do the tell, tell, tell.

• Tell them what you are going to tell them: Here you make your point all shiny and interesting but without all of the supporting arguments. With any luck it is also The Frame.
• Tell them: Take your main point and support it with as many other points as you think you can get away with. Stray far enough from the point to keep it interesting. Not so far that they forget what you are talking about.
• Tell them what you told them: Review, summarize, and remember to stick to your point. Hopefully you still have your audience, but even if they tuned out in the middle, you can still land the take away.

So forgive the overuse of a very tired addage -- but tell, tell, tell really works. Give it a try.

China in Your Backyard

Until I saw this article I thought low cost goods made from pirated designs with super cheap labor in China entered our markets through those shipping containers we see stacked everywhere.  Now it seems Chinese companies are invading with illegal immigrants and copying products locally and undercutting prices -- all without having to put a Made in China label on the products.  

Sound unbelievable? -- check out this story in the Financial Times. Sure it is just Italy now, but who is next?

There is a war going on and we don't even know it.

The Ultimate Walled Garden

I spent some time yesterday at Disneyland – the ultimate physical walled garden.  I can only marvel at Disney’s success in controlling every part of the experience.  From the music playing everywhere to the delicate balance of the wait times, to the happy and helpful staff, to the cleanliness, to the renewal found in the new additions, it is hard not to be impressed.

Of course none of this compares to the impressive marketing effort that brought me here for the fourth time since my girls were born – and manages to fill the park just about every day of the year.

Later this spring I am taking the girls to New York City – the ultimate open environment.  My mind is full of all of the potential contrasts – and I can hardly wait to hear what they think.

I was relieved that my girls elected to go to the beach today instead of back to Disneyland.  I have not deciphered their reasons for not going back, but here are mine for being relieved:

1. Coffee:  For some reason Nescafe has the exclusive for coffee in the park.  I do enjoy good coffee and being in an environment where it cannot be found at any price is downright disorienting.
2. Pricing:  The pay at the gate, wait in line, pricing construct is a highly complex business case to be sure.  Once in the gate we pay for rides with our time and the purveyors offer rides at a level that I suspect is just sufficient to prevent the customers from resorting to violence.  In the seven hours we were in the park we got in 9 rides (about 5 mins duration each), waited in line about half an hour each, and consumed one meal of unremarkable quality, and got a fair amount of exercise walking around.
3. Recommend it?  Strangely yes – as long as your kids are 10 or under.  Mine are 10 and 12, so I don’t think we will be back.

So what?  The connection between Disneyland and Steve Jobs is hard to miss.  Pixar is everywhere in the park these days and Steve Jobs is in fact the largest shareholder in Disney.  The Apple customer experience is the Disneyland walled garden of computing.  The iPad looks like it will be building another layer of bricks on the wall and the growing rift with Google and Amazon leads me to believe this trend will continue. 

I recently replaced all of the Macs in our house with PCs – mostly in response to Apple’s efforts to control every part of the experience. 

It will be interesting to see if the Apple marketing machine continues to keeps its park as full as Disneyland does.  

What to do with the Cash

We give China $20 Billion in cash every month (our trade surplus).  Other countries give China cash too.  This is a big problem for China -- because they are running out of places to put the money.  They put some in US Treasuries -- but we pay essentially zero interest, and they already have a trillion dollars of our debt.  They put a great deal into domestic projects, but there is a limit to that (inflation). They put another small mountain of cash into pre-purchasing natural resources like oil and copper from other countries, until those prices go up too much and everyone screams.  

Now they are building infrastructure projects in other countries as reported in the NY Times.

It should be a priority for us to figure out how to stop giving them all this cash.

TED: Food for your head

I love good speakers.  It almost does not matter what they are talking about.  Good speakers are a joy to watch in action.  The best video of good speakers can be found on the TED website.  The event just happened, so there is at least a year of new material up there for you to absorb.

If you need convincing, check out this post by Robert Scoble who just attended the event.

Don't just pick the talks that are on subjects you are already interested in.  I have never been to TED, but I do attend many events and I always come away with the benefit of something I did not intend to learn.  

So carve off 30 minutes and throw a dart a the TED web site and feed your brain.  

Google's as Your Banker

Google has some elements of greatness. It is an organization that thinks long term, makes rational decisions backed by data, is bold enough to go against the tide at times, and is actively trying to avoid doing evil. Google has its limits however and the recognition of those limits by the users (us) and Google (them) will be very important in the years to come.

Even though many of Google's services are offered free of charge, they are still services and they are in fact governed by terms of service which are actual written agreements.

In the negotiation of written agreements the issue of trust is central. Often the language in a written agreement is overly advantageous to one side. Anyone who has read a loan agreement knows what I am talking about. When making sure that a loan agreement accurately reflects the terms of the deal, the borrower must question both the language and its intent.  When doing just that we are often met with the response -- "We (the bank) would never exercise those rights, don't you trust us?". The best answer is: "I trust YOU, but I need to protect myself in the event this agreement comes under the control of someone other than YOU".

When we apply this thinking to our relationship with Google or Facebook or any other service provider, things get a little frightening. I do agree that Google is a great company, and that its goal to do no evil is sincere. What happens however when there is a leadership change at the company? What happens when the current leaders retire, or the company falters and they get pushed aside? The agreement Google has with its users would quickly be in the hands of different people and those people may have either a different definition of evil, or a general predilection to pursue it.

What if a new banker showed up at your house one day and said -- under the terms of our agreement I am taking all of your stuff?

Avatar Reflects Our Reality

I finally saw Avatar this weekend. I don't plan to get in the habbit of reviewing movies like I do books but it did bring up a few thoughts. First the 3D is pretty cool and when putting on the glasses I was kind of wishing I had not come to the 3D version, at the end however I was glad I did.

James Cameron takes the same old story that white people will kill indiscriminately in the pursuit of natural resources and makes what I think is the central arument of the movie: yes we did it 100 years ago and we will still be doing it in the year 2154.

This reflects the current pessimistic outlook on our ability to govern and projects it as a trend out 150 years. The recent NBC-WSJ poll shows that we are in the double digits for the first time ever on the number of people (11%) who responded "never" to the question: How much of the time do you trust the government to do what is right? An all time low of only 19% answered "Most of the Time" and 4% answered "Just about always" (not a record). Full poll results here:

I sure hope we find some leaders in our government that can actually do something -- and it would be even better if they did something right.

Glad I Don't Use Gmail

Well I do have a gmail account but I have not gotten in the habit of using it.  I experiment with as many Google products as I can because I am a big fan of innovation and I am always thrilled when I find evidence of it.

Fred Wilson had a great post today on the virtues of Explicit vs Implicit communicating and specifically what happens when you combine email with a social network -- like Google did this week with Buzz.

Real people all have multiple social circles that overlap and interact in extremely complex ways. So far no one has figured out an elegant way to model the complexity of real relationships -- and I suspect it will be a long time before such a thing comes about. A social media system fails when the makers think it actually replicates real life. So the bigger and more self assured makers of systems get, Google would be the biggest and most self assured, the less likely they will be to create a system of value.

Now all the buzz is about how Buzz is sharing too much information with too many people with too little approval or awareness by the person sharing.  I have to say I am pretty glad I am not one of the unwitting sharers. 

Parallel Universes

Anyone in tech not watching Cranky Geeks is really missing out.  In the past few weeks, John Dvorak and Sebastian Rupley have become the new Smothers Brothers with the straight man - slow guy routine.   Of course they claim to be covering the tech news, and they do regularly have good guests, but it is much more entertainment than anything else.

Now I don't know if either of the geeks has any musical talent, and their humor is certainly not  as widely appreciated, but I find myself busting up every time John Dvorak asks who Om Giga is.  One could say the Cranky Geeks are a parallel universe of the Smothers Brothers show.

This brings up something I wonder about often.  Of the people that participate in the technology industry we seem to have a few parallel universes.  Three that I think about are the Channel, the Geeks, and the New Media.  People and companies often operate in more than one universe, but sometimes it surprises me how much distance there is between them.  

The Channel is concerned mostly with how technology products are sold to businesses and the discussion is usually around the channel partner programs of the main vendors and how the go to market propositions differ from vendor to vendor.  The leading commentators are Everything Channel and Channel Insider and the leading association would be CompTIA.

The Geeks are concerned mostly with the technology itself and the discussion often revolves around new product launches, technology standards, and how the makers of the products are getting along.  The commentators include PC Magazine, TechCrunch, Cnet and the leading association would be CEA.  The Cranky Geeks are probably in this group and maybe Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte.  I sometimes cannot decide where those guys actually fit.

The New Media are the bloggers and maybe some institutions like the New York Times.  The discussion in this group is mostly about how technology is changing the way we consume information and the impact on the newspapers, TV stations, movies, music, and ultimately our society. The commentators include Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer, David Weinberger, and many others of course.  

As a follower of people and organizations in all three universes I am often struck by how the conversation in one universe can be disconnected from the others.  I will be writing more about this phenomenon and would be very interested in comments on your experiences. 

People You Like

People buy things from people they like.  I don't think this is changing.  In many cases (see previous post) we end up buying things without any people involved.  At those times, we are buying things from brands we like with processes we like.  Well, we probably don't like anything about it much, but we seem to be doing it anyway.

Whenever possible at the grocery store I use the self check out line.  The line is often shorter, but the real reason I do it is the experience with the real person has disappointed me so many times.  How many times has the check out person said "I can't wait to get out of here; my shift is almost over" when you ask how they are doing?  Yes indeed I would rather talk to a machine than someone like that.

When buying something more complex than groceries, say a business service for example, I would much prefer to have a competent and credible salesperson to help me make the best decision.  With the right person I get a much needed education, make a better choice, and probably even spend more money.  In addition, if something goes wrong I have someone to turn to for help.  I am still the buyer and it is still buyer beware, but with a salesperson I have someone with me to help.

Without a salesperson, I become the salesperson -- and that is a whole new level of buyer beware.

Yes we do need salespeople in our business ecosystem.

Everyone Wants to be in Sales

It seems like everyone wants to be in sales these days.  The twist is the new entrants want to be in sales -- without salespeople.  I spend good deal of time thinking about this because my company is an outsourced provider of sales and marketing services.

In the past decade many web based services have forever changed the way that customers interact with the makers of the products and services they buy.  And those interactions are being done more often than ever without the participation of a salesperson.

Travel:  Web services like Priceline, Expedia, Hotels, and Kayak have been cutting the travel agent out of the travel business for over a decade now.  Some of these services have real people in call centers somewhere, but I rarely talk with them and I suspect you don't either.  

Specialty: You can buy just about anything from Amazon, eBay, iTunes, and Craig's List without ever encountering a salesperson.

Advertising: Google is working hard to position itself as the salesperson for everything, but for now they are mostly disrupting the sale of advertising.  Google leads the market for advertising on the web through its AdWords and AdSense programs in a largely self service model.

Homes:  Zillow has not completely blown up the realtors yet, but it may not be long.  

Cars:  The great recession has caused the car manufacturers to dramatically reduce the number of car dealerships.  And car dealerships were mostly full of salespeople.  Car buying may be the next thing we do without the aid of salespeople.

Everything Else:  Last week a the latest digital personal assistant, Siri, was launched.  Yes I know, the Newton never panned out for Apple, and the world (and a box in my garage) is filled with failed PDAs, but if this one gets over the top, it aims to be the salesperson of everything from taxis to concert tickets.  All of this done without any actual salespeople.

All of the human salespeople better do something! 

The New Reply All

Today Google launched Buzz -- its new addition to Gmail that is predicted to be killing everything in its path from Twitter to SharePoint.  That is right, just read these articles and you will see that the Google steamroller is destined to crush at least a dozen companies with the announcement alone!

Mashable

PC Mag

ZD Net

I went to try it today and did not see it in my gmail account -- maybe I will get it tomorrow.  Either way, from what I have read and seen on the video it could in fact be pretty cool.  It would be nice to wrap some of these things that we do in different places into one place.  

On the other hand, anyone who has ever accidentally hit the Reply All button will want to be very careful.  I gather Buzz will enable you to broadcast messages to just a few people, or your entire network, or maybe even anyone.  That is going to be some sinking feeling when you realize you accidentally hit that button.

Stay tuned for more Buzz on Buzz tomorrow.