Is Dropbox a cause of Fedex's loss of customers wanting it next day?

WSJ has an article on FedEx needing to make changes to its fleets as customers want their deliveries slower and cheaper.

Things that absolutely positively have to be there overnight don't absolutely positively have to be there overnight anymore.

Nowhere was that more evident than when FedEx Corp. FDX +0.56% on Wednesday reported that its quarterly profit plunged 31% as its international customers and shippers flocked to slower, cheaper delivery options instead of its premium-priced express service.

Now the company whose name is synonymous with overnight delivery—and has built the world's largest air express fleet—must make even deeper changes that take it farther away from its roots. It has already tweaked capacity and deferred plane purchases. Now it will shrink its global network, possibly its air fleet and direct more business via third-party alternatives like ships, commercial airlines and third-party shippers.

Besides the shift in next day big packages, I wonder how much of the next day document delivery which I would guess is a much higher margin business than shipping iPhones around the world is impacted.

We have all suffered through 5MB document limits through e-mail delivery.  Using Gmail you would be able to send a big document, but the receiver couldn't receive it in their e-mail system.  With the growth of DropBox, Box, Google Drive, Micorsoft Skydrive you can now send GB documents to users in a text or e-mail for little cost and delivery in seconds.

In the WSJ article FedEx discloses the shift in delayed shipments from Asia.

Though you would think this "was a good problem to have," Dave Bronczek, CEO of FedEx Express, told analysts in an earnings call, the latest gain was driven by a 12% growth in deferred international export traffic, mainly led out of Asia and Europe. So while the company had "a lot of freight on our planes; our high load factors, quite frankly, were driven by the deferred traffic. So we had lower yields. We had more traffic, higher pounds—all in deferred traffic," Mr. Bronczek said. International export priority volume inched up only 2%.

Somewhere buried in those next day deliveries are probably documents which don't weigh that much and push the revenue up.

2 - 5 GB isn't enough.  I have 27 GB with Skydrive and pushing up 1 GB of photos is something I don't even think about.  

FedEx could have created a DropBox type of product, but there is no way they could charge the kind of money they make for a next day delivery.  FedEx tried a fax service in 1984 that didn't work.

A new facsimile delivery service, known as ZapMail, made its debut in 1984. It guaranteed delivery of five pages or less in less than two hours for $35. That year, the firm made its first acquisition, package courier Gelco Express. Other acquisitions soon followed, including businesses in Europe and the Middle East. International expansion continued in 1985 when Federal Express established a European headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. Sales grew to $2 billion.

The company's ZapMail service proved unprofitable. As a result, Federal Express discontinued it in 1986.

Read more: Fedex Corp - Early History - Express, Federal, Firm, and Delivery http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/443/Fedex-Corp-EARLY-HISTORY.html#ixzz2Ox0CO1zw

The Perfect Data Center

Dilbert's Scott Adams has a blog post on the Perfect Room and piece of SW that could support this.

You often see rooms that can't be furnished properly because furniture placement was an afterthought. The design of a room should start with the perfect arrangement of furniture and fixtures. I would think that for every budget and set of preferences there are a few furniture arrangements that stand out as the best. How hard would it be to catalog those best arrangements?

I imagine a time when a user can design a home simple by checking boxes on a long digital form. Questions for a living room might include:

1.      Do you want a TV in this room?
2.      Do you want a cozy reading chair?
3.      Do you want a fireplace?
4.      Etc.

Once the user selects all of his preferences for each room, he clicks a "shuffle" button and it spits out a house layout complete with external windows, doors, hallways, stairs, and engineering support structures. All of that stuff is fairly rules-based. If you don't like the first design, click the shuffle button again. In every case, the rooms will have exactly the features you specified but arranged differently. And of course you can walk through your model in 3D mode.

Scott closes with points on the savings and the issues.

1.      Rooms that need plumbing should be near each other to reduce costs.
2.      Orientation to the sun makes a huge difference in heating/cooling/insulation.
3.      Some designs require fewer hallways, which saves space.
4.      Some designs require more support structures, doors, windows, etc.
5.      Some designs have ductwork issues.

Those are just some obvious examples of potential savings. You'd also cut your architect expense by 80%. And you'd save on labor and materials because the building materials would be measured and cut at the factory, including everything from lumber to floor tiles to carpet.

My observation is that the building industry is slow to innovate and fairly disorganized. Builders, architects, and materials companies are all their own little silos. So my guess is that the "shuffle design" program will originate in some sort of online game environment before it gets ported to the real world.

i think this is what Compass Data Centers is attempting to do.

If you’ve ever sat behind a foul pole at a baseball game you know what a pain columns can be. That’s why your 10,000 square feet of 36” raised floor is column free. At Compass, your data center floor accommodates anything from a tape library or a Cisco 7000 with side-to-side airflow to OpenCompute’s new larger rack sizes. This degree of flexibility even extends to cable management to support your preference whether its above the rack, hanging from the ceiling, or below the floor. At Compass, the only option you don’t have is to strand your IT capacity.

Speaking of your data center floor flexibility, can you control how much the software uses of the server and storage capacity? We didn’t think so. The reality of the world is that most software does not drive the full use of the server (virtualized or otherwise). As a result, it’s tough to predict what your actual usage will be from rack-to-rack. Not to mention the patch, network and storage…That’s why your Compass solution will support rack densities that cover the spectrum up to 20kW without containment (from 0 to 400 W/sf). Just imagine what you can do using ASHRAE TC 9.9 best practices including containment.

Although perfection is hard to achieve as once you live in the space you find out things you didn't consider.

Fix for iOS 6.1.3 battery drain, switch to manual e-mail downloads

I upgraded my iPad and iPhone 5 to iOS 6.1.3 last week and both devices had huge battery drain issues.  The most noticeable was my iPad which seemed like it was dropping 15% of battery charge per hour just watching a movie on my flight from NYC to SEA.  My iPhone was having the same problems.

I read the forums and many were seeing the problems and it looks like the forums are making more noise.  Enough to have CNET post an article.

The persistent battery drain rears its ugly head again with iOS 6.1.3. Several people posting on Apple's Support Communities forum say the battery drains faster after installing the new update. Some have tried the usual fixes, such as turning off notifications and restoring the device to factory settings, but say their battery charge still doesn't last long.

My fix which seems to work is I turned off e-mail fetching completely.  Not push.  Not every 15,30 min or hour.   Sync mail manually.  I only retrieve e-mail when I choose to sync.  And, my battery now lasts a lot longer.  I liked it so much I turned off regular e-mail retrieval on my Samsung Galaxy Note as well.

Living without the constant stream of e-mail took a bit to get used to, but I actually like it better now.

Cloud hits the Reality, The Physical Data Center Infrastructure is focus for GigaOm Structure

It is entertaining when people discuss the cloud as something that just is there whenever they need it.  It can be hard for people to understand the physical reality of a data centers.  And, even much more difficult to understand the relationship between a VM instance in the cloud and the physical infrastructure impact it requires.  How many VMs per server?  How many VMs per core. 

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham posts on the next GigaOm Structure event June 19-20, 2013

Structure 2013: Bring on the practitioners!

by Stacey Higginbotham

2 HOURS AGO

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photo: (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

SUMMARY:

Are you going to the sixth Structure conference on June 19 and 20? If your business dependes in any way on the cloud and enterprise IT, you will want to be there.

...

This year’s focus: The physical cloud

Looking ahead, we’re peeling back some of the software-defined abstraction to focus on the physicality of the cloud. Like how do we build special-purpose architectures for our apps? What happens when we scale beyond the confines of the data center with dark fiber or other distributed resources?

We’ve got some amazing speakers signed up already: from Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who will undoubtedly hit upon the business side of the cloud, to Adrian Cockroft of Netflix, who will talk about some of the practical issues associated with supporting a giant movie streaming service on Amazon’s cloud. And of course, we’ll have Amazon’s Werner Vogels back for his sixth appearance onstage, where he’ll defend the online retailer’s title as the king of the cloud. Just kidding, this isn’t a boxing match, it’s an infrastructure conference. So please, no wagering.

...

This is my third year going to GigaOm Structure.  My first year I went as a media attendee for this blog.  The second year I went as a GigaOm Pro Analyst.  This year, the third year I am a speaker.

Disclosure: I work for GigaOm Pro as an analyst and have many discussions with the company regarding data centers and the cloud.

Top Three Talks for GigaOm Structure Data

Many of the hardcore data center folks don't go to GigaOm Structure Data.  This latest conference was dominated by Big Data presentations.  Chatting with a few of the old timers who have gone to many of the GigaOm conferences, there were three presentations that stood out.  Check these out to get a taste of what is presented.

 Paul Maritz makes a call for leadership for a Data Driven Future.  If you want to read the talk go here.

EMC’s Paul Maritz: it takes leadership to move companies toward a data-driven future

by Eliza Kern

MAR. 20, 2013 - 9:56 AM PDT

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photo: Albert Chau

SUMMARY:

What does it take to move companies toward a data-driven future? EMC chief strategist and Pivotal Initiative leader Paul Maritz spoke at Strucuture:Data in New York on how to move toward the future through human leadership and strategy.

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OM MALIK 08:49

This injection of web-scale ideas and practices into various companies involves a whole different kind of thinking, not just at the IT infrastructure level. It affects thinking at the executive level, at the middle-management level, and all throughout the company. People insist on seeing data as this special thing. I feel that it’s more about the culture of the company. If the company doesn’t have a culture of innovative use of data, there doesn’t seem to be much they can do to adapt.

PAUL MARITZ 09:23

I think it’s tied to business models. These underlying structures allow you to rethink business models, and unfortunately I’ve learnt that it’s very hard for an organization to change its business model. All of us become very comfortable with a business model, it allows you to look into the future, it’s your compass” that allows you to make predictions, and it’s very difficult to let go of that. It’s not so much a matter of technology, it’s the fact of a company coming at you with a very different business model. Amazon for example doesn’t have the same focus on managing brands in the way that a traditional retailer does. They manage a customer relationship. Their whole business model is predicated on getting value out of the customer rather than squeezing value out of brands or products.

Sean Gourley's talk got people to think about solving problems.  Sean's transcript is here.

Data science is not enough. We need data intelligence too

by Stacey Higginbotham

MAR. 20, 2013 - 8:18 AM PDT

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photo: Albert Chau

SUMMARY:

In his talk at Structure: Data, Quid’s Sean Gourley talked about the meaningful differences between “data science” and “data intelligence.” While one is concerned with correlations, the other is concerned about solving problems.

And, our talk on Capacity Planning and Asset Management made the top mentions as one of the top talks.  Our transcript is here.

Want a better/greener/more agile data center? Use the data.

by Stacey Higginbotham

MAR. 21, 2013 - 8:23 AM PDT

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photo: Albert Chau

SUMMARY:

Want to see big data in action? When it comes to planning out data center capacity, data can influence everything from the power usage to planning for disasters.

Disclosure: I work for GigaOm Pro as a freelance analyst and the panel are some of the best people I have encountered in capacity planning and asset management.