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I started last week with a long analysis series of the individual problems relating to the Nokia mess. Each article will deal only with one aspect of Nokia's current malaise and will include a picture to explain it. I am trying to keep the articles short and readable. If you want to read what Nokia itself identified as the risks to the new Windows strategy, the risks were all itemized in the official filing Nokia did to the USA Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the New York Stock Exchange, using the form 20-F. I visited some of those risks and how much the nightmare scenario has in fact come true under Elop in the past two years. Then I started this series of short single-issue blogs. First I showed how Nokia growth had turned instantly into collapse in February 2011, and then I wrote about Nokia vs Competitors. But this is a blog about just one topic today. The world record in market collapse in the handset industry.
So I did the math for you, and collected the seven biggest collapses in the handset industry, so we can see how Nokia's smartphones now in 2010-2012 under Elop, compare to previous bankruptcy-resulting disasters that forced the company or unit to be sold - Motorola, Palm, Siemens - and the equivalent total failure of Windows Mobile (replaced with no migration path by Windows Phone). And the two that survived their big scares, LG (definitely survived) and RIM (the jury is still out, but currently most think the worst is over). Thats our context, the six worst market failures ever. I will compare all seven, including Nokia where the starting point is harmonized. This is the 'clean' version of the graphic. I will provide one detailed variant, same graph, but with the seven reasons why, at the end of this blog. Use whichever you like (or both) if you feel like writing or speaking about this set of notorious mobile industry collapses.
This graphic may be freely shared
First a few notes about the graph. The metric is market share. As the industry growth per year has fluctuated greatly from one year to another, as we faced two global economic crises in the past 12 years that faced zero growth (by some measures even slight market decline year-on-year) the best measure to compare collapses in different periods is the market share metric. Also the starting point is very different, Nokia started at 35%, Motorola at 21% compared to the collapse of Palm and LG which started at 9% and Siemens at 8%. So I have harmonized the starting point to year zero. At Year Zero, the starting point of Nokia at 35% market share in 2010, is harmonized to Siemens in 2001 having 8% or RIM in 2009 having 19%.
Then I have used the fall in market share points, converted to a standardized rate of annual decline - counting from starting point to ending point, by number of years. So when Siemens fall from 8% to 2% in a three-year period, that means Siemens market share collapsed by 3 out of 4 it had (ie 75% as a rate of total fall). In other words, Siemens fell in half in 18 months, and in half again, in the next 18 months. Its average rate of decline per year was thus 35%.
Or Windows Mobile which started at 12% in 2008 and after the period was down to also only one fourth the size it started with, ie 3%. But Microsoft's smartphone operating system achieved that fall of being cut in half, in 12 months, not 18 months, and again in the next 12 months. So WinMo also lost 3 out of 4 market share points it had - but did it only in two years, compared to Siemens who did the same damage in three years. So Microsoft's average annual rate of collapse was 50% per year.
Finally, note that these are not strictly apples-to-apples comparisons, this worst-of-handsets record holders notorious list includes pure smartphone makers RIM and Palm; full-feature handset makers in the time to shift to smartphones Motorola and LG; a full-feature handset maker Siemens when the smartphone market was in its infancy and of no significance to the fall; a pure smartphone OS provider Microsoft Windows Mobile; and of the Nokia fall, this is only of its smartphone unit, which when this fall started, had become Nokia's biggest revenue unit and obviously generated more revenues than its dumbphone unit. So please note, this is not a measure of 'all Nokia mobile phones' including dumbphones/featurephones. This is purely the smartpone unit where Nokia's future - and the future of the industry - lies.
With all that, lets examine each of the seven to see how they fell, when they did it, and why. Here are the Seven Worst Collapses in the history of mobile phone handsets, and their stories:
(Was ranked number 3 in market of all mobile phone handsets)
Cause of collapse - Microsoft partnering
At number 7 we have LG with its ill-fated Microsoft misadventure. In 2008 LG was growing strong had grabbed 9% market share in mobile phones globally, was the number 3 bestselling phone in the USA, number 4 in Europe and seeing strong growth fuelled in part by its iconic LG Prada series of featurephones that in 2007 had outsold the similar-appearance 'original' Apple iPhones (what were later to be called iPhone 2G ie the featurephone before Apple turned the iPhone into a proper smartphone starting with iPhone 3) worldwide.
LG made the always-costly mistake of a deep partnership with Microsoft, and where most legacy handset-maker rivals used either Symbian or Android very successfully, to battle the rapidly growing iPhone and Blackberry at this time (2008), LG decided to rather partner deeply with Microsoft and believed the marketing BS that Windows Mobile would win over the iPhone (and Blackberry). The Windows market share went into deep dive the more Microsoft's product was obviously not competitive against iOS and Symbian (such as Nokia N-Series) in the consumer markets, Blackberry OS and Symbian (ie Nokia E-Series) in the enterprise markets. LG was then burned by Microsoft suddenly 'Osborning' the whole Windows Mobile line - announcing it will be terminated, and a new incompatible platform would be built on Windows Phone instead. This was soon after LG had joined as the strategic partner to Windows. LG lost a little over half its market share in all phones as the vital top-end flagship phones were utterly unsellable, and LG went from profits into deep losses. LG rapidly abandoned the doomed Microsoft path, and joined the Android family to great additional cost and delay, but LG survived the damage, and today is back to profits.
RIM - 2009-2012 - FELL FROM 19% to 5% IN 3 YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 34% PER YEAR: SURVIVES
(Was ranked number 2 in market of smartphones)
Cause of collapse - entering tablet market as pure handset maker
Blackberry-maker RIM saw promising profitable growth in 2008 as it battled the new iPhone (yes, thats true, RIM was not in any way damaged by the strong growth years of Apple, RIM was essentially immune, serving the most opposite distinct market: where the iPhone served affluent consumers interested in web surfing and later, apps; Blackberries served enteprise/business users and their emails and in consumer markets, the youth addicted to messaging). RIM management in Waterloo then embarked on the disasterous market exploration that all but destroyed the iconic Canadian smarpthone maker. They decided to try to do a tablet PC. I've explained on this blog many times, that a tablet PC makes perfect sense for any PC maker (like HP, Dell, Acer, or yes, Apple or Sony or Samsung) but it does not make any sense for a pure handset maker like Motorola or RIM (or as now rumors suggest, Nokia). The tablet market is vastly different, tablets are sold and priced differently than PCs. The tablet market is far smaller than smartphones, and dominated by Apple's iPad. An intelligent smartphone manufacturer CEO will resist the temptation just because superficially, on its appearance, a tablet looks like an enlarged smartphone. The smartphone market is fiercely competitive, regularly half of the big manufacturers report losses in the smartphone market even as the market grows at breakneck speeds usually more than 50% per year. The smart CEO focuses efforts to win and keep on winning in the far bigger smartphone market, and explores new smartphone opportunities but leaves the tablet PC market to the legacy PC makers who have to move there anyway as their own desktop PC market is stagnating.
Well, RIM obviously did not listen to my advice and right as they were stretched to the limit in supporting their global expansion marketing in smartphones - as Blackberries very bizarrely became the bestselling smartphones in unanticipated countries at the time like Thailand, Venezuela, South Africa, Nigeria etc - RIM actually admitted in public, the consumer love of the Blackberry took them by surprise and they didn't really know even fully why it was the bestselling smarpthone in such differing markets. Instead of learning why it is growing strongly in so many large emerging world markets, RIM took the eye off the ball, and launched an iPad competitor instead, now forcing most of its marketing effort to go into launching RIM into the PC market where it had never competed, on that distribution, sales, pricing etc market. The Blackberry tablet failed and drained massively RIM resources, forcing it to retrench globally from the growing consumer market, and into the receeding corporate market (where BYOD Bring Your Own Device policies were now allowing iPhones and Android smartphones to eat into RIM's traditionally 'safe' enterprise market).
Worst of all, the efforts into the launch of the Blackberry tablet drained precious software development skills needed for the next generation Blackberry OS, the one with full touch integration, that we now know as BB!0, that is scheduled for first handsets out this first calendar Quarter in 2013. The BB10 project was critical to keep Blackberry competitive, and any delays to BB10 would severely drain RIM's growth and market prospects. As RIM cut staff and costs fierecely in the Blackberry tablet launch disaster aftermath, the BB10 project got postponed and postponed again. However, RIM survived (or is surviving) but just barely. Last year saw a lot of rumors of RIM going bankrupt or being bought.
(Was ranked number 4 in market of mobile phone handsets)
Cause of death - market shirt from enterprise to consumer handsets (killed by Nokia)
Siemens was the first big casualty of a Top 5 manufacturer to die in digital age of consumer cellular phones. Siemens missed the big shift from enterprise oriented 'business phones' to the much larger consumer market. Siemens's phones tended to be quite technical and capable, but big and bulky and ugly and unfriendly to users. Where Nokia focused on consumer fashions and interests (replaceable colored covers, downloadable ringing tones) and made consumer services and features more easy to use (adding the clock and games, and making all Nokia phones very easy to use on SMS text messaging, adding a big phone number library capacity etc) Siemens missed those trends and found its high capacity in phones falling into loss-making and under-utilized. Siemens sold its handset unit to BenQ.
(Was ranked number 2 in market of mobile phone handsets)
Cause of death - iPhone and Nokia N-Series stole top end market of Razr
Motorola was enjoying the windfall gains of being Nokia's biggest rival, when the global carrier community decided to punish Nokia the last time for severe disgressions (These were the 2003 launch of the consumer-oriented smartphone Nokia N-Gage with its nasty concept of 'app store' that allowed apps to be sold and downloaded to N-Gage smartphones by 'sideloading' ie bypassing the carriers and their billing and traffic; plus the coincidentially timed Nokia push to the early version of Nokia's consumer marketing afforts around Club Nokia. The carrier community revolt caused Nokia to see global market share loss of a third in a two-year period).
This timing was very fortuitous for Motorola, timed with the launch of the Razr series, at the time the sleekest most sexy-looking featurephones on the market in 2004-2006. Powered by the Razr, the severely declining Motorola handset sales turned into strong growth over those two years (matched by almost exact decline in Nokia sales). After Nokia made peace with the carrier community in 2006 and withdrew the hated N-Gage and refocused Club Nokia to be delivered via the carrier networks - Nokia was able to recover completely. But why did Motorola now suddenly lose its share (and others did not for example Samsung etc).
Motorola's Razr was the first big scalp taken by the iPhone. In those markets where Apple was strong, mostly the USA and Europe - markets where Motorola also was usually strong - the slick sexy iPhone stole Motorola's lollipop and ran away with it. But in other markets, where Motorola also was strong but the iPhone was not to be seen, like China, Latin America and the Middle East (and parts of Europe too) - it was in fact Nokia's N-series, in particular the hugely popular Nokia N95 (a smartphone that vastly outsold the iPhone by the way) that destroyed Razr's markets. Motorola was then still in that typical USA-mindset thinking of smartphones as primarily enterprise-oriented ie business phones and made several smartphone design mistakes including ill-fated Windows based smartphones that failed to succeed right as the iPhone was proving to the USA market what Nokia had already years before proven to European and Asian markets - that the consumer market for smarpthones was far bigger. What focus Motorola did in 2008 and 2009 was into the wrong market segment (enterprise) and on the wrong platform (Windows). Motorola went from huge profits to massive losses in the collapse and then retrenched from markets, and tried to survive by shrinking such as selling its networking unit to Nokia. Motorola did not survive, went bankrupt, was split, and the handset unit was sold to Google.
(was ranked number 2 in market of smartphones)
Cause of death - iPhone
Palm was the second largest smartphone maker in the world behind Nokia, running also the second-most used smarpthone OS behind Symbian. Palm became purely a victim of the iPhone in 2007 and being in essentially the same markets where Apple is strong, especially the USA, and with poor carrier support even there, Palm died very fast. It did join the Windows ecosystem in an attempt to fight back, but that only drained further the funds Palm had and caused more headaches Palm didn't need, which meant its own radical and many felt possibly even iPhone-beating OS, WebOS, being severely delayed. Palm had focused on the enterprise market when the laggard US market finally followed the trends we had seen in Europe and advanced countries of Asia-Pacific to the consumer market, so Palm's response to the early iPhone was misunderstanding it and not reacting to it appropriately. Palm had never been strong in profits, was making ever bigger losses as its market share collapsed and lingered on for a while generating ever more losses in the 1% market share range before being bought by HP (and since, terminated, but possibly parts of what was Palm now might be resurrected via WebOS, as HP re-examines its interests in mobile)
(Was ranked number 2 in market of smartphone operating systems)
Cause of death - iPhone and Osborning of the Windows Mobile line
Microsoft's Windows is a kind of widow-maker in smarpthones. Its launch (Windows's ie Microsoft's launch I mean) itself resulted in killing the mother it was supposed to have, British smartphone maker Sendo. Microsoft plundered all the insights from Sendo, then went to another 'partner' it had, HTC, and instead launched Windows with HTC instead. Sendo claimed in the lawsuit (that it won) that Windows had been stealing Sendo intellectual property which it used to help HTC. Of the biggest failures on this list, most had decisive or contributing damage from attempting a Microsoft cure to their troubles. Windows is to winning in smartphones like water is to fire. LG, Motorola, Palm and Nokia on this list have felt damage from attempting a Microsoft cure. Note - nobody has ever used Windows to gain significant sustainable share in smartphones. Even HTC shifted away from Windows to Android the moment that became possible and HTC had at that time sold half of all Windows phones ever made.
Well, Microsoft did collect at one point six of the ten largest smartphone makers (Samsung, HTC, LG, SonyEricsson, Palm, Motorola) to support Windows but that didn't help. Every one of the major smartphone makers complained, some more openly than others, that Microsoft was always the worst partner they had seen in the smarpthone market, whether saying that explicitly, or indicating it via their emphasis by product portfolio, or complaining that consumers and carriers didn't prefer this platform. Every one of these makers had supported at least one other smartphone platform (Symbian, Android, Palm, LiMo) and those who ever attempted to prioritize Windows ahead of the others (LG, Motorola, Palm) had found the company immediately going from profits to losses, or the losses only becoming bigger, after Microsoft's Windows versions had been launched. HTC on the other hand, struggled with losses until it found profits out of Android..
The ultimate irony is, that after six years of pretty steady growth for Windows Mobile, it suddenly 'went over the cliff' and fell by a then-world-record fall in the handset industry, losing 50% per year on average, for two years, collapsing from 12% to 3% in yes, 24 months. Windows Mobile collapse was due almost exactly due to the iPhone, as WinMo's significant markets were almost exactly those where Apple's iPhone was growing strongly in 2008 and 2009. Whereas Windows Mobile had seemed reasonably competitive in 2006 against its then-rivals Symbian, Palm, Blackberry OS and Linux Mobile, once the iPhone appeared, Windows Mobile was instantly obsolete. It could not even take advantage of advanced features that Symbian supported, such as multiple screens, genuine multitasking, advanced cameras, advanced screen resolutions etc. Where Symbian (and Blackberry OS) did just fine during early iPhone market rise, Windows Mobile (and Palm OS) utterly collapsed.
Why Windows Mobile collapse turned so severe, 50% per year compared to its close compatriot Palm OS that only fell 42% per year - was the Osborning of Windows Mobile by Steve Ballmer. In a bizarre twist on history, compared to Microsoft under Bill Gates who provided a migration path from DOS to Windows on the PC side, that ensured Microsoft's giant market share edge on the basic text-based DOS personal computers would be held as the market transitioned to the modern mouse-input-based Windows environment; why didn't Microsoft do the same from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone? Windows Mobile was the smartphone equivalent of DOS, a mostly text-based input (or stylus) but after the iPhone, we've seen the touch-based input that Windows Phone epitomizes. If Steve Ballmer had offered a migration path from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone, rather than Osborning the whole Windows world, he might well have kept 10% or 8% of the Windows market for today (Windows Phone currently has about 2% market share).
Also just for those who don't know, the Osborne Effect is when a provider promises a new platform in the future, incompatible with the current ones, but does not have those new items to sell now. All current sales collapse as obsolete. This bankrupted the Osborne Computer company, and Ballmer Osborned his Windows Mobile platform which pushed the speed of collapse to a world record. Yes, in only 2 years, Microsoft's market share in smartphone operating systems fell from number 2 to number 6, his market share collapsed from 12% to 3% and this was the world record collapse in the mobile handset industry. Windows Mobile did not survive this transition, it was completely replaced (by a new OS, Windows Phone that is such a poor replacement that it has not peaked above 3% in any single quarter since its release in 2010)
NOKIA - 2010-2012 - FELL FROM 35% to 5% in TWO YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 62% PER YEAR - IS CURRENTLY ENDANGERED SPECIES AS FALL CONTINUES
(Was ranked number 1 in market of smartphones)
Cause of death - Elop Effect ie Osborne Effect combined with Ratner Effect - resulted in instant carrier boycott and retail boycott against Nokia, these furher damaged by another Osborne Effect by Elop and yet another by Ballmer, and the purchase of Skype by Microsoft causing a Microsoft-targeted sales boycott
Nokia invented the smarpthone so it started with 100% market share. It is predictable that Nokia would see market share erosion, gradually, over time, as the market drew new competitors, as happens with any new market. The Nokia average rate of market share decline had been historically be about 4% or 5% per annum, and guess what it was in 2010? Exactly to form, in year 2010, Nokia market share (annually) fell from 39% to 35% ie a fall of 4% in market share points (incidentially, there was some shenanigans with that, Nokia's previous CEO was caught buying market share ie boosting it by artificial prices that cut profits severely, an unsustainable problem which was part of why he was fired in the summer of 2010). Obviously Nokia's annual market share erosion was so mild, it would not register in this Top 7, in fact nowhere near the Top 10 biggest falls in handsets.
This quite gradual and modest decline in market share was suddenly boosted in 2011. To say boosted is an understatement. The floor fell off. Nokia set a world record by suddenly collapsing smartphone sales by 62% per year, for two years running. Note, this has nothing to do with the iPhone. The iPhone grew its market in the early years of the iPhone from 2007 to 2009 at a time when Nokia's smartphone sales grew more than Apple's. Since then, the iPhone sales stabilized and grew barely faster than the industry on a whole. Nokia's fall didn't start until after the iPhone's growth period had ended.
Something very drastic happened in the first quarter of 2011 that turned a strongly growing Nokia smartphone sales into the world-record biggest fall. I explained this pattern in the blog earlier in this series. (Note, I was not talking about market share there, I was talking about absolute unit sales. While Nokia's market share was eroding very gradually, as more and more new rivals were entering the hottest tech space, smartphones, Nokia's total smartphone sales grew 53% in year 2010 - and grew more than Apple iPhone or Samsung smartphone or any other smarpthone maker sales that year). Then suddenly, in Q1 of 2011, there is a massive drop in sales, and then a continuing collapse that continues to today.
Sources: Nokia quarterly data, industry analyst consensus, and TomiAhonen Consulting 2013
This table may be freely shared
Q4 2012 - 3% (est)
Sources: Nokia quarterly data, industry analyst consensus, and TomiAhonen Consulting 2013
This table may be freely shared
That is a world record, folks. A world record in market share fall in the mobile phone industry. A world record in failure. And how ironic, that Nokia would take this record, from previous record-holder Microsoft, by switching to a Microsoft-based strategy, and hiring a Microsoft guy as CEO. Yeah if you really want to fail spectacularly in mobile, you kind of need that Microsoft Windows power to really ruin your life, as we learn from such mobile industry failures as Sendo and Kin, who never even had the chance to get into the big time, or the falls of LG, Motorola and Palm, which all were fuelled partly or completely by Microsoft.
So what happened in Q1? There was no fire at a Nokia factory or a strike by employees or sudden collapse of some critical Nokia component supplier. There was no Tsunami causing evacuation, no nuclear power plant disaster causing electricity shortages and no volcanic cloud causing delivery distruption. There was no catastrophic component disaster like Sony had with exploding laptop batteries or Apple had with 'antennagate' (you are not holding your phone correctly). There was no sudden emergence of a rival phone that changed the market economics like the iPhone in 2007 killed Motorola's Razr and Palm and Windows Mobile. In fact, in 2011, Apple's iPhone 4 was delayed at launch, from June to September, so Nokia had even more room to succceed, not less.
At the end of 2010, Nokia had released its most successful handset - the N8 - and most successful Symbian operating system upgrade, S^3 ever seen, with 4 million N8 sales powering a total of 5 million of the new Symbian S^3 device sales in Q4 of 2010. This hot new flagship phone with its 12 megapixel camera and full touch screen was winning awards globally and still two years later is on the charts as one of today's best smartphones. Yes, running 'obsolete' Symbian. The uptake of N8 was so strong, it set a Nokia-record for biggest jump in Nokia smartphone sales, Nokia smarpthone average sales prices, Nokia smartphone profits, and Nokia profitability! And that N8, was about to see its 'sister phone' the E7 with the QWERTY keyboard slider and even larger screen (at the time, a giant 3.9 inches, far bigger than the iPhone of the time) to be launched in January 2011 (to huge initial success and accolades, especially from China, the world's largest smartphone market).
Anyone who says Nokia was 'losing' the war to Apple and RIM and Samsung and HTC simply is living in the lala-land of fantasy. In 2010, Nokia was more than twice the size of its nearest rivals and grew more in year 2010 than any of its rivals, so the gap to Nokia and the pack chasing it was not closing, it was growing. It so dominated the global smartphone market, Nokia was increasing the gap between it and the rest of the challengers. This is a fact. So, then, why the sudden comprehensive collapse of this massive success? Something happened in Q1 of 2011.
Yes, it was the Elop Effect, the costliest management error of all time. We already heard of the Osborne Effect. Before that, lets talk briefly about the Ratner Effect. Ratners was a successful discount jewelry store chain in Britain. Its CEO was asked why do they sell so much jewelry, to which he replied they sold so much because it was crap. He badmouthed his own products. This caused an instant collapse of Ratner jewelry sales, the company went to the brink of bankruptcy and the CEO was fired and the whole retail store chain totally rebranded. Imagine rebranding a retail chain like Ikea or H&M or Walmart or 7-Eleven... Ratners had to invent a new identity and fire the CEO just to survive. Thats the Ratner Effect.
That happened in year 1990. No CEO had since been as foolish to try this suicidal trick to ruining your market, until a certain Stephen Elop, new CEO of Nokia, who decided to pen his infamous Burning Platforms memo - in which he did, yes, call his own products rubbish to the degree they were in his words uncompetitive in the market and in his words had fallen behind such rivals as the iPhone. So this was as if to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the Ratner Effect, Stephen Elop's 'homage' to that corporate suicide attempt by repeating it. Except that Elop decided to be even more Ratnerish, than Mr Ratner himself. Ratner was telling the truth, when he said his jewelry was cheap because it was crap (it was, a very poor low-grade quality of gold mixture, etc).
Elop called Nokia's products uncompetitive - when they were beating the competition globally. Yes, I know what you think and what you may have read at some very misguided 'tech' press. But we deal in the real world and real numbers here on this blog. Nokia was not losing, far from it. Nokia not only was winning, Nokia was dominating the smartphone market more than Toyota or GM has ever had the luxury of dominating the car market! Just in the world's largest market for smartphones, China - Nokia had over 70% market share! In Africa (a Billion people, thats three USAs) or in the Middle East (another USA by population, but partially overlapping Africa, obviously) Nokia's smartphones had 80% market share. In India, the worlds' second largest mobile handset market even as smartphones were not yet highly sold, Nokia had over 70% market share in all phones.
Nokia was not losing to Apple's iPhone and other rivals, Nokia was more than twice as big as the iPhone in smartphones (thats excluding the real race, where Nokia was 8 times bigger in all types of phones, which is how Nokia's CEO also should have looked at the race, not by Apple's SteveJobs-colored glasses of conveniently excluding 80% of the handset market in 2010). And yes, Nokia's gap to its nearest rivals was INCREASING in 2010, not decreasing. Nokia was beating the rivals like a rented mule. Who looks at the iPad today, in tablets, and says Apple is 'losing' the tablets war? Come on. Nokia sold 103.6 million smartphones in 2010, as per the final revised numbers reported by Nokia in its Quarterly numbers. And Apple sold 47.5 million iPhones. Who was winning? (keeping in mind, both companies did this profitably, and both companies were growing in a healthy way, and both companies had said in 2010 that smartphones were the strategic future of the company's total product portfolio).
Elop took the Ratner Effect, where Ratner honestly called his products rubbish - which collapsed his sales. Elop looked at his winning smartphone products that were increasing the gap to rivals in 2010, and decided to destroy that sales growth, by 'doing the Ratner' - he Ratnererd Nokia's reputation. With the Burning Platforms memo. And don't say it was an internal memo that was leaked, of course it was leaked, Elop released to all staff and when it was leaked, Elop instantly jumped on the media to claim ownership of the memo. He intended it to be released. He was very proud of it back then. (He has since expressed regret and retracted many of the dumbest statements in the memo, and admitted to the Nokia shareholders' conference in April 2012, that yes, the Burning Platforms memo had hurt Nokia smartphone sales - something he now seems to suggest, he had not anticipated at the time?)
Add to that the Osborne Effect. Elop also decided in February to demolish Nokia current strong smartphone sales growth by Osborning the whole line. Note, this has NOTHING to do with the 'decision' to shift away from Symbian - that decision was made long ago before Elop. This was the sudden change, that the new operating system for Nokia's smartphones would not be one made by Nokia, ie Symbian and MeeGo, the new operating system only months from launch, but rather, Nokia would abandon its own operating systems altogether and join the Microsoft family supporting Windows Phone. What was wrong in the Elop Effect is the timing. Elop announced his end of Symbian in February, when the first Lumia smartphones using Windows Phone would not be available until November 2011 (in tiny numbers, in volume starting January 2012). This is the classic Osborne Effect. Announcing a new, incompatible platform that instantly makes current products obsolete. It is what destroyed the Osborne Computer Company. It is what previously helped set the world record in market share collapse in handsets, by Windows Mobile in the immediate previous two years. Before the Elop Effect, Nokia had a market share of 35% in 2010. After the Osborning of his products, up until Windows Phone based Lumia smartphones were available broadly and in volume, ie at Q4 of 2011, Nokia's market share had fallen to 12% !!!! (yes, it was obviouly both the Ratner Effect and the Obsorne Effect, but still..).
Stephen Elop totally voluntarily, with no reason whatsoever, caused the Ratner Effect by spreading lies and falsehoods about how bad Nokia products are. That caused an instant collapse of Nokia retail sales. I was on this blog immediately reporting it, and since Nokia CEO himself has admitted to the Nokia shareholders meeting in April 2012, that Nokia retail is often refusing to sell Nokia branded handsets, even when they have them in stock in the store. Nokia never had this problem before, Nokia was proud of the world's best retail and distribution network in the industry. Immediately after the Elop Effect, Nokia's retail revolted and put Nokia into what I call here a 'retail boycott'. It is not explicitly all stores or all store staff, it is far more random, where given sales reps simply refuse to show or sell (and increasingly store managers even refusing to stock) Nokia phones. Not just smartphones - all Nokia phone sales fell in early 2011 at a Nokia record speed. So the Ratner Effect side of the Elop Effect was clearly a self-inflicted wound. It was like an Olympic biathalon skiier (the ones who ski and shoot) deliberately taking his rifle, and shooting himself in the foot while competing.
Stephen Elop also voluntarily and unnecessarily caused the Osborne Effect in February 2011 by announcing the Microsoft Windows partnership at a time when he had no phones to sell or even to show. This was a timing disaster. Nothing would have prevented Elop from waiting until September to make the announcement, the usual timing Nokia has for a new phone to be launched, about two months before. Then the stores would have been able to sell old stock at some discounts, and used the news of the new phones as big buzz to increase interest in Nokia. The Osborne Effect hit the carrier community more than the retail stores. The carrier handset bosses who make strategic decisions about which handsets to support (and in many Industrialized World countries where handset subsidies are still common - also which of the handsets to subsidise and by how much). When the carriers/operators and their strategic leadership learned in February 2011, that the Symbian line is dead, and that Nokia has suddenly shifted away from MeeGo (even as Nokia had China Mobile as a carrier-partner supporting MeeGo and Nokia had prepared a new MeeGo based smartphone for Verizon - called SeaRay, what Elop later would cannibalize to create the first Lumia phone, the Lumia 800, etc) - they of course instructed the handset buying execs to discontinue supporting Symbian.
That makes 100% sense, if the Nokia CEO announces a change in his strategy, that Symbian is suddenly killed and its replacement, the much-promised MeeGo is also killed, then yes, the carriers will abandon Symbian immediately. It does NOT mean that the carriers will be taking Windows Phone instead, that would remain to be seen. For example Android was already growing strongly at this time and most of the Windows partners had shifted completely or partially from Windows to Android already at this time. The carrier reaction to the Osborne Effect was predictable and obivous, for example Horace Dediu ie Asymco was up on his blog instantly announcing that the Windows decision would collapse Nokia sales.
Note, that the Osborne Effect side of the Elop Effect hit essentially only the smartphone side of Nokia. So it collapsed Symbian sales by Nokia, not really impacting the dumbphone/featurephones sales (which were hit by the Ratner effect). And also Elop's Osborne Effect caused the ending of NTT DoCoMo's loyal support of Symbian in Japan, instantly also collapsing the Japanese Symbian sales overnight. NTT DoCoMo shifted to Android and is now in the process of bringing MeeGo's successor, Tizen based smartphones to Japan in 2013. Elop has since bitterly complained, time and again that the carriers are not supporting his strategy. Before the Elop Effect, Nokia had the largest carrier relations of any handset manufacturer and the carrier relations were the pride of the company, a clear competitive advantage second to none (now that is obviously with Samsung who stole all those contracts and deals and is forging new success replacing Nokia at every turn, such as with Tizen replacing MeeGo)
But yes, there was no need whatsoever for Nokia to make the Microsoft announcement in February, when the first phones weren't due until November. This was a self-induced wound. Its like the skiier in the biathalon now taking his rifle, deciding that the pain in one leg is not enough, and shoots himself in the other leg as well, to really damage his chances of winning this race.
The Nokia fall was already bad, then came Skype. This is not about which phone has or does not have Skype. We've had Skype on mobile phones since the middle of hte last decade. Today most smarpthones can have Skype installed and we can bypass the carriers completely if we use WiFi for example. This is not about having Skype on a phone (the early Nokia Lumia phones did not have Skype even). No. This is about who owns and bankrolls Skype. In other words, who keeps Skype alive, to threaten the carriers. Skype is the biggest existential threat to the mobile operators/carriers. Yes, Whatsapp or Blackberry Messenger or iMessage or Facebook are threats too, as what are commonly called OTT providers. Skype is the biggest. Skype has passed 1 Billion registered users (not all using it obviously) and through the Microsoft purchase of Skype in June 2011, Skype is now being expanded to cover all 1.2 Billion desktop/laptop/tablet/smartphone users of Windows and possibly even Xbox and beyond. For context, the world's largest mobile carrier/operator only has about 800 million users. Skype is a gargantuan threat to the carrier community.
Skype is not only messaging or only voice, it is voice, messaging and videocalls. Skype is particularly used in the most lucrative part of mobile operator business, cannibalizing international voice minutes and roaming revenues. Voice calls form 60% of mobile operator/carrier revenues and 50% of profits. SMS text messaging forms 20% of operator/carrier revenues and 45% of profits. So in total, Skype threatens about 80% of revenues and 95% of profits of the carrier community! If voice and messaging traffic disappears to Skype, or the revenues of it fall drastically, meaning the profits in it collapse totally, the operator/carrier business goes bankrupt. No two ways around it. Skype is an existential threat to carriers. For Microsoft to suggest to carriers, let me put Skype on your smarpthones via Windows Phone, is like labeling a bottle of poison as 'tastest great' and asking carriers to drink it all. That is not about to happen.
Stephen Elop testified to the Nokia shareholders meeting on April 2012, that its not that Skype exists which is killing Nokia sales. It is because Microsoft bought Skype - that the very ownership of Skype is what causes the carriers to reject any Windows based smartphones by any manufacturer. Before the Skype purchase, Microsoft had SonyEricsson, Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, ZTE and Dell supplying Windows based smartphones. After the Skype purchase, SonyEricsson, Dell and LG quit Windows completely - while HTC reduced its Windows portfolio shifting more to Android - Samsung announced the Tizen OS project - Huawei and ZTE decided not to roll out Windows Phone 8 based smartphones ie the next generation. All who have commented, either officially or indirectly, have said that the carrier demand for Windows ended with Skype. Nobody in the carrier community wants Microsoft anymore. The only reason they say nice things sometimes, and let Microsoft and Nokia occasionally launch a phone model or two is because Microsoft and Nokia are throwing quite literally billions of dollars into the marketing spend. The moment the money stops, the carriers say, sorry, it wasn't that popular after all. This is exactly the pattern we saw in Britain, in Germany, in America, and we will soon see in China too.
Not my words! So testified Nokia CEO Stephen Elop to the Nokia shareholders meeting in April, that the carriers dislike it that Microsoft owns Skype, adding 'of course' as it is so well known in the industry. And he added in a long reply that there are carriers who are refusing to sell any Windows based smartphones and that a year of negotiations with carriers involving Elop himself, and Microsoft, have not convinced any carriers to take the suicide pact of drinking the Skype poison and becoming Microsoft's bitch, sorry I should say slave.
And then Elop himself was not satisfied in the damage done to Nokia smarpthone sales. He had his new smarpthones coming out running MeeGo, the wonderful new OS powering the N9, that has been winning praise the world over, many reviewers actually calling it better than the iPhone - no smartphone had ever gotten that kind of review, certainly none by Nokia before or since; nor of any Microsoft Windows platform either (by any honest tech review, I am ignoring the Microsoft-planted propaganda stories such as their inflated Amazon ratings by the ghost reviewers who were caught being paid to write positive reviews of Windows Phone smartphones). MeeGo had three handsets and a tablet ready to launch in 2011 and many more to come. Nokia actually produced only two, the N9 and N950, both highly beloved by those who have used them. The Nokia N9 won the design award of the year in 2012 by the D&AD awards, considered the Nobel Prizes or Oscar Awards of the design industry (beating Apple among others). This was a high-price flagship superphone that in every side-by-side review beat all contemporaries from the iPhone to the Samsung Galaxy to the Nokia Lumia. If you liked the original Lumia 800, recognize that phone model, originally as the SeaRay was the little sister to the N9, when both were designed to run on MeeGo. After Elop force-migrated the SeaRay to become his first Lumia Windows smartphone, it had lots of its abilities sacrificed, making it a bastard child nobody could love.
So back to the N9. If you manufacture such a highly desirable and excellent device, you roll it out everywhere and let its sales fly (even more, if your smartphone unit is seeing currently dramatically declining sales, your factories run idle and your are bleeding cash). Can you imagine Apple, if it releases a new device that suddenly wins all awards and is called the best in field, by every analysts at the time? Apple would roll it out everywhere and ramp up production. Elop refused to let the N9 be sold in major markets, would not release the N950 for sale anywhere, and to really make sure he nailed every nail into the coffin of the Nokia-owned and developed MeeGo world, he announced one day after the N9 was revealed, that Nokia will not support any further MeeGo devices! He Osborned his own product one day after it was born. Natural born killer, that is what Elop is. He is Dr Kervorkian-Elop, the Suicide Doctor of the mobile industry.
So Nokia had released four Lumia based smartphones by June of 2011 and had deals with AT&T and T-Mobile in the USA, and even the first deal in China with China Unicom. When Steve Ballmer did what he knows best, f*cking his partners. Ballmer announced that Microsoft will not provide a migration path for any first generation Windows Phone prodcuts (on WP 6 and WP 7 versions) into the new Windows 8 ecosystem, where a new Windows Phone 8 OS would be introduced instead. Ballmer looked at his struggling partner Nokia, and all others still left in the Windows ecosystem, and decided to screw them royally. No migration path. Even after the disasterous results of the 'no migration path' decision with WIndows Mobile two years before. That caused the 2012 sales of Lumia of the first generation, what I call Lumia 1.0 to collapse. Nokia Lumia sales had just started to catch some success, and actually doubled from Q1 to Q2. But the Osborne Effect is immediate and dramatic. Nokia's very next quarter that strong growth was traded for instant call. The Lumia sales fell by 28% from Q2 to Q3. This even as Nokia was offering Lumia at fire sale price cuts, literally in some cases sold in the one penny basket (with contract).
So while Nokia's collapse started with the Elop Effect, that damage might have ended during 2011, and with the new Windows Phone smartphones on Lumia and the hot MeeGo based N9 and N950, Nokia could have recovered at least some of the losses, or at the very least, stopped the decline, if Elop was a competent CEO. Instead, after the Elop Effect, we had the Microsoft Skype purchase, that caused carriers to institute a global boycott of all Windows phones by any manufacturers (and many Microsoft partners exited at this point). Then Elop caused yet another Osborning of the MeeGo system. And finally Ballmer Osborned what little success Nokia was trying to build with Lumia 1.0. Now we start, once again, from zero, with Lumia 2.0, running Windows Phone 8, not from a strong Nokia market position of 35% global market. Not even from the far weakened position when Lumia 1.0 was launched, when Nokia held 14% of the market. No, now the Lumia 2.0 is being introduced on an OS platform that still has a global carrier-boycott against Skype against it, with Nokia bringing in 3% market share to support that transition. How is this going to play out?
I am expecting Nokia will not survive and am expecting some rivals to come in, buy Nokia not for the smartphone competence or the factories or carrier relations or distribution or brand strength - but because Nokia has the world's largest patents portfolio in the mobile industry and that alone is worth more than the roughly 10 Billion dollars that is Nokia's market cap value today.
I promised a variation to the simple picture in the above. Here is the same graphic, but adding the small boxes to describe the main reasons why these seven mobile handsets failed. You may use either graphic or both if you want to report on this story
This graphic may be freely shared
So yes, please do feel free to share this or any other stories, statistics, graphics and quotations in your stories about mobile and tech. And any journalists out there - look at this graphic. Look at Nokia. If this was Apple iPhone or Toyota or Boeing or Coca Cola, setting the world record collapse of its industry (and arguably a world record of any industry) - isn't that a HUGE story to tell? If you are a journalist or blogger, please do your story on this, and report on it. This is the biggest story in tech and some journalist who writes the Nokia Elop story will be winning the Pulitzer. And this story will become a case study at Harvard and all MBA schools, so if you are inclined to write a book - the Elop Effect and Nokia's collapse is a true case study in stupidity and ineptitude. Please do consider researching and writing your story about it.
So thats the story in Balamory. We had seen six incredible collapses in the handset industry. LG lost almost a quarter of its market per year for three years running, but recovered and is now healthy again. RIM and Siemens lost a third of the market per year for three years. RIM was on the ropes but now looks like it will survive. Siemens in mobile phones did not. Motorola and Palm lost four out of ten customers they had, per year, for three years in a row and went bust. And Windows Mobile set the world record for market failure losing literally half its customers per year, on average, for two years in a row, until the system was shut down and totally replaced.
Now we have Nokia under Elop. He looked at Ratner and Osborne, saw how they destroyed their respective companies, and decided he can do better. He combined the two, introduced us to the Elop Effect, that started Nokia's fall. Then partly through Elop's own idiotic decisions and partly due to Microsoft's actions, the problems at Nokia smartphones got only worse. Nokia's market presence has been falling 62% per year and rumors are increasing that Nokia will go bankrupt, or be sold, or both. Elop has acted in desperation moves from selling some of his smartphone factories (where the future of the industry is, that tells you how little Elop believes his strategy can succeed) to selling whole units, to selling some patents to selling Nokia's HQ building in Finland. This has been - and by a huge margin - the biggest fall in the history of the handset industry. Elop has taken growth and shot his company in the foot - twice - and even more since. He has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He had the win in his grasp but he voluntarily let it slip away. No, he actually flung it away. Elop has precided over the biggest market share collapse in the handset industry and is definitely the worst CEO of anyone in the mobile industry, ever. I will return with more analysis to this series, to illustrate, Elop is not just the worst CEO in telecoms, he is the worst CEO in any industry, of all time. But yes, keep your eyes on Nokia, we are witnessing a world record being made - a world record in failure. Elop is synonymous with total comprehensive failure.
Elop should do the right thing and resign. But as he is clearly not honorable enough to do that, he should be fired by Nokia Board immediately. You cannot hold onto a CEO who has just made Nokia a laughing stock and produced a world record failure for Nokia's illustrious history.
And perfectly on que, today Elop admits what many analysts have been saying that must be considered as Nokia's Plan B - when Gizmodo asked Elop (on their Spanish site) is Android possible in Nokia's future, the shock response, "anything is posssible". What happened to Microsoft forever? What happened to Elop and Ballmer being BFF's Best Friends Forever? Was it last April when Elop broke the friendship by admitting that carriers hate Skype and won't support Windows Phone handsets by anyone? After that point it seems the two have gone to war. Microsoft announced its tablets and talks now openly of its own smartphones. Ballmer announced Nokia's Lumia phones can't be upgraded to Windows Phone 8. Microsoft suddenly wants to have huge retail space in a massive global series of stores to sell Microsoft products similar to Apple stores. Nokia tries to claim it is still in a special relationship with Microsoft, but Ballmer now shows HTC smartphones and others, no longer Lumias. Earlier we heard Nokia was hiring Android staff, supposedly just to do some mapping app port, but who knows how much Android staff they actually hired worldwide with that pretense. Elop has been getting the Android question for 23 months, literally, 23 months now, ever since he first announced Microsoft. He's always up to now said there is no plan B, Nokia will only go Microsoft. Now, today, Elop suddenly drops the bombshell that yeah, Android is open possibility in the future.
What if Nokia decided last summer that Windows WAS dead, what Elop heard from all carriers and the other handset makers departing the Microsoft ecosystem or giving it only lip service? If Elop and Nokia's Board decided last summer ie 2012, that Windows is dead, and they now need a new Plan B, and Elop had just finished destroying Symbian, MeeGo and Meltemi, and if last summer they decided to quietly shirt to Android, then when might we see the first Nokia Android smartphones? About Christmas 2013. The development cycle in this industry is 18 months from clean table to first handset sold... So having done his share of Osborning, maybe Elop does know that Android phones are coming to Nokia, and now wants to start the buzz and speculation, so that he could then announce them around September or October of this year, to sell for Christmas.. At this moment pure speculation but lets start to monitor the rumor space.
Lessons from this blog? Its almost exactly parallel to LG. The massively costly misadventure to Microsoft, replaced by the rescue Plan B via Android back to profitability. And the irony? Elop himself sunk Nokia's own Linux based smartphone OS platform, MeeGo and he also sunk the low-cost handset OS running Linux, Meltemi, now to replace Nokia's OS with Linux-based Android, where Nokia is not in any way in control... And irony upon irony, MeeGo legacy living on via Tizen on Samsung and Huawei, as well as via Sailfish used by handset-maker start-up Jolla of Finland.
This was part 3 in the series of Nokia strategy mistakes illustrated by one picture each
The series started with the long blog re-visiting Nokia's SEC filing that identified risks in the Windows strategy (And how bizarrely almost every risk is turning out to actually have happened)
Then in Part 1 of the single-issue blogs, I showed how Nokia unit sales turned from record growth to sudden collapse timed exactly at Elop Effect February 2011
Then in Part 2 I compared Nokia market performance to the two other big smarpthone makers of the past three years, Apple and Samsung.
More stories coming in this series, each one with one picture to showcase one management failure by the world's worst CEO, Stephen Elop of Nokia.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Discover the Holy Spirit AnewThe Holy Spirit desires a relationship with us that will take us on the greatest adventure imaginable; a journey to the very heart of God. This book is meant to act as a journal for this adventure. In the first section of this journal, you will find a guide for The Wild Goose series. This guide will be a reference for discussion and reflection on the topics covered in each segment. Throughout the rest of this journal you will find space to write your thoughts, prayers, and any promptings of the Holy Spirit. This journal is not meant just to be a guide for the series but a place where you can keep an account of your journey with the Wild Goose.Whether you are currently watching, are just about to start, or have already finished the series, this journal is an excellent tool to assist you in discovering a deeper relationship with the Holy Spirit.Why the Name: "The Wild Goose"The "Wild Goose" was a term that the ancient Celts had for the Holy Spirit. Yes, there is a wildness to the Holy Spirit. The dominant images of the Holy Spirit are a meek dove or a flickering flame of a candle, both of which are in one way accurate. But the Holy Spirit is far more than that.About the PresenterFr. Dave Pivonka, TOR, is a nationally known author and speaker dedicated to helping others come to know God's love for them through preaching and writing. Fr. Dave has held several ministry positions at Franciscan University of Steubenville and is actively involved in the highly successful summer conferences program. He is the author of the new book Breath of God – Living a life led by the Holy Spirit.


text:
Gold Price Indonesia
(Indonesian Rupiah)
Conversion : 1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 grams
Indonesian Rupiah 24 Hour Spot Gold and Silver Price
Indonesian Rupiah Gold Price History Charts
To learn about our gold price data
Gold Price Indonesia
Indonesia is officially known as the Republic of Indonesia. The nation is a transcontinental country located in Southeast Asia. In addition, the country also has some territories in Oceania. Indonesia is the largest island country in the world, and it has an approximate population of 261 million. This makes the nation one of the most populous in the world. Indonesia's government is a unitary presidential constitutional republic.
The Indonesian Rupiah is the official currency of Indonesia. The word rupiah is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit "rupya" which means wrought silver. Like many other global currencies, the rupiah can be subdivided into 100 smaller units of currency called sen. These smaller units have become obsolete, however, due to inflation.
The Indonesian Rupiah is issued and controlled by the central bank of Indonesia, known as Bank Indonesia. The central bank was established in 1953 from the nationalism of De Javasche Bank, three years after Indonesia's independence from The Netherlands was recognised. The bank has several primary objectives, including but not limited to price stability, maintenance of the payment system, monetary management and more.
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text:
Uzdrowienia z bielactwa (Vitiligo)
Healing from vitiligo
Jadwiga Pikta (63), Zgierz (Poland)
As a young woman I liked to wear sleeveless dresses and blouses with a low neckline and felt completely desperate when I could no longer wear them any more - at an age when one loves life and also likes to wear pretty things - and now this! I was so ashamed that I wore tights even in the summer. My clothing covered my body up to my neck. I was exposed to the ridicule of others because of the spots and began to avoid people. That restricted the quality of my life even more, and my inner stress increased further.


text:
Friday, June 27, 2014
Nothing Is All Right
40 comments:
Oh, that sounds terrifying and painful. I am so sorry you (& especially your son) have to deal with such big and painful things. I wish you wise guides but especially I wish you a more hopeful tomorrow.
- June 27, 2014
Oh, I'm so sorry. It's so hard to watch someone you love in pain like this.
I don't know if it's any comfort, but my nephew had a similar experience (including the suicidal ideation) at around age 5, and while he's still seeing the psychologist, things are much better. I say that only to hold out some hope that, with time and treatment, things will improve. - June 27, 2014
I am very sorry to read about how unbearably difficult things have been for your family.
I know how difficult this is because it was my life too with my 11 yr old son.
The good news is that after 18 months of therapy for us and him, he's much better. He still feels "grey" at times but he can manage it better.
I wish I could offer some magic parenting advice about how we got him to talk to a therapist but it was pure dumb luck. I've no idea why he agreed to go. That said, I've another friend who had a similar situation with her son and she couldn't even get him to sit in the therapist's office. She and her partner went instead to learn strategies and he improved as well.
I share our story so that you will know that although it is the hardest thing (like you I questioned every parenting decision I'd ever made, every word I'd ever spoken) that it can get better. - June 27, 2014
- ~Kristi~ said...
I don't know how helpful this is, but if a) The fact that he let you know about this problem is amazing. If I would have let my parents know about my depression I might be a different person than I am now. b) The fact that you immediately got help for him is life-changing, amazing, wonderful. It was probably 5 years after the onset of my depression that I got help and I'm still having problems and trying to find a new therapist. You're doing a lot of things exactly right, and I wish those things would have happened to me when I was his age. You're helping more than you know, and you're amazing.
- June 27, 2014
I'm so, so sorry.
I know this: kids are who they are. They come into the world already wired and all we can do is respect, nurture, and guide what is there. Your son is well-loved and well-cared-for; that is all you can do, and it is everything.
Love wins. - June 27, 2014
I hope you find the support you need and know that you are not alone. It's a positive change that these struggles no longer have to remain a dark secret.
- June 27, 2014
- MFA Mama said...
Ah, shit. This is one Unfortunate Event I have absolutely no experience with in a child of mine, so I can't say I know what you're going through. I have a vivid enough imagination though that I am thoroughly dismayed on your behalf, and I'm so sorry you are dealing with this. You and TH are about as well-equipped as any set of parents could be to try and help AB/HB through this, and it sounds like you are doing all of the right things, but I wish it didn't have to be so hard for y'all. xo
- June 27, 2014
So sorry to hear about this. I don't have any wisdom but am thinking about you and your family.
--Susan - June 27, 2014
I'm terribly sorry that your son is suffering this way. I don't want to imagine the stress of trying to deal with this kind of issue. Sending peaceful thoughts to you. JB
- June 27, 2014
- bobbi said...
10 and 11 were the hardest years I've had to deal with as a parent, and they were nothing compared to what you are dealing with. I hope and pray that things continue to improved. You are doing everything you con...keep on keeping on...
- June 27, 2014
I'm so glad he's continuing and enjoying music...seems like a glimmer that can perhaps grow and light his world further. So sorry you're going through this stress and that he's going through this low :(
- June 27, 2014
- yatima said...
Oh DoctorMama I am so sorry. So much love to you.
- June 27, 2014
- jill said...
- June 27, 2014
- Cory said...
I'm so sorry. Your writing has helped me a great deal over the years; I wish I fill in for your assistant - some small thing to ease your every day while you support your son and family. Best wishes from Salt Lake City.
- June 28, 2014
- Jaya said...
I am so very sorry for all this. This must be unimaginably difficult. Often, these psychological disturbances can have their roots in physiological imbalances. For example, my brother during teenage went through this utterly horrible patch where this happy, happy child morphed into one who was filled with rage and lashed out at everybody. He was utterly lost for maybe 2 painful years. Towards the end of the period, we discovered a really bad Vitamin B-12 deficiency and had him corrected for it, and coincidence or not, he returned to the person he used to be; very low B-12 levels are linked to behavior such as this in teenagers, apparently. I would strong suggest checking his Vitamin B-12 and Vitamin D levels (this one is also strongly linked to depression), and people can get (or always be) startlingly, surprisingly low on both without realizing it. In addition to therapy and checking/supplementing with B-12 and D3 if necessary, I'd also throw in every supplement that has ever been linked with healthier brain function (DHA for example) and hope that it helps. Best of luck!
- June 28, 2014
- Blue said...
when my son was nine, he confided he'd thought about suicide and knew how some people did it and confessed he didn't really want to go on. I was gut-sick over having not keyed into where he was at...that he was really depressed.
we went to work. his therapist did something called EMDR with him...I don't know a whole lot about it, but it uses light and sound and seems to have good results in retraining one's brain to go down new neural-pathways vs. the familiar grooves certain thoughts travel in the brain. His therapist had worked with vets suffering severe PTSD, a child who'd stopped talking cold turkey a couple years earlier...people with severe trauma and anxiety. She taught him new skills to cope with his feelings. It was very effective and in the past 5 years he's had SERIOUS evolution as a person. Depression and anxiety are tamped down and mostly not an issue. He's aware of his propensities and we have tools to employ if he's ever starting to go "dark".
I know how scary and stressful and guilt-riddled this can be. Hang in there! Knowing he has people on his team, who've got his back and are going to help him is the biggest thing. He's not alone. And comparing my boy's feelings to a magic trick that seemed 100% and true, but that actually there is an explanation helped him understand that just cause that's how he was feeling (like there was no point in living) doesn't mean it's true. That even though it seemed real, it was like a magic trick that wasn't real, because he was sick, and there were things we could and would do to help him get better. ANd that his mommy had experienced a lot of those same feelings. - June 28, 2014
- kirsten said...
I have no amazing words of wisdom but know that I am thinking of you. This is just plain shitty.
- June 28, 2014
- Steph said...
Wow, tough things. I don't know if anything I can say will be helpful but this was totally me when I was a kid. I was (and am, at 41) willful, intelligent, dark, moody, sad, anxious, even vaguely suicidal (too afraid to actually make an attempt but always on my mind).
I am encouraged that your son confessed all this to you. I never talked about my feelings with my parents or therapists. (They forced me to go to therapists when they were divorcing when I was 12).
I didn't have the resources your son has (or if I did I didn't know about them and/or resisted).
I now have an almost 4 year old son who in inherently happy and a 2 year old daughter who is willful and not a happy person by nature. She also does not eat food (all she will do is drink formula, yes, that's right) and she WON'T WALK. At 26 months. So I am going through the guilt thing too. We are taking her to every imaginable specialist (neurology, GI, speech and feeding pathology), she's getting an MRI of her spine and brain, early intervention is on board.
My husband is a physician and it's been hard.
I know my story doesn't compare to your 10 year old crumbling in front of you, but I get the feelings he is feeling as well as the feelings of helplessness as a mom. I'm sorry, I wish you the best! He's a smart kid, and I think in the long run his intelligence and emotional intelligence will win.
Thinking of you.
-Steph - June 29, 2014
I'm so sorry to hear all of this. I have no advice to give, only my best wishes and energy to send. Like others, I do think it's a good sign your son, despite his darkness, has been able to confide in you. I hope you're able to keep building and building on that until you're back in the light.
- June 29, 2014
Aw shit, DoctorMama. I'm so sorry you're having to go through this. I was a depressed child and suicidal teen who got no help at all and somehow managed to survive until diagnosed with bipolar 20 years ago in my 40s. I'm now on lithium and wish I'd had it in my teens. You are being a Good Mom getting him help and giving him support. Wishing you much strength and courage.
- TX slowrunner - June 30, 2014
- Melissia said...
Doctor Momma, I also feel compelled to write so that you know that you are not alone. We have been there as well, with both of our boys. Both were hospitalized, briefly, as teenagers, and both are now college students, one married, in grad school. It did start early and we did what you did. We switched schedules, so that one parent was home all the time, and went to therapists and learned techniques to help. And it did. And we made it through. And they are now both functioning adults
- June 30, 2014
I, too have been there with two of my three children. My son was a bit older. my daughter began refusing to go to school in third grade. I can only offer you support and encouragement. It took three different therapists before we found one to connect with my son. That being said, it is a long road. SSRI's are wonderful but they can "stop" working and need to be changed but as a medical professional, I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
This is heart-wrenching stuff. Some kids simply come into the world with demons to battle. I have a third child who is as even-tempered as can be. Hang in there. As trite as it sounds, do the best you can to take care of yourself and nurture your marriage, You need each other. - June 30, 2014
- CecilyK said...
Oh, dude, I am so sorry. I have a good friend who has dealt with that, and I know she'd be happy to offer an ear/support/experience (her son at one point had to be hospitalized). She's amazing, as are you. I know you'd click. Let me know if you'd like to get in touch with her.
- July 02, 2014
- Becky said...
Wow! I just saw this- I've been distracted this week. I wanted you to know that I am thinking of you and your family. I'll write more once I've had a chance to think things through more. Please feel free to reach out as needed. This is hard. This is really, really hard.
- July 03, 2014
Oh. I'm sorry you and your son are needing to deal with this but glad that you are, I have to think, much better equipped than many many parents would be to do so. Not to downplay the difficulty even given that. I'll be out here thinking of all of you, for whatever that's worth.
- July 03, 2014
- Unknown said...
I'm just so sorry you are going through this, I can only offer cyber hugs, and my prayers for you, TH and your wonderful son.
so very sorry.
Kellie - July 08, 2014
I'm so sorry. My daughter started having trouble in 2nd grade. Massive tantrums in which she would repeatedly say she wanted to die, and in fact asked me to kill her. She was convinced that I wouldn't get in trouble if she'd requested it. Refusing to get out of bed on Saturdays. Refusing to go to school (sometimes we had to put her in the car in pajamas).
It got better, although we find that we have PTSD and are constantly wondering when the next breakdown will be, especially since her anxiety is ramping up.
So, no advice, especially since you're doing what needs to be done. But empathy, and commiseration, always. Give yourself permission to cry when you need to. - July 09, 2014
Doctor Mama,
I hope my suggestion is not completely and utterly naive, but I like the suggestion in this post (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11290826) about slices from an orange.
Thinking of you.
LD - July 09, 2014
you are doing the right things, it is NOT any body's fault!!! you are taking the right steps, this is a dark scary path that nobody chooses to walk. for him to know that you will not blame or abandon him no matter what happens will help him not to get lost. you and your husband need support for your struggles with this, too...nobody copes easily or ever feels in control of this stuff..
EMDR and other processing techniques might not meet "gold standard clinical trials" to prove efficacy, but have low risk of harm. Biofeedback and naturopathic/functional medicine have lots of anecdotal support and some research..so may be useful as well. This area of 'dis-ease' is closer to the art of medicine than the science of it. So, do the best you can...you are all in my thoughts. - July 13, 2014
i am so sorry for what you all are going thru. i have a son who went from being 'the perfect' child to going thru just normal teen attitude/etc and that has been hard enough. i can't even imagine going thru this.
- July 13, 2014
- E. said...
So sorry that you and TH are going through this, and that HB has been having to face such difficult stuff at his age (or any, but esp. at his age). I can only echo what everyone says above that the fact that he was willing and able to tell you something of what was up with him is important. And I think it's an amazingly good thing that he's still engaged in music. I hope that continues.
You guys are in my thoughts and my chaotic heathen prayers. Much love to all of you. - July 14, 2014
I have no words of advice, only thoughts of peace and serenity to send through the intertubes. I...I like that so many other parents are opening up here. I hope it helps to know that you're not alone on the journey, even if everyone's path is a little different.
I popped in because I recently started running again. Every mile's for you and HB now, lady. Hang in there. I've got my fingers crossed for all of you. - July 16, 2014
Thinking of you and your family. I'm so sorry to read about HB's struggles and hope that life gets much easier very soon.
Still running thanks to your words many years ago.
Sharon/Anon - July 21, 2014
I'm so sorry to hear you are facing this. But your role in his nature and nurture is that you are the best mother a child like HB could have. You understand his darkness. You are patient with him. You have always given him the environment he needs to be himself. I shudder to think what might have happened to him if you hadn't been his mom. I speak from experience in the sense that I was a very depressed child, and I had a very depressed child. Both of us had extended absences from school, but eventually got back into it, and thrived. My girl is well right now, and although her dark times were fraught with fear and sadness, parenting her through them made me who I am today, and healed some of the wounds I suffered when I was the dark child. Courage, hope and strength to you, dear one. F.
- July 22, 2014
I'm so sorry. I'm hoping for the best for all of you. You are doing everything right. Hang tight.
- July 29, 2014
I am so sorry about your son's depression. I see what exercise does for you and for my husband - have you considered starting him running or cycling? It may help.
Co. - July 31, 2014
I'm so sorry to hear you're going through this, and I'm really glad you reached out to tell us. I know that must have been difficult too. Sending you and your family best wishes and healing thoughts for your son. All the best, Sinéad
- August 14, 2014
It's been a long while since I've visited your blog and I was sorry to read your post today. We've been through (are still going through) this with our daughter since the winter of 2012. She did get placed on a 5150 for self harm and SI at one point. She's on Lexapro. If you haven't already, check in to dialectical behavioral therapy. She did an intensive 8 week program (3hrs, 4 days per week), followed by 10 months of weekly group DBT in conjunction with weekly individual therapy. She sees her PDoc monthly. Sometimes she seems better, sometimes not. It is a frightening, exhausting roller coaster and I too feel we have many years yet to work through. You are not alone, though it really feels like a lonely and isolated place to be. Hugs to you!
Angela - August 27, 2014
I am so glad you shared about your tough times here. You make the world a better place with your candor. Please don't think that it's just going to get worse; that's not necessarily true. Your son's brain is still developing. He can learn techniques to improve his mental health; they really work.
- August 28, 2014
Thank you for posting this - I came back to find it because my son (same grade, same age) fell off the cliff last month, depression and suicidal thoughts and all of it. I also thought we'd have more time before we had to deal with this. He seems to be getting better already, but it is so very scary, and hard, and I hate not knowing what to do. It helps to know I'm not the only person out there trying to figure it out.
- March 17, 2015


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Welcome to the Laurel and Hardy Official Website - Main Menu
home - home | message board | faq | contact us | business contacts
Laurel & Hardy films - features | talkies | silents | cameos | refilmings | Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy solo films | specials - Golden Age of Comedy | When Comedy Was King
the players - Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy | Hal Roach & Hal Roach Studios | the legacy of Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy
what's new - news | events | the Laurel & Hardy video clip of the month
the Laurel & Hardy archive - miscellaneous essays & past press releases | pressbooks | restoration
did you know - did you know | ask Lois Laurel-Hawes | quiz | personalities - Del Kempster | Richard W. Bann | Norbert Aping
Sons of the Desert - about the Sons of the Desert | Sons of the Desert tents - North America | British Isles | Australia & NZ | Europe | International | links | videos
gallery - photo album | photos & captions | posters
videos - Laurel & Hardy channel | downloads
links - Sons of the Desert Website (The International Laurel & Hardy Society) | The Laurel & Hardy Forum | Intra-Tent Journal | Italian Laurel & Hardy Webite (Stanlio & Ollio) | German Laurel & Hardy Website (Dick und Doof)
If you are using a browser that does not support frames, use the browser buttons to navigate back to the main menu.
Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy
Stan Laurel was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson on 16 June, 1890 in Ulverston, England; died on 23 February 1965.
Oliver Hardy was born Norvell Hardy on 18 January, 1892 in Harlem, Georgia; died on 7 August 1957.
The son of a British showman, Stan Laurel had been raised in English music halls. In 1910 he made his first trip to America as a member of the Fred Karno musical-comedy troupe, which also included Charlie Chaplin. Laurel stayed in the United States, touring in vaudeville and landing an occasional movie job.
Oliver Hardy had been destined for a military career, but opened a movie theater in Milledgeville, Georgia, instead. He next found work as an actor in Jacksonville, Florida, home of the Lubin film company. Hardy later moved to Hollywood, and by the mid 1920s, he was working as an all-purpose comic at the Hal Roach studio.
Laurel and Hardy's partnership at the Hal Roach studio began in 1926. Within a year of their first joint appearance, they were being touted as the new comedy team. After collaborating on many silent films, they took the transition to the talking film in stride. As their success spread throughout the world, they began making feature films as well and won an Oscar for their short subject entitled "The Music Box" (1932).After the team left the Hal Roach studio, they formed their own production company but were unable to repeat the success they had enjoyed under the guidance of Hal Roach.
Laurel & Hardy Feature Films
As the economics of motion picture exhibition changed in the 1930s, Hal Roach needed to produce feature-length vehicles for Laurel & Hardy. Filmgoers then and now treasure WAY OUT WEST, BLOCK-HEADS and SONS OF THE DESERT among their best full-length feature films. After SAPS AT SEA (1940) Laurel & Hardy left the Hal Roach Studios and signed with major studios 20th Century-Fox and MGM. From 1941-1945 they made eight feature films - six for Fox and two for MGM. In 1951 Laurel & Hardy made their final film appearance together in the disastrous UTOPIA, aka ATOLL K.
Laurel & Hardy Feature Films for the Hal Roach Studios (1931-1940)
1931 Pardon Us
1932 Pack Up Your Troubles
1933 Fra Diavolo (aka The Devil's Brother)
Sons of the Desert
1934 Babes in Toyland (aka March of the Wooden Soldiers)
1935 Bonnie Scotland
1936 The Bohemian Girl
Our Relations
1937 Way Out West
1838 Block-Heads
Swiss Miss
1940 A Chump at Oxford
Saps at Sea
Laurel & Hardy Feature Films for FOX and MGM (1941-1945)
1941 Great Guns (20th Century Fox)
1942 A-Haunting We Will Go (20th Century Fox)
1943 Air Raid Wardens (MGM)
Jitterbugs (20th Century Fox)
Dancing Masters (20th Century Fox)
1944 The Big Noise (20th Century Fox)
Nothing But Trouble (MGM)
The Bullfighters (20th Century Fox)
Other Laurel & Hardy Feature Films
1939 The Flying Deuces
1951 Utopia (aka Atoll K, Robinson Crusoeland)
Laurel & Hardy Talkie Shorts
Unlike many other silent film actors, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy adapted with ease to talking in movies, practically paying no attention to this new component of their work. Happily, their voices matched their screen personalities. And sound effects greatly aided their talking films. So did the wonderful, peppy, period background music. The Boys were then able to punctuate their physical and visual comedy with catch phrases long familiar to fans who smile when they hear variants of such lines as these:
"I'm Mr. Hardy, and this is my friend, Mr. Laurel."
"Why don't you do something to help me?"
"We certainly do!"
"Tell me that plan again."
"Here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!"
aurel & Hardy Talkie Shorts (1931-1940)
1929 Berth Marks
The Hoose-Gow
Men O' War
Perfect Day
They Go Boom
Unaccustomed As We Are
1930 Another Fine Mess
Below Zero
Hog Wild
Night Owls
The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case
1931 Beau Hunks
Be Big
Chickens Come Home
Come Clean
Laughing Gravy
One Good Turn
Our Wife
1932 Any Old Port
The Chimp
Country Hospital
The Music Box (Won the Oscar for best short subject in 1932)
Their First Mistake
1933 Busy Bodies
Dirty Work
Me and My Pal
Midnight Patrol
Towed in a Hole
Twice Two
1934 Going Bye-Bye
Oliver the Eighth
The Live Ghost
Them Thar Hills
1935 The Fixer-Uppers
Thicker Than Water
Tit for Tat
Laurel & Hardy Silent Shorts
Not yet a team, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy first appeared together in the independent film THE LUCKY DOG, which we now believe was shot in early 1921. During the 1920s they appeared separately in a number of silent shorts for the Hal Roach Studios. 45 MINUTES FROM HOLLYWOOD (1926) is the first Hal Roach production featuring both performers. Their characters blossomed as a team in DUCK SOUP, their very next film, then, curiously, regressed.
The independent recollections of both Stan Laurel and Hal Roach cite PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP (1927) as the first Laurel & Hardy film. THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS (1927) was promoted as the first official Laurel & Hardy release, but the film was actually produced and sold as part of the Hal Roach All-Star series. It was not until SHOULD MARRIED MEN GO HOME? (1928) that the studio officially branded their pictures as "The Laurel & Hardy Series."
Laurel & Hardy Silent Shorts (1921-1929)
1921 The Lucky Dog
1927 The Battle of the Century
Duck Soup
Do Detectives Think?
Flying Elephants
Hats Off
Love 'Em and Weep
Putting Pants on Philip
Sailors Beware!
The Second 100 Years
Slipping Wives
Sugar Daddies
Why Girls Love Sailors
With Love and Hisses
1928 Early to Bed
The Finishing Touch
From Soup to Nuts
Leave 'Em Laughing
Should Married Men Go Home?
That's My Wife
Their Purple Moment
Two Tars
We Faw Down
You're Darn Tootin'
1929 Angora Love
Bacon Grabbers
Big Business
Double Whoopee
Habeas Corpus
Wrong Again
Laurel & Hardy DVDs


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Halloween and candies (a ballot problem)
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This year, for Halloween, a post on candies (I promise, next year I will write another post on zombies). But I don't want to focus on the kids problems (last year, we tried to minimize their walking distance to collect as much candies as possible, with part 1 and part 2), I want to discuss my own problems. Because usually, the kids wear their costumes, and they go in the streets, they knock on the doors, while I stay at home. So I'm the one, with a bag full of candies, waiting for kids to knock on our door, and then I give them some candies (if they wear a costume). Consider the following problem. Assume that we start with red candies, and black ones, with . The thing is that no one like those black candies. What could be the probability that for the kids that will get candies after knocking at my door (with for convenience, but we will also consider the more general case where I have to many candies, , later on), the probability to get a red candy is always larger than the probability to have a black candy ? This is somehow related to the popular ballot problem, proposed (and solved) by Whitworth in 1878, but he wrote it only in the fourth edition of Choice and Chance, in 1886 (this is what the legend told us). In 1887, Joseph Bertrand proposed a similar problem, and Désiré André introduced the reflection principle to solve it. The problem is simple : consider an election between two candidates, A (who receives votes) and B (who receives votes). A wins the election (). If the ballots are cast one at a time, what is the probability that A will lead throughout the voting? For those who don't remember the conclusion, the probability is here quite simple,
Observe that some geometry proofs were given, later on, by Aebly or Mirimanoff, both in 1923, as well as Howard Grossman in the 1950′s (see the discussion on http://academiclogbook.blogspot.ca/…). Actually, http://futilitycloset.com// produced the following geometric proof (with no clear reference),
We start at O, where no votes have been cast. Each vote for A moves us one point east and each vote for B moves us one point north until we arrive at E, the final count, (m, n). If A is to lead throughout the contest, then our path must steer consistently east of the diagonal line OD, which represents a tie score. Any path that starts by going north, through (0,1), must cut OD on its way to E.
If any path does touch OD, let it be at C. The group of such paths can be paired off as p and q, reflections of each other in the line OD that meet at C and continue on a common track to E.
This means that the total number of paths that touch OD is twice the number of paths p that start their journey to E by going north. Now, the first segment of any path might be up to m units east or up to n units north, so the proportion of paths that start by going north is n/(m + n), and twice this number is 2n/(m + n). The complementary probability — the probability of a path not touching OD — is (m –n)/(m + n).
But let's try to solve our problem. Let and denote the number of black and red candies, respectively after the th kid git his (or her) candy. Yes, one at a time. Here, and . What we want is
Using this formulation, we recognize the ballot problem. Almost. Actually, in the original ballot problem (see Bertrand (1887)), we have to compute the probability that one candidate remains strictly ahead the other one throughout the count. With a strict condition, we get the well-known probability (given previously)
Here, ties are allowed, and we can prove (easily) that
(again, there is some nice geometric interpenetration of that result). It is also possible to get numerically that value using the following function, which will generate a trajectory, and return some indicators (with or without ties)
> red_black=function(sd){ + set.seed(sd) + vectcandy=sample(c(rep("R",r),rep("B",b))) + v1=rev(cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="R"))<rev(cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="B")) + v2=cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="R")<= cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="B") + return(list(evol=cbind(rev(cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="R")), + rev(cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="B")),v1),list=vectcandy,test=(sum(v1)==0), + ballot=(sum(v2)==0),when=min(which(v1==1))))}
(here I compute the ballot-type index, where ties are not allowed, and the candy-type index). If we generate 100,000 scenarios, starting with 50 red and 25 black candies, we get
> r=50 > b=25 > M=sapply(1:100000,red_black) > mean(unlist(M[3,])) [1] 0.50967
which can be compared with the theoretical value
> (r+1-b)/(r+1) [1] 0.5098039
We can also get the distribution of the first time we have more black candies than red ones left (given that this event occur)
> Z=unlist(M[5,]) > Z=Z[Z<Inf] > hist(Z,breaks=seq(0,80),probability=TRUE,col="light blue", + border=NA,xlab="",main="")
There might be some analytically formula that can be derived, but I have to confess that I am becoming extremely lazy,
Assume now that this year, kids do not show up at my door (for some reason). Assume that kids show up. We can see how the probability
will change, with ,
> r=50 > b=25 > impact_n = function(n){ + red_black=function(sd,nb=n){ + set.seed(sd) + vectcandy=sample(c(rep("R",r),rep("B",b))) + v=(rev(cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="R"))<rev(cumsum(rev(vectcandy)=="B")))[1:nb] + return(list(list=vectcandy,test=(sum(v)==0),when=min(which(v==1))))} + M=sapply(1:10000,red_black) + return(mean(unlist(M[2,])))}
Yes, not only I am too lazy to derive analytic formulas, I am so lazy that I do not try to optimize my code. Here, the evolution of the probability, as a function of is
> V=Vectorize(impact_n)(25:75) > plot(25:75,V)
Fun isn't it? But now, I have to conclude my post, to work a little bit on my make-up : I have learnt so many thinks at the Montreal Zombie Walk a few days ago that kids willing to knock at my door will be scared to death. I guess I will keep all the candies for me this year !
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Creative Writing 18
Explore your child's ability to write creative stories with these free prompts and paper!
Your child will be inundated with boring standardized test prompts in school these days. Why not liven up their creative spirit with fun and engaging prompts? These colorful and free blank papers and prompts are sure to spark some creative flames!
- Write about the scariest thing that has ever happened to you. What happened? Who was involved? What made this event so scary? How did you feel at the time? How do you feel looking back on it now?
- You look down at your hands and realize that you've switched bodies with someone! Who have you switched with? What is life like now? Will you be able to switch back? What will you do in this person's body for the day?
Halloween is right around the corner, so why not use these fun and spooky prompts and sentence starters? Sentence starters ensure that your child will have at least one sentence completed. Generally, this one sentence sparks more of an idea, and they are then on a roll with their writing! Have them copy down the sentence starter, and then allow them to finish the sentence however they please.
Here are some spook-tacular sentence starters:
- The creaking of the stairs grew louder with every step, and then…
- He heard a shrill in the night time air as chills ran down his spine and…
- Had she left the door open? She didn't think anything of it until she saw…
To really engage your students and liven up the atmosphere, make it a timed writing challenge. Quick writes are fantastic ways to add a little competition to students' writing. However, there's more magic to the task than what appears on the surface. Quick writes work to eliminate the thinking behind your child's writing. If your little one knows that they only have two minutes to jot their ideas down, then they will only focus on that. Make it a competition by having students count their words at the end of each timed quick write, and see who can write the most! To discourage heavy competitive spirit, encourage students to compete against themselves. Can they write more words than last time?


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Taking a Newborn Outside
Is it safe to take my newborn out in public? She's so little.
Dr. Greene's Answer
Being outside can be great at this age if she does not get too hot, too cold, or too much sun exposure.
The concern with being around other people is catching infections, which you prefer for her not to do, especially in the first month. Most of these would be caught from handling, so you might want to minimize the number of people who hold her and have them wash their hands first. You might also want to avoid staying for a long time in enclosed spaces with poor circulation where people are coughing or sneezing.
Get Dr. Greene's Wellness Recommendations


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Choose Your Own Change
From WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.
(Redirected from CYOC)
Choose Your Own Change aka CYOC is a transformation-oriented story archive and forum. It has been administered by Changes for all of its existence, with moderator help from Drakkenfyre, although user registration was disabled in 2007 due to trolling on the forums; new members were invited by current members but are now able to join again without invite.
- Address: http://www.cyoc.net/ (formerly ChooseYourChange.com)
- Administrators: Changes
- Moderator: Drakkenfyre
- Ran from/to:
- September 2001 - September 2003 (as chooseyourchange.com)
- September 2003 - present
The story archive caters to a wide variety of transformation concepts and fetishes, including human-to-animal (and vice-versa, both mythical and existing species), age progression and regression, transgender, transracial, and immobile/transmaterial.
It was featured on Something Awful's Awful Link of the Day on December 12, 2002.[1]
- ↑ Awful Link of the Day for December 16, 2002, on Something Awful. Retrieved August 23, 2012
This entry about a website is a stub - can you improve it? |


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Product Description
This cast aluminum projector mount adds versatility and simplicity to mounting a projector to a ceiling. The adjustable mounting arms adapt to projectors allowing for flexible installation. This model includes many different options:
- Supports up to 30lbs
- Fast Disconnect
- Angle Free Tilt
- White, Black as well as Silver available
- Universally adaptable to all projectors with mounting holes 12.1" apart. (Optional arm extension accessories available for up to 15.7"; AMRP10057. Contact us for more information)
Also available is a pole extension (AMREADJ1626) for high ceilings (sold separately)