Online Dating Will Win

Online dating will win, to the cost of the rest of us.

When Ray Kroc bought the McDonald brothers' hamburger stands in the 1950s, he saw the future. He saw the  way to commoditize a fragmented business to tap an underserved market. It's a formula that works time and again, most recently in Silicon Valley.

Don Valentine, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the Valley funds only businesses with the following:

A unique product.

A competitive advantage ie: barriers to entry.

A monster market.


I know I'm bouncing back and forth between burgers and bytes, but they're the same example from different eras. In the fifties and sixties, the concept of fast food fulfilled all of Don Valentine's requirements. After World War II, folks in the US were discovering their appetites. Televisions, refrigerators, air-conditioning, cars - all these things filled the tracts of new suburban America.

Then came the appetites for food. Once your house is full of humming machines and you have a car for all occasions, it's time to look outside. When you no longer have to brown-bag it to work, businesses that provide lunch win.

McDonalds won because it catered to the taste of the country at the right price. What kept it at the top was the ability to precisely replicate the formula; the food, the stores and the service. But lots of other folks noticed the fast-food trend and followed. Once you find a successful concept, subtle changes to individual elements will create something new and different enough to separate yourself from the rest. Add a growing and wealthy population, and riches are yours.This idea still works today: think Chipotle.

So the road to changing a society is well understood; examine the desires of a population and cater to that. If you find a way to reach a giant audience cheaply and then replicate the concept you will win. That's where the confluence of:

Widespread high-speed internet,

Cheap computing and...

Horniness

...have found us, here at the rise of internet dating. In terms of monster markets, there is none bigger.

It's all pretty easy, at least in retrospect. You want to find a special someone - or just a someone - find yourself a dating website. Contact, communicate, meet, and yada yada, whatever you both want. And from the business point of view, there's almost nothing to it. Some servers, a software front end, a back end, and a credit-card processing facility. (Or ads, like Plenty Of Fish.) You don't even need to add content because your users do so. In a way, it's the smartest business model ever - there's infinite supply for a huge demand that finds you.

It must have been like this with the first one hundred McDonalds. Suddenly, the dollars can't be counted fast enough.

But there is a downside. A fast food nation is an obese nation. Unless you exercise a lot, all that fried food will eventually take its toll, because our bodies aren't designed for those processed meals. Notwithstanding, fast food is and will remain hugely popular.

It's the same with internet dating. It's easy, accessible and provides almost instant gratification. Sometimes it might even work to find the love of someone's life. In the long term though, this is not the way we were designed to find people. Just as fast food adds to our waistlines, so internet dating will subtract from our social skills and, in the end, society.


To me, that's not a win.




Bottoms Up, Big Macs.

May I Have This Dance?

 Pic credit.

I prefer earlier composers - the Baroque suits me better. But in Salzburg, Mozart's home town, they have a wonderful tradition of re-enacting all things Mozartish. His music is everywhere and so is the sensibility. People dress as they did in the late eighteenth century and dance to the music of the time. It's wonderful to see.

The dancing's where I'm getting to. Mozart wrote a lot of dance music, and was no mean dancer himself. He wrote for the popular styles of the time, meaning popular with the kind of people who held and attended balls, not street riff-raff. He was passionate about writing and participating, especially the minuet.

There was nothing stuffy about the music:

They are exasperating to listen to in large quantity, but they are full of lively, even zany details, and serve as a reminder that eighteenth-century composers were expected to be adept at producing both 'popular' and 'serious' music, and that there was no categorical difference between the two.

The vision in my head is of a ballroom of finely dressed Austrians. People of all ages are in attendance, good dancers and bad, friends and strangers. There's chatter and laughter between dances, smiles and storytelling, like at any good party.

The music begins, and men and women partner up - sometimes wives and husbands, sometimes friends, oftentimes singles. Steps and moves are formalized and everyone knows the rules, although not everyone can keep time. The fun, as with all good dancing, lies in the shared grace and closeness. The movements are contrived and formulated, but that is the point. Anyone can dance with anyone else precisely because the rules are clear and understood.

One other surviving period detail is that men always ask for the woman to join him in a dance. That seems to work best.







Bottoms Up Salzburgers.

Stop/Start

Barbara Bach from Celebs101

Your experience is different, I am certain, but let me tell you about mine. Far from the seamless process presented by porn - and, often, Hollywood - it's messy getting from here to orgasm with a chick. Disjointed. Stop and start, if you like. More like being in Friday night traffic than anything else, sometimes speeding along, sometimes going nowhere.

For a bloke raised on images of Roger Moore as James Bond, ideal sex consists mostly of glib bon mots, double entendres and beautiful women just waiting to be bonked. These women aren't simply willing partners; they're often mute, mostly dressed in haute couture and there TO be fucked.

Movieland seduction is about being the leading man in the presence of a woman. Then it happens. Okay, there's a lull in the action and PHHHwaaarRRRRR, here comes Barbara Bach.

THEN they shag.

From this, it's no wonder we get Austin Powers. The premise is laughable.



Bottoms Up, Bondistas.

The Dating Matrix

Bottoms Up, Optimists!

Who are you really?

Learning how to sell is largely about listening. A gratifying part of being a better salesman is succeeding in silencing your own voice so you can hear what other people are communicating - what they're really saying.

Here's what I discovered while listening to people talk: we constantly tell everyone who we are. I reckon that within the first twenty sentences, the person you're with will tell you what's on their mind, what they think about that thing, and they will reveal a large measure of who they are.

What I used to do was to prepare my answer or reply way before the other person finished speaking. Before the first few words of each sentence were out of the other person's mouth, I was ready to fire my thoughts back. Conversations like this aren't communication, they're two concurrent monologues.

I remember from a long-ago marketing class that communication has two parts. First is the communication, then there is feedback. Knowing this and holding it in mind changes the dynamics of conversations, especially conversations with a new, possibly datable, person.

That's what I concentrate on now, listening to the woman, and giving great feedback. The unanticipated consequence of this is that very early on, without even thinking about it, I can tell if she's for me or not. It's easier to move on (rather than make a move) if you can see who she really is, rather than who she says she is.



Bottoms Up, Listeners!



Edited for pic, simplicity and clarity.

Pic from here [link]

Ladies Night

Thursday last week at around nine pm I felt like a couple of coldies at my local boozer. Angie wasn't working, so I couldn't indulge myself in Pink Squirrel-type banter. And Miles, who shakes a very good classic martini and is unusually adept at jokes at other people's expense, was pre-occupied - pre-occupied with his own search for country pie by the looks. Tending bar must be a top-ten way to access bulk trim.


So I happily chatted with the guy next to me and enjoyed my drink. India Pale Ale, with its aromatic, honeyed nose and nifty back-of-the-throat kick perfectly hit the spot.

At the beer-apex, around two drinks, I swivelled around and noticed that the bar had turned into something God-awful. It looked like the trade show from hell, with unctuous males panting to make a sale, and cock-sure females knowing they were in the dickie seat. Yes, you guessed it. Thursday night is Ladies Night, and the exhibitors and prospects were pouring in the door.

The idea's simple. Females drink (tiny pours in plastic cups) for free. Males pay full-price-plus (and sip from a regular glass.) Honey-bees home to flowers; whales swim to breeding grounds; salesman promise the world. It's the same old game, with a little less smokescreen.

Quote of the night came from the token cougar in heat: Oh Lord, they're not much older than my son. I just hope he won't recognize mine in the morning.






Stiff drink picture from here [link]

Edited because I was too clever to check the spelling of 'unctuous'.