As the saying goes, “you can teach an old dog new tricks” and maybe that’s why puppies are so cute. (Oh yes you are ugglie booglie.)
Being from the south, I’m a huge fan of Delta Airlines but due to an assignment it was more cost effective for me to fly JetBlue. Now of course a lot of folks complain about last winter when JetBlue had to cancel flights (as if no other airline ever has). I know I did and was not happy I was flying with them but they were $200 cheaper then my other options. But that all changed on my first flight, I flew home sitting in nice big wide seats (we are the “Big Men on Content”) and I’m even getting to watch the Colbert Report real-time. I thought to myself this is the way it should be. But I can’t blame Delta, to change the seats and add TV’s well is not cheap. A hundred and fifty plus seats on a plane, whoa. But then I have yesterday’s flight experience.
I’m flying across country to see some friends in the tri-valley and get on my JetBlue flight. After I relax into my larger seat and turn on CSI the pilot announce that we are flying “BetaBlue” the only plane flying today that has WIFI service in flight. It seems that JetBlue in conjunction with the FAA are running tests to see if we can connect to the internet in flight. After we passed 10,000 feet, I opened up my laptop and found my BetaBlue hotspot and within a few minutes was chatting with friends on the ground. What struck me is why is it that Delta, United, or even USAir hadn’t thought of this. They only added four hotspots on the plane and probably a transmitter somewhere. It can’t be a bigger effort than changing the movies system from tape to disc. And then I remembered, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. It’s obvious that JetBlue, being a puppy, was constantly learning new trick to make it customers happy.
But this reminds me that we see puppies and old dogs everywhere. Even in the tech market which moves fast we still have old dogs and puppies. Oracle and Microsoft are both old dogs and for a while companies like Documentum and Interwoven were puppies. But in fact for a while late-90’s Interwoven was a puppy to Documentum. What we have to remember is that over time every puppy becomes an old dogs Puppies are always learning and wanting to please and old dogs should learn from that instead of trying to nip at the pups all the time.
* For those of you Mythbusters fans out their, I do know that Adam and Jamie “busted” this myth in episode 74 but the saying still holds.
** A few weeks ago JetBlue received an investment from Lufthansa. This could mean interesting things in the future.
