Jul 2008

Diagnosing the cost disease

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

I was tipped off to this article from the Strib that ran in the Saturday paper. It’s worth a critical read. More worth reading are the reader comments because they speak to some the "externalities" of the megachurch and the ministry marketing paradigm—something I’ll define in a future post.

As for this post, I was following reporter Jeff Strickler along as he discovered all the effort and angst that goes into “one hour on a Sunday” at Eagle Brook Church in White Bear Lake and other venues (yeah, the one that installed the cupholders in their theater-style seats), when an innocent observation he made reached out and hit me on the head. He had done his homework and landed an interview with Scott Thumma, one of my research sources on megachurch stats. The conversation got into church giving trends and growth trends, and there it was:

“Another myth about megachurches, according to researcher Thumma, is that they spend a lot of time begging for money. In fact, most take a rather relaxed approach. That includes Eagle Brook, despite an annual budget nearing $10 million. Like a big-box mega-store that holds down prices with volume, Eagle Brook's continuous growth means they don't have to lean on members to dig deep; an ever-increasing number of hands slip cash into offering baskets.”

Strickler connected the dots—all the more remarkable because his article does not reflect any sort of critical or biased tone (In fact, I’m sure Eagle Brook would read this piece as good PR). As the excerpt above explains, Megachurches operate on an economy of scale financial model, whether they know it or not. The conclusions drawn by Mark Chaves in his 2006 article (I blogged about this well-researched article in March) are largely confirmed by the above observation. A major growth factor in megachurches during an era of flat growth in the church overall has to do with Baumol’s Cost Disease. (Baumol is pictured.)

Churches must achieve scale in order to provide the “services” people (read: consumers) expect. Since the 1970s, giving levels per family unit haven’t sustained smaller churches—especially as they tended flocks that were increasingly straying toward the capabilities of larger churches.

Currently, we find polar opposites emerging, with simple/house/missional churches on one end of the spectrum and so-called ‘gigachurches’ emerging on the other. There still churches of every size imaginable on our spectrum, but your 50 to 500 size congregations are increasingly coming under financial strain regardless of whether they try to compete with the giants or intentionally attempt to stay smaller. Compete or die has become the operative norm, leading some churches to the ministry marketing paradigm, and others into the strange, new world of church mergers and video venues.

Rather than offer deeper reflection on the some of the more telling quotes in the piece, Achievable Ends has done it better here.

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This is my last post about how awful Windows Vista is…

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

…for a while, anyway. In truth, I haven’t posted about the age-old question for quite some time. Part of that has been the resurgence of the Mac (now the number three computer company in the world), which has been widely covered elsewhere. If you’ve missed it, just google “Mac market share” and bone up on it through recent news articles.

In many ways the question has been answered by most tech writers out there today. Windows Vista is a commercial failure across the board. Why is that? I know of a few people that are perfectly happy on Vista (just a few) and they really don’t know what they are missing, or why Vista has such a bad rep.

I’m okay with that. Use what works and don’t worry about it. But if you are interested in what all the fuss is about, this recent piece in the New York Times lays out the issues for Microsoft very well. If there is any empathy for a huge company like Microsoft, this may be the appropriate place for it. Getting to a version of Windows that is on par (under the hood) with Mac OS X will require enormous effort:

Windows has put on a lot of weight over the years. Beginning as a thin veneer for older software code, it has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs, fixing the fixes that never worked properly, all while maintaining compatibility with older software and hardware—is there anything Windows doesn’t try to do?

Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

Speed and performance are now the real differentiators between Mac and Windows—not of the hardware, but the software. People will need significantly higher-end hardware to get the most out of Vista—or for Microsoft to add features that Mac OS offers without a noticeable performance hit. The price point debate on Macs versus Windows now has a new wrinkle. How much computing muscle do you have to buy to get close to parity with a Mac? The answer may surprise you. Macs can do more for the money.

Overcoming the gap will require a complete rewrite of Windows, as the NYT article explores. However doing so would pose great financial and brand risk to Microsoft—a catch 22 that could further alienate customers and drive more people from the platform.

There may come a day when a new Windows overcomes its past and works as well or better than other systems. That would be great. But as former Apple software architect Avadis Tevanian told the Times, the question is whether Microsoft “has the intestinal fortitude” to pull it off.

With Bill Gates now officially retired, the future of Windows is anything but secure. I hear they are readying a huge Ad campaign to go after Apple's Ads. I can understand wanting to do this. But I think $100 million would be better spent in an R&D lab figuring out what to do about Vista's present and future speed issues.

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Show me the money

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

With my project focusing on film industry marketing to churches, I ran across this little info-gem last week and thought I would pass it along. It's an interactive timeline infographic that charts Hollywood films and their gross earnings from 1986 to 2008. The portion below includes Jerry McGuire, just for the sake of my clever headline.

What makes this so cool is that the entire thing is interactive. If you click on a region of the graph, it pops-up a message with the movie’s gross receipts and a link to a synopsis. It represents both an elegant and engaging way to present numeric data, along with the hyperlinked power of the Web. This is one of the finest examples of useful interactive and linky web media I've ever seen.

Check out some of your favorite movies over the past 20 years (requires flash 9 in your browser).

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