Matt Richtel investigates the mystery of why laptops and not iPads need to be pulled out of bags for the X-Ray machine at airport security.

From the New York Times

What’s the distinction between the devices? Similar shapes, many similar functions, the tablet is thinner but not by much. Is the iPad a lower security risk? What about the punier laptop-like gadgets, the netbooks and ultrabooks? What about my smartphone?

Richtel contacts the TSA and security experts, but doesn’t really get a good answer. The TSA said that it had its reasons but declined to share them saying that “the agency didn’t want to betray any secrets.” Another security expert called it “security theater”, implying that making passengers go through some inconvenience makes it look like the government is taking their security seriously!

The problem of course is that electronic devices come in all sizes. Rules are best applied to clearly defined categories. Categorization of devices based upon size is just not practical. There has to be an easy way for TSA and passenger to unambiguously agree on the categorization that then leads to the application of the rule “the device comes outside the bag for the X-Ray machine”.

Is it a laptop? (Y/N) is an easy way to categorize. Is it more than 1 cubic foot? (Y/N) will just not work.

The real world presents a lot of ‘continuous functions’. Sometimes you have rules based upon categories like single/married or male/female that are clearly defined (more in some states than in other). But most of the time you categorize by drawing a line on the graph of a continuously varying function like age. You can vote when you are 18. You can drink when you are 21 etc.

What is the right age at which you can vote? Actually age may not have much to do with it. Education, mental maturity may have more to do with it. But those are harder to measure or indisputably agree on. So age is the best proxy.

The voting age does differ from country to country, so obviously there isn’t one right answer. But once it is in place, a rule like the voting age, just digs itself in. It becomes very difficult to change. Status quo itself has inertia. Additionally, there may be vested interests that are pushing at it from both sides. It becomes very difficult to change. Greece’s early retirement age, for instance (55).

Rules like clean categories. If the real world presents continuous functions, rule makers chop up the continuous function to create clean categories. Once these categories are created, they are very difficult to change.

There is another property of rules. You can always add more. They are very much like things carved in stone. You can’t erase them, but you can always add more.

It’s tax season here in the US. The US tax code is a labyrinth of rules and loopholes and rules to close loopholes that is impossible to deal with. Everyone agrees that it is far too complex. But somehow law makers keep adding more deductions, more rules to the tax code.

The most interesting thing about rules is how they eventually become rituals. Rules endure, and outlive the rule makers. On the way, generations of rule makers keep adding more rules, but they never take anything away. One day the rule makers no longer know why the rules exist. But they keep enforcing them. They have become the priests and the rules, rituals.

Here’s a Zen story that hits home

When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

I recently met the CIO of a leading news media company. He said that over time their Marketing department had added so many “special offers” for their newspaper that they now had 1200 of them in their system. Nobody really understood all of them. But they were afraid to remove them. Why change something that wasn’t broken? Apparently there was a rogue link in some forum which gave readers a free 3 month trial period even if they were current subscribers! But that was a small price to pay.

Businesses, especially big business, has its share of rules and rituals. Some of it is necessary. Some of it isn’t. The cost to business from unnecessary rules is enormous. It slows down progress. It gets in the way of much needed change. It saps the energy of people. They end up spending so much of their passion attacking and defending rules and justifying exceptions, which could be used constructively.

The only way to keep business agile is to constantly subject its rules to the sunlight of logic. Why do we have this rule in place? Did we make this rule when the conditions were different from what they are today? Do we completely understand the costs of this rule and have we weighed them against the benefits? Does anyone even remember why we have this rule?

Like zero based budgeting, we should be talking about zero-based rules.

If you fell out of your chair at that number, that’s probably because you don’t know that the Chevy Volt is an electric car with a back up gasoline engine. A full charge takes me about 30 miles after which it switches to the petrol engine. So if I keep driving on my battery, the mileage keeps improving.

I crossed a 100mpg after some effort. I charge the car using a standard 110V outlet which takes 10 hours for a full charge. Which means that I have to remember to plug it in at night, otherwise the next day I’ll be driving on gasoline. I now regularly forget to charge my iPad, but almost never, my Volt.

So when I crossed 100 mpg, I was naturally quite thrilled about it. I posted this tweet

The big 100! @chevyvolt is there a club or something I will get invited to? instagr.am/p/G64ALOyBs6/

— Basab Pradhan (@basabp) February 12, 2012

To which I got some responses that were humbling. Like this one

@umbertom @basabp @chevyvolt I’m at 330 + mpg. www.voltstats.net. You should join. Avg is 115+ mpg. #DetroitTechno

— George Robison (@GeorgeRobison) February 18, 2012

After which I joined voltstats.net and kept at it. My mileage is now 104mpg.

Why would I spend any time pushing my mileage up? And then joining a website with a bunch of people who are similarly engaged? I get nothing out of the deal. Yes, there is some satisfaction on doing my bit to save the planet, but anything over 17mpg (my previous car) would have been an improvement. Why go for a 100?

This behavior, that would make no sense to economists, is driven by what is called gamification. Apparently we are all wired to play games.

There’s a lot of action around gamification of the enterprise. SAP is investing in this area. Salesforce.com bought a company Rypple that uses gamification to improve employee performance.

Outside of the enterprise Stackoverflow uses badges and so on to reward certain activity. My daughter does Math exercises on Khan Academy, which awards badges after you win a certain number of points. It certainly keeps her going without much complaint. We offered her a reward for every 10,000 points. But she has never claimed it. Achievement is its own reward?!

But I wonder if the psychology at work here is the same thing that makes us play silly games, board games and basketball? Does that capture what is going on here?

I think there is something else at work here. If you can measure something and if you can influence it, that something automatically becomes a challenge, a contest. Is it the overachiever in you that compels you to better your best score (or someone else’s)? Or is it your playful, game loving side? Perhaps they are all at work here – play, achievement, competition – just in varying proportions for different people.

Whatever it is, we will see more and more of it in our companies. For a game to be successful, the measurement of outcomes should be largely driven by game play not by random or extraneous circumstances. As life gets more digitized, such opportunities will keep popping up.

Ten years ago, you could never have had a contest on how many friends you had. Now I can say that I have more Facebook friends than you.

If such an award existed, Ron Johnson would be a Hall of Famer retailer. He was instrumental in making Apple Stores what they are today – the biggest sales per sq ft of retail space and a wake up call for the rest of the retail industry. Now he is the CEO at J C Penney and he’s shaking things up there.

Mr. Johnson is currently meeting the media, rolling out his new strategy for J C Penney (the video interview is worth watching). There’s a new brand identity, a major redesign of stores which will now be organized around stores-within-stores for major brands. But the thing that struck me as particularly bold and perhaps risky was a fundamental change in pricing strategy.

J C Penney is moving to what they call “Fair and Square” pricing. There will no longer be the deep discount sales that its customers have come to expect.

Why are they doing this? In Mr. Johnson’s words

Pricing is actually a pretty simple and straight forward thing. Customers will not pay literally a penny more than the true value of the product. And as I have been watching the department stores for the past decade, I have been struck by the extraordinary amount of promotional activity, which to me, didn’t feel like it was appropriate for a department store. My instinct was that it wasn’t a good thing.

Last year J C Penney had 590 sales events. A whopping 72% of their sales came from merchandise discounted at least 50%.

From this, they are moving to where there will be only three kinds of prices – Everyday, Month-long Value (back to school type sales) and Best Prices (clearance).

This is a pretty gutsy move.

An HBR blog post is down on the timing of this strategy and thinks Penney should wait for when its new brand and stores vision has been fulfilled.

Quite simply, J.C. Penney lacks the differentiation to make this pricing strategy successful. J.C. Penney’s products are fairly homogenous. When selling a relatively undifferentiated product, the only lever to generate higher sales is discounts. Even worse, if competitors drop prices on comparable products, J.C. Penney’s hands are tied — it is a sitting duck that can’t respond.

In my opinion the new pricing strategy is an inherent part of the new J C Penney strategy and can’t be disassociated from the store makeover and the new brand identity.

Undoubtedly this is a risky gambit. But is it the right strategy? At the heart of it, the new pricing strategy is about simplicity.

Customers like simple, stable pricing. A busy housewife would love to be able to do her shopping at the Penney store near her place of work on weekdays, instead of fighting for parking space at the mall near her home on the weekend when the sales are on. When she is in the store, she can confidently buy any product with the assurance that its price isn’t going to be halved the next sale.

There is another aspect to simple pricing that Penney won’t be able to control and that is to ensure that prices on merchandise are the same everywhere. Apple does this very well on their products. When I buy from Apple online or in an Apple store, I am pretty certain that I don’t need to do any comparison shopping on the internet.

Customers like simple pricing. But they also like low prices. We don’t know where Penney’s prices will end up, but if 72% of merchandise is sold at 50% or more off full price, we can safely say that there is a lot of headroom below full price. Will that be enough to keep their customers or not is the key question. How they withstand the pressure of weekend sales from competing department stores must be giving sleepless nights to Penney executives.

After years of weekend sales, customers now expect them. They expect to see those flyers in their mailboxes with astonishingly low prices. How will Penney pull in the customers? Local marketing will probably have to completely change.

Besides the fact that customers like simple pricing, there are other benefits to having a simple pricing strategy. Highly volatile prices create highly volatile demand. Volatile demand creates its own set of problems. From store work force scheduling to inventory management. High volatility in demand results in either stock outs or higher inventory costs or both.

The fact is that simplicity in product and pricing results in simpler business operations.

Take Southwest Airlines for instance. From an earlier post The Virtue of Simplicity

Southwest Airlines is a company that I truly admire. The genius of SouthwestAirlines is in how they have become the most important airlines in the US by simplifying it for their passengers and for themselves. In the morass of complexity that is the American airlines industry, Southwest Airlines is a shining beacon of hope. Not only is their pricing dead simple, everything about the airlines is that way. They fly only Boeing 737s. This simplifies, crew scheduling, training, aircraft maintenance and spares. They have only one class – coach class. There is no seat assignment. It’s first come first serve [Update: This has changed but in a uniquely Southwest fashion]. And their frequent flier program is a tribute to simplicity – 8 round trips and you get a free roundtrip to anywhere they fly.

I hope J C Penney is successful with ‘Fair and Square’. Taking a leaf out of the book of their neighbor in Dallas – Southwest Airlines – might be just what the retailer needs.

And then we shall hope that this might inspire banks, telcos and cable companies to adopt simpler pricing strategies. And pigs will fly.

And boy is he angry. A couple of days back, Robert Scoble, who hopefully needs no introduction to readers of this blog, posted a rant on the usability of Workday which his employer, Rackspace, uses for employee travel expenses. A quote is below. The video is far more telling. In that, Scoble is visibly frustrated and angry.

It’s not everyday I complain about software, but, sorry, Workday really sucks. If you are considering an expense reporting tool, get Expensify.
Why? What’s wrong with Workday?
It’s slow.
It constantly gives me errors and doesn’t let me enter data.
It isn’t easy to enter lots of data.
It doesn’t hook up to my credit cards.
It doesn’t have a mobile app to upload photos of receipts.
It doesn’t let me do milage by entering in a start and end point on a map.
Expensify is far superior. It takes 1/100th the time for me to do an expense report there than in Workday.

Commentators have wondered about Scoble’s motive here. Workday Rising, Workday’s annual user group meeting roughly coincided with his rant. Was it designed to stir up controversy at just the right moment for controversy to strike? Bloggers thrive on controversy, do they not?

But I totally get where Scoble is coming from, foam-flecked tirade and everything. I call it Enterprise Rage. It is similar to road rage. If you have it, you feel like stepping out of your constrained space (car, cubicle whatever) and punching somebody in the face. Or screaming your head off, if that takes your fancy. But you can’t because you’ll get fired or run over. So, those who can, make videos and vent. Others take up hobbies or rack up therapy bills.

Enterprise Rage can be caused by many things. For instance, things that are wasteful and frustrating and don’t have to be. Like submitting an expense claim.

Workday is a new breed of enterprise software company that I hear does care about usability. And expenses is not central to what they do (but then does that mean you can put just anything out there?) But even so Workday would be an exception. Enterprise software vendors, in general, don’t care about usability.

Why? Because enterprise software does not have to bother about usability. Their software is demoed and sold to executives. Executives care about dashboards and business intelligence. Will I be able to use it from my iPad? How many hours before I can get that report? Ooh, that pie chart looks so good. Can I have it?

Feature, function matter of course. But usability in the hands of employees is rarely a selection criterion. Executives have assistants to log expense statements. They don’t even know there are usability or performance issues with the expenses system. And the employees, poor sods, can’t get their expenses reimbursed without using the system.

The problem of bad enterprise software never rises to become a big issue in companies. Mostly because employees are not given a choice. If the software isn’t working, work stops of course. But if it is, there is no other way of getting your work done. It might be difficult to learn, difficult to use and slow as molasses but hey, who said you had to work just 8 hours a day. Besides, if a company has already spent millions on the software and its implementation, airing grievances about its usability is generally not encouraged.

There is one area, though, where usability already greatly impacts the value the company gets from the software – CRM. Unlike with other workflow type software, where there is no way around, with CRM, if the salesforce doesn’t like the CRM, information just doesn’t go into the CRM. Sure there’ll be some mandatory pipeline updation, but not much else. The rich, stream of customer meeting notes which are invaluable to team-selling are all lost to emails and phone calls. Or just plain lost. I’ve used at least half a dozen CRM systems extensively in my career and the best one in my opinion – Highrise from 37signals. Not surprisingly it was designed for small sales teams. It wouldn’t work for any large enterprise, but it is so easy to use for the sales person, there is no need to coax, cajole or threaten them to just “use the damn system”.

Enterprise software vendors need to wake up. Employees now know what a good, performing user experience feels like. They use a whole bunch of great software in their personal lives from companies like Google, Apple and Twitter. Also, for every Workday, there is an Expensify that is born in the competitive cauldron of small business software where assistants are rare and software with sucky usability won’t survive.

Two, productivity in the US and other advanced countries has been inexorably rising even through the recession. Which means that higher output is expected from employees. You can’t expect more out of employees and give them crappy software to work with. They tend to get upset and go vent on their favorite social media site. If they are someone like Robert Scoble with a big megaphone, the software vendor better watch out for its reputation.

There will soon come a day, when prospective employees will first inquire about compensation and benefits. And then they will ask “What system does your company use for collaboration/crm/expense reimbursement?” Maybe not while we are in this economy. But the time will come.Till then, expect more of the same.

On Wednesday, as I trudged out of Oracle Open World after Larry Ellison’s keynote, I learnt that Steve Jobs had passed away. It threw a pall of gloom over me and most of the attendees.

The world is poorer without Steve Jobs.

On Thursday I was talking to my 15 year old son about the significance of Steve Jobs and how he was being compared to Thomas Edison. He was curious. “Was Steve Jobs an inventor like Edison?”. No he wasn’t but in Edison’s days, a single invention like the light bulb could directly become a product. Today, there are hundreds of patented inventions that go into a new product. They come from different companies that have scientists in many different streams like material science, semiconductors, manufacturing technology and software.

No Steve Jobs wasn’t an inventing genius. But he was a creative genius like Edison. And they were both great businessmen. Apple at the height of its market power (today?) is as awe inspiring as General Electric ever was. Probably more.

In 2008 I switched from a Windows laptop to a MacBook. Before that the only Apple product I ever owned was an iPod. My experience with my MacBook was so superlative that I became a fan. In the short time since my first MacBook I acquired an iMac for my son, an iPad, an iPhone, Airport Express, AppleTV and Time Capsule.

To me, Apple is exceptional in two ways. First, it melds, like no other company, these often conflicting objectives – functional design and visual design, usability and feature/function, software and hardware, engineering and beauty.

Two, it seeks to excel, to set the standard in whatever it does. Look at the way it reinvented retailing in Apple Stores. And in a field that it entered in the last decade. Today retailers around the world look to Apple stores as their role model.

Steve Jobs was essential to both these things. When conflicting objectives collide and trade offs had to be made, he made the important ones. And when a product was not up to snuff, it went back to the drawing board, again and again until Steve thought they had it right.

Apple may still have all the same creative geniuses that they had last week. But how do you replace this dynamic of a “Chief Designer & Chief Executive Officer”?

In 1994 when I came to the US my great regret was that I had not been able to see Michael Jordan play. That was soon remedied as he came back to the NBA. But this time, there are no comebacks. I can only wish I had gone to an Apple conference to see Steve Jobs on stage in his element.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs. This Macolyte mourns you.

And yet, it is surprising how little attention is paid to written communication skills. The BPO industry trained thousands of people in spoken English, often accompanied with accent training. But English writing skills get little attention.

Why are English writing skills so important?

Internal business communication in an IT Services company is entirely in English. The offshore model means that business matters that could have been transacted in a meeting or over the phone, necessarily end up on email. If an email, or design document is not well written, a whole day might go by before a clarification or correction can be made. Big waste of productivity!

Second, Indian offshore service providers work with clients who are used to dealing with consultants who typically have excellent writing skills. In western markets particularly, writing with clarity and even flair, is a mark of a good education. That’s what you get compared with.

Over time, most clients on the IT side of the house have adjusted their mental models and no longer automatically connect good writing skills with IT skills. But as we start going in front of business, the same problems will start surfacing again with a new set of clients.

Nominally, Indians in the IT Services industry were educated in English medium schools. I would guess that over 90% of the industry took their XII board exams in English medium. But when it comes to writing English, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much.

Indian high school education is all geared towards college entrance exams. Entrance exams for engineering colleges don’t test on English. The Physics, Chemistry and Math exams are entirely (?) multiple choice. As a result, nobody cares about English at school. Correction – nobody cares about any language, period.

And then came the mobile revolution. The kids coming out of college now write emails, the way they text. Short, unintelligible sentences full of typos. Not surprising since for them words texted far exceed words written in full sentences in email or any other form of writing.

Go to the comments section of any Indian publication online. You’ll see what I mean. I can’t understand half of what’s written there.

This is actually now a crisis. I believe that with the new generation, writing full sentences is just not cool any more. Every idea must be conveyed in 140 characters or less. Much of it will be SMS English. There will be typos galore, because, you know what, I am too busy to review what I just wrote. If you can’t understand what I’ve written that’s your problem.

As always, the industry will have to come up with its own solutions. We can never rely on the Indian education system to meet our needs. But unlike technical knowledge, it is really difficult to start writing well if you have ignored it in school and college.

Photo: Johan Larsson

Startups don’t have IT policies. For the past few years I have been using email in the cloud, a MacBook, an Android phone and have not been within miles of a securID card. All that changed overnight.

Infosys, like most major corporations, takes information security very seriously. Actually, because its policies have to be at least as strict as its most security conscious clients, Infosys is probably an outlier, even in the corporate world.

All very necessary and reasonable. But I am going to miss my personal tech freedom. Most people who have gone back to work for a large company know what I am talking about.

The world around them is changing, and companies will have to respond to it. Current IT policies are based upon a “two state” view of the world. It sees the “employee at work using company computing infrastructure” and “employee on her own time, on her own device” as two states, separated by time and space. This is increasingly untenable. Not only does it not reflect the reality of the life of information workers, it is also easy to argue that this view of the user is not in the interests of the company.

In today’s shrinking world, a major corporation is open for business in some part of the world at all hours. Employees have to be open to this 24X7, always-on kind of work environment. The boundaries between company time and personal time are blurred. Should the employee have to keep switching between company and personal devices?

If I go for a two week trip to Asia Pacific and carry just my company devices with me, can I put my personal life on hold? I might have to pay my bills, answer personal email and yes, even lookup my friends on Facebook. I might want to catch my favorite weekly show on HBO. Should I have to carry two laptops?

I could also argue that IT policy based upon this “two states” world view is not in the interests of the company. Let’s say a new employee is hired into a tax advisory firm. He is an expert in say cross-border taxation issues. For years he has kept notes in Evernote. But now he can’t bring those notes inside the firewall because of the lock-down environment in the company. That can’t be a good thing for the company.

Further, the taxation expert has a twitter account and a blog which connects him to other experts and people interested in his field. These are personal accounts, but the company gains from his network and reputation. The company gets leads because of his online presence.

Another problem is the consumerization of computing technology. There was a time when the IT department could standardize on Windows and Blackberry and few employees would be disappointed. But now Macs are a real corporate alternative. And iOS and Android phones and tablets outnumber RIM devices. Their users love them and will keep the pressure on IT to let them use these devices.

Fragmentation always costs more and IT departments hate it. But how long will they be able to hold up against employees who want their own device?

Which is why regardless of the challenges, Bring Your Own Computer and Bring Your Own Device are here to stay.

In spite of these new age consumption methods for news and opinion, I still get the odd email newsletter. One of them is from the Wall Street Journal Online. But I don’t click on the stories much. In fact on most days, I delete the emails unseen.

The WSJ email newsletter is put together for the sole purpose of inserting ads and generating revenue. The ad, as you can see in the image below, occupies pride of place. Most people I know don’t allow automatic download of images in emails. So basically you have a big blog of nothing right at the top of the email.

To the left of that big blob of nothing is, wait for it, another big blob of nothing. Whoever designed the email, decided that the first topic could be next to the ad, but the second topic must begin way below.

The email signup takes up most of the rest of the space above the fold. Its kind of funny that users are signing up for email newsletters in which the first and almost only thing they see in the email is an invitation to sign up for email.

I could go on you know. The use of all caps. The general ugliness of the email. But you get the drift. It sucks.

On the other hand, here’s an email newsletter from GigaOm. This is how its done.

At the top of the email is a list of the top headlines, that is well designed and pleasing to the eye.

If you click on a headline, it doesn’t take you directly to the website. Instead, it takes you to a short blurb about the post that you clicked on, within the email. You read the blurb and if you want to read more click and go to the website.

Isn’t that a little counterintuitive? If the user has clicked on the title, just take him to the website, no? Each click is X ad impressions. Each ad impression is worth $Y…

Actually, no. I like the fact that I get a little bit of a blurb within the email. This saves me from the costly (in time) visit to the website, if I was curious about the title but wasn’t sure what it was about. And this makes me click more.

The fundamental difference in the approach is that GigaOm wants the newsletter to be useful for readers before they start making money on it. WSJ sees it just as a source of revenue. In fact they probably handed it over to the ad sales department to design. It certainly looks like that.

John Gapper in the FT

The calculation every client makes is, in the words of Christopher McKenna, a professor at the Oxford university’s Saïd Business School who studies professional services firms, that “consultants will carry information in and information out. The client has to decide which of those flows is worth more.”

Indeed, one of the main reasons companies hire consultants is to make sure they do not fall behind what their competitors are doing – in return for parting with their own secrets, they gain access to their rivals’ suitably disguised “best practices”. The consultant is a broker who attempts to amass so much knowledge that each company has to hire him, no matter how uncomfortable that feels.

The value in hiring management consultants lies in broadly three (overlapping) areas:

1. Superior analytics skills – Firms like McKinsey do hire some of the best business brains.
2. Expertise – industry or functional expertise.
3. Best practices

The third – best practices – does overlap with expertise, but differs in a crucial way. Expertise could be acquired either because you were a part of industry or because you have been a consultant to that industry (or function like Marketing or HR) for many years. But best practice is just about knowing what the best companies are doing.

Hiring consultants to get industry best practices is quite common. There was a time when smart MBAs were concentrated in management consultancies and were hired by companies just looking for smart analytical types to fix problems that their own managers were not able to.

But hiring MBAs became commoner in the industry as business schools kept churning them out. This redressed the IQ balance somewhat. Which forced management consulting firms to shift more towards hiring people from the industry (acquiring expertise) and to offering best practices.

In many cases, hiring a management consultant for best practices is perfectly alright. In functional areas like HR for instance. Although, hiring somebody with the expertise as an employee might be better.

But if you hire a McKinsey for core business strategy you have to be pretty convinced that your executive row has the wrong people. Even then, if you were the CEO, wouldn’t you make changes to your exec team rather than seek outside help?

Outside of management consulting I see no dilemma. In IT consulting for instance, there is a certain complementarity in the expertise that the IT consultant brings. Assuming that IT is not core to the company (i.e. you are not amazon.com) there is every reason for the company to tap the technology expertise with a consultant.

Management consulting is the only kind of consulting where most of what they do is not complementary to what the client’s leadership is doing. It makes up for their deficiencies.

The companies who therefore use them for core stuff have admitted to themselves that a) their exec team cannot rise to challenge and b) in the inflow-outflow that Chris McKenna speaks of above, they will definitely gain from the inflow more than they can lose from the outflow of information.

You know who’s never used consultants? Warren Buffett.

I recently booked airline tickets on Cathay Pacific for my in-laws who live in India, to come spend a few weeks in the holidays here with us in the Bay Area. I made the booking on Cathay’s website using my CurrentBank debit card. A few days later I was shocked to learn that CurrentBank had hit me with a fee of $234.92 for “international transaction fees”. I scrambled and called CurrentBank, who basically said, sorry, but read your contract.

I of course knew about those international transaction fees. I see them all the time when I use my card outside the US. But how am I supposed to know that sitting in the Bay Area I can be hit by these fees while buying tickets on an international airline. I had never paid any transaction fees on Cathay before this and this was not the first time I was buying tickets online on Cathay, though the trip always originated in the US.

Wouldn’t it be really simple for Visa and/or CurrentBank to pop a message while the transaction is being processed that said “Please note that CurrentBank will charge you an additional fee of $234.92″. Something that is always done at ATMs around the country. But why would they. You see, the card holder might have second thoughts.

The objective, you see, is not to serve your customer’s interests. It is to lure him in by “free checking” and other tall claims and then trap him with well-laid traps.

You might say, “Hey, you should have read the contract.” I offer an analogy to whoever might pose that question. Suppose you went to an e-commerce website. You clicked on the “I agree” button. The agreement that you just agreed to included a line that said “A service charge of 3% will be charged to your credit card for every purchase.” You then did your holiday shopping and then discovered in January that the e-commerce company hit you with an additional charge. You’d be pissed, wouldn’t you? So am I.

Earlier this week I got hit by a fee of $15. My account is not supposed to have any fees, but there must be a good reason why they hit me with a fee. I’ll never know. Their online statement gives no explanation. And it is not worth my time to call and find out what the fee is about. They probably concluded long ago that saying too much in transaction statements just raised unpleasant questions. And who wants to deal with those pesky customers.

I know CurrentBank needs to make a profit. I know that they’ve been hit big time by the cap on debit card fees (which the retailer pays). But I’d be much happier if they charged me whatever they needed in an upfront and transparent way. Don’t lay traps.

That’s why I am rooting for BankSimple. I have no problem paying a fee for checking. I know it costs money to provide a good service. But I want the services and fees to be simple, upfront and transparent.

You might say, why BankSimple, maybe this is just a CurrentBank problem. Try another bank. I don’t have to. I know all of them suffer from the same problem. They are all busy “leveraging their customer base.” After gazillion acquisitions, the way they compete has come down to reducing costs and getting more out of the existing customers. Unfortunately, the latter often means ambushing them in dark alleys with hidden fees.