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The longer view

October 30, 2010 in Business | 6 comments

We have two iPhones in our family. Yesterday we traded in the older one — my wife’s first-generation model, bought in 2007 — at Radio Shack. They gave us $72.94 for the phone and charger, against $199 for a new 16Gb iPhone 4. We’ll probably trade our other iPhone, my second-generation 3g one, pretty soon too.

Apple doesn’t have the same offer. I’m not sure who else does. I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t stopped in a Radio Shack to buy an ethernet cable a few days ago, when the kid behind the counter told me about it. Turns out Radio Shack will take a lot of stuff in trade. Since my iPhone 3g is brand new (I replaced it at an Apple store last month for $79, before I knew about this deal), I can get $116.13 for it, according to the online appraisal system at that last link.

Yes, it bothers me that we’re staying inside Apple and AT&T’s joint silo. It also bothers me that Fake Steve Jobs is right about Android fragmentation. I also see a serious risk that Real Steve Jobs might succeed at repositioning closed systems as “integrated”. Just because, well, he’s Steve. We’re all in his reality distortion field now.

Speaking of which, Apple is now bigger than Microsoft, and the iPhone is now bigger than Rim.

I still see this as a phase, and not a bad one. Apple and Google have together cracked open the unholy death grip that phone makers and carriers have long had on the mobile world. At some point those two halves will come completely apart.

Until they do, we won’t have ambient connectivity, or what I call the Frankston Threshold.

But we’ll get there. It’s inevitable.

[Later…] If you do trade in an old iPhone, be sure to erase it before handing it over. Do that under Settings/General/Reset/Erase all content and settings.

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Portrait of the artist as a young non-CEO

October 25, 2010 in Business, history, Past, Technology | 5 comments

For folks interested in what makes Steve Jobs and Apple (same thing) tick, Being Steve Jobs’ Last Boss, in the current Bloomberg Businessweek, is helpful reading. It’s an interview of John Sculley by Leander Kahney of Cultofmac.com. Sculley had been a very successful president of Pepsico when he was recruited as CEO of Apple in 1983, essentially to serve as Steve Jobs’ adult supervisor. While Sculley oversaw much growth at Apple in the following decade, mistakes were made (including the ousting of Steve), and Sculley himself was ousted after a decade on the job.

The encompassing statements:

Steve had this perspective that always started with the user’s experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression. He recruited me to Apple because he believed the computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an outrageous idea back in the early 1980s. He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.”

What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist. I remember going into Steve’s house, and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around, but he was incredibly careful in what he selected.

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it’s designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out. The boards had to be beautiful in Steve’s eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box, because he didn’t want people tampering with anything.

And,

The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO.”

As I wrote to Dave (in September 1997, after Steve came back to Apple),

The simple fact is that Apple always was Steve’s company, even when he wasn’t there. The force that allowed Apple to survive more than a decade of bad leadership, cluelessness and constant mistakes was the legacy of Steve’s original Art. That legacy was not just an OS that was 10 years ahead of the rest of the world, but a Cause that induced a righteousness of purpose centered around a will to innovate — to perpetuate the original artistic achievements. And in Steve’s absence Apple did some righteous innovation too. Eventually, though, the flywheels lost mass and the engine wore out.

In the end, by when too many of the innovative spirts first animated by Steve had moved on to WebTV and Microsoft, all that remained was that righteousness, and Apple looked and worked like what it was: a church wracked by petty politics and a pointless yet deeply felt spirituality.

Now Steve is back, and gradually renovating his old company. He’ll do it his way, and it will once again express his Art.

These things I can guarantee about whatever Apple makes from this point forward:

  1. It will be original.
  2. It will be innovative.
  3. It will be exclusive.
  4. It will be expensive.
  5. It’s aesthetics will be impeccable.
  6. The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal. The influence of customers and users will be held in even higher contempt.

And here we are.

Bonus link.

I was overheard to have said…

October 21, 2010 in Berkman, Business, Ideas, Technology, VRM | 1 comment

Nice interview with Dan Levy of Sparksheet:

From Part I:

What opportunities does the widespread adoption of mobile smartphones present for VRM?

This is the limitless sweet spot for VRM.

Humans are mobile animals. We were not built only to sit at desks and type on machines, or even to drive cars. We were built to walk and talk before we did anything else.

This is why mobile devices at their best serve as extensions of ourselves. They enlarge our abilities to deal with the world around us, with each other, and with the organizations we relate to. This especially applies to companies we do business with.

Right now we are at what I call the “too many apps” stage of doing this. Every store, every radio station, every newspaper and magazine wants to build its own app. At this early stage in the history of mobile development we need lots and lots of experimenting and prototyping, so having so many apps (where in lots of cases one would do) is fine.

But as time goes on we’re going to want fewer apps and better ways of dealing with multiple entities. For example, we’ll want one easy way to issue a personal RFP, or to store and selectively share personal data on an as-needed basis.

We won’t want our health data in five different clouds, each with its own app. We may have it in one cloud, for example, much as most of us currently have our money in one bank. But we’ll also need for that data to be portable, and the services substitutable.

From Part II:

I want to ask you about privacy, which is an important part of the VRM discussion. We want businesses to recognize our past interactions and treat us in a personalized way, but we’re also a little creeped out when it happens. So how do you see people using VRM tools to navigate that line in a way that makes us feel safe and well served?

We need our own tools for controlling the way our data and other personal information is used. Some of these tools will be technical. Others will be legal. That means we will have tools for engagement that say right up front how we want our data used and respected. We can do this without changing any laws at all – just the way we engage.

As I said in The Data Bubble, the tide began to turn with the Wall Street Journal article series titled “What They Know,” which is about how companies gather and use data about us. More and more of us are going to be creeped out by assumptions made by marketers about what we might want.

This is also part of what I believe is an advertising bubble. Our tolerance of too much advertising is like the proverbial frog, boiling slowly. The difference is that the frog dies, while we’re going to jump out. Everything has its limits, and we will discover how much advertising we’re willing to suffer, especially as more of it gets too personal.

The holy grail of advertising for many decades has been personalization. If we know enough about a person, the theory goes, we can make perfect bull’s-eye messages for them. But this goal has several problems.

The first problem is that personal advertising is kind of an oxymoron. Advertising has always been something you do for populations, not individuals, even if ads show up in searches by individuals, and advertisers are looking for individual responses.

From the individual’s side, advertising shouldn’t be any more personal than a floor tile. You don’t want the floor tile in a public bathroom to speak into your pants.

In fact, we’ve never liked personalized advertising of the old conventional sort, such as direct mail. We see our name on the envelope and then toss it anyway, most of the time.

The second problem is the belief that it’s actually possible to have perfect information about somebody. It’s not. And where it gets close it gets creepy.

The third problem is that advertising is still guesswork.

We need it, to let lots of customers know what we’ve got. But there should also be more efficient ways for supply and demand to meet and get acquainted – ways in which, for example, individual customers eliminate guesswork by telling vendors exactly what they want. VRM is one answer to that need.

These and other topics will be subjects of a panel I’m on this morning at Slush in Helsinki. Ted Shelton of OpenFirst is moderating.

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KCET’s brave move

October 12, 2010 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Journalism, News, Technology | 18 comments

I just learned by Craig Smith that KCET, the flagship PBS TV station in Los Angeles, is “going rogue.” Specifically, Craig says, “KCET will be dropping its PBS affiliation at the end of the year. That means if you live in Santa Barbara and want to watch the PBS NewsHour, Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Antiques Roadshow or even Sesame Street, you may be out of luck starting at the beginning of next year.”

KCET is a Los Angeles station that puts no signal at all into Santa Barbara (except though a translator on Gibraltar Peak). But it’s the nearest PBS affiliate and is therefore on the local cable system (Cox), thanks to must-carry rules.

Here’s the LA Times story. Here’s another one. Both rake KCET over the coals. They’re abandoning viewers, paying their general manager too much, yada yada.

As all those pieces point out, KCET isn’t the only source of PBS programming in the LA area. KOCE, licensed to Huntington Beach in Orange County, is another long-time PBS affiliate and promises to at least help pick up the slack. And it’s in a good position to do that. Where KOCE used to radiate from a local site in Orange County, it now also broadcasts from Mt. Wilson, which overlooks Los Angeles and is home to nearly all the area’s TV and FM stations. In fact, KOCE is actually putting out a signal that maxes at one million watts, while KCET is currently at 190,000 watts with a construction permit for 106,000 watts. This means that technically, at least, KOCE is now a bigger station. At 162,000 watts, so isKLCS, another PBS station in Los Angeles.

At least one of those others is sure to show up on cable systems in outlying areas such as Santa Barbara, bringing familiar shows to PBS audiences there. (The bihg question for KOCE is whether it can still be an Orange County station, and not morph into National/Southern California one.)

But the real story here is the death of TV as we knew it, and the birth of whatever follows.

Relatively few people actually watch TV from antennas any more. KCET, KOCE and KLCS are cable stations now. That means they’re just data streams with channel numbers, arriving at flat screens served by cable systems required to carry them.

What makes a TV station local is now content and culture, not transmitter location and power. In fact, a station won’t even need a “channel” or “channels” after the next digital transition is done. That’s the transition from cable to Internet, at the end of which all video will be either a data stream or a file transfer, as with a podcast.

All that keeps cable coherent today is the continuing perception, substantiated only by combination of regulation and set-top box design, that “TV” still exists, and choices there are limited to “channels” and program schedules. All of those are anachronisms. Living fossils. And very doomed.

KCET bailed on PBS because it didn’t want to pay whatever it took to stay affiliated with that program source. This means KCET has some faith — or at least a good idea — that Whatever Comes Next will be good enough for lots of people to watch. If we’re lucky, what’s liberated will also be liberating.

I sure hope so. Dumping PBS was a brave move by KCET. They deserve congratulations for it.

[Later…] Please read John Proffitt’s comment below. He lays out a scenario so likely yet easily denied that it has the ring of prophesy. TV is still TV, and KCET and its competitors are all TV stations. The next digital transition for the likes of KCET will indeed give us more more kinds of Ken Burns. The one that follows will bring us whatever we bring ourselves. Yes, there will still be big heads and long tails, but the game won’t be a closed one, or assume a sphinctered distribution system (which TV still is—and will still be if everything still has to run through regulated BigCos). More in my own responses and others that follow in the comments.

For bonus links, check out what KETC (not a typo and no relation), the landmark PBS station in St. Louis has been up to lately. There is lots of co-thinking out loud, including this stuff, facilitated by Robert Paterson—

(For some reason the text here keeps reverting to an earlier version, then back to a later one, each time I edit it. Very strange. In fact, I just discovered that half this post disappeared somehow. I just restored it from Google search cache. I hope.)

Loose Links

October 12, 2010 in Blogging, Business, Links | 6 comments

So here are a bunch of tabs I just cleared off my browsers:

I’d rather find them here than in a bookmark folder I’ll never look at again.

On trees that don’t grow to the sky

October 12, 2010 in Business, News, Past | 5 comments

You could build a shallow history of computing by looking only at which company looked like it was taking over the world at any given moment. First there was IBM, then Microsoft, then Google, and now there’s Facebook. None of them ever did take over the world, and no one company ever will.

It was with that perspective in mind that I wrote Waving Goodbye to Facebook in the August issue of Linux Journal, which is now on the Web. The pull-grafs:

Responding in his own Newsweek blog, Barrett Sheridan called Zuckerberg’s plans a “Play to Take Over the Entire Internet“. In TechCrunch, MG Siegler’s headline read, “I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet“. Whether or not Facebook is that ambitious, it won’t succeed at anything other than enlarging itself. The limits to that are those of any private architecture. It can get big, but not bigger than the planet. What Facebook has built is The Great Indoors. A lot of people like going there, just like a lot of people like going to shopping malls. But Facebook is a building, not geology.

The Web is geology. It is a wide open public space on which private and public structures can be built in boundless variety. Linux is probably the most widely used building material below and within those structures. Calculating its value is pointless, because — as Eric S. Raymond made clear long ago — Linux has use value more than sale value. As useful stuff, its leverage is boundless and therefore incalculable. It will also last as long as it remains useful.

The same cannot be said of Facebook, whose value is quite calculable, and which will thrive only as long as its revenue model and its investors’ patience holds out. Both of those will be shortened by the dissatisfaction of users, which Facebook has been risking increasingly over the years.

Of course, Facebook has little choice in that matter. To rephrase The Social Network‘s poster copy, you can’t make a billion friends without making a few million enemies. And, of course, following Facebook right now is kinda necessary. A few links I just moved here from tabs on my browser:

But then there is this, by Paul Boutin in the New York Times‘ Gadgetwise blog: Facebook Now Lets You Take Your Data With You. Thanks, Mark.

The Business Movie

October 9, 2010 in Business, Call center hell, Life, News, Technology | 10 comments

Went to see The Social Network last night, and thought it was terrific. Even though most of the scenes set at Harvard and Silicon Valley were shot elsewhere, the versimilitude was high. And,while it was strange to see the recent past treated as history, the story actually works, and carries truth, even if it doesn’t ring true for the living subjects of the story. (I’ve haven’t met any of the movie’s characters, but I thought Justin Timberlake’s portrayal of the Sean Parker character was drawn straight from Jason Calacanis.)

The story that matters, at least to me, is about the making of a Silicon Valley success. In The Business-Movie Business, The New Yorker‘s James Surowiecki unpacks Hollywood’s small and mostly poor assortment of movies about business. His summary statement is “Movies’ mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.” Here’s how he puts “The Social Network” in that context:

Watching “Wall Street,” you’d think that business is a Hollywood obsession. But it’s really Hollywood’s biggest blind spot.

For that reason, the fall’s most important business film—indeed, the most important business film in ages—is not the second “Wall Street” but, rather, “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s film about Facebook. The film represents a rare attempt to take business seriously, and to interrogate the blend of insight, ruthlessness, creativity, and hubris required to start a successful company. Hollywood has made good films about money, loyalty, trust, and organization before—but most of them have been about gangsters. “The Social Network” suggests that it could also start making good films about businesspeople who don’t carry guns.

Henry Blodget’s blog post title sums up his own take: No Wonder Everyone Loves The Facebook Movie: It’s The American Dream. He begins,

True, it paints Harvard as a stuffy cartoon-scape. True, it treats women as as video-game props, sex tools, and platforms for coke-snorting. And, true, Mark Zuckerberg’s character comes off as a bit of an asshole. (But based on the other evidence I’ve seen, this would seem to be a fair representation of the reality at the time. And, thanks to Aaron Sorkin’s writing and Jesse Eisenberg’s delivery, even the assholishness is charming.)

But all this is secondary to the main message of the movie, which is a celebration of what makes a vibrant corner of our economy–and our country–great.

What’s the Facebook movie really about?

It’s about a college sophomore who says “fuck you” to authority, follows his passion, and creates something great. In so doing, he works ridiculously hard, inspires his colleagues, blows past the comfortable establishment, and becomes rich beyond belief.

In other words, the Facebook movie is the latest incarnation of the American Dream.

Ah, but we wake up from our dreams. And Hollywood knows how to make that movie too.

Mark Zuckerberg is clearly an extremely bright and prescient dude, and Facebook could hardly be a bigger success story. But that story isn’t over. In fact, it’s just begun.

(An aside… Both The New Yorker and BusinessInsider, from which I lifted the quotes above, do something I hate. They give me more than I intend to copy, putting on my clipboard a “Read more” and the URL of the piece. So, when I paste the passage, I get bonus jive. Sometimes this is handy, but it smacks of pure promotion, and its annoying.)

Some research questions

September 21, 2010 in Business, Research, Technology | 6 comments

Here’s some what I’m looking for right now. Any help is welcome.

Topic 1: Advertising

  1. Size of the advertising industry, both in the U.S. and worldwide.
  2. Sums of advertising of various types to which individuals are exposed every day.
  3. Breakouts and growth rates of advertising sectors. Online and mobile especially.
  4. Weaknesses and/or declines in advertising sectors.
  5. Hard numbers on click-through rates on various advertising types, and ratios to impressions. Trends as well.
  6. Successes and failures of coupons and other forms of promotion.
  7. Overhead in the production of advertising. (Paper, electricity, server cycles, etc.)
  8. Size of the whole marketing category, including salaries for marketers.

Topic 2: History

  1. Need amounts invested, through the dot-com era (1996-2000), in start-ups. Especially interested in break-outs by business models of those funded. Regional break-outs would be good too.
  2. Success rates of investments. I want more than stock and sale prices for the companies. If possible, I want totaled revenues for those companies, by sector if possible.

There’s more, but that’s enough for now. Thanks.

Would you move to Chatanooga for Internet speed?

September 20, 2010 in Business, Ideas, infrastructure, Places, Technology | 18 comments

So , the Chatanooga power (and now high speed Internet) utility, is now offering Internet speeds up up to 1Gbps over fiber optic connections to homes. (A U.S. record, far as I know.) If you ignore EPB “triple play” offerings of TV and telephony alongside Internet connectivity and just go for the Internet connection, your prices are these (I’ve rounded up from the posted prices):

  • $58 for 30Mbps
  • $70 for 50Mbps
  • $140 for 100Mbps and $350 for 1Gbps.

Let’s assume you get one or more IP addresses with this, and no blocked ports. In other words, a full native Internet connection. Answer these:

  • Does that make you think about moving there?
  • If not, would you get it if you lived in Chatanooga?
  • And if your answer to that is yes, how would you recommend EPB improve its offering, either in its deployment or its characterization in marketing?

Just wondering.

Let’s kill Interruptive ads

September 19, 2010 in Business, Journalism, problems | 28 comments

The Web is not television, and I would like online advertisers and publications to stop treating the Web like it is. Interruptive ads such as this one at Salon…

… are meant to get 100% click-through rates, I suppose. But in too many cases — namely mine, repeatedly — they get 100% of multiple clicks that fail to go through. I don’t know why clicking on the X next to “Close and enter Salon” doesn’t work for me (on three different browsers), but it doesn’t, and that causes me to be very annoyed, mostly at Salon.

I got to that blanked-out Salon page by following this Jay Rosen tweet. Earlier today I ran across the same thing when I followed this Phil Windley tweet to this page at Freeman. There I was greeted with the same kind of interruption, this time a self-promo for the pub’s email newsletter. Clicking on that X got me through, but I didn’t like having to do that, and frankly don’t remember what I read, because I arrived annoyed. (And I’m new to that pub, which makes the interruption even more rude.)

Here’s what I believe: It doesn’t matter how much money interruptive ads make for publications on the Web. They sap the readers’ tolerance and good will, and any unnecessary amount of that is too high a price to pay. (Videos? Okay, we’re used to that on TV. But serious text-based pubs like Salon and Freeman should chill.)

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