Category Archives: Web/Tech

Apple Computer Role Reversal as Big Brother

Business Mistakes, Current Affairs, Web/Tech, , , , , , , , ,

What delicious irony. The champion of the little guy has become big brother.

Remember the groundbreaking first Macintosh television commercial, in 1984, with the young woman throwing a hammer into the giant video screen on an evil big brother, smashing it into bits? There’s a role reversal going on.

Apple Computer has taken the establishment role in the booming new iPhone application market. First the iPhone, then well-publicized stories of trivial iPhone apps making thousands of dollars daily, and then the application review process got swamped. And now there’s Apple Computer, the gatekeeper, protector of the establishment, standing between all those developers with stars in their eyes, on one had, and admission into the app store, on the other.

The original idea of review was a combination of protecting the software from crashing, and protecting the Apple store from embarrassment. Ever since the stories of iPhone application fortunes first broke — I fear it was with a fart app making $10,000 a day — the software developers are flocking to iPhone apps. Of course I have no special knowledge, but from the outside looking in, it would seem like the crush of applicants makes long waits, unfair rejections, and inconsistencies inevitable. I’m guessing Apple’s private-sector resources to manage the tidal wave are completely overwhelmed. Mobclix, which tracks iPhone applications with analytics, is reporting that there are more than 85,000 applications approved by Apple so far, and the wait has gone from days to weeks, and is rising.

On a Mobclix blog about the iPhone applications market, iPhone app developer Max Zamkow says:

iPhone developers live in constant fear of receiving an email from Apple with what can only be termed the ‘Death Sentence’: “We’ve reviewed your application and we have determined that this application…will not be appropriate for the App Store.”

He’s developed an app called FruitShoot Lite that lets unhappy iPhone developers (or anybody else) vent their anger by mock shooting at mock apples on their iPhones. But the default fruit target is a banana. And it passed the review.

It’s a couple of months ago now that Jason Calacanis, celebrity entrepreneur and blogger with a known taste for controversy, lashed out against Apple in The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts, in which he complained not just about the “draconian policies” of the iPhone app review, but also four other sins including “anti-competitive” practices with MP3 players, “monopolistic” dealings with telecommunications (a reference to AT&T’s lock on the US iPhone), “hypocrisy” of blocking competing browsers on the iPhone, and blocking Google voice on the iPhone.

TechCrunch highlighted a dumb-but-approved “upskirt” app last week, mocking the glaring inconsistencies:

Let me just get this straight: A hilarious satirical app made by the Someecards guys cannot get approved because it contains cards that, for example, mock Hitler. But an upskirt app is just fine? That is so ridiculous.

Yes, ironic indeed. On first glance, I look at the rising tide of complaints and I think they’re all delusional: Apple is a business, not a public service, and it owns the iTunes store, so it can do what it likes. Developers waiting weeks to get into the market, living in fear of rejection after all that work? It’s Apple’s clubhouse, so Apple can admit whoever it wants. However, as the whole thing starts to sink in, I have to add that Apple Computer has made this bed for itself, so it deserves to lie in it.

Not that I don’t like Apple. I’ve been a serious Mac user twice, first for about 10 years from the beginning in 1984 until the middle 90s, and again for the last two years. I like the Mac, love the iPhone, love Apple’s products in general. However, I’ve never quite accepted the odd phenomenon of Macintosh and Apple as crusade. The whole phenomenon of some connection between operating systems and good (Apple) or evil (Windows) has always seemed a bit creepy to me. After all, they’re just products for sale. Apple, IBM, Microsoft … they are all big companies.

Apple Computer, however, has actively catered to this odd canonization of brand throughout its history. It wasn’t for nothing that the Macintosh anti-big-brother image is part of our cultural heritage. It wasn’t for nothing that IBM became “big blue” and Microsoft “the dark side” … Apple spent a lot of thinking time, effort, and money on building that anti-establishment tinge to its brand. And it’s not totally crazy to suggest that Apple managed to change brand to aura, or halo.

Live by the anti-establishment brand, die by the anti-establishment brand. What we’re seeing, I think, with the rising protest of developers against Apple, is something akin to a jilted lover, or the famous Shakespeare epithet about a woman scorned. It seems like the backlash is whipped to a frenzy with Apple in a way that it might not be if it were some other big company, or, say, the US Patent and Trademark Office. Companies move slowly, government agencies move slowly, but not Apple Computer. The woman with the hammer in that 1984 commercial, crashing big brother and all. Say it isn’t so. Disillusion.

(Photo credit:wikipedia)

All-Caps Shouting FREE! Is So Last Millennium.

Marketing, Web/Tech

It’s not that I’m against free webinars. Just cool it with the shouting, all-caps, annoying FREE!. It’s not a differentiator. It’s not unusual. Lead with something else.

You’re not Oprah giving every member of your audience a new car. You’re not giving away free meals, or even free coffee. You’re doing a webinar. They’re almost all free. My email collects 5-10 webinar invitations every day, all of them free. Get over yourself.

I’ve got nothing against free webinars, I present free webinars too. I really like the technology. It’s a great medium. I just really don’t like marketing as if FREE! is something that matters in a webinar.

And, come to think of it, have we not come to an age in which free is so frequently assumed with so many content and expertise offerings that it’s become odd, a bit jarring, to make such a point of it? Free webinars, free blogs, free movies, free radio … all I get when you shout out FREE! is that you’re a bit out of touch.

And, wait a minute … maybe your webinar, or whatever, would be more successful if you gave it a value. Is it worth it?

(Photo credit: Viviamo/Shutterstock)

Gee, You Had to Pay $2, Once, to Get News?

Journalism, Web/Tech, , ,

Interesting juxtaposition: while much of the world worries about where we get real news, and particularly investigative reporting, iPhone users are up in arms about CNN charging less than $2, once, for an iPhone app that includes ads.

Journalism MournedMegan Berry posted Do You Get What You Pay For? yesterday on the Huffington Post:

CNN’s new iPhone app is creating quite a stir. First of all, they’re the first major news site to have a paid app ($1.99). Secondly, they’ve included ads in it. Users are in quite an uproar over this. They wouldn’t pay for something with ads in it!

There’s no doubt that the iPhone world is new and strange. I have an iPhone myself, and I love it; but how did $1.99 for an application end up as expensive? In what world? Maybe I’ve been in software for too long. Megan (disclosure: she’s my daughter) adds:

Yet, what about newspapers, magazines, television, and increasingly games? We constantly pay for media that includes ads, and we don’t even think twice about it.

Meanwhile there’s a lot of real worry about what’s happening to journalism, and especially investigative journalism, as newspapers and magazines fade. Within a click or two of that same CNN-iPhone-related post on Huffington, there’s this post in which Arianna Huffington frets over the debate over online news, another about whether the New York Times should charge for news, and yet another titled What Google Can Do for Journalism. I posted about that here just a couple of months ago.

On The Huffington Post, meanwhile, they took a Quick Poll on how people feel about paying for an iPhone application with advertising in it. Almost half the respondents said no: “If I pay for an app, I shouldn’t have to put up with advertising.”

I’m not saying that iPhone users shouldn’t worry about a couple of dollars, but … no, wait a minute, maybe that is what I’m saying. Skip a cup of coffee, once. Not that I even like CNN, but if nobody can figure out how to pay the reporters, we’re not going to have Journalism. I can imagine a world without newspapers, but a world without Journalism would be a lot worse than that. If saving Journalism (note: not newspapers necessarily, but investigative reporting) takes some ads, I can deal with ads.

So I just bought the CNN application for my iPhone.

(Photo credit: cen/Shutterstock.)

FTC vs. Social Media Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

Current Affairs, Journalism, Social media, Weblogs, , , ,

Here I was writing this post about new FTC rules for social media, feeling self-righteous about it, when it occurred to me that Shutterstock.com gives me a free stock photos account, which I use to illustrate this blog. And I’m an Amazon.com affiliate. I accept review copies of books, some of which I’ve reviewed here (although I bought most of the books I’ve reviewed, and I don’t go around asking for review copies, just accepting them, occasionally, when they’re offered). And I’m an employee of Palo Alto Software. So I don’t want to be a pot calling kettles black. Or a wolf disguised as a sheep.

Still, it’s about time. A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruling aimed at blogging and, I assume, Twitter starts Dec. 1. This is from the New York Times story on it:

Beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

I’m glad they made it specific. I hope they enforce it. The same general idea was previously built into basic journalism ethics and it should have been obvious that it applied here as well. Ethics? I mean what do you think, when people are paying people to blog about their products, tweet about them, and do reviews on social media sites. Making endorsements look like honest opinion, or reviews pretending they’re objective, is ugly. I hope it’s obvious why.

What if some company offered to pay you under the table for talking it up with all your friends? How would you feel to be a walking talking advertisement parading as a person?

But it happens all the time. I got an email last month offering me money to endorse products on this blog. It was blatant and unembarrassed. The offer to shill for money was couched in terms like “business models” and “revenue streams.”  But it was pretty simple: if I would endorse products in my blog, they’d pay me. No, thank you.

Time magazine’s last issue included a story called Brought to You by Twitter, about tweeting for money:

A company called Izea, which made its name connecting bloggers with firms willing to compensate them for plugs on their blogs, has set up a similar service for the Twittersphere. At a site called Sponsored Tweets, Twitter users can sign in, set the price they want companies to pay them for tweeting an ad on their behalf and wait for the offers to come in. Jocelyn French, the mother of a 2-year-old boy and 1-year-old girl, has tweeted for a parenting website, a college-information site and Kmart, among others, at $1 a pop. “I figure, hey, why not get paid at the same time?” French says. On average, companies are paying Sponsored Tweets users $29 per tweet.

I hope you see the problem with that: first, it’s dishonest, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, because it’s presented as conversation.

Back in the 1970s when I studied Journalism in grad school, the generally accepted ethics were pretty obvious on this. Disguising ads as editorial was clearly out of bounds. But that was way before Amazon.com revolutionized consumer reviews, and then there was the proliferation of blogs and now Twitter blurring the boundaries. But still, put it back onto the personal level: if a company pays you to pretend you’re giving a legitimate personal opinion, that just doesn’t feel good. Right?

(Photo: Sarah Heinman/Flickr)

Technology vs Productivity vs Expectations, Oh My

Current Affairs, Productivity Software, Reflections, , , , , ,

This post title should be recited to the tune of “lions, tigers, and bears, oh my;” that is if you’re old enough to remember The Wizard of Oz, or young (at heart) enough to have seen it as a rerun. It’s rhythmic and its cyclical and it never stops.

Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn are potential business advantages right now. Believe it or not, Twitter offers me real productivity gains. If you don’t see it yet, you will, later on. Facebook and LinkedIn do that for others (not me, but only because I can’t deal with too many different media). Businesses that manage these facilities well are ahead of the game, for now. If you don’t believe me, look at Zappo’s valuations when Amazon.com bought it.

Soon, though, they’ll be expected. It won’t be that businesses operating on the leading edge get credit. Instead, it will be that businesses operating behind that edge will suffer.

That’s the cycle: technology boosts productivity, and that boosts expectations, so we go back to the start again.

I’ve seen that same cycle for a long time now, over and over. When I started with spreadsheets, in 1980, they were so new that my use of spreadsheets gave me competitive advantage in business school. (That image to the right is a 1979 ad for VisiCalc, the first mainstream spreadsheet). Not any more; everybody assumes spreadsheets. Complicated spreadsheets don’t buy anybody competitive advantage. The same was true, believe it or not, with word processing (yes, there was a time when business people didn’t all understand word processing). Now we all assume that. There was a time when an early personal computer and WordStar software and a daisy wheel printer was a huge competitive advantage. No longer. And the same thing happened with desktop publishing. First it was competitive advantage, but then the bar was raised, and it became merely expected. And with email, and Internet websites. Technology to productivity to expectations to back to the start again.

True, we got better output. Spreadsheets give us better business analysis, word processing gives us better writing tools, and desktop publishing gives us better output. But we don’t spend less time. We just expect more.

(Photo credit: Woosa Rosa/Shutterstock)

The Web as Random Acts of Kindness

Current Affairs, True Stories, Web/Tech, , , ,

Researchers put a cute-looking cardboard robot on the streets of New York. It could only go forward but it had a note asking people to help it to its destination. It got there quickly with the help of 43 people. They asked for nothing in return.

A teenager got caught on YouTube with a humiliating video that spread like wildfire. Editors at Wikipedia make a point of keeping his name off of the story.

The Wikipedia itself is a marvelous example of people helping people, for free, because they want to.

People helping people, asking nothing in return. In the TED talk here, Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain talks of the web as random acts of kindness. Node by node, computers are shared. Volunteers run the soft spots and correct problems. There’s a very refreshing optimism here, a reminder that technology isn’t necessarily making us all more lonely and isolated.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

(If you don’t see the video here, you can click here for the original on the TED site.)

Here is more on Jonathan Zittrain from the TED site:

He is an investigator for the OpenNet initiative and co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has long studied the legal, technological and world-shaking aspects of quickly morphing virtual terrains. He performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002. His initiatives include projects to fight malware (StopBadware) and ChillingEffects, a site designed to support open content by tracking legal threats to individual users.

(Photo credit: that’s a screen shot from the video of the talk, about 17 minutes in.)

Curious Case of Experts vs. Managers

Weblogs, , , , ,

How do you react to this quote? This is Mark Shaeffer about social media experts, in this post. I quoted him in my post here yesterday:

How many have ever had a real sales job or have been actually accountable for delivering new value in a marketplace by creating, testing and distributing a product on a meaningful scale?   Very few.  Yet these are our marketing “gurus?”

Now wait a minute.

Who says marketing experts have to have sales experience? Why do they need to have been accountable for a new product?

I want my experts smart, experienced, and knowledgeable. I want them to listen. I want them open to new ideas. I want them to give good advice.

But I don’t care if they’ve had sales responsibility; or if they’ve launched a new product. Why should I?

Do I care if my doctor has built a house? Do I care if my accountant can sing? Why do I want experts to be managers?

What about you? Do you think a business expert has to have line management experience? Can a single-person expert really be an expert if he or she hasn’t run a company?

Do you think the best programmer makes the best manager?

“Line vs. staff” was a big deal to multinational executives and managers I consulted for in the 1970s and 1980s. As a consultant and newsletter generator, I was staff. Line managers had responsibility for sales numbers or profitability. And they were proud of it. It was important to their career.

Does that still matter? Or is it confusing makers and managers? And don’t the experts have to close some sales now and then to survive in business?

Not that the idea threatens me at all – I’m safe on this respect, since I’ve built a company, based on my own software, so whatever expertise I claim will pass that “sales or new product” test.

It’s just that experts and managers are like apples and oranges. Different skills. I want managers to be managers, and experts to be experts.

———-

Late addition: I had the above post ready to go when I was dealing with comments from yesterday and picked up Chris Brogan’s defense, here. He picked up on the same underlying assumption:

Have I held a sales job in a big company? Hell no. I’m not a salesman. Instead, I’m someone who equips salespeople with new tools to drive to value. I’m a hell of an opener, and decent with the first 2/3 of the cycle, but if my kids had to eat on my ability to close complex sales? Hell no.

Interesting perspective. Can you trust me? Beats me. I’ll let my work stand for itself. : )

No argument from me there.

(Photo credit: karbunar/Shutterstock)

But Can We Trust the Trust Agents?

Social media, Weblogs, Writing, , , , ,

I was just getting back to the office yesterday, a Monday morning after a week away — 4 days of business, and 3 relaxing and invigorating days in Yosemite, which is really away — when Dan Levine (@schoolmarketer on Twitter) suggested I read The social media country club on Mark Shaeffer’s businessgrow blog.

Yes, I’m a sucker for contrary points of view. Get a group going, approach consensus, and I want to read the one who’s out in left field. If everybody else is right and this one’s all wrong, so what, I can work that out. But then how often is left field the right place to be?

Mark starts out objecting to rave reviews of Trust Agents, the book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. It’s subtitle is “Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.” I haven’t read it, but I’ve read a lot of favorable comments. Mark, however, says those favorable comments are the result of group think and myth making:

The “thought leaders” of social media marketing are a country club fearful of saying anything negative or controversial about another club member. The real commerce of social media is trading favors and a negative comment breaks the favor chain.

He paints a picture a lot like the fable of the emperor’s new clothes. You can see with this quote, under the general heading of credibility, that at the very least he’s making his position clear:

Take a close look at the credentials (if you can find any) of nearly any leading social media marketing “expert.”  How many have ever had a real sales job or have been actually accountable for delivering new value in a marketplace by creating, testing and distributing a product on a meaningful scale?   Very few.  Yet these are our marketing “gurus?”  In a communication channel already dominated by porn-peddling, get-rich-quick nimrods, it simply doesn’t help our collective credibility to have our most visible advocates spouting incredibly naive statements about marketing fundamentals they know little about.

I don’t know that I agree; it seems too harsh to me. I don’t think expertise is measured only by job history, or sales history, or middle management in a big company history, which seems to be laying just under the surface of the blogger bashing. And I wish Mark had said which statements in the book are naive. But it’s certainly a very contrarian point of view. And worth considering. So I’m sharing it here.

(Photo credit: STILLFX/Shutterstock)

Yosemite and America’s Best Idea

Weblogs, , , ,

I’m a bit off my normal thought patterns today, waking up in a generic freeway-exit hotel in the California Central Valley, headed for Yosemite National Park with my youngest daughter. Below Half Dome

Yosemite means a lot to me. My dad took my brothers and me there many times when we were growing up in the San Francisco area. As a teenager I went backpacking into the Yosemite high country every summer. Later on, my wife and I took our kids up into the high country every summer. That first picture is me with our three oldest in 1980, on the shoulder below Half Dome.

I’m very much looking forward to the Ken Burns series on National Parks starting this month on PBS. He calls it “America’s Best Idea.” I second that. I’ve lived in Mexico and Austria as well as the U.S., and I’ve traveled to dozens of countries, but I’ve never seen anything like our own national park system. It’s a great privilege to be able to hold the polluting effects of civilization at bay in some of these great parks. Poor Mexico, my country-in-law, has tried hard but is just economically unable to hold back the tide, even though it has some natural beauties that truly deserve it. Too bad. Let’s be grateful for what we have. The website for the Ken Burns series says tell your story; and this is mine.

Little Yosemite Valley

The second picture here is our family plus pack burro  on the far side of the river campsite at Little Yosemite Valley. That was in 1988. They used to rent pack burros in Yosemite for use by families and groups going out into the high country. We’d rent a burro for $15 per day and relieve ourselves of actually packing the stuff on our backs, which made it possible for a family to make a 4-5 day trip up into the mountains. My wife made those high-country trips into great family vacations. And we were always broke, so the $15 a day lodging cost was attractive. They don’t do that at Yosemite any more, because of problems like insurance, and people not respecting the implied privilege. And that’s too bad.

I’m particularly excited today because I’ve missed Yosemite since we moved to Oregon 17 years ago.  I do get into the Oregon Cascades a lot, but I’ve missed Yosemite and I’m anxious to visit again.

This last photo, taken above Nevada Falls in 1980, is of our three oldest children, now 37, 35, and 33 years old. I can’t say that I would be looking forward to backpacking tonight (we have a hotel room reserved) but I am very glad we were able to do it when we did. And very happy to visit again, later today.
Above Nevada Falls

Photo credits: first one by my wife Evangelina Berry, second by some teenage boy who was talking up our teenage daughters at the time, third one by me.

What’s In a Name? Lots.

Weblogs, , , , , ,

Blog names and titles: do you agree that some are better than others? Lots of blogs have succeeded with titles that are merely descriptive, not remarkable: Seth’s blog, Small Business Technology, Escape from Cubicle Nation, and many others.

Browsing around the other day, I discovered a Jay White who calls his blog “Dumb Little Man.” That’s a great example of a creative title that’s very easy to remember, recognize, and not misspell. It’s at dumblittleman.com of course. I liked him even before I started reading the blog.

I posted last January about Gardening Nude, a good blog with undeniable search engine power. And Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror, obviously for programmers. Freakonomics, Women 2.0, Duct Tape Marketing, and Lifehack, to mention some more. These aren’t just good blogs, they’re remarkably good names for blogs.

What amazes me is how these blogs with great names beat the chicken and egg problem: a blog isn’t really taken seriously until it has a few hundred posts, but it can’t have the posts first and then figure out the name. With some rare exceptions (Freakonomics, for example, was moved to a different Web address when it moved to the New York Times) the name, including the domain name, has to come first. In some cases (as with Escape from Cubicle Nation, Duct Tape Marketing) it either starts with a book or becomes a book. In any case, my congratulations for doing it right.

This is a good reminder about a lot of names in business: business names, product names, for example: they’re tough to change, once you’ve started; but hard to get a really good one to start.

(Image: tkemot/shutterstock)