Category: Technology

MercuryNews.com | 04/26/2005 | Discord over Jobs biography?

MercuryNews.com | 04/26/2005 | Discord over Jobs biography?

Jeff Young is a good buddy and an excellent writer. He worked with me at PC Week and later at Forbes where he was a contributing editor and a contributor to the early success of Forbes.com.

 I love it when a company gets vengeful and does things like boycott magazine’s with their ads (as IBM did to Fortune) or yanks books off of shelves. Apple’s decision to yank all of Wiley’s books from its stores’ shelves is just the kind of publicity publishers would kill for.

Apple is turning into a real friend of the First Amendment — not.  

 

Update: In conversations, some friends are disputing the responsibility of a corporation to assume first amendment ownership, arguing that trade secret protection and IP rights predominate in a corporate environment.  While the press, particularly the trade press, has a long tradition of ferreting out corporate information via anonymous sources inside the company, dumpter diving, and hard leg work — sometimes publishing the results under nom de plume columns such as Mack the Knife and Spencer the Katt — there have been some notable instances of corporation rattling their legal sabers at publishers for divulging trade secrets.

Whatever the legal footing I’ll wimp out and back off the first amendment argument, admitting its specious in the case of Apple allegedly yanking Wiley’s titles from its shelves in retaliation for Young’s upcoming Jobs bio. As a PR tactic, I still don’t understand why corporations play into the controversy by threatening to block the publication of negative news, insuring they will, in the act, create yet more negative news. Sort of the way publisher’s used to welcome a "Banned in Boston" designation in the days when the Watch and Ward Society would encourage the City Censor to ban objectionable books. 

Google ain’t about search any more

The media’s inflation of Google’s reputation over the past two years is typical of the tech press pigpile that takes every new big thing and cover-stories it to death.  Google’s place in the world is certainly due to some smart fundamentals — their design was, and still is, wonderfully functional and spare. Their search methodology is generally accurate and fulfilling. They’ve made some good acquisitions. But to cast them as David to Microsoft’s Goliath, as the next big Borg in technology, dominating everything they touch, is to fall prey to the breathless vapors that saw Netscape in its early days get cast in a role it didn’t deserve, AOL over-inflate to the point of high humor, and Yahoo become the wunderkind of all things digital.

Today’s Saul Hansell piece in the biz section of the Times carries the great quote by John Batelle that Google ain’t about search anymore, but is now an advertising company. Commenting on the news that Google would begin expanding its pay-per-click Adsense model to include "image" advertising, Batelle said:

 "This drives the nail into the coffin of the idea that Google is a search business. It is an advertising business that has nothing particularly to do with search."

Right on, John. And that, my friends, is called taking one’s eye off of the prize. Google is squarely in the business of selling ad inventory to marketers. The premise is context and the premise is neither new, nor, in the end, particuarly compelling.  Google was just the first and best to deliver on the promise of putting scotch ads in front of scotch drinkers. First they did it with text links, now they’re going to do it with rich media.

 From the WSJ.com:

"Among the changes: Google will let advertisers run animated display ads on non-Google content sites that contract with Google to sell ads. It will allow advertisers to specify the sites on which they want their ads to appear, without having to pick a keyword tied to the content on a page. It will begin auctioning ad placements for its partner sites based on how many people see the ad, known as cost per impression, as well as its traditional cost-per-click method."

Publisher’s don’t need to quake. Indeed, some, like CNET and the NYT, have already signed onto the program. Ad agencies and marketers aren’t going to shut their doors to the ad sales force at Fortune and tell them to go away, we’re buying inventory from Google. Never. First off, Google has nothing close to an integrated sale — no conferences, newsletters, special advertising sections and the other side dishes a publisher has to offer. Second, Google has squat for content. Google is a remora sucking on the side of the information industry. If the fish stops swimming, so does Google.

What’s the strategy for co-existing with Google in the advertising marketplace?

1. You can compete with what you don’t know. Publishers should sign-up for, and selectively enable their pages to accept Google advertising. It’s found money, particularly if there is any unsold inventory. Firing the ad sales force and using Google as a rep firm is lunacy.

2. Enable vertical search within their own niche — and every good magazine is about defining a niche — and then deliver new ad units against it. No one can better broker the relationship between reader and advertiser than a capable publisher.

3. Optimize your pages for not only Google, but all engines. That’s found traffic when implemented correctly. I suspect more than 50 percent of arriving traffic is shot deep into a site through search results.

4. Expect, and plan for, the next Google. Google has no defensible advantage in this space. Once we all get over our infatuation with the company — like those publishers did in the late 90s who paid millions for "tenant" space with AOL and quickly figured out it didn’t deliver — another one will come along with a better idea and methodology. Bank on it.

Google needs to focus on search and searching better. It’s desktop search pales against Blinx. Picasa is nice, but no Flickr. Blogger is no WordPress. As Google sticks Wall Street’s needle into its arm, it will scramble to make numbers one quarter after another. My prediction — Google is in the content business within two years, it has to now that it’s turned into an advertising company. 

Update: Google’s Letter to AdSense Publishers

 

The Gartner Hype Cycle

There’s a good piece by V.C. Peter Gardner, head of telecomm investments at 3i, on the fabled Gartner Hype Cycle  and its applicability to contemporary technologies.

Gardner writes:

“The Gartner Hype Cycle, introduced back in 1995, has aided our understanding of the causes of business failures amongst early-stage technologies. Gartner explains how technologies are "hyped up" and appear to be far more developed, both in technology maturity and also market readiness, than they really are. One recent example from mobile communications markets is WAP, where there was an incredible amount of hype, which in reality the technology failed to match up to. Unified messaging also appeared to be a great idea, but it never convinced the IS managers. In both of these, the telecoms market misread the consumer demand. Both of these dived spectacularly into the Trough of Disillusionment and appear bound to stay there.

“VoIP on the other hand, which had a similar profile of being over-hyped and failing to deliver because of perceived quality problems, has now passed through the Trough of Disillusionment and is firmly on the Slope of Enlightenment and approaching the Plateau of Productivity. That is significantly helped by the emergence of broadband rather than dial-up as the consumer bearer.

“Yahoo! and Google are examples of high profile successes that fit the hype model well. Yahoo! floated towards the Peak of Expectations and was valued with a lot of hype. Then followed the slump of 2001 and 2002. Businesses like Yahoo! and Amazon.com have now emerged as successful and profitable businesses maturing towards the Plateau of Productivity, enabling Google to have its value recognised.”

I’d link to the piece, but it is locked behind the costwall. Total Telecom is a UK pub at www.totaltele.com.

The New York Times > Technology > For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting

The New York Times > Technology > For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting

Markoff on the commercial prospects for Podcasting, specifically Odeo.

No Times today. A big dumping of snow here on the Cape has forced me to the nyt.com for my daily read. 

Forbes.com: Which Search Engine Is The Best?

Forbes.com is running a poll on the occasion of Microsoft’s launch of MSN Search asking readers what their favorite search enginer/service is. No surprise, it’s Google by a mile, followed by Yahoo, followed by MSN.

Forbes.com: Which Search Engine Is The Best?

From the handful of searches I ran on MSN yesterday, I’d say Microsoft has a long way to go, not necessarily based on any keen insights into their methodology, but on the fact that I find the MSN site butt-ugly and cluttered beyond belief compared to good old spare Google.

Charles Ferguson had a great piece in the MIT Technology Review in December on the Microsoft/Google battleplan. It says it better than any other analysis, given Ferguson’s front row seat at Vermeer (developer of WYSIWIG web builder Frontpage) during Microsoft’s call to action against Netscape. He builds a plausible scenario for how the battle for dominance in search will come down to a classic architectual platform battle, with ISVs and APIs becoming the arsenal.

Microsoft knows that game.

I’d like to link to the Ferguson article, but even me, a paid subscriber to the digital Zinio edition of the Tech Review, can’t get the to the piece. Maybe Charles did the world a favor and has it posted elsewhere. I’ll chase it down.

Walter Wriston

Walter Wriston passed away on Jan 21 at the age of 85. While a banker, he was one of the smartest people on the subject of networks (up there with George Gilder) I’ve known, and amazingly presicent when discussing the impact of networks on quaint old notions of sovereignty and geography.

Walter Wriston

He was a banker, the father of electronic banking, the man who initiated the revolution that included ATMs and eventually online banking services. The former chairman of Citicorp, he wrote a book, The Twilight of Sovereignty, that influenced most of my thinking about the potential impact of communications networks. Based on his observations of how, in the late 60s, currency traders were able to wrest control over setting the value of any nation’s currency from its Minister of Finance, and “vote”, in real-time, thanks to the first international trading networks, Wriston came to the conclusion that old notions of borders and geography were doomed.

The rise of the European Union and the Euro were predicted by him. Telecommuting was predicted by him. He wasn’t a geek, didn’t go on about doped erbium amplifiers and dark fiber, jjust the big picture.

I had the pleasure of knowing him when he served on the board of Forbes.com. He was a very wise man. Here is Steve Forbes’ tribute.

The Twilight of Sovereignty : How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World. I highly recommend it.

The Email Paradigm Reversal

Email – Becoming the Unnecessary Evil

Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0, in the November issue, has a great chart provided by Meng Wong on the flip in the “paradigm shift” of email – the great killer app of the Internet. The topic of the issue is the “accountable net,” but the Meng Wong graphic (on page 29 of the issue), essentially boils down the shift in attitudes about email from 20th Century Email to 21st Century Email into ten tenets.

Meng Wong's Reversal of the Paradigm Shift

Tenet number one holds that in the last century, “The average message is good. Spam is the exception.” In this century “The average message is spam. Ham is the exception.”

Tenet two: in the 20th century, “By default, accept a message unless we have a good reason to reject it.” In this century: “By default, reject a message unless we have a good reason to accept it.”

Which I tie together to the report this morning that Doubleclick is reporting a steep decline in “marketing mail” efficacy as reported on MediaPost

That report leads with:
“Revenue per e-mail delivered dropped by 19.2 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, even as the proportion of customers who made purchases after clicking through to the sites included in messages grew to 4.2 percent from 3.4 percent, according to DoubleClick’s most recent e-mail trend report, released Monday. The decrease in revenue per e-mail appears to stem from falls in both the percentage of consumers opening e-mail and those clicking on the links contained in messages, as well as from smaller median order sizes.”

Email newsletters were the hot property in the late nineties. Advertisers saw greater response rates when they sponsored and embedded their links into an old-fashioned ASCII email newletter than any banner or skyscraper unit on a page. While Doubleclick’s report doesn’t assail email newsletters, the syllogism can be made that a commercial link embedded in an email newsletter is losing its appeal.

I wrote a piece on the state of direct marketing one year after the passage of the Do Not Call Registry. With no where to go, the intrusive marketing crowd was expected to pile onto email, begging the question if a Do Not Mail registry was viable.

Apparently not, sayeth the experts. Too hard to manage and Sisyphean in the face of offshore spam.

Anyway, given the torrent of misguided bullshit that lands in the typical inbox everyday, email has lost for the time being. When you see good people like Sheldon Brown, the guru of all things related to bicycles suffer under the barrage of 4,000 pieces of Spam today, you come to the realization that the noise has thoroughly overwhelmed the signal.

Ave Atque Vale IBM PCs

In 1987, IBM’s chairman, John Akers, made the strange comment at an industry conference in San Francisco that IBM would not participate in any “commodity” businesses.” I was the news editor at PC Week at the time and we took the statement as an indication that Big Blue was getting tired of the PC business. Trying to get Akers to clarify his statement was difficult as relations with PC Week and IBM were pretty strained – all of the time – and we were in their doghouse for reporting their decision to scrap the clone-killing “MicroChannel” bus to return to the industry standard preferred by corporate customers with big investments in third-party expansion cards.

The news this morning on the front page of the New York Times that IBM is seeking a buyer of its PC and laptop business is an interesting coda to the most significant three decades in the history of technology. The company’s decision to create an “open-architecture” machine in its rush to enter the market for PCs in the early 80s let the genie out of the bottle forever, creating an immense gold rush of cloners, independent software publishers, and add-on makers that transformed the world as we know it. Watching poor IBM try to stuff that genie back into the model through FUD, architecture shifts, and occasional stabs at litigation was a great spectator sport from the vantage point of PC Week.

My colleague at the time, Jim Forbes, who went on to host DemoMobile, and is now fishing away his retirement in San Diego, made the prescient comment that PCs were turning into toasters, and it was time to find another line of work than writing about them. “PC Week is going to turn into ToasterWeek,” he said.

Well, PC Week turned into E-Week and IBM is throwing in the towel. I can’t help but feel old and nostalgic. Gone are the days when the world got truly excited about new machines coming out of IBM’s labs. It’s impossible to convey the excitement that was stirred up when IBM released the 16-bit AT, the 32-bit 386, and the drama that followed as Compaq and Dell tried to match the state of the art with their own clones.

Now the machines are indeed toasters. The moral of the story is buried somewhere in the strategy of standards. The Mac is still a closed standard, and while the cuddly machines may deliver better margins to Apple, they are still fringe boxes, as fringe as they were twenty years ago. Compaq is gone. Gateway is moribund, and only the manufacturing geniuses at Dell are significant players. IBM, in making the decision through the late Don Estridge to “open the box”, to use a non-IBM microprocessor (Intel), a non-IBM OS (DOS), and to permit the great big world to develop applications and hardware with no royalties or penalties was one that transformed the world forever.

Standards always win, closed architectures don’t. Walking the tightrope between open but profitable is, at the end, the secret to success in technology.

Municipal Wi-Fi

Today’s WSJ reports efforts by the telcos to block municipal plans to offer Wi-Fi to their citizens in Pennsylvania. Verizon lobbied the legislature to block attempts by cities to offer free Wi-Fi.

My thinking on telco stupidity and avarice was formed by Charles Ferguson’s excellent polemic, “The Broadband Problem: Anatomy of a Market Failure and a Policy Dilemma “.

Ferguson, former CEO of Vermeer, the company that developed Frontpage, a WYSIWIG HTML editor acquired by Microsoft, is a research fellow at the Brookings Institute. I highly recommend the book.

While the role of municipal governments in granting utility monopolies to cable companies was hashed out in the 1980s — essentially awarding a town or city to a single provider to cut down on infrastructure disruption — Wi-Fi doesn’t involve ComCast trucks hanging devices off of utility poles, provides broadband to the masses in the spirit of POTS for all, and if anything, will goad the lazy Verizons of the world to get off their dark-fiber asses and start eating their profitable T-1 businesses.

I’m all in favor of broadband at all costs, especially in rural areas where broadband is every bit as much of an economic development incentive as roads without potholes. While I rather see the private marketplace do its economic magic, the cozy relationship between the Telcos and public utility commissions insures we’ll never see true free market capitalism at work.