Thank Ten Customers Today

About a month ago, some of my customers got upset that they were ineligible (US sweeps rules being what they are) for a promotion I designed around an event they planned to attend.  They complained on Facebook, and I thought they had a good point.

I looked them up in our database and sent them a handwritten note and some brand swag, just thanking them for being a Facebook fans and customers.

The couple hours I spent on that was 100% worth it. One of them even posted an Instagram photo of my note on our brand page.

Every marketing manager, VP, or exec should try this.  But don't wait for a reason to apologize.

Sit down and thank 10 customers.  They'll love it.  Reflect on why you do your job, whether you really value their business,  and keep that moment close to you.  

Relatisonhips matter, and having a great relationship with every customer should be your goal.

Monetizing the Point of Sweat

I went on a nice little bike ride this weekend.  It was memorable, because it was my first with a road bike. You know, the ones with the thin tires, and the potentiaal to cost many thousands?  I rented a Felt Z85, and was pretty happy with it. I took my iPhone along for the ride.

I mapped my ride with the MapMyRide iPhone app.  After the ride, something crazy happened - I became a marketing opportunity. Hey, I just wanted to map my bike run! A women's antiperspirant had other ideas! 

Interesting- why in the lord's name would I tweet their hastag?  I'm dripping with sweat!  My legs are shaking!  I am a man, BTW, and I have never heard of your product!

I tapped "Close" on the ad  - and started looing at some of the details. I tapped "Route Details" and up came another ad.  Well, at least this one was for men...

As an athlete, I would never have wanted to see these ads. What could they be offering? However, being in marketing, I am accustomed to trying to find out. As my wife set about cleaning her bike, I lingered on the driveway, still dripping in sweat from an agonizing final climb. I tapped the Gilette ad.

Interesting. I signed up for a half marathon Training program...we'll see how they take it from there. Nice setting of my expectations on when the plan will arrive.

As an athlete, I can't think of anything I wanted less than those ads. The targeting for the first ad was hopelessly off, the second execution mystified me because I had to interact with what looked like an ad in order to egt what I want: content.

 The utility and content of MMF is what keeps people engaged - but what happens when all you see is ads?  When monetizing the "point of sweat" - content goes further than interruption.

Multichannel monetization should beat piracy

Nick Bilton writes, "Internet Pirates Will Always Win" and provokes some interesting ideas: is preventing piracy just a game of whack-a-mole?  Certainly, in the current paradigm, it can seem that way.  

I wrote to colleagues in 2007, when Razorfish was in discusions with NewCo (the nascent NBC/Fox JV that would become Hulu) that fighting the desire of content to be easily available (even if not free) was not a viable business strategy.  

Then, as now, this is a matter of ideology, because the people with the biggest ideas about content are rarely in charge of setting its price or licensing terms.  

But in the multi-channel world, with connected devices now a threatening alternative to STB-connected distribution, content players should not forget the power of an engaged audience.  They are a monetizable asset, and even if watching for a far lower prixce, creating a low-price tier with identifiable audience members can produce email opt-ins, social discussions, merchandise/DVD/other revenue, and tune-in for other programs.  

Mr. Bilton quotes Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, in the article:

The hit HBO show "Game of Thrones" is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don?t really want to solve the piracy problem. "

"If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement," he said. "But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money."

Mr. Holmes is not wrong about the exciting power dynamic in play - it certainly could be empowering to do something the "man" doesn't want you to do. Nevertheless, exercising our inner Che Guevara is neither an effective mechanism of revolution against the industry nor a stricly pleasurable experience (corrupt and low quality BitTorrrent downloads mostly waste our time, if not our money).  Wouldn't a low-price on-demand stream or download just be...easier?

It's myopic to think that adding many more low-revenue streams is going to lose money; it certainly will if the HBO/HBO Go are your only revenue source.  The MSOs and the premium TV providers have to work together to create experiences and tiers whose scope is beyond the cable system, and where even if the price is lower, the experience is better than piracy, which is, after all, a pain in the butt.  But I'm just an idealist, I know.

How Advertisers Catch Up to Consumers in Social

Facebook and other identity and behavior networks have created new behaviors - and these behaviors have had no trouble attracting the attention of consumers.  The new behaviors have been so empowering of consumers, that as they adopt new behaviros, they have learned to tune out advertising even more effectively.  Consumers have even learned to kill ads, concepts, and brand strategies they dislike en masse.

Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer in Seattle, noted that when the firm published its most recent forecast for digital advertising back in February, it projected that Facebook revenue would probably double again this year to $6 billion, a number she said is likely now out of reach.

"Consumers have adopted social media a whole lot faster than advertisers," Williamson said. "It's taking them a lot longer to figure out how to fit social media into their plans. [TheStreet.com]

This gap in "monetization" should be viewed in the context of how all innovation takes time to conquer relevant adoption curves and settle into a business model that works for all participants.  With the pace of today's change, we have cases like Groupon, where the vectors of growth point one way, while the sustainiability of the business is highly questionable.  This phenomenon in the information sector is likely to continue as the flow of information between market participants becomes effortless.  It is even worthy of excellent satire from McSweeney's: Ponzify 

So it's not just about your 2 Million app downloads that net you some nice venture funding for "traction" in the marketplace.  Make sure you're paying attention to how your users behave, as well as how their behavior change when you add "monetization" strategies.  

Watch Facebook's Mobile ad product introductions carefully.  If the users hate the products, and find them annoying, intrusive, or unstable, that's bad for the Facebook ecosystem and engenders the kind of hatred consumers have for companies like AT&T, in which they stay with the company but hate it because they cannot easily leave.  Conversely, if the consumer ignores the ads,  and skps right through them, that's bad for advertisers, who need at least some user attention to get value out of the ads.  The holy grail for facebook is helping to identify the ads in the middle: the ads so content-like that consumers will see them as a net benefit.  

This is small thinking strategy for Facebook, at best.  Which are the two or three brands whose social engagement strategies you like as much as you do their products?  Those are the ads that will be premium inventory in your newsfeed.  The social experiences that consuemrs want, which are so attractive consumers will seek them out for their value, are the name of the game for Facebook, because these experiences will have to rent access to Facebook's identity network.  And that is where the money will be.

Don't worry about Time Spent on Facebook

Is this BI/comScore chart bad for Facebook, or is this what we would expect? BusinessInsider says the time spent is shiftting to other social networks. I am not convinced.

Look at the Facebook developer site: Build Facebook for Websites. Build For Mobile. Build Apps on Facebook. These are strategically important initiatives, all taking the Facebook platform and making the digital world more social, but also taking time and attention off of “Facebook”.

From Facebook's Developer Homepage: this is what Facebook is betting on, and consumers are flocking to it. I can't prove it with the data above, but if you're only looking at minutes on the site, that's what you'd see.

Behavior Networks like Pinterest are easy to start because the Facebook Identity layer is there for support - if Facebook were Microsoft it would probably have shut off Pinterest's access to the open graph; Facebook is a very different kind of company.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebooks-engagement-has-peaked-and-now-its-falling-2012-5#ixzz1vjRLWPry

Could your ISP track your Roaming via CableWiFi?

The downside of the CableWifi roaming partneship is clearly about privacy.  TheNextWeb reports that five major ISPs team up for massive Wi-Fi sharing effort across the US.

Imagine the ad targeting possibilities – with a single sign on as you roam the country, your ISP/MSO record is now going to follow you around he country.   Now with a slick landing page over wifi, or a flag on your addressable cable box, your surfing and travcel habits are now even more interesting fodder for multi-screen ad targeting.  It would be fascinating to know whether the CableWifi folks will be partnering with an offline/online cookie solution.  

According to the article:

In what will be a massive win for US cable company subscribers, five of the country’s largest cable providers have announced that they will combine to offer each other’s customers access to their own metropolitan Wi-Fi networks — the largest such project in the US to date.

The partnership will include Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable and will include access to over 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the US under the CableWiFi brand.

...

In order to connect to the hotspots, subscribers simply have to look for a CableWiFi network and then connect using the same details that they use when connecting to their existing provider’s networks. Over the next couple of months, those networks will automatically connect to these networks when they are near a CableWiFi hotspot.  

Reminder: free wifi is hardly EVER free.

Facebook will know the future before you can Tweet it

What were you doing last night?  Mark Zuckerberg had a hackathon.  Oh yeah, and today his company went public.

I have been thinking about valuation of Facebook all week, and i think whatever the offering price is, it's wrong, and the GM announcement just made things worse by focusing on revenue in the Millions.  The valuation should not be  based on revenue.

Instead we are looking at the premiere testing ground for defining social expereiences and ad products across multiple channels based on the behavior and reactions of real users.  The future is clearly coming, where recommendations and votes of confidence from friends will be louder than advertising.  With the end of broadcast, and even the end of web portals,  attention is a strategic asset.  And Facebook has a boatload of attention, because we are addicted to news about other people.  

This need to gossip, and the need to share, is a basic human need- It's Brain Candy, according to Harvard researchers.

To be cute about my hypothesis:  Facebook will know the future, ship an awesome product and move on,  before you can Tweet it. 

Facebook is in a dominant market position to be able to take the attention people spend on the platform, across devices and all over the social web, to find out what works before any of their competitors, and with enough scale to stay ahead.  As long as they do not piss off users (the product being sold to advertisers) then the business is incredibly valuable.  I don't really know how to value it, but you must imagine some of these platforms competing with each other, and almost no one can compete with Facebook in this regard. 

It comparatively easy to build a behavior network to scale, but people are growing tired of joining new identity networks - they already have Facebook, or Linkedin, or Google,  and it is so easy to get traction by just riding over the top of that; consumers will begin to expect it.  Such a strategic advantage is incredibly valuable, and suggests that Facebook might even have a business when many of these other platforms just get boring.  Facebook will be the social layer people use - and that could echo for a decade or more.

Facebook keeps saying they are not trying to be a great company, they are trying to make a great product, and while the effects are similar the emphasis contained therein produces really remarkable results.  So don't worry about getting the valuation right, because they are going to ship a lot of code before anyone figures out the generational shift in behavior and advertising we're in, but I think Facebook might be the company that gets there first.

Facebook stock closed barely above the offer price - find me someone at Facebook who really cares about that, instead of shipping  a great product.  Their strategy? Culture as strategy.  Facebook tries to get people to enjoy but not flaunt their wealth and these norms suggest that inside Facebook is brewing...the next Facebook.

Path, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare: Can there be more than one identity network

iden·ti·ty. noun \ī-ˈden-tə-tē, ə-, -ˈde-nə-\:  the distinguishing character or personality of an individual -Merriam-webster.com

I suggested in my previous post about identity networks that Behavior Networks have certain properties.

But what about Identity networks?

Identity networks are primarily networks of connections, not content.  Even though content rides on top, identity (friends, co-workers, classmates, teammates etc) is defined by connections between users are the primary organizing principle.

Behavior networks don't need to or even really care to store your data of this variety.  To some degree, this is about the maturity of the network itself.  Path is well-funded, and doesn't necessarily need to generate revenue - it is focusing on creating a product people love.  It is also riding the tide of people who think identity networks are too powerful.

This property of identity networks is quite interesting.  Who is the customer, from Facebook's perspective? Depending on your point of view, the customer is the one who pays (the advertiser) or the user (the person who registers an account for their identity).  What if those two groups do not want the same thing?  So identity networks are constantly seeking to grow revenue without alienating users, who produce the inventory for sale to advertisers.

The inventory is connections, and content, and the trackable data within the network, and we are now at the point where users have more control, but also less power in this equation.  They have more discrete levels of control over their information, but less aggregate power: their information remains on the site.  The business of Facebook marketing seeks endlessly to grab data from users, turn it into inventory and find willing bidders for that inventory.

LinkedIn is Facebook's strongest rival identity network.  LinkedIn has added many more content behaviors than I really thought possible, but it has proven its staying power and has  a commanding advantage in terns of data that is increasingly an opportunity for display advertising and the emerging corporate pages that employees are now connecting to. What remains under-leveraged is the extension of LinkedIn's identity network into the physical and corporate IT environments. I'll do a separate post about some strategic opportunities along those lines for LinkedIn.

The value of a network increases exponentially with the number of people (nodes) and the number of connections between them, but as users become aware of the power dynamic in which they stand, value is being drained out of the network.  This is first reputational damage done by privacy scandals and the like, and subsequently by users who defect to behavior networks or leave the social world altogether.  this is why Facebook runs aggressive re-engagement campaigns for users who have not logged in regularly.  

Path is somewhere between a behavior and identity network, and seems chastened by the address book privacy scandal from just a few months ago.  In fact, if you go back to the launch of Path's app "With" which had a very simple photo sharing mechanic for sharing who you are With, Path lets us know they are in the business of building networks:

as we continue our quest to build new types of networks which maintain their quality over time, we have been fascinated by the idea of an interaction network. Or, as we enjoy calling it, the With Graph.

Interaction networks, or behavior networks, can be discrete products, to test features and bring a feature set clearly into focus before adding it into a product.  It's clear that this ethos is infused within Path, as many have discovered.  Check out Path's About web page - which I have labeled below; the lesson: don't build when you can get all of the functionality without woorying about the infrastructure?

 

These are just some of the issues that companies struggle with.  Do we build our own networks, or extend others?  Do we have the ability to trust business partners to host our content, and critical utilities, when they are focused, precise, but not under our control?  One of the side effects of a services-oriented world, in which marketing services are delivered by a multitude of vendors and in-house solutions, is that identity and  behavior networks can be easily adopted into the marketing ecosystem - will it be you, or your competitor who gets there first?

Foursquare has a better shot at being a location-enabling platform, and it is doing a great job of expanding the behaviors - from check-in to discovery - that can be built with the network.  It could become a centralized clearinghouse of your place in physical space, enabled with your permissions and enriching digital interactions.  Foursquare's connections are transmit location information, which has different sensitivities, and it's been harder for other social networks to effectively create location-sensitive content filters.  The rich opportunity for serving deals and enriching merchant relationships arising from actual, physical visits and commerce.   Perhaps Foursquare could a platform for retail commerce, featuring payments and offering retailer CRM opportunities..but it will have to become a stronger Identity network in order to do so.

I will address ways to profit from this tension between behavior networks and identity networks, and how to effectively leverage behavior networks, in a future post.

Don't let your SEO strategy get away from you

My dad sent me a link to a story on the SF BUsiness times site, and after logging in and seeing the story, I found myself wandering.  I saw side by side ads for Verizon and AT&T careers, and I was curious about how these ads were related to the destination content.  My, was I surprised.  The sites both linked to the homepage of the respective career pages.  I'll show AT&T and then Verizon's.  Both companies are so large, and nationwide employers, it is interesting that they approach things so differently.

With AT&T, I felt welcomed by a gallery of faces of actual humans, and there's enough happening on the site that everyone from recruiters, to college students, to experienced professionals should be able to find what they are looking for.  You have to hand it to the company for using the .jobs TLD (the site is http://att.jobs) yet the branding feels spot on for what I expect to see from the other touchpoints I regularly use as a customer.

By contrast, I found Verizon's careers site mystifying, wit so many links to so many things, and so many groupings.  

Remember, no matter how much your site's success depends on organic search, and regarless of the desperation of your target audience to "convert" (whether a job application, tshirt purchase, or other action)  someone will actually, eventually, with human eyes, look at your site.  

I'm seeing more and more the paradox of organic search and the site design below, which seems to put everything but the kitchen sink as a text link on the homepage.  This won't last forever, and the increasedinfluence  of social content and participation on link relevance will hopefully limit the impact of these usability-killing visual mazes.

UPDATE: In fairness to Verizon, it seems like the page I landed on wasn't the home page.  The home page, below, shows off more of the corporate identity that I saw on AT&T's page.  I'll stick to the point about the SEO contrast, but I also think the landing page choice for Verizon was not the best.  Choosing the right campaign landing page is a question for another day.  

Behavior Networks and Identity Networks

Instagram's acquisition by Facebook illustrates how the tension between identity networks, and behavior networks will play out in the marketplace, and how it may not benefit users directly.  This divide pits sites like Pinterest and Instagram vs. Facebook, Twitter, Path, and others.

Identity networks, like Facebook and Linkedin, focus on You and managing connections to pieces of identity, and while you may have have wide-ranging conversations within such networks around content, which are key to communicating your identity, the profile remains the anchor point to an identity you care about. Facebook deserves credit for making this idea popular and easy to understand - forcing Google and Microsoft to change in many ways.  

Facebook's Connect and Open Graph initiatives show how crucial the concept of identity is to the Facebook model- the advertising Facebook sees in the future isn't customized by cookie pools, it's customized based on the open graph. It's not limited to Less and less of the meaning that users derive from being Facebook users will come from using Facebook.com and more and more will come from experiences enabled by the Facebook Platform. Facebook, as it extends the platform, is admitting that it cannot innovate fast enough at the edge to keep every user fully engaged - what they want is to have that user identified and authenticated, pulling their behavior into the Facebook ecosystem.

Thus, the edge of the platform, powered by identity, is where new user behaviors will emerge. These emergent groups of connections, I call Behavior Networks. They have several important properties.

1. Leverage an identity network to authenticate users - e.g. social sign in
2. An intentionally narrow feature set, the novelty of which self-selects new users.
3. User to user value exchange is based on behaviors - e.g. who you are on Pinterest is DEFINED by what you pin.
4. Nonlinear growth in user base enabled by the Identity Network.
5. Scale is the enemy of behavior networks, because they represent the end of novelty (2).

Behavior networks remain rooted in one style of behaving, and are key to a very specific context or action.  Instagram and Pinterest are in this category.  While relying to varying degrees on your identity (on Facebook, Twitter, etc)  your identity on these sites defines your behavior - if you never publish anything, you don't exist. No matter how many instgram photos you take, that's all the network says about you.

Test yourself, when was the last time you deleted an Instagram photo?  When was the last time you deleted a Facebook post?  I've done many of those things on Facebook, but I never worry about Instgram.

The real-time web is perfect for behavior networks.  All that matters is what you are doing- your behavior is your only identity but it doesn't live forever.

For these reasons, these behavior networks represent a challenge for marketers. Extending engagement beyond the behavior network - site traffic, conversions and so on - will be used to prove that the marketer's participation had some value. And this will require functionality a behavior network operator will be loathe to construct. All ROI metrics will come down to this: did the users engage further? Did they pin stuff and their friends bought it? The ROI analysis will require a channel linked to identity.  So as marketers we face the dilemma of proving the value of engagement beyond behavior networks, and these are uncertain times indeed.

My next two posts on this topic will deal with:

1. Path, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare: Can there be more than one identity network
2. How will the tension chnage the practice of marketing?

WSJ vs. NYT: The Reality Distortion Field

Side by side, the headlines from today's WSJ and Today's NYT.  Doesn't get any clearer that these two papers are picking the facts they want...in everything.  

 

Do Trade Shows Matter?

Peter Kafka of all things D wrote The Apple in The Room  in 2006 (also re-posted it this morning on Twitter), but with the rise of social media, it’s become more and more true.  Companies have an end around CES. 

Some have lamented the departure of Microsoft from the show.   If anything, Microsoft’s departure as the anchor of CES shows its decline but also how far behind the curve MS really can be.

Since companies create their own media channels, they have much more flexibility about when and how they communicate product news- both big and small. An age of real time and more transparent corporate comms also means companies can publish and shape a message all year long, at will.

The article's points about the smart devices, really the Internet of Things trend, have changed the important players. Meaningful, differentiating innovation – the kinds of WOW I WANT THAT features consumers want – happen so frequently outside the pavilion or dates of the show.  

CES used to be an event for the journalists to carry the message to consumers.  But now consumers don't need the journalists (not exclusively, anyway) to tell them what is cool this year.  Also,  important industry announcements are increasingly coming at places like TC Disrupt and the Launch conference. So yes, CES failed to keep pace with the industry but I am not sure it had a chance against the tide.

My experience at SXSW last year was very different from the previous year.  In 2010, it felt like being at the center of the universe and the cusp of very important trends.  At SXSW 2011, we saw more or less the continuation of the same trends, but the Interactive festival has gotten so crazy, so big, so commercial, I wonder if the big brand dollars that have flocked to the event have sapped it of some of the weirdness that made it great.  

And trade shows have been replaced by Brand Shows: the biggest games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty are now so large they have their own conferences. These events are media channels, concentrated pockets of support for the product, hungry for news.  The attendees are motivated and they want to BUY STUFF.  They are powerful message multipliers.  The scale and style of these kids of gatherings will vary by brand but if you have that, why wait for CES?

Does Using HootSuite Kill Your EdgeRank?

There are so many myths about what fans like, but we're strarting to understand that what one person sees on Facebook or Twitter reallys isn't predictable- their graph will determine what they see, and Facebook now gives brands more headachess than ever for getting into the newsfeed.  

A possible answer to this is the rising numebr of studies which use the facebook API, and largwe scale data collection, to break news about what may be happening to page content (with the implicit point that most of thye a brand's fans will engage via tyhe newsfeed rather than coming to the page).

Solid analytcis, have been published on this topic, such as Facebook Engagement analysis from Visibli or L2's Facebook IQ.  A new study by EdgeRank Checker -suggests that using Third-party applicationsto post to facebook results in the creation of content that gets lowerr engangent than native Facebooks posts.

There are a variety of reasons for pages to want a managed publishing solution, including regulatory, workflow, manpower, and moderation, in additon to those you'll also hear in the sales pitches from Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, and the others named below.  

So what is the enterprise digital social strategist to do?   Never, ever, take the top line conclusion from the vendor and appluy it to your bsuiness.  Ask for data about your client specifically.  Dig into which pages were used.  

For example, there are so many tiny fan pages doing a terrible job with mediocre nontent, I bet the amouint of objects created by those pages dwarfs the major brand pages.  We've all seen those pages.  I'll be digging in, let's see what else EdgeRank can tell us.

Do Consumers want to Keep Ads?

I'm glad that brand sare on borad with the idea that there can be a "not right now" relationship with a consumer- many marketers may only care about their explicit conversion metrcis.  That's encouraging.  But our real task is this: identifying the entertainment and information consumers want, and instead of standing in the way, creating the opportuntuiy for dialogue about what they might need, on their schedule.

AdKeeper Button Lets Viewers Keep, Share Ads 03/04/2011:

Volvo plans to become one of the first brands to launch an online display ad campaign with an AdKeeper button. Clicking on the "K" in the ad will allow consumers to keep the ad for future viewing when convenient, as well as share with others through social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or email.

Every Business is Different, even if you're selling Unicorns

I enjoyed reading Dan Zarella's post “New Data: 'Engage in the Conversation' May Not Actually Work"  very much.   It made me think- would such a recommendation ever be enough to run an ongoing  social media effort for YOUR business?

What ultimately makes "enagaging in the conversation" actually work is the ability to drive action from followers/fans.  What are those actions?  Why are they important to your brand or product?

Communities are powerful, but unicorns and rainbows are equally powerful myths among many in social media.  What separates great social crm is a firm understanding of the consumer, and what they need.  

If you posted 100 tweets about the industry/your firm and then saved one sale with 10 @replies, that's only 10% reply percentage, whcih Zarella's charts imply is low.  Is it?  If it moves your business, you can't argue it's not working.

Agreed, in my example we don't have any data about operational costs or incremental revenue, but every business is different, even if you're selling unicorns.  Concentrate opn what your customers want, and track whether you're delivering it.

Fascinating - Apple is the new IBM?

By painting Apple as a new untouchable in the CE industry, has Dave Morgan taken the liberty to show us that the consumer experience trumps just about everything else?   After a decade of losing Apple vs. IBM comparisons (in which I,  as a boy, defended Apple to the ends of the earth, aided by my weekly infusion of MacWEEK) can Apple have a further decade of dominance? Eerily familiar to descriptions of IBM in the 1960s or 70s.

Apple: The First Trillion-Dollar Company? 01/13/2011:

Apple is out-innovating and out-executing the entire market. No other company is delivering better consumer electronics products with better content and communications experiences to the market, and iterating them constantly, than Apple.? Not only that, but no one else is delivering consumer electronic products and related software and content at the scale, and with the degree of customer service, that Apple is today. Not Sony. Not Samsung. Not LG. Not Google. No one.

The business of video on demand was possible and eminently doable in 1994-95.  Most of the cable companies buried their heads in the sand.   IBM was content selling servers, having lost the DOS vs. Windows battle (or even OS2/Warp!)  Yet we didn't see it for more than a decade in most US Cable households.  

Great products and ideas die, all the time.  I personally never owned a mac clone, but some of those machines were really insipiring piecves of machinery.  Gil Amelio couldn;t save Apple, but Jobs did.  He rebooted the company.

And that's why the powerhouse that Apple has become, can't last forever.  What IBM has build doesn't rely on one person, ditto to GE, Comcast, Verizon.  Apple has a lockup on the fringe, but it can't take the mass.  The mass just won't tolerate it.

David Pogue suggests this morning that CES was a sideshow of Apple copycats.  His money quote from an industry insider:

“These companies are like 6-year-olds on a soccer team,” one company representative told me. “The ball goes over here, and they all run after it in a blob. ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ”

The innovation, however, is moving to the cloud- the services on top of the devices.  That will keep shiny, new things on our TVs for now.  See InsideFacebook's The Best Facebook-Integrated Devices from CES 2011.

But it can't last longer than Steve Jobs.  Even as Steve keeps the fanboys cheering (and even some day clicking the "like" button) he hasn't build anything that can outlive him.

Well, maybe, just maybe, it's fixing the news business! (via Fake Steve Jobs)

The news business has descended into the gutter in a pathetic attempt to stay alive. It’s been a horrible race to the bottom. This is turn has polluted our politics, and now we’re seeing the result of it.

Fortunately for the world, we’re going to change all that, with iPad and the apps model. But that’s a story for another day.

GOOG 3G/4G Spectrum Patents from Nortel Key to World Domination

Over at SAI, the chart of the day suggests that ChromeOS is a jab at Windwows (duh) and that Google needs the OS to succeed because it is the best hope to kill a weaker Microsoft.  Despite Microsoft's attempts to break out of the doldrums, and the extreme diversification of their product offerings (many of which never stood a chance of working)- Windows remains the cash cow for the giant.

If I were Google, I wouldn't try to win the war against Windows under current conditions; I would need more things to fall into place.

Android users are wising up to the Google Platform, and applications for Android are proliferating.  Windows Phone 7, how are you feeling?

Bing is getting better, has differentiated itself and is integrating with Facebook more obviously (the future of social search is very scary for any company that does not follow Bing's lead)- that's got to be scary for Google.

ChromeOS apps would all be web apps, and the value proposition would have to involve the cloud, and applications that are enhanced by always on-data networks.  WiFi in the current sense just will not cut it.  You know what would?  3G/4G wireless connectivity built in.  

ChromeOS laptops might be a miserable failure like the Nexus one, but if Google sold them at a loss, they'd exact a far more painful loss on Microsoft.  With onerous license fees from the essential connectivity, Google has to own the key patents in order to reduce its costs.  This illuminates why Google may be fighting so hard against Apple and RIM for Nortel's 3G/4G patents.

When yo sign into Google Apps, use email, docs, spreadsheets, watch Youtube videos in the Chrome browser, and android apps all day, getting served advertising by Doubleclick until you remotely program your Google TV from your android phone and watch The Office when it's convenient for you...that's when Microsoft dies.  And with the exception of GoogleTV, I haven't named one thing above that sucks.  

To do the same thing on Windows/microsoft/Bing/MSN/Xbox, you're making some compromises along the way, for sure.  It's not a done deal, but it's for all the marbles.

Gifts I Want, from Staples

No, no, it's ok, I have everything I want.  You don't need to get me anything.  Really?  What's this?  Socks?  (Actually, I just bought new athletic socks for running, no joke from Amazon (Affiliate Link).

But what I'm really exited about, gift wise, is this page used by Staples email marketing to promote thier Twitter comtest.  Let's face it, brands usually need to give prospective followers something exciting to do - classic what's in it for me.

Things I like about this page:

1. I arrived via email- always try to support social with email
2. Choose your prize (one of 5 gifts pictured, showing rage of the Brand as well)
3. Emphasizes following @staplestweets
4. Holiday Tweet generator (though I wish it had some more suggestion and was less “mad libs”

What are your favorites this holiday season?