Info Chat

I’ve decided that A) the topics of my blog were getting outside the scope of what I originally intended them to be, and 2) I wanted a blog that was a little more representative of all of my interests and experience. So, please check out my new blog bstg: http://careerpenguin.com/blog/

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The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has decided you need an auctioneers license (which is apparently hard to get) in order to sell goods on e-bay. Sure. What next? Will I need a doctorate and malpractice insurance from the state if I post a comment on WebMD?

Even better, in an attempt to enforce the inane law, PA has chosen someone to make a spectacle of. A woman who started selling items on e-bay so she could remain at home with her daughter, who has a brain tumor. Wow.

Yet another lame attempt to profit (in the form of auctioneer licenses this time) from something even though you have added zero value to it.

Come to think of it, I wonder if the states will get to charge taxes on top of the bandwidth usage charge that Time Warner wants to institute?

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So Business Week doesn’t want people linking to its web site. Sure, why not.

Wonder what the conversation at BW HQ was when they came up with this genius policy?

Bob: "We have too many people using our web site."
Joe: "What? We’re a Time Warner customer - we can’t afford any more bandwidth charges!"
Bob: "Turns out a lot of people come to our site as a result of these things called ‘hyperlinks’."
Joe: "Well, let’s forbid people from using these hyperlink things!"
Bob: "Done. Now we if we could only stop people from reading our magazine - our print costs are skyrocketing…"

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The cable and telco companies of course. Which is nothing new really. Who does business with comcast or verizon because they want to? The reality is many of us use these providers for broadband, or tv, or voice, because we don’t have a choice, not because of the outstanding service they provide or the quality of their offerings.

So now Time Warner is making a move that can only be intended to a) stifle innovation and growth, b) prove they have perfected time travel by taking us back 12 years, c) ensure new competition will arise and drive them out of business eventually, or d) just plain mock the consumer by flexing their almost monopoly over certain markets. TW has decided that us pesky consumers may actually be getting a fair value out of their service. So they have decided to limit bandwidth and charge for excessive use. Sure.

How about a better idea. Instead of trying to capitalize from the business model of iTunes by getting your cut for movies consumers are going to download - offer a viable service yourself? Then you could get all the profit. Think about it. Why can’t a company like TW, or maybe Verizon give us a great service, with a useable interface and a forward thinking product roadmap for all of our digital needs? $99 gets you voice, internet, TV, 3 movie rentals, and 5 songs per month. Additional movies/songs/programming/voice lines etc are available at an incremental charge. And trust me, if the charge is fair, and the application viable, we will us it all day long…

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Well, a new University of Utah study may have great impact on how we all commute. Among other things, the study showed that:

Hands-free cell phones are no less dangerous while driving than hand-held cell phones because the conversation itself is the major distraction.

So if requiring hands free devices is no safer than not because the real culprit is the fact that most people just can’t plain talk and drive at the same time (something I have long suspected!) it looks like the government is facing a bit of a dilemma. The way I see it there are only two viable options. Mandate that everyone drive a motorcycle (without a passenger of course), or make it illegal to talk while driving.

Better yet, we could require an IQ test in addition to a driver test and save all the trouble…

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I’ve been trying for a while to figure out how the new wave of social media sites fit in to the economy. Late the other night, I think I finally got my mind around it. It happened while I was watching a Seinfeld re-run (it was the one where George pretended to be a marine biologist and ended up accidentally saving the whale into who’s blowhole Kramer lodged a golf ball - one of the all-time classic episodes).

Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and the like are really nothing more than the Internet equivalent of television shows. They are for pure entertainment purposes, part of out pop culture. One is hip and the place to be until a new one comes along, and then everyone migrates. Loyalty doesn’t really exist. Now, before I get bombarded, I totally get the actual potential value of these type of sites, Andrew McAfee does a great job of evangelizing this.

However, I don’t think most people use the sites in this way. To most people, it is a purely recreational activity. Enter all your information, keep in light touch with people you don’t have the time to truly stay in touch with. Studies have shown most people, when presented with a choice to pay for use of these sites, would not do so. Sounds like network television to me. Would I pay to watch new episodes of Grey’s Anatomy? Likely not.

So if people aren’t willing to pay for these sights, then how can they be a valuable contributor to the economy, and receive multi-billion dollar valuations? Advertising of course. Much like Seinfeld or Grey’s Anatomy they present a wonderful audience for advertisers. Of course they can be even more targeted than television ads, hence why advertisers are salivating over them.

So what does it mean? I think it means they can generate oodles of revenue during their run (like Friends). It also probably means that unless they figure out how to develop a long term business model that people are willing to pay for (like ESPN for TV, maybe Ning for the web) the life span of these sites is probably limited, much like a network TV show.

It also means that advertisers will ultimately want to rate them in ways other than page views, and number of users. Advertisers have become incredibly savvy with the network TV medium, and will do the same with social media sites. They know that some of them will be hits, like Facebook and that others will ultimately end up the Gossip Girl of the web.

So before we get carried away with how these social media sites are going to revolution the way we do business, let’s try and put them in perspective. Advertising mediums that provide users with entertainment, not new economic models…

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When it comes to software - The Customer. Plain and simple. It’s funny how many people don’t get that. Or don’t want to get that for some reason. I’ve been in the business of building applications for 16 years, 10 of those dedicated to web applications, and it is by far the most common mistake that individuals and companies make.

I’m not sure why this happens. Maybe product managers get too caught up in the projects they are working, and what they perceive the benefit or value to them to be that they don’t worry about the customer perception of value? Perhaps product groups forget that the value customers receive isn’t in the individuality of the new features they are working on, but the holistic business benefit their application provides? Maybe companies with a history of success think they are so good at delivering value to their customer’s they don’t need to pay attention to it?

There are a lot of ways that this mistake manifests itself. Incorrect pricing, missing or poorly positioned features, etc. Have you ever used a product where they incrementally charge for a piece of functionality that is really a prerequisite for the application to meet the requirements of the business problem it is solving? Or a product that incrementally charges for functionality that is freely available via open source or common applications like MS Office? I know I have (I will leave out the names of the guilty - don’t want to get accused of mudslinging), and it has motivated me to move on to other products.

So if you’re developing a software application, do your customers a favor. Stop, step back, look at the application as a whole, and how it meets the needs of your customers. And more importantly, talk to your customers and make sure they agree.

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Just a quick little test of the Windows Live Writer tool. not sure how integrated it really is with Wordpress at this point, but I do like the idea of the tool. Let’s see if it lives up to expectations…

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I just read that Wal-Mart is going to implement SAP Financials. For those who aren’t familiar with Wal-Mart, this is pretty big news. Wal-Mart has long had the reputation of being an IT Silo, preferring to build applications rather than purchase them.

I’m curious if this was done because Wal-Mart’s IT has difficulty keeping up with global expansion, if this signifies a trend towards a more open approach at Wal-Mart, or if Wal-Mart is doing this more to leverage SAP’s domain expertise in deploying global applications?

But, as long as I can still get my Halloween candy, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

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I really have not been a fan of all of the versioning that has gone on with the Web. Mostly since no one ever indicated web 1.0 when it was web 1.0, I mean if we knew it was going to be labeled a 1.0 release, instead of thought of as an ever evolving platform, with too many incarnations to possibly enumerate, maybe we would have put more thought into it before it was released…

But I digress. I wanted to talk about how instead of web 2.0, maybe we should call it part of the maturation process we all expected from the web. If we compare it to the human maturation process, I would say the web has hit puberty. You remember puberty - there are a lot of changes going on in your body. Some of these changes manifest themselves in unpleasant form (acne). You really haven’t established you identity as a person yet. And you still act like a kid most of the time, but demonstrate flashes of adulthood on occasion.

Really, doesn’t that sound a bit like the web today? The platform (body) is evolving and presenting new widespread standards that will support it in the future. Unpleasant manifestations, like this blog, are popping up everywhere. Business models (its identity) on the web are evolving beyond commerce and advertising supported models into service based models. MySpace and Facebook (kid-like behavior vs. adult behavior).

If this analogy holds any water, I can’t wait until sometime in the next 5-7 years when the Web gets its first date. Maybe a truly integrated ERP system which users can deploy and modify over time? Nah, we’ll probably save that for adulthood - maybe that will be the Web’s first marriage.

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