I've had tons of SEO consultants pitch to me, both in my past life as a web dev and in my present role as a businessowner, and not one has ever said "of course, there's a downside risk to this activity -- we might end up in Google Hell." But, since Google doesn't document how their system works, any attempt to game it has some downside risk.
It may be that the people interviewed for this article knew about the risk, I don't know. But I bet that most of the companies that end up in Google Hell have no idea that they're running a risk.
How we backstop this problem, I have no idea. It'd be hard for Google to offer support, even paid support, without creating a hole through which their algorithms could be reverse-engineered.
I'm sorry that you're bothered by my response, but I answered a specific question, called up by TFA: why does good marketing beat out good technology? It's because marketers have a specific skillset that makes it easy for them to communicate and convert sales. Of course they get what they want; they practice doing that every day, all day long.
How do I know this? I'm a marketer. I have an MBA in marketing, have managed million-dollar marketing budgets, and have launched new products for Fortune 500 companies. I've even helped engineers design good products (heck, I've written code for a variety of projects).
In all that time, I've never met anyone who said they could create a need for a product from whole cloth. Lifestyle marketing, and psychographics, are of course essential parts of marketing today, and help us target products. Targeting refers to matching a product's benefits to those in the market who will most benefit from those attributes, not some sort of mass brainwashing that leaves the masses walking down the streets, arms outstretched in front of them, eyes fixed in the distance, moaning "iiiiiPoooods, muuuuusstttt haaaaavvve iiiiiiPooooods."
Understanding lifestyles, demographics, psychographics, and other behavior measures allows us to develop new products too, by putting together constellations of attributes that may indicate emergent unsatisfied needs and wants. This isn't brainwashing either; it's just listening.
Of course, there are unscrupulous marketers out there. From TFA, we see unscrupulous marketers and executives and engineers putting out bad products that simply don't work. That's wrong and should stop, and, typically the market punishes bad products. In what TFA describes, the market isn't punishing bad products because people in the market are unable to assess the difference between good and bad. For a lot of tech products, the vast majority of people can't tell the difference. Consumers generally look, as TFA asserts, for signals to product quality. A consumer looking to buy a charcoal grill for this summer may check out how heavy the grill's construction is, to determine if it'll last -- that's a signal for quality. A consumer looking to buy a firewall... what's the signal there? There is none. Frankly, the people marketing good technology products have to figure out how to communicate simple signals for quality. A label indicating certification, such as the UL or Good Housekeeping labels, is often a way to do this (it's not obvious to me who should certify security products).
The same thing is true in the office -- management is looking for signals. Those may be in your memos, reports, and spreadsheets, some set of words and information that suggests that you know what you're talking about and understand the business needs. They may be in how you comport yourself -- I recently saw a guy pitch a good product to a few angel investors who spent the next week laughing at him because he came off as such a nutcase; since the product was outside of their expertise, they didn't consider it any further because the guy didn't appear credible. After he appeared non-credible, it didn't matter what else valid he said. Look for the signals that management expects.
Yes, marketing people are evil droids, bent on the destruction of all that is good and effective. Oh wait, they're probably not.
The issue with going up against marketing is simple: a marketers job is to figure out what their marketing targets expect and need, and then communicate with those targets in a meaningful way. That's all they do. Don't be surprised that they can influence people whom engineering can't; engineers' job isn't to discover needs and influence.
The article pretty much explains why what you see happens, happens: it's difficult for non-specialist engineers to assess the quality of technical products. The result is that these non-specialist engineers assess products based on criteria other than those on which these products should be assessed.
That means that the challenge is to bring the important criteria to the fore for your target audience. And that's a very specialized skill; it's called marketing.
But it's not $100 more than a 360. Why? Early adopters already have a 360. The marginal cost of having a 360 tomorrow is... $0. The marginal cost of having a PS3 tomorrow is... $600-ish. So it stops being an either/or question, and it starts being an and question. Why should I have a 360 and a PS3? The answer of why you should have a 360 and a Wii is obvious -- they're completely differentiated. The difference between the 360 and the PS3 is... a few exclusives, Blu-Ray, no XBox Live.
The marginal value to the consumer of their potential new PS3 is just the value placed on the specific games (at added cost) and the Blu-Ray -- not HD visuals, which they already get with the 360. Do consumers really value the PS3's added features highly? Compare the PS3 to $600 in new XBox 360 games. Which gives you more marginal happiness? Unless you're committed to a PS3-exclusive title, the answer is almost certainly $600 worth of games (whose online play you've already paid for).
Yes, you're right, it'll be torture down the road when the big exclusives come out (if they come out). And then all of the serious gamers and other early adopters who have passed up the PS3 will buy one. Just they'll do it at $299.
Palm's ability to offer the Treo on multiple carriers is certainly a big advantage, but there is precedent for offering a high-end converged device on just one carrier -- T-Mobile's Sidekick. How did that do? Let's see, it became an iconic product that every famous person had to have. Last year, T-Mobile moved about a million of those. Apple apparently thinks it'll sell 5 million iPhones. Is that possible? That basically depends on a few questions:
Will, as you ask, people switch to Cingular? Well, with number portability one issue goes away. Another potential issue is that Sprint is a much bigger business carrier than is Cingular -- some business users will only have Sprint phones as an option. But we do see that most carriers have about 2% churn annually, and Cingular did gain 2.4mm new subscribers in just 4Q '06, so there's precedent for an inflow of customers
Is the price too high? I think it seems high, but the bigger iPods sell reasonably well too, and they're pretty pricey. There are also a lot of smartphones in the $399-$699 range without rebate, and most of these started out with pretty small rebates and long contracts. The iPhone is selling through the same, proven channel with the same, proven incentives.
Is the iPhone a toy? This is related to the question "will not being available on Sprint and Verizon doom the product with businesspeople?" All of the things the iPhone does are things that people pay RIM and Palm big money to do right now. If the iPhone can do them better -- and assuming they need to be done better -- then it's not a toy, it's a productivity tool, and how many executives are going to accept their IT guy's objection that "we don't have an account with Cingular"? Oh, and because it looks sexy, the iPhone is also a toy, and can compete in the toy market with the Sidekick. How big is that market? 1.1 million units last year. The Blackberry Pearl sold a bunch of units at the end of the year too -- maybe 500,000? That's a good sized market, and a very fashion-conscious one, that should be very receptive to the iPhone.
Is the iPhone really just "about as good as" other smartphones? That's the big question. Apple's history in designing similar devices suggests that the iPhone should be substantially better, but, if it's not, then it's true that success outside a small niche is going to be impossible. Apple's banking a lot on its ability to design a better interface, we'll have to see how the iPhone holds up over time.
Add it all up, and I think you get about 3mm shipments in the iPhone's first year on the market -- a lot less than 5, but a start.
Umm... the product has as much storage as the iPod nano, the best-selling of all iPod models, plus a snazzy new interface. Hard to do? Maybe. Looks like they did it.
The price drop definitely indicates that they're in trouble, but it may not be as big of a panic move as it looks. Cutting prices can be good, because it can cause you to sell larger volumes. What does moving a bigger volume get you, if you're losing money on each unit? Well, it can mean that you get to breakeven *faster*, if your costs vary with volume.
The PS3 uses a lot of cutting-edge parts, and cutting-edge tech parts generally get cheaper the more of them you make. This is partially because you get what economists call Economies of Scale, which is when you save money from making larger quantities -- savings that typically come from things like having factories that run more efficiently at higher capacities, and lower cost per unit for raw materials and parts when bought in bulk. This is also partially because you move along the experience curve, which basically means that "the more widgets you make, the more you get good at making widgets." (The experience curve, which is more focused on units, is different than the learning curve, which is more focused on time). So, if Sony can drive volume with its cost cuts, then they can get economies of scale and of learning, and perhaps cut the cost to produce each console.
The PS3 is also carrying a substantial cost that is related only to the start-up of the operation: building new factories, developing the technology, providing developer documentation, etc. These are all one-time costs that won't reoccur during the product's lifetime. These costs have to be paid off from the PS3's profits. Suppose, just to make up a number, that it cost Sony $1 billion to start up production. Right now Sony's shipped about 2 million PS3s. To break even on their start-up cost, $500 from each machine sold needs to go to pay off start-up costs. If the price cut causes Sony to sell 10 million, then each unit has to pay off only $100 worth of start-up costs. That's a lot more achievable number, even if you're only talking about a $300 ticket, than $500 is on a $500 ticket. Obviously, Sony is planning to sell a lot more than 10 million PS3s, but, the longer it takes to pay off its start-up costs, the more interest it has to pay on the money it borrowed to develop the product.[*] Clearly, selling a higher volume of units will help spread out the start-up cost across more units and make it easier to break even on each one.
Volume also helps Sony's other customers -- the developers. The more units are out there, the more units of a new game a developer can sell. Sony needs to make its PS3 ecosystem as large as possible in order to ensure that new games come out for the console a few years down the road. This is a place where volume drives volume -- the more units are out there, the more new games come out for the machine, the more people buy the machine for the games, GOTO 10.
So, Sony's probably making a volume move, not panicking. Yet.
* Technically, Sony probably won't pay off the bonds it sold to borrow the money early. More likely, it'll invest the money in a project that its managers think will make more than the 5% it's paying on the bonds. But, since putting off that project delays profits and costs money, it's all about the same in the end.
This is a nice doctrinaire statement, but in a non-perfect market there's deadweight loss from inequitable distribution of power. Taxes, regulations... if they remedy that power distribution, they replace one deadweight loss with another. As a businessowner, I can say that taxes and regulations are entirely predictable in their effects. On the other hand, when someone has more power relative to me, well, it's hard to anticipate what the effect on me will be (they could be benevolent, they could squeeze, most likely it'll be in between... but where?). As much as certain people like to say that taxes and regulations are a horrible burden, they're at worst a burden that can be planned for, and that's not really so bad if you're prepared to be smart and do some planning.
Beyond that, there's very little evidence that having more generous welfare benefits has any effect on the work choices of the vast majority of people. If it did, imagine how many lower-class white Americans would be hopping the first plane to emigrate illegally to Sweden.
This is an absolutely correct comment. There's no question that Apple had to include DRM in order to launch the iTunes Music Store. What the FA seems to say is that Apple could drop DRM at any time. Even assuming this is true, why would they be the first to go DRM-less? Let someone else take the risk that the music labels will go ballistic. Let someone else take the risk that the DRM-free music ends up on all the peer-to-peer networks. Maybe none of that will happen -- certainly we all hope it won't. But Apple has the #1 music store out there, by a lot. There's no reason they need to be the one to take the risk. They can wait for someone else to prove to the big labels that DRM-free music is good (eMusic is proving this to small labels). Then we'll see Apple switch quite quickly.
Sure, clamshell has won out at the consumer level, but how many clamshell smartphones do you see out there? Sure, there's the Nokia 9000 series, but virtually every smartphone is either candybar or candybar with a slide-out keyboard. Smartphone users have shown themselves prepared to accept the candybar form-factor, and that's the target market for this product.
Perhaps this is because of the advantages that candybar offers for some applications. Basically the entire interface on the iPhone would've been impossible if it had two smaller screens rather than one large screen. The Nintendo DS is a great gaming machine but I'm not sure that I'm interested in using its two screens togther to watch Pirates of the Caribbean.
Hipsters have also embraced the candybar, with the Hiptop and Sidekick. That's much more the price point of the iPhone.
It's also important to note that the latest successful clamshell phones -- especially the RAZR -- have been dramatically thinner. It's much harder to make thin with all of the widgets and gadgets that need to go into a smartphone. Apple delivered on thin, which is clearly desired by all market segments.
The "crappy" Cingular network is a common complaint against the phone. One thing to note is that Cingular has never crippled its phones, which was key to Apple here -- as fast as Verizon's network may be, they charge for every feature use, and that would have killed the iPhone. So this is a big win for most users, including those who want to install apps.
Also, the network isn't that bad. Compared to other USA networks, coverage is about the same, and nobody offers the data speed that you can get on other continents. Worry about service more if Apple chooses a crappy European carrier. Cingular and T-Mobile were the only possible US choices for national coverage with GSM, and both are about equal in what they offer.
Back to installing apps: it's not clear if the OS X on the iPhone is similar to the desktop version, if it is, that's a killer app. The creative and executive types who will shell out for this kind of thing would much rather install something they already use on their desktop than some application designed just for the phone. Half of the effort expended in selecting and using a smartphone is finding applications that allow productivity on the phone while syncing in some way with the desktop. If Apple made it possible to run OS X apps on this phone -- and I actually think they didn't, but that's another discussion entirely -- that fixes an entire class of problems that smartphone users have, whether or not other phones offer downloadable applications.
You're right to point out that the iPhone isn't that innovative. It does few things that my Treo doesn't do, or that a Windows Smartphone, Blackberry, Blackjack, etc., don't do. But it seems to do them more easily and smoothly, as well as looking better while it does them. That's a good selling proposition.
Most large corporations with divisions that have multiple products have something known as "internal transfer prices" -- the price that one division charges another division for the product it produces. Transfer prices aren't play money; when one division buys from another division, that money moves from one division's budget to another division's budget -- it disappears just as completely as if a check were cut to an external vendor. So, in this case, the AdWords revenues go up by the transfer price and, say, the Docs and Spreadsheet expenses go up by that price as well. It may seem like play money, but, for everybody below Executive VP level, those are probably two completely different budgets. To Sergey and Larry, sure, it's moving money from their right pocket to their left, but for their employees it's money out of their department or division's budget. The folks in charge of AdWords are highly incentivized by their bottom line to get as much money as possible from Maps, Blogger, etc.
Transfer prices are sometimes mildly discounted in order to provide some incentive for companies to use internal vendors, but there's about 40 years of very clear business history that shows that artifically discounting transfer prices in order to keep your divisions buying internally is really awful for both the buying and selling division (see: just about all of US heavy industry since 1970). As a matter of practice, it's unlikely that Google's various divisions would get a very discounted internal transfer price just on that basis. Beyond that, it's clear that AdWords's main limitation is space inventory -- they could sell more ads, they just don't have any place to put them. That's why Google has their new radio advertising program, and that's why a lot of people think that they bought YouTube. So, AdWords is unlikely to discount their internal transfer price based on this as well. Heck, if other Google divisions complain, this is just a good way for AdWords execs to say "give us more resources to expand our advertising inventory, then we can make all the other divisions happy."
So, anyway, yes they have to pay for it, and it's likely they pay full price.
I had the same experience, bad digestion problems eventually driving me to a series of doctors. The GI I saw also diagnosed me with IBS and prescribed me some pills that I could take every day for the rest of my life and maybe feel a little better.
Then, following a friend's advice, I went to see an allergist, who said, hey, it sounds like you have food allergies! I got tested, I learned what I was allergic to, and now I've modified my diet so that I don't spend 2/3 of my waking hours on the can.
The lesson? Doctors know a lot about their specialty, and specialties are becoming increasingly vertical as knowledge increases. I had a fancy health plan that let me self-refer to both specialists; I wonder what would have happened if I'd had a relationship with a family practitioner whom I had seen twice a year since I got out of college. Would that doctor have been smart enough to say "you may have x or y, let's do these things to see which you have?" Too bad such a thing doesn't exist in the big city anymore.
If they make you give out a SSN, there's a series of numbers that are approved for use in advertisements, etc. Check out: http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/ssn/SSN-addendum. html#FakeNumbers for more info on numbers you may be able to give out in lieu of your real one. Of course be careful, because in some cases giving out a false SSN can expose you to criminal penalties.
Who's keeping what in the hands of private companies?
Let's get serious here boys and girls. Governments aren't keeping the private sector out of space - in fact, there are already companies that will launch your satellite into space for a few million $$$.
You know what it took to start these companies? Billions and billions of dollars in up-front investment. You have a couple billion in your pocket? Then you can go to Mars.
Let's face it, with a couple billion lying around, most entrepreneurs would choose to invest in something else.
What you're probably seeing on the Mac is the much brighter gamma and, quite probably, a properly calibrated monitor. The brighter gamma makes your brights brighter and your whites whiter, plus lets you see in all those shadowy areas which are such a pain in both of those games (in fact, some Mac users I know have gamma-adjustment bound to a function key that they can use to adjust the gamma of the whole screen to ridiculously bright values so as to see in those dark corners campers seem to like).
You Windoze users can have some of the same benefit; while you can't have a high-end Mac monitor's ability to auto-adjust the color profiles based on the aging of your phosphors, and your gamut will remain ridiculously narrow because of MS's use of the sRGB colorspace, you can at least make your colors come out purty. Linux/Mac users: if you can, chose some other colorspace (CIE has a very wide gamut).
If you own/posess an Adobe product, it probably came with their gamma correction utility. Calibrate your monitor. Now. It only takes 10 minutes. Now recalibrate it every time you change your Windows theme or wallpaper. Linux users, you'll prob'ly have to futz with your video driver settings, but, hey, you like doing that kind of stuff!
If you want to see colors more clearly and vividly, change your Windows/Gnome/KDE/whatever theme to use neutral colors, such as a slightly blue gray for all of the chrome, and a gray, white, black, or very muted primary for the titlebars. Believe it or not, you percieve colors relative to other colors around them (example: pull a dark shirt out of your closet. Is it blue or black? Like most men, you've got no idea. Now put it next to some blue jeans. You can tell easily what color it is). Keep your window colors low-contrast and away from bright primary colors and you'll see much more vivid colors.
The reason that smartcards are ahead in Europe is in fact the telcos, but it's not the cost of a call: it's the fact that lines suck. Here in the US, all of our credit card machines are hooked up to regular old phone lines and dial into a bank computer to make a transaction. No information besides the account number is kept on the card; the machine verifies the checksum on the card, calls the bank, and asks if the account can handle the new purchase. This seems simple but presupposes:
1. You can always get an open line.
2. The open line will have a reasonable (i.e. you can correct for it) amount of line noise.
In much of Europe you can't count on one of those things (or couldn't until the nineties, and by then the smart card infrastructure was there). The answer? Make all credit cards smart, so that all account information is kept on them locally. Then you don't have to deal with some sketchy phone line. The smart card readers just talk to the chip on the smart card, asking it if there's enough money left on the card.
Not only does this Web designer use one-pixel gifs... pretty much every Web designer does. The reason is that browsers suck. Theoretically, by using CSS, visual presentation of information can be managed. But CSS support is horrible -- only IE 5 for Mac really has it (among released browsers at this point).
So Web designers are forced to use HTML for visual presentation of information (no, just putting it in a simple list isn't good enough -- 400 years of learning how to effectively present information says otherwise. See Edward Tufte's works FMI). And the only way to do that is to micromanage detailed issues like spacing.
But all that's moot. The worst part about this whole article is that the companies are lying to their customers about how their information is being used. There is almost no way an educated user, without the benefit of infinite time and tools, could have known to protect him- or herself from this information theft. That's why Truste needs to sue and the FTC needs to get involved. Personally, I think that the companies who did this need to be permanently banned from having a Web presence in order to set an example, but I don't know how that could be done legally.
Actually, that's not true. IE 5.5 is less standards-compliant than Netscape 6 or, ironically, IE 5.0. And it's the latter that's most disturbing. They had it right; they embraced the technology. Now they're extending the technology in a proprietary way.
What's next? If Netscape is, in fact, dead, then we're in trouble. We'll depend entirely on MS to tell us what languages we can use to code on the Web (look for IE6 with... Visual Basic support!). Microsoft will, literally, control the Web.
So complain. Tell your boss. Don't install IE5.5. This is a Very Bad Thing.
I hate to tell you this, but banks are evil. I used to bank with Bank of America... they got quite a bit of coverage in the LA Times (ya know... newspaper) when it came out that they were selling customers' -names -contact info -account numbers -account balances -social security numbers to just about anyone out there. Needless to say they don't hold my money anymore, but the fact is that anyone could have impersonated me based on that info and gotten car loans, home loans, etc. (in fact, somebody did steal my identity to buy phone service, but I don't know for sure they got the info from BofA)
The big bad problem with not levying sales taxes on internet purchases is that counties and cities rely on sales taxes for operating budget. Let's break that down:
*We pay Income taxes to the Federal Government. Sometimes, if they're feeling friendly, they give some of that money to the state you live in. They may not give the state its population's fair share (however you define that) of the money given to all states, but some of it goes back to states. And, if the Feds are in a budget-balancing mood, they can cut those givebacks without so much as a by-your-leave.
*We pay Income taxes to the State Government. Sometimes, if they're feeling friendly, that give some of that money to the county you live in. Once again, the county may not get its fair share. Once again, the State government can balance its books on the backs of the counties.
*We pay assessments to counties and cities. These are now often capped by law or consititutional amendment.
*We pay property taxes to counties and cities. These are also often capped by law or constitutional amendment.
*We pay sales taxes. These are levied seperately by states, counties and cities (or not, depending on where you live).
That's basically our taxation structure here in the US. Of all those monies, the only ones that go directly to cities and counties -- the governments which are, after all, closest and most responsive to you -- are sales taxes, property taxes and assessments. The Internet threatens to take away 1/3 of the ability (and much more than that in dollar terms) to raise money of local government.
Let's take an example of this, in case my logic isn't clear. I live in Los Angeles (this probably makes me singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of American Civilization). In the mid-90s, Welfare Reform (a laudable goal)took away much of LA County's medical care income. At the same time, the state went into recession. The State Government kept the books balanced by sending less money from the various State taxes and assessments back to the counties. The result? A massive, multi-billion dollar budget shortfall.
That's what all local governments are in for without sales taxes. I agree, there's big trouble, federally, with the tax system we have. But let's worry about funding our communities first.
Actually, in this case, the next court of appeal _is_ the Supreme Court. And there's a trick to this: there's nothing in the law that says the Court has to hear a case appealed to it. They can simply let the lower court's order stand without comment... and that's it. End of story.In the past, the Court has not in fact chosen to hear antitrust cases. So this could be the last we hear of this.
Orpheus, Judge Jackson was not just unbiased - he was one of the best judges that MS could have drawn. Back in the mid-'90s, when the DOJ had won the initial rounds of the antitrust battle (leading to some of the behavioral remidies that have proven so feeble), the government gained an injunction against the release of Win 95. MS appealed, and the judge who drew the appeal was Jackson. Who won? Well, as you can tell from what's on your desktop, MS. That's right, you can thank old T. Penfield for the commercial availability of Win 95. I'd imagine that qualifies as pro-MS. Jackson is also a conservative judge who would normally be against government interference in commerce (unless it has to do with sex). In this case, I suspect rather strongly that MS's poor trial performance, including that rigged videotape and their incompetent expert witnesses, swayed the jurist.
As for speed, I'll bet on quick (for the justice system) myself. DOJ wants to take care of this ASAP so that the process won't get disrupted by the changover in administrations (or simply cancelled if George W. is elected). The states want to take care of this quickly so that the AGs can get famous and the statehouses can get the $$$. And MS wants to get this over with so that what we're seeing happen to their stock now doesn't happen everyday. So I imagine we'll have a final appeal this year.
This is great for Apple and for open sourcers everywhere, but let's keep track of the fact that Darwin is not OSX. Darwin is the foundation for OSX, but it lacks things like the Quartz imaging layer, Carbon and the Blue Box to run good old-fashioned Mac apps, and, of coourse, the notorious Aqua interface. Darwin has always been cross-platform (PPC and x86), it's only higher-level services that are platform-specific.
It's great that Apple is porting the code to other platforms. It will provide some basic level of interoperability and perhaps make it easier to port software (say, Adobe Photoshop) to other Darwin-based OSes. Note that I said easier, not easy. It'd probably still be a lot more fun to port SuSE apps to LinuxPPC.
What porting Darwin really does is make a good, basic POSIX-compliant BSD-like OS available for many major platforms. At the very least, it may provide some interesting ideas. But it sure don't mean that I can go out and buy some Crusoe-based laptop and run Mac OS X on it.
I did in fact get throough to their server and downloaded a couple of files. I'm at work, not near my Linux machine so I can't see if any of them are actually real files, but they seem to be out there.
Virtually all the files in their Source directory seem to be from Mandrake, just as alleged... and none of the source seems to be for anything I haven't heard of before. Where's the value-added?
Slashdot Mirror
I've had tons of SEO consultants pitch to me, both in my past life as a web dev and in my present role as a businessowner, and not one has ever said "of course, there's a downside risk to this activity -- we might end up in Google Hell." But, since Google doesn't document how their system works, any attempt to game it has some downside risk.
It may be that the people interviewed for this article knew about the risk, I don't know. But I bet that most of the companies that end up in Google Hell have no idea that they're running a risk.
How we backstop this problem, I have no idea. It'd be hard for Google to offer support, even paid support, without creating a hole through which their algorithms could be reverse-engineered.
I'm sorry that you're bothered by my response, but I answered a specific question, called up by TFA: why does good marketing beat out good technology? It's because marketers have a specific skillset that makes it easy for them to communicate and convert sales. Of course they get what they want; they practice doing that every day, all day long.
How do I know this? I'm a marketer. I have an MBA in marketing, have managed million-dollar marketing budgets, and have launched new products for Fortune 500 companies. I've even helped engineers design good products (heck, I've written code for a variety of projects).
In all that time, I've never met anyone who said they could create a need for a product from whole cloth. Lifestyle marketing, and psychographics, are of course essential parts of marketing today, and help us target products. Targeting refers to matching a product's benefits to those in the market who will most benefit from those attributes, not some sort of mass brainwashing that leaves the masses walking down the streets, arms outstretched in front of them, eyes fixed in the distance, moaning "iiiiiPoooods, muuuuusstttt haaaaavvve iiiiiiPooooods."
Understanding lifestyles, demographics, psychographics, and other behavior measures allows us to develop new products too, by putting together constellations of attributes that may indicate emergent unsatisfied needs and wants. This isn't brainwashing either; it's just listening.
Of course, there are unscrupulous marketers out there. From TFA, we see unscrupulous marketers and executives and engineers putting out bad products that simply don't work. That's wrong and should stop, and, typically the market punishes bad products. In what TFA describes, the market isn't punishing bad products because people in the market are unable to assess the difference between good and bad. For a lot of tech products, the vast majority of people can't tell the difference. Consumers generally look, as TFA asserts, for signals to product quality. A consumer looking to buy a charcoal grill for this summer may check out how heavy the grill's construction is, to determine if it'll last -- that's a signal for quality. A consumer looking to buy a firewall... what's the signal there? There is none. Frankly, the people marketing good technology products have to figure out how to communicate simple signals for quality. A label indicating certification, such as the UL or Good Housekeeping labels, is often a way to do this (it's not obvious to me who should certify security products).
The same thing is true in the office -- management is looking for signals. Those may be in your memos, reports, and spreadsheets, some set of words and information that suggests that you know what you're talking about and understand the business needs. They may be in how you comport yourself -- I recently saw a guy pitch a good product to a few angel investors who spent the next week laughing at him because he came off as such a nutcase; since the product was outside of their expertise, they didn't consider it any further because the guy didn't appear credible. After he appeared non-credible, it didn't matter what else valid he said. Look for the signals that management expects.
Yes, marketing people are evil droids, bent on the destruction of all that is good and effective. Oh wait, they're probably not.
The issue with going up against marketing is simple: a marketers job is to figure out what their marketing targets expect and need, and then communicate with those targets in a meaningful way. That's all they do. Don't be surprised that they can influence people whom engineering can't; engineers' job isn't to discover needs and influence.
The article pretty much explains why what you see happens, happens: it's difficult for non-specialist engineers to assess the quality of technical products. The result is that these non-specialist engineers assess products based on criteria other than those on which these products should be assessed.
That means that the challenge is to bring the important criteria to the fore for your target audience. And that's a very specialized skill; it's called marketing.
But it's not $100 more than a 360. Why? Early adopters already have a 360. The marginal cost of having a 360 tomorrow is... $0. The marginal cost of having a PS3 tomorrow is... $600-ish. So it stops being an either/or question, and it starts being an and question. Why should I have a 360 and a PS3? The answer of why you should have a 360 and a Wii is obvious -- they're completely differentiated. The difference between the 360 and the PS3 is... a few exclusives, Blu-Ray, no XBox Live.
The marginal value to the consumer of their potential new PS3 is just the value placed on the specific games (at added cost) and the Blu-Ray -- not HD visuals, which they already get with the 360. Do consumers really value the PS3's added features highly? Compare the PS3 to $600 in new XBox 360 games. Which gives you more marginal happiness? Unless you're committed to a PS3-exclusive title, the answer is almost certainly $600 worth of games (whose online play you've already paid for).
Yes, you're right, it'll be torture down the road when the big exclusives come out (if they come out). And then all of the serious gamers and other early adopters who have passed up the PS3 will buy one. Just they'll do it at $299.
Add it all up, and I think you get about 3mm shipments in the iPhone's first year on the market -- a lot less than 5, but a start.
Umm... the product has as much storage as the iPod nano, the best-selling of all iPod models, plus a snazzy new interface. Hard to do? Maybe. Looks like they did it.
The price drop definitely indicates that they're in trouble, but it may not be as big of a panic move as it looks. Cutting prices can be good, because it can cause you to sell larger volumes. What does moving a bigger volume get you, if you're losing money on each unit? Well, it can mean that you get to breakeven *faster*, if your costs vary with volume.
The PS3 uses a lot of cutting-edge parts, and cutting-edge tech parts generally get cheaper the more of them you make. This is partially because you get what economists call Economies of Scale, which is when you save money from making larger quantities -- savings that typically come from things like having factories that run more efficiently at higher capacities, and lower cost per unit for raw materials and parts when bought in bulk. This is also partially because you move along the experience curve, which basically means that "the more widgets you make, the more you get good at making widgets." (The experience curve, which is more focused on units, is different than the learning curve, which is more focused on time). So, if Sony can drive volume with its cost cuts, then they can get economies of scale and of learning, and perhaps cut the cost to produce each console.
The PS3 is also carrying a substantial cost that is related only to the start-up of the operation: building new factories, developing the technology, providing developer documentation, etc. These are all one-time costs that won't reoccur during the product's lifetime. These costs have to be paid off from the PS3's profits. Suppose, just to make up a number, that it cost Sony $1 billion to start up production. Right now Sony's shipped about 2 million PS3s. To break even on their start-up cost, $500 from each machine sold needs to go to pay off start-up costs. If the price cut causes Sony to sell 10 million, then each unit has to pay off only $100 worth of start-up costs. That's a lot more achievable number, even if you're only talking about a $300 ticket, than $500 is on a $500 ticket. Obviously, Sony is planning to sell a lot more than 10 million PS3s, but, the longer it takes to pay off its start-up costs, the more interest it has to pay on the money it borrowed to develop the product.[*] Clearly, selling a higher volume of units will help spread out the start-up cost across more units and make it easier to break even on each one.
Volume also helps Sony's other customers -- the developers. The more units are out there, the more units of a new game a developer can sell. Sony needs to make its PS3 ecosystem as large as possible in order to ensure that new games come out for the console a few years down the road. This is a place where volume drives volume -- the more units are out there, the more new games come out for the machine, the more people buy the machine for the games, GOTO 10.
So, Sony's probably making a volume move, not panicking. Yet.
* Technically, Sony probably won't pay off the bonds it sold to borrow the money early. More likely, it'll invest the money in a project that its managers think will make more than the 5% it's paying on the bonds. But, since putting off that project delays profits and costs money, it's all about the same in the end.
This is a nice doctrinaire statement, but in a non-perfect market there's deadweight loss from inequitable distribution of power. Taxes, regulations... if they remedy that power distribution, they replace one deadweight loss with another. As a businessowner, I can say that taxes and regulations are entirely predictable in their effects. On the other hand, when someone has more power relative to me, well, it's hard to anticipate what the effect on me will be (they could be benevolent, they could squeeze, most likely it'll be in between... but where?). As much as certain people like to say that taxes and regulations are a horrible burden, they're at worst a burden that can be planned for, and that's not really so bad if you're prepared to be smart and do some planning.
Beyond that, there's very little evidence that having more generous welfare benefits has any effect on the work choices of the vast majority of people. If it did, imagine how many lower-class white Americans would be hopping the first plane to emigrate illegally to Sweden.
This is an absolutely correct comment. There's no question that Apple had to include DRM in order to launch the iTunes Music Store. What the FA seems to say is that Apple could drop DRM at any time. Even assuming this is true, why would they be the first to go DRM-less? Let someone else take the risk that the music labels will go ballistic. Let someone else take the risk that the DRM-free music ends up on all the peer-to-peer networks. Maybe none of that will happen -- certainly we all hope it won't. But Apple has the #1 music store out there, by a lot. There's no reason they need to be the one to take the risk. They can wait for someone else to prove to the big labels that DRM-free music is good (eMusic is proving this to small labels). Then we'll see Apple switch quite quickly.
It's all much ado over nothing.
Sure, clamshell has won out at the consumer level, but how many clamshell smartphones do you see out there? Sure, there's the Nokia 9000 series, but virtually every smartphone is either candybar or candybar with a slide-out keyboard. Smartphone users have shown themselves prepared to accept the candybar form-factor, and that's the target market for this product.
Perhaps this is because of the advantages that candybar offers for some applications. Basically the entire interface on the iPhone would've been impossible if it had two smaller screens rather than one large screen. The Nintendo DS is a great gaming machine but I'm not sure that I'm interested in using its two screens togther to watch Pirates of the Caribbean.
Hipsters have also embraced the candybar, with the Hiptop and Sidekick. That's much more the price point of the iPhone.
It's also important to note that the latest successful clamshell phones -- especially the RAZR -- have been dramatically thinner. It's much harder to make thin with all of the widgets and gadgets that need to go into a smartphone. Apple delivered on thin, which is clearly desired by all market segments.
The "crappy" Cingular network is a common complaint against the phone. One thing to note is that Cingular has never crippled its phones, which was key to Apple here -- as fast as Verizon's network may be, they charge for every feature use, and that would have killed the iPhone. So this is a big win for most users, including those who want to install apps.
Also, the network isn't that bad. Compared to other USA networks, coverage is about the same, and nobody offers the data speed that you can get on other continents. Worry about service more if Apple chooses a crappy European carrier. Cingular and T-Mobile were the only possible US choices for national coverage with GSM, and both are about equal in what they offer.
Back to installing apps: it's not clear if the OS X on the iPhone is similar to the desktop version, if it is, that's a killer app. The creative and executive types who will shell out for this kind of thing would much rather install something they already use on their desktop than some application designed just for the phone. Half of the effort expended in selecting and using a smartphone is finding applications that allow productivity on the phone while syncing in some way with the desktop. If Apple made it possible to run OS X apps on this phone -- and I actually think they didn't, but that's another discussion entirely -- that fixes an entire class of problems that smartphone users have, whether or not other phones offer downloadable applications.
You're right to point out that the iPhone isn't that innovative. It does few things that my Treo doesn't do, or that a Windows Smartphone, Blackberry, Blackjack, etc., don't do. But it seems to do them more easily and smoothly, as well as looking better while it does them. That's a good selling proposition.
Most large corporations with divisions that have multiple products have something known as "internal transfer prices" -- the price that one division charges another division for the product it produces. Transfer prices aren't play money; when one division buys from another division, that money moves from one division's budget to another division's budget -- it disappears just as completely as if a check were cut to an external vendor. So, in this case, the AdWords revenues go up by the transfer price and, say, the Docs and Spreadsheet expenses go up by that price as well. It may seem like play money, but, for everybody below Executive VP level, those are probably two completely different budgets. To Sergey and Larry, sure, it's moving money from their right pocket to their left, but for their employees it's money out of their department or division's budget. The folks in charge of AdWords are highly incentivized by their bottom line to get as much money as possible from Maps, Blogger, etc.
Transfer prices are sometimes mildly discounted in order to provide some incentive for companies to use internal vendors, but there's about 40 years of very clear business history that shows that artifically discounting transfer prices in order to keep your divisions buying internally is really awful for both the buying and selling division (see: just about all of US heavy industry since 1970). As a matter of practice, it's unlikely that Google's various divisions would get a very discounted internal transfer price just on that basis. Beyond that, it's clear that AdWords's main limitation is space inventory -- they could sell more ads, they just don't have any place to put them. That's why Google has their new radio advertising program, and that's why a lot of people think that they bought YouTube. So, AdWords is unlikely to discount their internal transfer price based on this as well. Heck, if other Google divisions complain, this is just a good way for AdWords execs to say "give us more resources to expand our advertising inventory, then we can make all the other divisions happy."
So, anyway, yes they have to pay for it, and it's likely they pay full price.
I had the same experience, bad digestion problems eventually driving me to a series of doctors. The GI I saw also diagnosed me with IBS and prescribed me some pills that I could take every day for the rest of my life and maybe feel a little better.
Then, following a friend's advice, I went to see an allergist, who said, hey, it sounds like you have food allergies! I got tested, I learned what I was allergic to, and now I've modified my diet so that I don't spend 2/3 of my waking hours on the can.
The lesson? Doctors know a lot about their specialty, and specialties are becoming increasingly vertical as knowledge increases. I had a fancy health plan that let me self-refer to both specialists; I wonder what would have happened if I'd had a relationship with a family practitioner whom I had seen twice a year since I got out of college. Would that doctor have been smart enough to say "you may have x or y, let's do these things to see which you have?" Too bad such a thing doesn't exist in the big city anymore.
If they make you give out a SSN, there's a series of numbers that are approved for use in advertisements, etc. Check out:. html#FakeNumbers
http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/ssn/SSN-addendum
for more info on numbers you may be able to give out in lieu of your real one. Of course be careful, because in some cases giving out a false SSN can expose you to criminal penalties.
Who's keeping what in the hands of private companies?
Let's get serious here boys and girls. Governments aren't keeping the private sector out of space - in fact, there are already companies that will launch your satellite into space for a few million $$$.
You know what it took to start these companies? Billions and billions of dollars in up-front investment. You have a couple billion in your pocket? Then you can go to Mars.
Let's face it, with a couple billion lying around, most entrepreneurs would choose to invest in something else.
You'll note in this article that they tested their palette on Macs and Windows machines only. No flavors of Linux, no Solaris, no HP/UX...
Why? Because every platform has a different 256-color palette. So those Web-safe colors aren't Web-save on most X-Windowing machines anyway.
What you're probably seeing on the Mac is the much brighter gamma and, quite probably, a properly calibrated monitor. The brighter gamma makes your brights brighter and your whites whiter, plus lets you see in all those shadowy areas which are such a pain in both of those games (in fact, some Mac users I know have gamma-adjustment bound to a function key that they can use to adjust the gamma of the whole screen to ridiculously bright values so as to see in those dark corners campers seem to like).
You Windoze users can have some of the same benefit; while you can't have a high-end Mac monitor's ability to auto-adjust the color profiles based on the aging of your phosphors, and your gamut will remain ridiculously narrow because of MS's use of the sRGB colorspace, you can at least make your colors come out purty. Linux/Mac users: if you can, chose some other colorspace (CIE has a very wide gamut).
If you own/posess an Adobe product, it probably came with their gamma correction utility. Calibrate your monitor. Now. It only takes 10 minutes. Now recalibrate it every time you change your Windows theme or wallpaper. Linux users, you'll prob'ly have to futz with your video driver settings, but, hey, you like doing that kind of stuff!
If you want to see colors more clearly and vividly, change your Windows/Gnome/KDE/whatever theme to use neutral colors, such as a slightly blue gray for all of the chrome, and a gray, white, black, or very muted primary for the titlebars. Believe it or not, you percieve colors relative to other colors around them (example: pull a dark shirt out of your closet. Is it blue or black? Like most men, you've got no idea. Now put it next to some blue jeans. You can tell easily what color it is). Keep your window colors low-contrast and away from bright primary colors and you'll see much more vivid colors.
The reason that smartcards are ahead in Europe is in fact the telcos, but it's not the cost of a call: it's the fact that lines suck. Here in the US, all of our credit card machines are hooked up to regular old phone lines and dial into a bank computer to make a transaction. No information besides the account number is kept on the card; the machine verifies the checksum on the card, calls the bank, and asks if the account can handle the new purchase. This seems simple but presupposes:
1. You can always get an open line.
2. The open line will have a reasonable (i.e. you can correct for it) amount of line noise.
In much of Europe you can't count on one of those things (or couldn't until the nineties, and by then the smart card infrastructure was there). The answer? Make all credit cards smart, so that all account information is kept on them locally. Then you don't have to deal with some sketchy phone line. The smart card readers just talk to the chip on the smart card, asking it if there's enough money left on the card.
Not only does this Web designer use one-pixel gifs... pretty much every Web designer does. The reason is that browsers suck. Theoretically, by using CSS, visual presentation of information can be managed. But CSS support is horrible -- only IE 5 for Mac really has it (among released browsers at this point).
So Web designers are forced to use HTML for visual presentation of information (no, just putting it in a simple list isn't good enough -- 400 years of learning how to effectively present information says otherwise. See Edward Tufte's works FMI). And the only way to do that is to micromanage detailed issues like spacing.
But all that's moot. The worst part about this whole article is that the companies are lying to their customers about how their information is being used. There is almost no way an educated user, without the benefit of infinite time and tools, could have known to protect him- or herself from this information theft. That's why Truste needs to sue and the FTC needs to get involved. Personally, I think that the companies who did this need to be permanently banned from having a Web presence in order to set an example, but I don't know how that could be done legally.
You can do something: opt out
http://www.coremetrics.com/opt_out_ options.html
Actually, that's not true. IE 5.5 is less standards-compliant than Netscape 6 or, ironically, IE 5.0. And it's the latter that's most disturbing. They had it right; they embraced the technology. Now they're extending the technology in a proprietary way.
What's next? If Netscape is, in fact, dead, then we're in trouble. We'll depend entirely on MS to tell us what languages we can use to code on the Web (look for IE6 with... Visual Basic support!). Microsoft will, literally, control the Web.
So complain. Tell your boss. Don't install IE5.5. This is a Very Bad Thing.
I hate to tell you this, but banks are evil. I used to bank with Bank of America... they got quite a bit of coverage in the LA Times (ya know... newspaper) when it came out that they were selling customers'
-names
-contact info
-account numbers
-account balances
-social security numbers
to just about anyone out there. Needless to say they don't hold my money anymore, but the fact is that anyone could have impersonated me based on that info and gotten car loans, home loans, etc. (in fact, somebody did steal my identity to buy phone service, but I don't know for sure they got the info from BofA)
The big bad problem with not levying sales taxes on internet purchases is that counties and cities rely on sales taxes for operating budget. Let's break that down:
*We pay Income taxes to the Federal Government. Sometimes, if they're feeling friendly, they give some of that money to the state you live in. They may not give the state its population's fair share (however you define that) of the money given to all states, but some of it goes back to states. And, if the Feds are in a budget-balancing mood, they can cut those givebacks without so much as a by-your-leave.
*We pay Income taxes to the State Government. Sometimes, if they're feeling friendly, that give some of that money to the county you live in. Once again, the county may not get its fair share. Once again, the State government can balance its books on the backs of the counties.
*We pay assessments to counties and cities. These are now often capped by law or consititutional amendment.
*We pay property taxes to counties and cities. These are also often capped by law or constitutional amendment.
*We pay sales taxes. These are levied seperately by states, counties and cities (or not, depending on where you live).
That's basically our taxation structure here in the US. Of all those monies, the only ones that go directly to cities and counties -- the governments which are, after all, closest and most responsive to you -- are sales taxes, property taxes and assessments. The Internet threatens to take away 1/3 of the ability (and much more than that in dollar terms) to raise money of local government.
Let's take an example of this, in case my logic isn't clear. I live in Los Angeles (this probably makes me singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of American Civilization). In the mid-90s, Welfare Reform (a laudable goal)took away much of LA County's medical care income. At the same time, the state went into recession. The State Government kept the books balanced by sending less money from the various State taxes and assessments back to the counties. The result? A massive, multi-billion dollar budget shortfall.
That's what all local governments are in for without sales taxes. I agree, there's big trouble, federally, with the tax system we have. But let's worry about funding our communities first.
Actually, in this case, the next court of appeal _is_ the Supreme Court. And there's a trick to this: there's nothing in the law that says the Court has to hear a case appealed to it. They can simply let the lower court's order stand without comment... and that's it. End of story.In the past, the Court has not in fact chosen to hear antitrust cases. So this could be the last we hear of this.
Orpheus, Judge Jackson was not just unbiased - he was one of the best judges that MS could have drawn. Back in the mid-'90s, when the DOJ had won the initial rounds of the antitrust battle (leading to some of the behavioral remidies that have proven so feeble), the government gained an injunction against the release of Win 95. MS appealed, and the judge who drew the appeal was Jackson. Who won? Well, as you can tell from what's on your desktop, MS. That's right, you can thank old T. Penfield for the commercial availability of Win 95. I'd imagine that qualifies as pro-MS. Jackson is also a conservative judge who would normally be against government interference in commerce (unless it has to do with sex). In this case, I suspect rather strongly that MS's poor trial performance, including that rigged videotape and their incompetent expert witnesses, swayed the jurist.
As for speed, I'll bet on quick (for the justice system) myself. DOJ wants to take care of this ASAP so that the process won't get disrupted by the changover in administrations (or simply cancelled if George W. is elected). The states want to take care of this quickly so that the AGs can get famous and the statehouses can get the $$$. And MS wants to get this over with so that what we're seeing happen to their stock now doesn't happen everyday. So I imagine we'll have a final appeal this year.
This is great for Apple and for open sourcers everywhere, but let's keep track of the fact that Darwin is not OSX. Darwin is the foundation for OSX, but it lacks things like the Quartz imaging layer, Carbon and the Blue Box to run good old-fashioned Mac apps, and, of coourse, the notorious Aqua interface. Darwin has always been cross-platform (PPC and x86), it's only higher-level services that are platform-specific.
It's great that Apple is porting the code to other platforms. It will provide some basic level of interoperability and perhaps make it easier to port software (say, Adobe Photoshop) to other Darwin-based OSes. Note that I said easier, not easy. It'd probably still be a lot more fun to port SuSE apps to LinuxPPC.
What porting Darwin really does is make a good, basic POSIX-compliant BSD-like OS available for many major platforms. At the very least, it may provide some interesting ideas. But it sure don't mean that I can go out and buy some Crusoe-based laptop and run Mac OS X on it.
I did in fact get throough to their server and downloaded a couple of files. I'm at work, not near my Linux machine so I can't see if any of them are actually real files, but they seem to be out there.
Virtually all the files in their Source directory seem to be from Mandrake, just as alleged... and none of the source seems to be for anything I haven't heard of before. Where's the value-added?