Woz + Drury = International Segway Polo!
Some great photos from downunder as the Silicon Valley Aftershocks (Segway Polo!) visit New Zealand to play the Pole Blacks. Hey, the NZ Polo gang let the Segway riding maniacs onto their grounds! Steve Wozniak turned-up, much to the delight of my mate Rod – one of NZ’s hottest tech entrepreneurs.
No More Subscriptions!
Call me crazy but I decided my one new years resolution would be no more subscriptions to services or magazines.
Not a week goes by without someone asking me to "Join" of "Beta" the next better, faster, sleeker service. None ever seem to integrate. The mantra seems to be "upgrade" – read: "leave your existing service, come to mine". So, no more subscriptions for a year…
Which means, not subscribing to Google’s new hosted domain service. Interesting idea but I am not sure what value it really adds over the already pretty sleek offering from Network Solutions.
Subscription creep = complexity.
Yahoo…
Both Steve and Stowe speak to this story on Yahoo in which they say it’s not their goal to be #1 in search:
“We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”
No surprise there. Yahoo’s “life engine” brand positioning gets more to where they are going. Arguably, they’ve done a better job than Google of integrating the entire web 2.0 suite. And that’s how I use them. My customized portal is of as much value to me as the utility of Google. Frankly, none of Google’s products other than search have wowed me. Google Earth was like fun for a day. But I’ve found the reverse to be true for Yahoo!
I’m not about to make any declarative statements about giving up on Yahoo!. What is telling is the relationship between the CMO and Google vs. Yahoo – at least the CMO of a start-up. I look at Adsense every couple of days. They suck my marketing budget up like an out-of-control Dyson vacuum cleaner. And of all the marketing vendors they are the only one to demonstrate a very real, automated correlation between investment and results. Yahoo simply isn’t there with them.
What is catching my attention as a CMO are all the other search options coming my way – companies like SLI Systems and Eurekster for instance. We tend to always view the battle as being between giants. More than often innovation happens at the edges of the market – that’s how Google snuck-up on Yahoo and I have no doubt that Google will inevitably be challenged by upstarts.
So, even if my thesis holds true, it will be interesting to see how they monetize the life-engine position in the future. Google’s competitive weapon isn’t just the utility of search, but all so the utility of their advertising engine.
Disclosure: Yahoo! is a customer of LogLogic where I am CMO.
Media Extensibility
The power of the media coupled with the power of participatory communications can be a wicked thing.
I’ve been waiting eagerly to see the first reviews on the new Windows Treo and if there is one review to wait for, it is Walt Mossberg’s. His brutal, but polite, honesty is to be admired. The cascade effect of his review can be witnessed over at BuzzMachine. Today, rather than the echo of a negative review being solely restricted to word of mouth – or a “did you see that” – it is a case of “did you read, see, hear that” as well. The echo isn’t just louder, it has more depth.
I wonder what effect this will have over time on the theory of “Chasm Crossing” (a theory I passionately beleive in). In the past the power of PC Magazine and Walt were absolute. They made and killed product in a couple of pages. Now I can triangulate news quicker – not just listening to the reviewer but also the early adopter. This has definitely changed the mechanics of “Chasm Crossing” – it might have even altered the concept.
One thing that many of these reviews fail to focus on is the ecosystem that surrounds a device of this kind. I recently bought one of the new Blackberry’s. The device itself is nice, although the lack of camera and WiFi is annoying. What isn’t nice is the absolutely archaic email service that a consumer has to use to collect and forward emails. The automated deletion of emails on the server once they are deleted on the device rarely works and so you pretty quickly are unable to recieve emails until getting to a PC and browser.
To make things work, Blackberry’s world is a Windows world. The mail interface works inconsistently across platforms, only working well on Internet Explorer.
And, Cingular is still stumped as to why the International roaming capability works OK in some places and not at all in others (I know this will result in a conversation about replacing my SIM card – meaning the problem is unique to my device).
Finally, the lack of applications for the Blackberry is really apparent. I got used to all kinds of useful apps on my Treo and Sony phone. There are very few for the Blackberry and those that are there aren’t priced to move.
I was ready to give the new Treo a shot but I’m going to wait. Triangulating the news has convinced me again not to be an early adopter.
Biting The DRM Dust
David was glad to see Dave Winer say that, in his opinion, the problems people were having with their iPods and iTunes are DRM-related. I was glad to see David get into the issue of what the “R” in DRM really means. It means restrictions.
Until CDs vanish, I continue to buy my albumns via amazon or BN. If I ever want a single track, I’ll maybe use iTunes. The reason is simple – I want to own the music. Really own the music. David raises some fair questions related to this:
- Buy someone a specific song through an online music store the way you might buy someone a CD? You can’t and pretty soon, once CDs are gone (and they will be), we won’t be able to buy each other music (you can and will be able to buy gift certificates to online music stores…. but how impersonal is that?)
- Down the road, when there are no more CDs and all music is bought online, pass your life’s music collection onto someone else when you die (the way you can LPs and CDs today)? You can’t.
Something to think about as you drool all over that iPod Nano.
