June 23, 2008
Earthshatteringly bad service from Earthlink
It took over 5 hours to recover from an expired domain name. The experience with Earthlink was one of the worst customer experiences I've had in my life, and I can't remember the other ones.
The domain had been my primary web and email address for 10 years. It took me a few days to realize that the problem was the domain, not just an email delivery problem. Once I realized the problem was with the domain, I looked up the domain on whois and saw that it was registered at register.com.
Then came a comedy of redirection. I called Register, who sent me to their partner division, who sent to Earthlink, who sent me back to Register, who sent me back to Earthlink again. Each of these episodes involved long waits on hold. The last Register clerk who sent me to Earthlink a second time was extremely patient and volunteered to stay on the line while I talked to the Earthlink folk who denied I was registered through them.
This time the Earthlink clerk recognized the registration. But she was unwilling to give me any information about the account unless I provided her with the credit card number I used to register the account a decade ago. I don't know about you but I save financial information for 7 years, which is the recommendation for tax purposes. Finally she referred me to another number. She wouldn't explain why, or what the other number was. I stayed on hold at that number for 30 minutes, then gave up and tried Earthlink chat.
Finally, the chat clerk explained what the problem was. The number was a collections agency. Apparently I had owed money to Earthlink (even though my records showed that I had been paying them regularly). Another side trip to the billing department at Earthlink who confirmed that I was paid up. A re-visit to Earthlink chat. Now, the clerk identified that there were *two* accounts, one of which was delinquent (I hadn't gotten any notices that I remembered). But he couldn't give me any more help unless I remembered the decade-old credit card. He was about to invoke a supervisor confirmation procedure that would take another day to verify my identity.
But then I had an epiphany. Amazon.com to the rescue!!! I realized that I'd been buying stuff from Amazon for a decade. I looked up the history of my Amazon account. Lo and behold, there were the 10 year old credit card numbers. At this point, Earthlink's computer system went down and I needed to call back 30 minutes later. Finally, they were able to look up my account, and sent me to the collections people with instructions to get a confirmation number once I had paid my bill.
By this time, the collections office was really closed (they hadn't picked up the phone earlier when they were supposedly open). I tried them in the morning, the first minute they opened, and someone answered the phone. They confirmed that my account was paid up. They couldn't give me a confirmation number, since I didn't owe any money. To get out of the catch 22, I offered to pay them just to get a confirmation number. The supervisor discovered a fee of $50 (real or fictional, I'm not sure), and I used this to ransom the confirmation number.
Then I called back Earthlink, gave them the number, and was ready to renew the domain. Ok, in order to renew your domain, you need to transfer the hosting to us, said the clerk. Oh, no I don't. It took a few steps of back and forth to cause them to renew my domain name without getting their hosting services which I very definitively did not want. I gave them a new credit card, and paid $30, which is $20 more than the going rate.
A couple of hours later, alevin.com was back in service. But that wasn't even the end. I got an email from them, saying that my credit card had been rejected. They hadn't used the new credit card number I gave them, but the 10 year old number that had been expired for years. I gave them the current credit card number, again.
I think I registered the domain with Mindspring, back in the day, when they were good. Earthlink bought mindspring and went through years of turmoil and decline. Now they have acheived a level of customer service that is dramatically awful.
In 30 days, I can transfer the domain to some other registrar and be rid of Earthlink forever.
October 24, 2007
Are you related to Strom Thurmond?
Liz Henry just pointed out a creepy looking web service that will tell you >a href="http://www.genetree.com/">who you are related to. Like, perhaps, the letter carrier or Thomas Jefferson.
They could support themselves with ads from divorce lawyers.
She's Geeky
This week, I went to She's Geeky, an unconference for women in technology. There were sessions on topics technical, organizational, entrepreneurial, and personal.
One interesting session was on managing groups of men. The conversation dealt with some of the style differences between women and men, the list below comes from that session and some others that dealt with the topic:
* women communicate by telling stories that put the issue into context; men are more likely communicate with bullet points and arguments
* women often try to lead conversations by asking questions and getting others to contribute; this can be read as weakness
* decisiveness and strong opinions from women can be read as bitchiness. People varied in their reaction to this, ranging from "claim your inner bitch" to "learn to respect people with alternative skills and styles"
* see above: women may care too much about what other people think about them.
* women sometimes have trouble saying no; there was a whole session on the topic that I didn't go to.
* on the whole, more men believe they're above average, and more women believe they are below average (think about this for a moment...) women need to learn to filter men's boasts when they aren't matched by reality, realize their own competence, and get safe support to build confidence.
There were also some rather unfunny stories of traditional sexism: the only female engineer in a group being asked to decorate a new office; a woman who found she was making less than similarly qualified men; a woman executive being asked to regularly provide fashion advice to her CEO (and she seemed to feel obligated to do it). (I suggested that she refer him to the neiman marcus personal shopping service.
October 15, 2007
SHDH
At SuperHappyDevHouse20, I worked on a couple of projects to make tools for peer organizing. More notes when I have time to blog..
September 16, 2007
The Box
Last post's exploration of "the way things work" was "Infrastructure", Brian Hayes' photo survey of industrial infrastructure. This week's episode of "Richard-Scarry-for-grownups" is The Box, by former Economist editor Marc Levinson, which delves into the history of container shipping.
The Box is compelling history of things and people. It dives into the details of industry structure, finance and technology and assembles an intricate picture of transformative change. And recounts the adventures of the competing entrepreneurs racing to get the system working, beat competition, and outwit regulation.
Container shipping appears inevitable from the perspective of technological determinism. Boxes, trains, trucks, motorized ships, cranes, none of the technology was dramatically new. Container systems had been tried in the railroad shipping since the 1920s. The old system, where each item needed to be loaded, unloaded, and reloaded with manual labor, was costly and slow. But, a clear view is not the same as a short distance, to quote Paul Saffo.
The incumbent industry had strong incentives to preserve the status quo. Shipping, trucking, and trains were regulated industries with centrally set prices and terms of service, established cartels, and a focus on the mechanics rather than on the service of transport. It took an innovative entrepreneur and some well-timed government handouts to break the logjam. Malcom McLean, a trucking magnate, envisioned the system in his minds eye, drove the engineering for the interlocking containers and the fast-loading cranes, put together aggressive debt financing, and benefited from the US government's giveaway of WWII surplus transport ships. Far-sighted port agencies in New Jersey, Long Beach, and Singapore invested heavily in container ports, securing early leads. When change came, it was rapid. Levinson writes, "Three years after containerships first sailed to Europe, only two American companies were still operating breakbulk ships across the North Atlantic."
But even the folks who saw change coming had very imperfect foresight. Many cities invested in ports, but only a few succeeded, and others invested heavily without return. After making a fortune in his first container ventures, McLean himself bet badly, on a fast, fuel-guzzling container ship that hit the market during the 1970s oil crisis, then on a huge slow ship that was introduced just in time for the 80s oil price crash. From a distance, the transition to container shipping seems orderly and logical, like water flowing downhill. Close up, it's rapids.
And its attention to evidence shows a more complicated picture of the relationship between labor, capital, and government than would be predicted by ideology. Much economic writing in the popular press has a clear ideological slant. The free market generates the most efficient economic outcomes, while regulation, government subsidy, and labor protection reduce economic growth. Alternatively, regulations protect against excessive corporate power, subsidies protect infant industries and local economies, and unions empower workers.
Levinson's history of the rise of container shipping uncovers a more mixed and subtle story. The early innovators in container shipping got a jumpstart from a government fire sale of surplus WWII ships. WIthout the gift of lowcost ships, the capital costs of ships would have been higher than the entrepreneurs could carry. Early on, some port cities and agencies invested heavily in the creation of container ports. The government investment paid off spectacularly well for some, and badly for others.
At the same time, the shipping, trucking,and rail industries were highly regulated. Players were attuned to manipulating the regulatory agency rather than competing. Much later on, the successful container industry helped drive deregulation. Levinson doesn't touch the reasons that the railroads got regulated in the first place; they had been an overly powerful oligopoly that abused their market power. So, when does it make sense for government to subsidize or regulate industry? Sometimes, in the cases of early industries, very high capital investments, and to combat market power. And sometimes regulations and subsidies outlive their usefulness.
The biggest expense in shipping was not the transport itself, but the repeated loading and unloading of every item. Longshoreman's unions arose to protect workers against an abusive contingent labor system, where workers scrambled every day for the chance to unload the days ships. The union policies provided steady work, but also created work rules that mandated more workers than were needed to do the job. The longshoreman protested containerization vehemently. In some regions, protracted labor conflicts kept the port from adapting to the new technology; by the time the union lost, the container ports had been set up elsewhere. But in the US west coast, the union negotiated a settlement where longshoremen whose jobs were made obsolete received retirement payouts. The benefit of containerization was shared with the workers.
The Box tells a story that is more complicated than an ideolog would prefer. Unions and government actions are sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful, and helpful structures can outlive their usefulness and need replacing.
March 17, 2007
Freedom from Cingular
So, it sounds like Cingular and other phone companies have been blocking calls to Freeconference.com>
I am very eager to try the Nokia E61i with wifi, and to see what the OpenMoko project comes up with. How long til someone sells voip phones for $49 in cities with good public net? Tony Bowden, a Socialtext colleague who lives in Estonia which has great wifi, was tryign the skype phone approach. Wonder how that was going.
January 28, 2007
Speaking of followup, muni wireless
installations have been around for long enough to come back and test which ones are working. Novarum, a consultancy specializing in wireless broadband, has gotten behind the hype and the skepticism, and tested muni wireless networks by coverage and speed. The best rated system were Saint Cloud Florida and Mountain View (which worked when I was there). The first thing to note is that according to the study, some of them actually do seem to work. Second, reasonable performance depends on more transmitters; early estimates recommended 20 transmitters per square mile, but it appears as though 40 are needed for adequate performance.
Novarum also ranked the cellular broadband networks, and included them in an overall ranking with the wifi nets. The Saint Cloud net came in first overall, and the Google Mountain View net came in number ten on the combined list. The cellular nets rank better because they have better coverage. Wifi nets, when you can get them, are faster than cellular.
One puzzlement is that Palo Alto appears on the wireless list, ranked number 8, at 2.45 on a scale of 5. On the University drag, there are plenty of locations offering free wifi, but what is the muni offering? Is it the lame Anchorfree service that has poor connectivity and a horridly annoying registration system? If that's the case, then it's below the cutoff where a rational person would consider the system to "work." Santa Clara is above it, ranked at 2.65. A field trip may be in order for some anecdotal testing. I wonder where in the Santa Clara sprawl the network is to be found?
What was the population in the survey? Hard to say. To build that top 10 list, how many citiies did they visit. Ten? Fifty? They don't say on their website. This makes it impossible to draw conclusions about the overall state of muni wireless investments.
Novarum plans to come back in six months to test again.
January 14, 2007
Scott Rosenberg on software development
Caught author interview with Scott Rosenberg, about his new book about the Chandler project and software development. I like Rosenberg's writing, but I haven't read the book yet.
From the interview, Rosenberg sees Chandler's failure-to-thrive as a cautionary tale about all software development. However, Chandler actually had a distinctively awkward set of initial conditions:
* architecture driven. They had a grand vision of a message-based storage model that they needed to get perfect before they did anything
* clearer vision of architecture than application. Reading Chandler's material, there was no clearly articulated goal beyond a free clone of Outlook (though that alone wouldn't have been a bad thing)
* infinite budget. Open source, with a wealthy funder. No economic constraints or time pressure to keep them on the straight and narrow. No personal itch-scratching, unlike the classic open source story.
Plenty of software projects fail because they don't adhere to the logical set of constraints. Chandler started without the constraints.
It's a phone
Steve Jobs first big applause line in the iPod speach was "it's a phone". The second was "you can hear voicemail in the order you choose.
The "smartphone" trend all about using a phone for everything but making phone calls and listening to voice mail. A naive focus on technology, competitive advantage, or customer requests all leads engineers and marketers to stuff more features into the phone and neglect what the user is really trying to do.
I'd like a version of the iPhone with really big keys with indented numbers so you can dial with fractional attention. Use the keypad to protect that beautiful, fragile-looking screen.
Summary: It looks gorgeous, and I want one:
* when I can add my own software
* after the model gets introduced that doesn't break in less than 30 days
December 31, 2006
Blog catchup: Peterme insight
From an October 11 post about a BayCHI event, two interesting insights:
- There are no good user research methods of emergent behavior. Cross this with Rashmi Sinha's classic on design patterns for social sharing and I'll bet you could come up with some handy metrics.
- What do we deliver in a world of ever-evolving designs?... contemporary systems seem to live in perpetual beta, that they continually release new features, functionality, and interface designs, and, well, what do we do about that?. It's not just about "endless beta", the convention for communicating that things might be evolving (good) or buggy (bad). It's about the spread of agile methods, where services are designed and developed in smaller chunks. Peter acknowledges that the trend poses a challenge for design firms used to working on big bang redesigns and long-cycle product development. This is true in my experience; it's hard to hire outside consultants unless they are willing to "go native and work closely with the client across the multiple small iterations of a longer design cycle.
Vista late adopter
Shoplifting is a problem for stores. The logical solution? Retail stores require that all clothing and bag makers redesign the pockets, handbags, and backpacks. If you try to steal something, an alarm goes off when you try to leave the store. If someone, somewhere has figured out how to steal using your model of backpack, then your backpack will stop opening til you get it fixed. Want to go shopping? You need to buy a new bag. Is there a bug in the store's system? You can't put your hands in your pockets.
This is Microsoft's approach to DRM. In the interests of protecting content providers, Microsoft requires peripheral vendors to support DRM. This widely discussed essay talks about the various vulnerabilities and anti-features of Vista DRM support. Microsoft can disable or degrade your peripheral if somebody somewhere has compromised your driver. If you want to play DRM content, Vista requires all of your peripherals to support DRM, so you need all new display, speakers, etc. The hardware DRM means a step backward, away from universal drivers toward device-specific drivers In all, it sounds like Vista makes your system unreliable and cumbersome, in the interest of protecting content providers.
Given these risks, I'm not going to get Vista any time soon on my own computers. I'll wait til the experience of millions of others demonstrates whether it's as burdensome and flaky as it sounds like it might be.
November 26, 2006
Helpful egovernment tools
Some pleasant discoveries in a weekend with lots of electronic and physical housekeeping. Travis County, Texas hadn't figured out that I'd moved to California, and sent a jury duty notice. They also had a nifty online application that lets you tell them you've moved and are no longer eligible. Palo Alto's traffic citation system doesn't let you pay fines online, but there's a reasonably sane automated voice system to pay a traffic ticket with a credit card. They charge a very annoying $12 fee to pay the ticket online, but avoiding an hour-long errand is worth it. I don't mind paying for decent services with taxes or fees; it's just that the gov't is probably saving money when citizens do their own data entry.
September 18, 2006
Georesearch in realtime
Yesterday, I came home after a bike ride and was able to find answers on the internet to my questions about the wildlife and places I saw on the ride. In 1998, the last time I'd gone out (running) in the same landscape, the information wasn't on the net yet. It would have taken hours of research and travel to find the same information. The internet is a thing of wonder.
Jon Udell fantasizes about being about to have geo-information available immediately, as you experience the landscape. That would be both cool and horrid. The reason I put a blackberry in the drawer is that it intruded into experience. I'd go for a walk on a sunny day and see email, not trees and flowers.
It's one thing to see mysterious weathered structures in a marsh, and an odd-looking drawbridge that looks like it rotates sideways, and rush-like plants growing at the side of the water, and observe variations in the color of pools, another thing to learn about the abandoned town, and the man who tended the drawbridge, the ecosystem that depends on those plants, the salt concentrations and microorganisms that influence the color of the water. I didn't need all that information right while cycling, the salty breeze and the landscape was plenty.
Wordsworth defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility. A corrolary -- you're not writing the poem while in the midst of the emotion and sensation. I think it would be great to be able to bookmark a landscape, and come back to learn about it later, and not forget. Being able to look the landscape up later is enough cyborg for me.
Status?
Dale at O'Reilly is uncomfortable with a ">citation of Make Magazine in an article on status. The article's hypothesis is that people acquire craft skills in order to show off and be superior to others. Dale feels that creative people make things to please themselves. Both of these miss a third perspective -- creativity as a gift. How often do creative people make something in order to please others? Cooking is surely like that. I'm more motivated to undertake a creative project if there's someone who will enjoy and appreciate it. It's about making the other person feel happer, not smaller.
August 28, 2006
Bar Camp Stanford
BarCamp Stanford was fun, with some cool hacks, enjoyable people, and maybe some useful organizing. The very pleasant location at Stanford had glass doors open to a green view and perfect weather.
Blog posts here will be completely anecdotal focusing on ThingsILearned rather than reporting.
Bar Camp: Attention tools
Went to a session on capturing attention stream. There are three ways this could potentially be useful; we talked about two of them; for the individual and for marketers. For the individual, it could be cool, but have the potential to add to synchronous overload (popping up recommendations when you are trying to concentrate) and asynchronous overload (giving you even more things to sift through and file). It would be a gold mine for marketers, but needs a high level of shared consent to avoid yet another dimension of creepiness to the surveillance society.
Looked at tools including Root Vaults and Posted by alevin at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 01, 2006
Movable Type Upgrade
If this entry posts correctly, I've upgraded Movable Type. The process isn't all done yet. The cms templates are somewhat messed up, I need to delete over 10,000 spam comments from the last several weeks, and need to install a new comment utility.
UPDATE: The cms template just needed a shift-refresh, and the spam comments are gone. Woo hoo! If you made a comment in the last six weeks ago, it got caught in a spring cleaning frenzy. Feel free to comment again.
April 30, 2006
Heading off to Women 2.0
It's cool to be somewhere where there are multiple events for women entrepreneurs. Will blog about the program when done.
One nice touch for networking -- the lunch is after the talks, the better for conversation-starting. It's more awkward to mill around with a group of strangers, and then, by the time you have more things to talk about, everybody leaves
April 06, 2006
Popularity can't ruin open source
I am glad to see that this this LinuxWorld articlecontains plenty of quotes countering Forrester Analyst Michael Goulde's report: "Vendors Refine Their Open Source Strategies/The Risk of Subverting Open Source Freedoms Mounts".
Goulde argues that "The traditional open source project with a large community and volunteer contributors is going to be diluted by extensive vendor participation," he told LinuxInsider in an interview."
What Goulde is missing is that fast that in the open source ecosystem, a very high percentage of projects fail. Most projects, whether initiated by individuals or vendors, don't get much contribution and die a quiet death. That's nothing new. If new vendors release open source projects that are not interesting to developers, then those projects won't get community participation. A tree fell in the forest and nobody heard.
His other argument makes even less sense. He writes in the report: "As major software suppliers adopt open source software as part of their strategies, the risk increases that the goals of the open source movement -- user freedom to use, modify, and distribute software -- will be undermined."
But the freedom to modify is in the license, not in the promise by the vendor. If a vendor open sources a product, it uses either GPL, or BSD, or some other style of license that grants permission to modify, and requires redistribution to be credited or to be also open source. Once the vendor releases the software, they can't take it back. Even if they offer new software under a different license, the community is now free to fork the code.
Wikiwyg -- the wysiwyg editor for wikis that was initially developed by Socialtext and released open source, is getting a increasing number of useful patches and bugfixes from the community. People find it useful, it's being adopted, and developers are contributing. The right to modify and redistribute is protected by LGPL.
If a vendor releases software that's useful, the community will pick it up. If it's less useful, it will get less traction. Projects might pick up interest as they mature, or lose interest if the software diverges from what the community wants. All of these patterns are common.
Rather than describing risks to open source, Gould might have described risks to vendors. If vendors hope that simply by opensourcing their code, they are guaranteed developer interest, they are sadly deluded. Just like any other product, an open source product needs to meet the needs of its customers -- in this case, open source developers -- in order to be successful.
March 25, 2006
Les Orchard on ajax portals
On the topic of portals reincarnated with ajax "I never wanted portals to be more dynamic, or even open to third-party-authored widgets - I wanted them to go away altogether."
January 07, 2006
Yes, Google Video is Evil
Google gives the content industries freedom to set their own prices, starting with Free. This will be popular with content providers, who hate Apple because Steve Jobs insists on setting his own prices for online music and video.
But Google does not allow video producers to set their own terms of use. Google Video has their very own, proprietary DRM that doesn't let users save the video to their PC or portable players. No time-shifting, space-shifting, excerpting, or other hallmarks of fair use. Fair use is forbidden according to Google's support documentation.
If Google wanted to be Not Evil, it would allow video producers the choice of providing content in DRM-encumbered or DRM-free formats. Video providers who wanted to allow users to download, time-shift, excerpt, and mash-up would be able to do so. Video producers who want to restrict content could do so too. If restricted content loses viewers to sources with more convenient terms, that would be neither here nor there to Google.
Many video producers who upload their content to Google Video are small non-commercial players, or obscure sources like this sushi documentary that have much more to gain from exposure than from restricting use.
Google gets a very small bye for beta -- maybe giving content providers their choice of format is a soon-to-come future feature. If not, Google Video really is evil.
Aggregated shopping
Donata.com writes about auto advertisers shifting budget from tv and print ads to the internet. He's predicting a new trend in online advertising, away from search context ads (Google) and an unstructured database (Craigslist), and toward structured, decentralized, XML-based ads. In this model, each dealer would post their list of available cars, with price and options. Now, there are already a plenty of centralized aggregator services. Froogle can find you deals on desk lamps and rain boots. If Froogle let users subscribe to a search by RSS, that would be a long way toward the vision.
December 25, 2005
Smart textile remote control
Maggie Orth's International Fashion Machines is marketing a fuzzy light switch. Touching the pompom completes the circuit and turns on/off the light.
A fuzzy switch is kind of nifty if you don't have little kids with sticky fingers. But it's not that different from a regular switch that you need to get up to flip.
What would be really nifty is a fabric household remote control. Touch bits of fuzz or parts of a colorful pattern to could turn on/off lights, heating/air conditioning, stereo, run the bath. The trigger could be a soft press, or a bounce for the playful. It could be a fuzzy desk toy, a mousepad like desk accessory, or a watch band.
It will be especially fun when these are available as kits, and 8-12 year old kids will be able to make them as crafts projects.
October 23, 2005
Telcos prevent customer satisfaction
Last week's WSJ reported that "Several large telephone and cable companies are starting to make it harder for consumers to use the Internet for phone calls or swapping video files." Surely, the best strategy that a business can take when faced with booming customer demand is to reduce what it offers to customers.
The incumbent telcos and content companies have the same problem -- they'd rather protect their obsolete business models than to see what customers want now and provide it.
October 10, 2005
This is so delightfully evil...
Clocky, an alarm clock that rolls off the sideboard and hides when you swat it.
Just won an well-deserved Ignobel Prize.
September 25, 2005
Someday when Apple merges with Disney
On that day, Disney will license all of its content with creative commons licenses, and offer Disney fans a set of creative tools to remix video, and retell stories, and create games, and resell the content they create using Disney raw materials....
Then Disney stories will return to the folk art roots from which they started, and fans young and old will multiply the time they spend with Disney stories and characters by a factor of several, and the market for creative tools and accessories will grow.
Today this is but a fairy tale. Second Life, the creative stepchild of the entertainment business, is enabling the creation fo a secondary market in player-created game content. The stepchild of the entertainment business is misunderstood and despised by its elder sisters, but it will be queen someday.
September 20, 2005
What's Google doing with that fiber?
Om Malik speculates that Google is building a nationwide fiber network, will use wifi at endpoints to reach users, and then use location-awareness to turbo-charge ads.
The dots to connect are:
* Google has been quietly buying up dark fiber around the country
* Google is working with a small startup in San Francisco that has software for location-based services at wifi hotspots
* Google just launched Google Talk, a text and voice messaging client.
* Google spends a lot of money on IP transit fees, and could avoid those fees by sharing traffic directly with ISPs.
If that's what Google is doing -- wow. Google is very good at building very big, low-cost computing systems. The network incumbents have an inflated cost structure and a business model based on lobbying for competitive advantage. Some smart capital investment could free vast potential energy in communication services. This could go kaboom.
September 17, 2005
von Hippel's "lead users" vs. Goeffrey Moore's Visionaries
Michael Osofsky picks up the thread comparing Eric Von Hippel's "lead users" to Geoffrey Moore's "visionaries," and prompts some more reflection on the similarities and differences between the categories of technologyearly adopters.
I suspect that von Hippel's Lead Users and Moore's Visionaries are mostly the same people viewed with different perspectives shaped by time and technology.
Moore saw visionaries as "early adopters" -- people who are eager consumers of brand new products. von Hippel studies early adopters as innovators -- people who not only consume but customize products.
Early adopters have always played a role in customizing products, but they have more opportunities to do so these days. There are more tools available to modify products, ranging from open source software to low-cost CAD and low-volume contract manufacturers.
When Moore first wrote Crossing the Chasm, it was most important to help technology companies to see how different mainstream buyers were from early adopters. A technology provider wishing to hit the big time needed to focus on packaging the product for more mainstream buyers, and to ignore the eccentric preferences of the visionaries.
These days, customer innovation has been democratized, changing the rules of business success. Successful tech companies (like Google, Amazon, Ebay) need to be good both at packaging a service for broad use, and at providing tools for lead user customization.
By moving away from Moore's understanding of users as eager but passive "consumers" and focusing on the active role played by lead customer innovation, von Hippel reaches several insights that Moore didn't a decade ago. Many lead user customizations are one-offs which allow a manufactured product access to an application the vendor couldn't supply cost-effectively. Many other lead user customizations are applicable to a larger class of customers, and vendors can use the signals of end-user customization to lead their next-generation product development efforts.
So, instead of abandoning lead users, von Hippel recommends serving them with customization tools, and adopting popular customer innovations into the manufactured product line.
Vint Cerf helps Google reduce evil
In an interview with CNET, the internet pioneer evangelized sensible ideas about public policy for the internet.
Cerf told CNET that he finds it ''"troublesome" that various states and localities have been proposing and implementing measures to outlaw municipally sponsored broadband networks. "Why on Earth would we inhibit people from making their own investments--deciding, for example, to float a bond?"'.
Cerf has also been out talking to Hollywood, encouraging them to 'view the Internet as an alternative distribution outlet. "Some are responding positively, but some legal departments are still having trouble swallowing the idea."'
Hopefully Cerf's well-respected presense and active evangelism will help Google throw its weight behind good tech policy and counteract the force of the telecom and content oligopolies. The tech business strategy mantra is "commoditize your complements." Google benefits when there are fatter pipes available to more people, and more content available for indexing and related ads. The world will get better when the innovative business that see the fortunes to gain pry off the stranglehold of stagnant businesses who only see what they have to lose.
Asterisk needs marketing
Socialtext is considering the use of Asterisk as a telephony server. We use a mishmash of skype, vonage, POTS, and freeconference.com to support our distributed team. It's amazing that it can be done at all, but the string and baling wire is getting tiresome. "Can you hear me" isn't amusing any more, and wastes plenty of valuable time.
The open source telephony server toolkit has tremendous potential to provide low-cost telecom services for small-to-mid-sized businesses But somebody needs to step up and market the heck out of it.
I was browsing through the Asterisk site itself, and the sites for some Asterisk VARs. The sites all focused on a long, long, long list of features. The laundry list is probably helpful for a telecom geek who knows exactly what she is looking for, and is in search of the specific set of protocols, hardware devices, and functions.
The "feature list" approach is next to useless for a small business person who wants to know how their telecom needs can be met effectively. A good marketing person would talk to small business people and understand what sets of capabilities they're looking for in a phone server. Then they would explain, step by step, what Asterisk can do, and what the packages contain. The laundry list of features would show up on the site as a third level of detail, when the customer, now with a better understanding of what they are looking for, can see the details and compare to alternatives.
What's needed isn't marketing fluff -- airy promises about enhanced productivity solutions yada yada. It's for basic, clear, education so customers can learn what to buy and how to buy it.
Boycott Windows Vista
Personal computers were overwhelmingly successful in because they supported a wide variety of software and peripherals. PCs put digital control of words and data into the hands of end-users, routed around central IT bottlenecks, and a multi-billion dollar market was born.
Special-purpose word processing computers bit the dust. IBM's monolithic model -- where you bought the computer, storage, peripherals and software from the same vendor -- lost market share. Microsoft played a huge role in making the PC explosion happen in the 80s and 90s.
Now, Microsoft is breaking this model that made it successful with its upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Audio and video are the latest media to move from the exclusive control of central distribution into the hands of end-users. And Microsoft has written Vista to keep that control out of end-users' hands.
This News.com story explains how Vista is designed to restrict audio and video capabilities:
For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer's connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren't in place.
The News.com article goes into more detail on how Vista reduces opportunites for software developers, hardware devices, and end-users.
This is a fine reason not to upgrade to Windows Vista when it comes out. A software upgrade ought to provide customers a better product, not a worse product.
This is also an opportunity for entrepreneurs building on Linux and web-based services. People who can package easy-to-use, open personal creativity systems have a vast market to gain that's being left behind by Microsoft.
September 16, 2005
Cingular Wireless sucks
The superb What Geeks experience contrasts with the dismal customer service black hole which is Cingular Wireless.
My account has fallen victim to the merger between Cingular and AT&T Wireless. I sent Cingular a payment, but continued to get dunning phone calls. It turned out that while I had changed the address from Cingular to AT&T, I had failed to update my account number to the new Cingular account. They couldn't find my payment. So I double-paid using my credit card to keep them from turning off the account.
The next step is to fax bank and bill-pay records of the transaction to their research department. The support person had a helpful demeanor, but was unable to confirm the fax number of the research department, or any way to check on the problem once the records had been faxed in. I'm scheduled to get a call back on Wednesday.
In the meantime, Cingular has a visible amount of my money earning interest somewhere. If one has bad memories of MCI billing "glitches" that turned out to be genuine, one might start to be suspicious at this point. There's plenty of money to be made by double-billing people who have problems with the AT&T conversion. Hanlon's Razoroffers some mild comfort to the paranoid: "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
p.s. Here's Chris Shipley of Network World and the Demo conferences telling her story about getting stuck in the AT&T/Cingular transition.
Kudos to What Geeks
I dreaded an endless cross-vendor finger-pointing maze when when the Microsoft documentation for securing a wireless network contradicted the Linksys documentation, and the Microsoft rep tried to send me to Fujitsu.
At that point, I gave up on the vendors and called Whatgeeks a rental help desk service that promised assistance at $.99 per minute. The Whatgeeks tech support person was superb. He helped me through configuring security for a network with several versions of Windows and different speeds of network cards. Then he helped with another network misconfiguration. The tech was polite, informative, knowledgeable and efficient. What great customer service. Highly recommended.
August 24, 2005
Web platforms are as dangerous as desktop platforms, until...
Google maps, Flickr, Ebay, and other web services with APIs are pulling the relevant platform away from the desktop and toward the web.
Still, the network effect of powerful, privately owned web APIs is potentially as dangerous as the network effect of Microsoft's desktop APIs. On any given day, Google or Ebay have the right to change their APIs and make life difficult for their developers. They have the right to change the terms of service, and increase prices on services that their developers depend on completely.
The lockout effect could be even worse, because Google and EBay own the servers, and changes can take effect in real time. When Microsoft bakes DRM into every copy of Windows, users don't need to upgrade their PC immediately. But if Google or Ebay changed terms of service, those dependent on the service would need to comply immediately.
Google and Amazon, and Ebay's big servers are a big deal. A web service can start small. But once service becomes popular, it takes a good amount of capital to complete. Currently, competition between GOOHOO and AMABAY are keeping things lively. But oligopoly could lead to complacency and extractive economics, as in other industries.
The owner of a dominant API/service is in a very powerful position. Google has the ability to adhere to its corporate slogan, "do no evil." That ethical stance does make a real difference. A powerful ruler can choose to be a benevolent dictator or a tyrant. But the temptation is there for power to corrupt.
I can imagine a way out of this oligopoly bind.
What if there was peer to peer for web service requests. Many small servers could run the popular service, and publish their availability. When a client issues a request, the request would be taken by an available server. This wouldn't work for services that require a pre-existing content store (like maps?). But it would work for services that require large amounts of individual content (like calendars?).
Maybe the technology already exists somewhere, and is waiting for the killer app. Maybe I'm missing something -- this is just musing outloud. What do you think?
Google kicks open closed IM services
Yowza! How long will it take for Google's IM and voice chat to meet and surpass the usage of the whole sorry proprietary lot of AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. And how many minutes will it take to open their networks after Google's announcement?
In a world where you can phone anybody and email anybody and fax anybody, the IM vendors created absurd islands.
Google's service is based on the open Jabber protocol, unlike Yahoo, which fought and lost a guerrilla war last year against the third-party clients Gaim and Trillian, which patiently reverse engineered the repeated protocol changes that Yahoo used to fend off other clients.
By contrast, Google's site proudly advertises other clients, including Adium, Gaim, iChat, Psi, and Trillian. The developer site invites developers to build more tools to help more people connect.
The vile AOL terms of service claims that AOL owns the content of its customers' conversations: ""Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content." AOL makes customers agree to those draconian terms, and then has the gall to claim that they don't really mean it, it's just boilerplate, the lawyers made us do it.
By contrast, Google's lawyers know who's the boss: " Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not otherwise claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload or transmit from, or store using, your Google Talk account."
I look forward to hearing from voice gurus about Google's choices for security and voice -- they're starting off with XMPP, and adding support for SIP, and are federating with Earthlink and Sipphone service.
Summary -- the anybody talks to anybody approach will destroy the island approach. Reed's Law wins: the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
tip from Chip, who explains that the server supports TLS security to encrypt your words in transit.
p.s. critique from the folks at Techdirt that the Google IM client is missing some important features -- it doesn't save conversation history, and it doesn't search. It's hard to imagine that Google will forget search in future versions.
I still think that major provider + open network + developer community will beat the closed islands over time.
August 19, 2005
Yahoo personality crisis?
via Peterme, an Economist article argues that Yahoo's business strategy is contradictory -- they want to provide content, and to provide tools for user-generated content.
The Economist's analysis misses two key points about networked business models.
- the Long Tail. Chris Anderson rightly argues that businesses providing "niche content" benefit from having popular content as a draw. A shopper might come for ColdPlay and find less popular artists through the recommendations. There's no conflict, and a lot of benefit, to having a broad spectrum of content from commercial hits through homegrown productions
- the Lead User. Services like search and blogging and mapping are streamlined for convenience-seeking, mainstream users. At the same time these services have APIs that allow "lead users" to craft more specialized applications that build on these basic services.
The Economist quotes John Battelle to make its point:
Yahoo!'s “business model is necessarily in conflict,” says John Battelle, the author of a forthcoming book on the search industry. With so much content owned by Yahoo! or generated within its site by users, the quandary for the firm will be: “Do you point people to your own stuff or to the most relevant stuff?” If the former, Yahoo!'s reputation as a trusted internet search and navigation brand may evaporate; if the latter, its content may not earn the returns to justify Yahoo!'s investments in it. By contrast, says Mr Battelle, Google, which has chosen not to make content, does not face this conflict.
Jeremy Zawodny says that Yahoo is becoming less of a "walled garden" because they are opening up to more user-generated content. More user-generated content is good, but they're not actually in conflict with each other.
In a world of infinite shelf space, Britney Spears doesn't crowd out obscure bluegrass. Battelle is concerned that Yahoo will favor popular commercial content. But that would be self-defeating -- Yahoo will make more money if they use the "head" to help cultivate business in the "tail." Amazon discovered the opposite of the "Battelle effect". Amazon makes more money when it sells gear from merchants than its own gear. So it adds feature to recommend third party goods.
So, I don't think there is a conflict between popular content, niche content, and peer content. The more the better, with search and community tools to find and share.
There is a conflict, I think, but it's different than the tension between popular content and peer content -- and Google has just as much of a conflict as Yahoo.
For both companies, part of the product line is software, not just content. Google provides its own search software which is optimized for mass use. And it provides APIs for developers to extend searching to a million niches.
The conflict between central provider and developer is perhaps greater with software. Google and Yahoo owns their own mapping APIs. Its developers don't. The big kids have some benefit from keeping its APIs stable to gain network effects. But if they choose to change the APIs, developers are stuck rebuilding.
August 16, 2005
Lead users vs. "Crossing the Chasm"
MIT professor Eric Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation studies the role of user innovation in product development, and concludes that businesses should follow their lead users to find profitable new products.
The book cites research showing that a surprisingly large number of users —from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent—develop or modify products. Open source software is the example that first comes to mind, but user innovation is found in a wide range of business and consumer products ranging from pipe installation to medical equipment to camping gear.
People who customize their products belong to a class of "lead users" who are "ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there." In one study, Von Hippel's team followed the product development process at 3M. The researchers concluded that following lead users can lead to greater success in the development of new products than following traditional market research methods that focuses on identifying the needs of broader market segments.
Von Hippel recommends a business strategy to "follow the lead users". This can mean taking their lead on product direction. Many "lead user" customizations are one-offs. But the ones that are repeated point the way to the most innovative and successful new products. Companies can supporting "lead users" with toolkits that help modify products. Some industries, including chip design, have been retooled to support the creation of customer designs almost entirely.
This advice is nearly the opposite of the canonical strategy in Geoffrey Moore's 1991 classic, Crossing the Chasm. Moore argues that for high-tech companies, focusing on lead users can lead to business failure. Moore observes that high-tech products follow a market adoption curve, starting with "early adopters", who are eager for advantage through innovation, and continuing through the more conservative "early majority" and mainstream buyers.
In Moore's analysis, the "early adopters" have more in common with each other than with everyone else. Because early adopters are the first customers of a high-tech product, high-tech companies can get caught in a trap attempting to please their early adopters, and never break out of the trap into mainstream success. Mainstream buyers are put off by the customizeable knobs and levers that attract the "early adopter" tinkering class. Instead, mainstream buyers prefer ease of use, packaging, and service.
Geoffrey Moore advises high-tech companies to stop trying to please their early adopters. Instead, they should identify market segments that need the product, and product a feature-rich, well-serviced package for these market segments. Once there are enough of these segments to prove the viability of the product, the product may join the main stream. At that point, the product experiences a"hypergrowth" phase, when the best thing thing the company can do is to ignore customer request altogether, and simply ship product.
Why do these two strong theories contradict each other?
* is user innovation increasing with the spread of design toolkits and open source software, so that more users are becoming "early adopters"?
* does Von Hippel's work simply focus on an earlier part of the technology adoption life cycle than Moore?
Comments are most welcome.
August 13, 2005
The phone companies entering the cable business
The phone companies are spending large amounts of money, in business investment and lobbying in order to enter the video business. In Texas, SBC just won a victory that lowers their cost compared to cable television by allowing them to start out with statewide franchises, instead of negotiating with each city.
The phone companies have been eyeing ways to diversify away from phone service for decades. In the 80s and early 90s, AT&T made a series of disastrous attempts to enter the computer business after the anti-trust settlement with the US department of Justice.
Video distribution seems a better fit than PCs. It's a familiar business model, where where a being an oligopoly owner of a distribution channel makes you the leading provider of a service. Owning big servers and pipes is surely a competitive advantage, as is managing an itemized billing service.
The phone companies know they need to slug it out with the cable companies with price wars and features. But cable won't be the only competition. The market is also seeing entrants with new distribution models."Long-tail" business like Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Google have the ability to leverage big servers, ecommerce and ad platforms, search and recommendation engines to become major distribution channels. Peer to peer distribution is becoming a notable alternative to get video, and ad models are emerging for p2p. Content providers like the Comedy Channel can host Daily Show clips themselves. The low cost of video is starting to create a generation of video podcasters. Services like Ourmediaare emerging to host amateur audiovisional content.
This is going to make the video business much less of a comfy oligopoly. The phone company will have to fight for the market.
The Broadcast Niche
Broadcast contains two kinds of content -- things the people really want to watch at the same time, and things that people would rather watch on their own schedule. So broadcast won't die. It will be contrained to events that a great many people want to watch at the same time, like the Superbowl, or a newscast of a major breaking story.
Shawn makes this insightful point in a comment to Mark Cuban's blog. Cuban post focused on technology -- he argued that broadcast has better performance than internet, and that multi-cast technology isn't being developed aggressively enough. Other readers take Cuban up on the technical points, but Shawn nails the market evolution.
The video market has been migrating to "personal schedule" for decades. But there are two things that kept "event" and "program" content together. First is a lucrative advertising business model that applied only to broadcast. Second is capital-intensive distribution. It was expensive to distribute broadcast content, so the market became was an oligopoly. That oligopoly was able to create "pseudo-events" -- broadcasting episodes of the Sopranos, and only distributing DVDs to BlockBuster video later.
Both of these things are changing. The cost of distribution is decliningAd models are evolving for peer-to-peer distributed content. Mark Pesce's post from May of this year chronicles how peer to peer distribution of television has become a commercial force in the last year, starting with the Battlestar Galactica phenomenon. Pesce's article speculates about a number of ways that advertisers will sponsor peer to peer content.
The net result is that the niche for pre-recorded broadcast -- whether over-the-air, or on cable -- gets smaller. The superbowl will still generate large ad revenues, but programming will keep migrating away.
August 09, 2005
Information service, communication service, and bad law
The FCC exempted phone companies from having to lease lines to internet service providers. They did this by re-classifying broadband as an "information service", which was ruled not to be subject to line-sharing.
In the words of Light reading the FCC ruled that the physical facilities that deliver broadband, and the broadband service itself are indistinguishable and inseparable. The two things together -- the facility and the service -- are now called an “information service.” The “facility” part of that service can no longer be separated and called a “telecommunication service,” and as such can't be subject to common carriage rules.
The FCC is doing exactly the wrong thing to adapt to the change in telecom technology. Back when phone and cable were different from each other, there were two categories of regulation -- telecommunication services (phones) and communication services (cable companies) -- to regulate very different kinds of services.
Now, the network is the same. Internet broadband can carry phone, video, and any other kind of content.
* Broadband connectivity has a tendency toward monopoly. It is expensive to lay fiber, which creates the broadband connections.
* Broadband services are a hyper-competitive market, with low barriers to entry.
In order to increase competition, you'd want to treat the oligopolistic connectivity market separately from the competitive service market. You'd enable competing connectivity providers on the wire, to increase competition. You'd watch for signs of monopoly power, and regulate if needed. And you'd treat the hypercompetitive service with as little regulation as possible.
The FCC's response is backward -- they are squelch competition, by considering services inseparable from access.
August 06, 2005
The Success of Open Source
Steven Weber's excellent book, The Success of Open Source is a superb complement to Yochai Benkler's classic essay, Coase's Penguin. Benkler looks at peer production as an economic system and concludes that it has become a third major form of organizing production, alongside the market and the firm. Weber takes a closer look inside the open source production process, and provides a fascinating analysis of how and why it works:
- the origin of open source software
- why people participate
- how projects are organized
- how open source fits into surrounding organizational and economic structures.
By doing this, Weber reaches a variety of interesting observations and conclusions:
- Counter to the myth, the open source development process is not a teeming bazaar, with "bottom-up" self-organization composed of local signals. The largest and most successful open source projects have identifiable, hierarchical organizational structures, with a leader and/or inner circle, up to a few hundred active contributors, and a much larger group of occasional participants.
- While Open source licenses protect the right to "fork", to take the codebase off in a different direction than the original project, projects stay together more than a skeptic might think. Weber observes that project leaders depend on developers and developers depend on the community. The ability to get more done together than separately.
- Developers contribute to open source projects even though most users are "free riders" who benefit from the software, and contribute little or no code. This is less of a paradox than it might seem, since software is a "network good" that gains value the more people who use it. The more people who use a program, the tbugs that are reported and fixed, and the more robust the system becomes.
- Since the origins of the phenomenon, there have been different approaches to licenses. The West Coast, Berkeley-style licenses are easy-going about the ability to include open source software in other, non-open source code, so long as credit is preserved. The East Coast, Free Software Foundation GPL (Gnu Public License) is strict about requiring that redistributed code must always be free software, and any software including free software must be distributed by GPL
Perhaps the most insightful conclusion Weber draws is the relation between open source and intellectual property. Weber observes that open source redefines property around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.
Weber is able to make this observation because he avoids polemic. Weber doesn't try argue that open source software is good because intellectual property is bad. And he doesn't argue that that open source software is bad because intellectual property is good. Instead, he is able to observe how open source redefines property itself.
Weber's pragmatic analysis leads him to focus on the vibrant intersection between open source production and traditional business, with a look at a variety of hybrid business models, from IBM's focus on hardware and service, to Red Hat's packaging and branding, to MySQL's service and customization, to Apple's addition of proprietary chrome and polish. Weber predicts continued evolution and innovation and this boundary.
The book was published in 2004, and so it misses one of the most interesting trends in the last couple of years -- the rise of open source software that's not just for hackers. Netscape/Mozilla is included in the book as an example of failure. Weber looks around at Linux, Gnome, KDE, etc, and concludes that open source software may never be able to make software that works for non-hackers. This was before before the breakout success of Firefox, and the popularity of GAIM, an instant messaging client with a consumer-quality interface.
Weber examines the brash and blunt hacker culture, with its focus on technical decision making through vehement debates on project mailing lists that hash out solutions to technical problems and decisions about technnical direction. I wonder about how the culture will evolve as interactions grow with non-geek users, and hybrid companies face decisions that have external constraints driven by customers.
Towards the end of the book, Weber speculates about how the organizing methods of open source software might affect the production of other kinds of goods -- writing, music, biotech, business ideas. I thought it was interesting, but less substantial than the parts of the book focused on open source itself, with analysis based on observation.
August 05, 2005
The end of innocence for Mozilla?
Dave Coursey laments the End of Innocence for Mozilla with the founding of a taxable subsidiary.
The danger of the Mozilla Foundation forming a for-profit business, Mozilla Corp., is that the result may be as nasty and political as your average nonprofit and as money-grubbing as your typical software company. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's a wide departure from the egalitarian notion of "free" software that has carried Mozilla this far. And with that departure, I am feeling a touch of loss.
Richard Stallman, the prophet of free software idealism, says that free software is intended to be "free as in speech, not free as in beer". Open source software never was intended to be free of commerce. You can make money with open source software. IBM makes oodles of money with Linux and Apache. MySQL makes money with its database. You just can't sell the source code.
I think Mozilla lost its innocence a long time ago, and in a different way. Much of open source software is by geeks, for geeks. Open source developers have focused on creating tools for developers, and avoided the burden of developing for people who aren't programmers. An open source developer is "scratching his own itch", not developing code to please other people.
For whatever reason, Mozilla isn't like this. Mozilla is designed to be usable and attractive for ordinary people, and extensible for geeks. The Mozilla team designs with empathy for users. They have already lost the innocence of solipsism -- they are serving others than themselves.
I can't help feeling that the foundation is crossing a line from which it can never retreat, taking with it a bit of the romance of software by the people, for the people.
Coursey writes these sentimental lines for a salary earned from a magazine publisher that makes money from advertising.
Mozilla is maintaining its license terms. That means that people will continue to be able to look at the code, modify the code, and fork the project to create their own products, following the terms of the license. That's the freedom that counts -- not freedom from being able to make a living.
Thanks, Joi for some clarification about the business structure.
July 30, 2005
Does Technorati Top 100 count
The conversation at BlogHer is about how and whether to break into the Technorati 100. This misses the point of the Long tail-- what makes the Blogosphere different from the mainstream media. You can aim to be a top celebrity. Or you can be an authoritative voice on an important topic, and be the media for an important issue. The blogosphere isn't just about celebrity, it's about subcommunities.
July 19, 2005
When will IM standardize?
What about other communications protocols?
Telephone interconnection is mandated by law. For example, Texas law says:
Sec. 60.204. INTERCONNECTION. A telecommunications provider shall provide interconnection with other telecommunications.
providers' networks for the transmission and routing of telephone
exchange service and exchange access.
The law is needed because there are strong temptations for vendors not to interconnect. A very quick search suggests that legal requirements for interconnect go back to 1913/
Internet email standardized back when academic institutions were the primary users of the internet. This is very good -- connectivity became universal. And bad -- the protocols were very trusting, creating a medium for spam.
Fax was born from a standard. In the 1970s, the CCITT (now ITU) created a standard for digital fax that allowed the creation of an industry.
Thinking about these examples, the non-standardization of IM is an artifact of history and business model. IM is a free rider on top of the internet, and is offerere