Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • Barusch gets story wrong

    Last week I commented on a blog post by Ronald Barusch called Dealpolitik: Yahoo!’s survival plan. In his post Barusch critiques Yahoo! Inc.’s pursuit of different options for the company. Part of his critique reflected on Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for the company three years ago:

    True, with hindsight the Yahoo board made a world-class blunder in turning down the Microsoft $33 per share bid over three years ago. But the board has to make the best of today’s situation.

    Whilst I agree with the Barusch central thesis that the company needs a new direction or possibly a new owner, and don’t have any particular sympathy for the board, I don’t think that the argument for new management at Yahoo! should centre around the Microsoft takeover bid.

    I explained in my comment to the Barusch article that whilst I didn’t have sympathy for the Yahoo! board, I also didn’t think that the whole picture of the Microsoft deal was reflected in the article. I think that there is a serious argument to be made for the Microsoft deal being a flawed structure, with a distinct possibility of it not a viable deal in the first place. There are two main strands to my thinking:

    • First of all the destruction of value meant that many Microsoft shareholders were opposed to the deal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a bad deal for all Yahoo! shareholders. (Only the ones that initially opposed the deal. Since the Microsoft deal at the time offered cash for the first 50 per cent of shares and Microsoft shares for the last 50 per cent shares. Given the state of Microsoft’s share price over the past decade or so and the state of the Microsoft online services line, cash would be preferable.)
    • The second and more important strand is that the deal had a number of antitrust roadblocks to cross. Whilst Microsoft is a bit player in the search engine advertising market, it is already a convicted monopolist in its server and tools business. This important because Yahoo! is not only a media company; but also a key contributor to a number of critical open source projects; having contributed to PHP, the Debian Linux distribution and Hadoop. Given this, the deal would have been exposed to antitrust risk in the EU. A second risk of antitrust would have come from the Japanese and Chinese markets were you have national internet champions in Softbank (majority owner of Yahoo! Japan) and Alibaba trying to escape the clutches of Yahoo! instead being acquired by Microsoft

    It was interesting that neither Microsoft, the media or Yahoo! broached the likely antitrust implications publicly at that time. Which I suspect is partly a credit to good execution by Microsoft’s corporate communications team.

    The Microsoft bid was a powerful lever that helped Microsoft secure the search deal it wanted with Yahoo!. Though Microsoft has failed to reap the full commercial gains partly because it’s AdCenter technology wasn’t as good as the Yahoo! Panama project it replaced – and neither were as good as Google’s own advertising technology.

    What should the Yahoo! board have done, and what should it do next probably has more options in it than football fans arguing over the performance of their team manager and I don’t have the definitive answer.

    But I suspect my comment may have been bounced from the Wall Street Journal Online site because it throws a spanner in the works of the Mr Barusch. His nice, neat storyline with the Microsoft deal opportunity as an inciting incident into a downward spiral of a digital greek tragedy. Mr Barusch and his colleagues don’t want the evidence to get in the way of a good story

    As an aside, it also shows how powerful storytelling is as a way to game media | public relations in favour of the PR over the journalist. People like stories, they think in stories and it makes it easier to efficiently and effectively file easy copy or blog posts.

    So if the Microsoft hostile takeover bid wasn’t the inciting incident what was?

    My own personal opinion is that spiral probably goes at least as far back as Yahoo! overpaying for its purchase of Broadcast.com – a business that had some 13.5 million USD in revenue per quarter, acquired for 5.9 billion USD in Yahoo! stock back in 1999. It was a bad deal, and it adversely affected Yahoo!’s approach to strategy, risk-taking, decision-making and speed of execution. This is likely to affected Yahoo!’s thinking on its attempted acquisition of a young Google.

    I believe that the damaged approach to strategy was a major factor in Brad Garlinghouse’s famous peanut butter memo from 2006 (though as Techcrunch summised it was also a political power-play and as I mentioned at the time, Garlinghouse was as much to blame in many respects as other senior executives.)

    Investor Paul Graham thought that Yahoo! was screwed by cultural traits baked into the organisation’s cultural DNA as far back as 1998:

    • Less interested in innovating in advertising, because this would expose customers to the reality that they were overpaying for their inventory.Yahoo! was build on brand advertising driven by reach not by targeted ads so they missed why search advertising (and a good search engine was so important)
    • Yahoo! thought of itself as a media company rather than a technology innovator; back then technology companies sold software rather than advertising, so by default they must be a media business
    • Fear of Microsoft – whilst Microsoft is a big ugly mean company now, it is nothing compared to the beast it was before the internet became mainstream and the Judge Jackson trial. Graham thought that Yahoo! tried to define itself out of the footprint of Microsoft. All of this meant that Yahoo! wasn’t a Google, Facebook or Twitter-style technical talent magnet

  • London conference on cyberspace

    The Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government has always had the best online presence of all the different government departments, but I still find it interesting that it is they rather than the department of media and culture who are looking to lead a discussion on the future of the web and associated technologies. The FCO are hosting a conference on cyberspace in London on November 1-2, 2011 and are extending it online through social media platforms. I can’t help but feel the dialogue is aimed as much within the UK as internationally.

    Of course, the ironic thing is that the UK isn’t at all progressive in terms of all things internet related compared to the likes of South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Iceland or Finland to name but a few countries. The Digital Economy Bill and actions done by the likes of Ed Vaizey have shown resistance rather than working out how it can benefit from the change. The music industry tried to fight the change and has torn itself apart so it will be interesting to see how that stance will work out. I look forward to following the conference on cyberspace; in cyberspace.

    Find out more here. More online related topics here.

  • Asian woman & more news

    Asian woman observations

    Marketing to the modern Asian woman: Trends to watch by Vic Corsi, Landor – WPP – “Shopping is a social activity and the goal is not necessarily to make a purchase. Group shopping is one of an Asian woman’s main hobbies—over 20 percent of Asian women go shopping every weekend with no expectation of purchasing. While she peruses the malls contemplating what to buy—either now or on some future shopping mission—the Asian woman is looking for brands to convince and entertain.” – the author is writing from a Singapore perspective, but still great content. The big challenge is that the asian woman as a demographic isn’t homogeneous. Shopping is an activity, partly because of air conditioning, which occurs in certain markets like Singapore or Hong Kong. But many asian women are very value orientated. A classic example of this Asian woman would be in lower tier Chinese cities, Indonesia or the Philippines where is the a huge difference in incomes. I suspect that the modern asian woman of the title is code for wealthy and relatively young.

    Consumer behaviour

    Report: Workers in China and India Most Likely to Play Hooky – WSJ

    Design

    JNKsystem.com　 : NEIGHBORHOOD C.W.P. ALT.Zippo – I love the way Neighbourhood puts pocket wear and tear on these to provide authenticity

    Ethics

    A VC: Following Facebook Down The Wrong Path – interesting post on Facebook privacy

    Ideas

    Text of Steve Jobs’ Commencement address (2005)

    Talking To The Future Humans – Bruce Sterling | VICE

    Japan

    Japanese manufacturers see positive signs – FT.com

    Media

    Irish Post bought as going concern – RTÉ News – this is potentially good news

    UK Labour Party wants journalism licenses, will prohibit “journalism” by people who are “struck off” the register of licensed journalists – Boing Boing – this sounds very suspect

    Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value – NYTimes.com – e-education doesn’t necessarily work: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning

    Online

    Questions Arise Over Yahoo’s Value as Buyers Weigh Bids – NYTimes.com

    Facebook: Sharing it all | The Economist – Facebook the sociopathic network

    Software

    Communities Dominate Brands: Analysis of Smartphone Wars and 3 Big News last week or so: Part 1 of 3: Intel + Samung – Nokia = Tizen (not MeeGo)

    Technology

    Why do some people really hate Apple | guardian.co.uk

    Michael Dell Advises Hewlett-Packard – NYTimes.com – its about scale in other areas rather than margins

    Wireless

    Sony Ericsson CEO: We Should Have Taken The iPhone More Seriously | TechCrunch

    Chinese phone systems ‘no threat’ to Google – FT.com – yeah right

  • Digital experiences & functionalism

    This post on digital experiences sprang out of my going through images on Flickr. I was looking at pictures that I had taken of products designed by Dieter Rams like the Vitsœ 606 shelving system and his work at Braun on the service. Rams’ approach to industrial design was part of the functionalism movement where the look of a product is dictated by what the object does. In architecture this was used as an excuse to build rough-looking buildings with little aesthetic appeal.  This partly explains by a number of the leading thinkers in modern architecture have taken a ‘user’ hostile approach to their designs, washing their hands of  having to think about form in their process at all.
    Braun SK1 radio

    The Braun SK1 radio designed by Dieter Rams

    Rams approach to design had quality very much at the centre of it, so his work has as much to do with the ethics and principles of traditional Japanese design as it had with a modern movement. I got into this chain of thought because digital largely fails to mirror the good design that Rams has done in the analogue age. Rams in an interview for the documentary Objectified says that Apple seems to be only modern company that subscribes to his principles of good design, or takes design as seriously as he did.
    Braun desk fan from the early 1960s

    So why are digital experiences failing to match the best analogue examples of product design? I have some ideas, but I wouldn’t pretend to think that they are definitive answer to the question.

    Horizontal industry structure affects design thinking

    When geeks wore ties, polyester shirts and pocket protectors technology companies used to make the hardware and the software and digital experiences that went with them. Economies of scale and standardisation brought about a business computing environment based on Microsoft operating systems and Intel X86 processors. The exceptions to this being a small amount of powerful UNIX workstations and Apple’s range of Macintosh computers. In web services it splits up via hosting and APIs at the very least. This tends to be very different to many manufacturing processes and leaves designers with a sense that they have comparatively little control over their devices. It also means that the point of interface between designs: like how to interact with the software is dictated by the software partner, not the device manufacturer. In digital services, the terms of service of the API limit the power and design choices made.

    Design isn’t taken seriously

    In hardware manufacturing businesses work with manufacturers like Foxconn Technology Group. These manufacturers have moved up the value chain doing more and more of the work around the product including design now. There are few manufacturers that keep much of that work in-house. Reference designs make tooling easier, give component manufacturers more power and allow the client get to market faster. But they are going to market with a commoditised offering. This isn’t a new phenomena: JVC used to make VHS video recorders for Ferguson under the Videostar name with only the branding changing some 3o years ago.

    Outsourcing design implies that the process isn’t core to the value proposition of the business, and that’s a shame.

    Focus on the ingredients rather than the cake

    If you look at the marketing of mobile and computing devices the adverts often read like a parts list rather than a marketing brochure. How many car magazines publish articles showing the components that make up the engine, who they are manufactured by and how much the car would have cost? How would really care about which brand of air filter the engine used? Yet tear-downs are an important part of consumer electronics coverage now. The focus on the ingredients probably started as a way for manufacturers to take some control of their own product as part of the horizontal industry eco-system; but now it has become a fetish. A great micro-processor is often not enough to make a phone great when consumers choose on all-up experience.

    It isn’t only hardware manufacturers who do this. When I worked in-house for Yahoo!; the company launched lots of different search products to try and get feature parity with Google’s offerings. They were good products but the consumers still stayed away in droves; mainly because it wasn’t enough to be just like Google. If the company had carved its own path the future may have been very different.

    Quality is relative

    If you think about buying a new car or a fridge-freezer being told that you could use it, but it wasn’t fully finished and would be subject to considerable change – you would be very worried  and I wouldn’t blame you. However software and services change, sometimes quite dramatically. It means that quality means something very different in the digital world, compared to the world that you and I live in. There is no ‘getting things right first time’ and there is a mentality of impermanence, the idea that anything can be fixed.

    The user case is malleable

    The malleable nature of digital services and applications mean that the user case may not have even been dreamt up at the design stage. Thinking for a moment about Twitter, it has morphed into an extremely dynamic system of interactions:

    • The hashtag accompanies events acting as a public ‘back channel’ where previously the technologically savvy would have used IRC (internet relay chat)  and the rest of us probably were oblivious to it all
    • It has raised money for charities, and has been directly responsible for helping Dell to sell refurbished computers
    • It has been the rallying point for political action
    • It is history in the making as the Library of Congress has been archiving tweets

    Given those vast differences it is understandable why it’s hard to design for use cases and hard to get great digital experiences.

  • In The Plex by Steven Levy

    I bought In The Plex automatically because I had previously read and enjoyed Levy’s previous works: Insanely Great, Hackers and Crypto. Given his heritage covering technology companies and personalities as both an author and a journalist, I was curious what he would make of Google.

    The book is expansive and provides a lot of additional colour around Google, some of which I found of interest as I had worked at Yahoo! competing against Google and working with some of the early darlings of the web 2.0 movement – Flickr and Delicious. There were a couple of things that surprised me such as Google’s use of machine learning on areas like translation explained why grammar is still so bad in this area as it needs heuristics that lexicographers could provide similar to that offered by Crystal Semantics.

    Overall it was interesting to see that as with most large organisations Google is not only fallible but run through with realpolitik and a fair bit of serendipity. This contrasts with the external perception of Google as the technological Übermensch. A classic example of this is the series of missteps Google made whilst competing in China, which are documented in the book. From staffing practices, promotional tactics and legal to technology; Google blew it’s chances and Baidu did a better job.

    As an aside it was interesting to note that Google used queries on rival search engines to try and work out how to comply with Chinese government regulations, which is eerily like bad practices that Google accused Bing of last February in ‘hiybbprqag’-gate.

    There is a curious myopia that runs through a lot of later Google product thinking that reminded me of the reality and perceptions that I was aware of existing inside Microsoft from the contact I have had with the organisation through the various different agencies I have worked at. A classic example of this is the Google view of a file-less future, which by implication assumes that people won’t have legacy documents or use services other than the Google cloud. It is a myopia that comes part of arrogance and a patronising attitude towards the consumer that Google always knows best about every aspect of their needs.

    Contrast this with Apple and iTunes. Whilst Apple would like to sell you only content from the iTunes store, it recognises that you will have content from different sources: Amazon MP3s, ripped CDs, podcasts and self-created files that iTunes needs to play nicely with.

    The ‘no files’ approach assumes ubiquitous bandwidth which is likely to be a fiction for a while. (Part of the reason why I am able to write this post is that I was stuck for half-a-day on a train journey to Wales enjoying patchy mobile phone coverage and a wi-fi free environment, which allowed me to focus on reading this book in hardback).  This approach smacks of the old data lock-in that Microsoft used to have with proprietary file formats for its Office documents.

    Levy does a good job pulling all of this together and chronicling Google, but In The Plex fails to cast a critical eye over it all. I suspect that this is because he is too close to the company: the access that he gained enveloped him. Which is a shame as all the experience and insight Levy could bring to the book that would add value to the reader is omitted. Whilst In The Plex is an interesting historical document, it could be so much more. More book reviews can be found here.