Too Many people are making too much about ComScore’s searcher penetration data, which released on August 14. Microsoft and Yahoo executives shouldn’t get their hopes up, nor should analysts, bloggers or journalists writing about the data otherwise be misguided. Similarly, ComScore has overstated Microsoft-Yahoo combined search potential.
I would like to suggest that Apple make something like “Complete My Album” and “Upgrade to iTunes Plus” available for movies, TV shows and music videos. Such iTunes features could revolutionize how people electronically rent or buy video content.
There are occasional iTunes sales and promotions that do some of what I want to suggest (and hopefully I haven’t missed any important perpetual promotions or features). I’m convinced that iTunes Store could use the upsell “complete my this or that” strategy to further leap ahead of competing digital download services. Of course, content copyright holders and distributors would have to be willing parties to the changes.
The pundits opining about Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for his media conglomerate’s online content miss the forest for the trees. The majority spout conjecture about whether or not people would pay and in that context whether or not anyone should charge, considering the abundance of alternative online informational sources. What everyone should ask: Can you put content behind a paywall, even just require registration, and fully participate in the Google economy?
Can we be honest, here? If your business is content and selling online advertising around it, you must pay homage to the great Google algorithm. As was with previous age’s deities, the minions must make sacrifices before the great Google god. To receive its blessings, they must do Google’s bidding—quite literally on keywords—and give away all their worldly possessions (e.g., content, for free). But can they give to Lord Google and keep something for themselves, too?
August is the month of punditry. With many workers on vacation—this year, many are unemployed or on unpaid furlough, too—tech companies tend to hold back big announcements. So news and blog sites have to fill the space with something, seeing as how there is less news. Five minutes before Midnight EDT, yesterday, Business Week posted analyst Jack Gold’s Windows Mobile-ending prediction. It’s Microsoft punditry at its scariest.
Is there some relationship between razorfish and stingrays? About the time I started to blog about Microsoft selling digital ad agency Razorfish to Publicis Groupe, a phone call came that a stingray had stung my daughter. So I raced north to Del Mar beach, where the wonderful lifeguards cared for my wounded 15 year-old. We’re back home, and I am, finally, ready to offer my intrusive opinion about Microsoft’s sale.
Themes for Chrome 3.0 beta got me to thinking about Google’s sudden personalization push. You can skin Gmail, and there are comic-book heroes and other themes for iGoogle. Now there are Chrome skins, and what about that Android-powered MyTouch from T-Mobile? The marketing push is big customization and personalization.
TechFlash’s Todd Bishop did some good sleuthing of regulatory filings and turned up a so-called Yahoo escape clause to the Microsoft search deal. Two, actually.
But while they might comfort Yahoo that there is a way out of the deal, I promise you there is none.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMpwJn_4NtE]
Damn, I must read Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price. Based on the WNYC video (below) and Q&A—”The Gift Economist”—in the July 19, 2009 the New York Times Magazine, I must disagree with Chris’ concept of free as applied to digital products. Free and the Internet go oddly together, and not necessarily well together.
Chris may be right, but for other reasons than he presents here. In the video above, Chris asserts that on the Internet “free really can be free.” Nobody has to pay. He presents his view, which does allow for combo free and paid models, by way of marketing and economic history and theory.
S-o-o-o-o, US TV broadcasters aren’t alone pulling the plug on their analog channels. Microsoft is closing down channels 8 and 10 and folding some of their content into Channel 9. Someone at Microsoft thinks this is good marketing? It’s a great idea if the goal is for existing and potential customers to start switching channels.
My reaction to Microsoft Hohm is mixed. The branding and marketing are quite clever, and that’s yet another welcome change. More fundamentally, Hohm is yet another example of Microsoft chasing Google’s tail. Maybe Microsoft should conserve some energy by taking a shorter path rather than tagging behind the weaving Google.
Flash should have a place on all mobile handsets, and Adobe is planning to make version 10 available for smartphones. But not iPhone. Now why is that? I’m going to tell you.
First this, ah, news flash. Today, Adobe showed off Flash running on Android-based smartphone HTC Hero. This is a dreamy handset. You want it. You know you do. Hell, I want it, and I recently bought a Nokia N97. While iPhone is all the rave, Android is where the big action is coming. Google gets the mobile-to-cloud applications stack better than any company, even Apple. Flash is part of the story.
Microsoft has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. But in just three years, since 2006, startups and Apple have set a new course for technology and how societies use it.
For Microsoft, this change is scarier than movie “Quarantine.” Without a course correction, Microsoft in the 2010s will be very much like IBM was in the 1990s. That’s no place Microsoft should want to be.