Ian M Rountree

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Why We All Win – Cellular Edition

November 25, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

Platform wars are stupid but necessary, because homogeneous doesn’t work in the market place. Simple as that.

There’s a lot of kerfuffle lately about the Droid, and Android in general, competing with the iPhone and its platform. Rightly so, but I think some people are missing the point of differentiation with this. At the end of the day, there are four platforms worth mentioning: iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Everything else is dumbphones masquerading as productivity tools.

We’ll start with Apple, because they wouldn’t have it any other way. Most of what you hear about the iPhone is how awesome it is, how many apps there are. This is a key to its success, but it also tends to blind people. So many choices makes decisions tougher, after all. But spend an hour in the app store, and what are you likely to find? A lot of communication toys, multimedia tools, games, virtual beer and assorted hodge podge. What does this make the iPhone, once you dig in? A toy. It’s a multimedia device, which is exactly what Apple wants. Thing is, not many people pay attention to this, or consider whether anything other than total malleability is what they need.

Enter Android. On any device, Android is a killer operating system; it’s light weight, handles well for the most part, and makes your phone feel like a small computer. The market has apps, granted, and lots of them, the number growing sometimes faster than Apple’s AppStore because of differences in developers and approval processes. Android is also open source, which means anyone with the chops can dig in and do whatever they feel like for it with no hindrances past their own skills. This is a big deal! It’s a bridge product, halfway between high computing power and the fun of the iPhone’s platform. There’s fun, but there’s also a smattering of productivity and communication.

Productivity. Something a lot of phones lack, which is only partly bad. Not many people want to type out a thousand-word blog post or a two thousand word article on a phone’s keyboard. Applications for this are, rightly so, limited. It would be nice to see one of the platforms stand up and address this in a straight-forward manner. Windows Mobile sort of tries, but with Microsoft’s lackadaisical attitude to development for WinMo, it’s no wonder no one gives a second thought to it. Device selection failure as well helps the slow execution of WinMo by the iPhone and Android. It’s barely a competitor.

What is? BlackBerry and Symbian. Nokia hasn’t done a lot with Symbian lately – we’ll see what comes up – but RIM has made some decidedly choice moves in the last year. AppWorld is great, there’s a decent suite of applications, but they’re heavily weighted in two directions: Communication and aggregation. Readers and messengers. This is, I think, a decent move for RIM to make because BlackBerry has always been about keeping in touch. I use a Berry myself, so I may be biased here, but it does everything I need it do – I usually have four instant messenger programs running, plus BBMessenger, UberTwitter (until Seesmic works – you’re on notice, Loic) and WordPress for on the fly blogging. RIM may be pushing themselves in toward a niche with pragmatists in mind, but that’s ok. It’s what they’ve proven they’re good at.

So where does this leave us? Winners. The communicators will have their BlackBerry phones. The developers and power users will filter to Android. Everyone who wants the internet in all its multimedia glory at their beck and call will find an iPhone waiting. Someone, somewhere, will love a Windows Mobile handset just enough to give it a happy home. I like having choice. Better still, I like having choices that are becoming increasingly clear.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: android, blackberry, google, mobile, review, rim, windows

Life at the Scale of the Internet

October 16, 2009 by Ian 4 Comments

Somehow my store now has CBC Newsworld running all the time now, instead of music. As such I’ve been exposed to a lot of news lately – on the one hand it means I’m a bit better informed than usual, and on the other, it exposes me to three hours of balloon boy coverage, which no one needs.

But it’s gotten me thinking about a quote I heard I can’t recall where, that went something along the lines of

Businesses need to begin thinking in the scale of the internet, because anything smaller is already outmoded.

Don’t quote me on that quote. It’s a sentiment, not even a paraphrase, but it did hit me pretty hard. Something as large as the internet, with no set borders, and an ever-diversifying infrastructure (whether it’s able to scale itself at pace with itself has yet to be seen) is about as intangible as it gets. How do you measure something like this? It’s all well and good to think in the scale of the internet, but if you try to encompass the Net in your head, it’s going to explode.

So how can we narrow it down and make it concievable without threatening the scale of the thing itself?

You don’t. And there’s the problem. The information explosion began a lot earlier than the internet. Ars Technica ran a piece the other day about the menace of content copying (pursuant of course to copyright debates, which I’ve addressed before) that has a quote regarding the beginning of Big Content:

In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton’s Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to “musical taste” itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances.

“From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,” he wrote. “And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.”

The piece is long, but well worth reading. Still, the primary example is that innovation kills copyright, which was instituted to foster innovation. It’s all very Greek myth, really, and it’s a bit much for me to handle. But this is what traditional media is trying to convince me the internet is doing.

How much impact does the trading of culture for technology have on us, after all?

I have to wonder. So here’s an experiment. In my iTunes right now, there are 2401 songs, which total 7.4 days of continuous music, taking up 16.09 GB of hard drive pace on my computer. Now, about 80% of this comes from discs I’ve ripped out of my own collection in the last eleven years I’ve been collecting music. A further 10% is directly from the iTunes store, and the remaining 10% I can’t lay a direct cause to. We’ll say pirating, because it’s as likely as anything else.

Now, if I sort my iTunes by play count, I get 9 songs with counts over 50. A total of 34 songs have been played more than 25 times, 312 songs have been played once, and 1552 songs have never been played at all.

Never. Not once. This means more than 3/4 of my iTunes library I’ve never even heard.

Now, further, I checked which songs I play the most. Just about all of them are new music, things I’ve gotten from the iTunes store. Of the 9 songs with counts over 50, 8 of them are iTunes+ songs, actually. And every single song I’ve purchased has been played more than 10 times.
This means that the 3/4 of my library which I’ve never played is just about entirely made up of my old albums. Having looked into the things I have which have been played between 5 and 10 times, that makes up the entirety of the Mystery 10%, which I can’t account for having paid for any time in my life. Not one of these songs has been played since about ten days since it was added to my library.

My iTunes library is an analogue for how I see the internet scale.

I visit, consistently, 48 sites on the net every day. Some, such as Google Reader, get massive amounts of visits – this is because I suck all f the good content, the blogs I like reading, into my gReader and never visit the main sites again unless I want to make a comment. Mark Dykeman recently asked on his blog a question about how much impoetus we’re giving people to involve themselves with our internet presenses (post: Do you need to read this?) and it’s a damned good question. How much of the internet do we really need? How much of it is expendable?

And that’s the lie right there. Because the answer is none of it. I don’t care that 4chan exists on a day to day basis, but it’s there, and someone cares. I couldn’t pay less attention to Ground Round’s exquisitely designed brouchureware website if I was paid to do so – but someone visits every day, I bet, because they care. Search explosion or not, content explosion and overload or not, it’s all there for a reason; someone cared enough to put it there, and someone cares enough to keep it there.

How can businesses – and worse yet, people – think in internet scale effectively, when the long tail is so visible it hurts? Especially when my long tail is not your long tail is not Clay’s or Bill’s or Tim’s?

Convince me to care. That’s the internet scale in four words. Otherwise, I’ll keep racking up the play counts on things I already access regularly, and you’ll end up like the pirated music on my iTunes; neglected, discounted, and neither making money nor losing any. From me, anyway. I can’t speak for anyone else.

What are you going to do to convince me to care?

Filed Under: Communication Tagged With: commentary, economics, google, marketing

We're Not Those Guys!

August 12, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

I came across an interesting thing today in my ambling over the internet. It’s a service called Plurk, and it claims to be the unTwitter.

Now, most of you probably know what Twitter is. Lots of you likely have Twitter accounts. I do, you can feel free to follow it, it’s @WhyRTM – simple, right? I love Twitter. But I don’t love Plurk, and I didn’t even sign up.

If you visit Plurk’s front page, the first thing you see is the bold question; “Tired of your existing social networks?”

Am I the only one this irks?

This tells me that the basis of all of Plurk’s identity is saying “But We’re Not Them” which is so faulty it hurts. Microsoft did the same thing with its rebranding of the Live Search engine, turning it into Bing. What does bing stand for? “But It’s Not Google” – and whether Microsoft intended this or not, this is the story that got out, and it’s what people will believe. Even now, with tales rolling in of Bing’s searches coming up massively pro-MS and anti-Apple, it’s easier to believe that this was intentional.

Best Buy has been running “We’re Not On Commission” ads for years now, and the effect is the same. It tells people not that your staff are better, that your prices are lower, that your store is more fun to shop at – it says nothing except “Oh, we’re not in that crowd” which is no incentive at all.

How does this not make sense? Failing to develop your own identity and leeching the popularity of others by sharking the people annoyed with them is diminishing. This means, as a business or as a person, you’re not making the most of your You-ness, you’re bashing the competition (unprofessional) at the same time as you’re telling people that you’re exactly what they are – but you’re not them.

Who cares if Plurk is better? Hundreds of thousands of people post hundreds of millions of tweets daily, and if I’m networking, I’m going to Twitter, because that’s where the people are.

Who cares if Bing is awesome? It’s not Google, according to my social awareness, which tells me that it’s exactly what google is, but with a different banner at the top.

Say it with me, now, it’s the motto of the day: I Want To Be Different, Just Like Evrbody Else.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: google, microsoft, online marketing, positioning, twitter

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