Dylan Hunter

Now, I’ll admit, I’ve been salivating about the potential of picking up a Powerbook/MacBook Pro for quite some time, but it’s good to see that with the exception of some rounded corners, my life won’t actually change that much! Major kudos to Hunter Kressall!

WARNING: Not suitable for the kidlings!

After seeing this post from Tim O’Reilly, decided to order the two books suggested for myself. Currently reading Juicing the Orange, and one of the things they point to in the book is this mental beatdown of 127 questions that they use to diagnose a client’s situation to figure out what to do for creative campaigns with them.

Obviously won’t be able to, and don’t need to answer / use all in the normal course, (we all have actual progress to make, Man! ) and definitely seems to be oriented toward much more mature companies, but still looks to be a good source for thinking about the kinds of things that are, or will be, important when launching / relaunching your own company, product, etc.

Whew, does this one bring up some haunting memories of some very similar conversations we had back at ATW a long time ago. We, like AOL, were generating far and away more revenue from an older, dying, rev stream, with major downward pressure on it, (ours being white label B2B licensing fees - dropping even more precipitously than AOL’s - down 80% in 16 mths) with new customer win rates and renewals on our older line of business falling through the floor, again, as AOL’s.

We really had two major choices - either go whole hog consumer, turning ATW.com into a formal search portal, (we had been dancing around for 2 yrs). My opinion, this gave us both the highest degree of control over our future as well as highest long-term potential once we adjusted focus, but also required restructuring, as well as a strong leap of faith that our newer efforts would work, or shop around the internet business entirely, keeping it going via the older dying rev streams in the interim. In our case, the choice was made in favor of the status quo / liquidate - the lure of the drug of current revenue, even if dying, has, and will always be, amazingly powerful, making leaps of faith, especially when also requiring restructuring/firings, very hard to pull off. From the view up here in the Nosebleeds, I would agree that this is the right way for them to go, but we’ll have to see whether their Board bites.

Dulles, Va. - Two weeks away from pitching his radical plan to transform AOL into a free, ad-supported service, CEO Jonathan Miller is expected to call for thousands of layoffs and a “near halt” to marketing of the company’s trademark Internet service, The New York Times reported on Monday. Miller, who will detail his proposal to the board of parent Time Warner, is expected to “defend his unusually draconian plan by arguing that trying to wring every last dime from its dial-up subscribers is preventing AOL from being as aggressive as it can in competing with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on the web,” The Times reported, citing anonymous AOL executives. The plan, however, could be a tough sell to some board members, since they would initially have to accept lower profits until the company is able to boost its advertising revenue. The plan is scheduled for public announcement on August 2.
Link

BTW - Since I absolutely hate places that put content behind forced registrations, will hopefully be moving the above link away from the NYT very soon. Apologies to everyone for including links to this kind of crippled content if you hit this before then.

This really is the most disgusting part of a dying tech company. When they can’t actually make a business out of doing what they were supposed to be doing, the investors start getting the IP lawyers to start poking the carcass to see if they can pull a Unisys, (especially on really basic stuff) building themselves an annuity on the backs of those who actually succeed, turning what at least might have passed into history as something to have once been proud of into a future plague.

It really is sad to see this kind of ridiculous IP protection, especially on the Internet, used by bottom-feeders who fail against those who succeed, (especially for this kind of really stupid common sense ones) or, in this case, use as a method to try to force someone with a useful social network asset to buy Friendster out for the patent, when the business itself couldn’t justify. Here’s hoping that the numerous companies that will receive the soon-to-follow flight of C&D threats do what many of us did with those from Unisys - insert them deeply into the circular file.

P.S. Can you tell that these kind of IP issues really get under my skin?

As you’ve probably noticed by now, the site’s both looking and functioning a bit differently. And no, it wasn’t intentional - yep, overwrote my site theme when upgrading WordPress this morning, (I know, I know - make a copy, edit the copy - was being slack when I started futzing around with several months ago, and now it’s bit me in the tail, as it should). Maybe I’ll finally take this as a good kick in the tail to do my own design…. or, especially since it’s summer, and I’m really trying to find an RoR replacement that I can futz with, maybe not… In either case, we’ll be spending some quality time with Kubrick for a little bit. Enjoy the “familiarity…”