Dylan Hunter

Actually, what I find most interesting here is why MLB’s streams / streamer are so low in comparison to the others. Is it a format issue, (length of stream)? Integration / focus? Too tight a concentration on a single content type? Can’t be that it’s avail on TV, as that would affect Time Warner, as well. Well, since I’ve never gone to the MLB site, s’pose I’ll have to go check it out…

A very cute timeline / explanation of the buzz campaign for the way overhyped MS Origami Project. And while there’s definitely no question that Dustin Hubbard deserves some strong credit for pulling it off, (or, at least gets the credit for serendipity! ) it also shows a bit of the danger of overhyping a product that’s just not that extraordinary.

Had the UMPC been as impressive as folks were hoping from the buzz, MS would have done beautifully in kicking up its reputation a good, strong bit on the innovation front, even if they only sold 2 UMPC units, helping them to cover up some of the Vista black eyes, and, perhaps, if they could get a couple of whiz-bang doo-dads back in the product schedule before Vista, *1* might actually help them a bit on adoption there, as well, (and for that, if it pulls forward adoption curves even .001%, it would have more than paid for itself, Dustin and the entire Origami Team at least a hundred times over! ).

Unfortunately, since after all this hype, what eventually came out was effectively one very large Wet Noodle(tm), unfortunately, it serves the opposite purpose, serving to damage MS as wasting our time with another not fully baked product, (probably sticking to its classic “get it right by v. 3.0″ strategy) that doesn’t do what the Innovators want it to, and is much too expensive to generate any significant Early Adopter purchase.

Buzz is always a double-edged sword, and here, since the level wasn’t well-matched to the thing being hyped, it ended up scoring a net negative. But still, a good learning experience and, as importantly, a fine display of skill that will hopefully only become more impressive with further seasoning, and were it my call, (which it isn’t! ) Dustin and the rest of the Origami Buzz Team have proved themselves well enough to give them a shot at the Big Leagues - I’d definitely toss them on either the Vista or revamped MSN Search launch teams to see what they could do on those, and just ask them to try to do a tighter “buzz match,” (to external potential opinion, rather than oversipping the internal koolaid) on that one.

So, nicely done Dustin & Gang, on the level of buzz generated, and, as importantly, for having the courage to admit the strong role of serendipity in, rather than playing it as planned perfectly from the beginning, (and here, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they would have done anyway, even if the phrase “overhyped” weren’t flying about from the moment the UMPC launched! ). Here’s hoping you keep moving on from here. And for the rest of us, a good thought exercise to keep in mind when planning our buzz campaigns, (knowing that any claim to actually “control buzz” is like handing someone a card with “cat herder” on it - immediately stamps a big, blaring “SMOKING CRACK” across the forehead of the speaker / giver! ).
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*1* Even if only on the version that would ship with UMPC’s, where they could control the hardware configs better for a first shot, and then for more GA on the desktop / laptop front later. In fact, if played right, could let MS use the UMPC for a nice semi-GA tech test bed for a little bit, to let them say that they’ve actually released some of the features that they’ve kept ripping out of Vista, even if they’re only available to the 14 people who would actually shell out the thousand bucks to be the first on their block to own their own Star Trek: Next Generation notepad doo-hickey!

What more can I say - Absolute Genius!

You know, it’s this kind of crud that really makes folks hate MS, (and others who engage in such similar tying practices*1*). You’ve got one thing that folks want, which you then use to force them to buy something they don’t want - it’s tying, pure and simple - another anti-trust violation, (where oh where has the lawsuit vs. MS gone?).

Yes, it does goose the per-user numbers in the spreadsheet, (so long as you’re not also modeling adoption rates and/or "probability of switch to competitor" which you just dropped and boosted, respectively, by at least 8-10 full percentage pts each).

Appealing to Bill & Co is a waste of time and effort, but for the rest of us, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - focus on building products that people want and need and they will _happily_ buy from you / be advertised to on your site. Stop wasting time, effort and money on restrictive pricing schemes, endless pointless litigation, etc.

The most disappointing part of this, of course, is that, though I personally hate the idea of one company having the level of power that MS does, and am not exactly what you’d call the greatest Windows supporter, to be fair, it’s a solid product, and there are, indeed, people who are fully happy using - there should be no need for these kind of heavy-handed tactics.

If MS is worried about adoption rates on Vista, then they’ve got to do something real like not requiring _major_ reinvestment in higher-grade hardware to accomplish - geez, there’s an idea! How many of us remember all the additional money that we had to spend, and how many perfectly good PC’s all got shelved when Win95 came out? And if the adoption rates, especially on the corp side were too slow for Bill, et al’s taste, by God, they should have planned it better and built Vista to _work on what we all have now_! Forget this crud about tying Halo 2 - make the balance between cost, (Total Cost - which, for Vista, also does include all the new hardware that we need to buy to get it) and value fit your customers, and things will work out fine. Push down too hard on the cost side to your benefit vs your customers, and the number of people who will consider the balance struck will be all that fewer, and you deserve the results you get.

Anyway, breathe…. relax…. enough about Vista - this was about pathetic pricing tactics, and am sure you’ve more than got the idea by now!

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*1* Though MS bears the brunt tenfold-plus, of course, because they’re controlling your OS - Apple, where’s that version of OSX that’ll run with BIOS?! And/or Go Novell - finally make that new Linux Desktop 10 a viable alternative!

I actually worked on something similar a bunch of years ago, at the time more oriented toward personalization of search results, but, if anything, the threshold of how good you have to be on to make it worthwhile should definitely be lower in an ad context, so should be a good feature when they launch, (presuming they actually do it well, which, unfortunately, MSN Search does not raise great faith in - perhaps their folks in Beijing will be better at! ).

Is hardly iron-hard, but you definitely can predict several demographic components by how people express the same / similar ideas, at least good enough to try using as ad segmentation technique, and then as long as you can keep pushing the acquisition needle further over, you keep investing!

“Microsoft Corp may soon be able to tell whether an Internet search query comes from a man or a woman.

“…’There’s a confidence interval around one’s gender,’ [Jed] Nahum said in a telephone interview. ‘Advertisers can start to tailor their message based on those estimates. Using the new technology, Microsoft will be able to tell, for example, that someone searching for the term `Dodge Caravan’ is more likely to be female than someone searching for `Dodge’ alone.’”

More (warning: coming from Taipei, so it’ll take a sec to load)

Ok, now I’m thoroughly disconcerted… By now, we’ve all heard of Sony’s XCP/DRM/rootkit fiasco, (and we’ll leave any more commentary on to the many others who will be so tempted - limiting my only addition to another in hopefully a growing chorus plugging membership in the EFF! ).

But now, if I want to remove Sony’s unauthorized invasion into my computer, I have to trust and DL MS’ anti-spyware app? Good God, what’s next, Satan offering to help me fend off Beelzebub? Now this _is_ heavily disturbing - I need to evaluate who is more evil - Sony for not only their foolish DRM stuff, but, more importantly, their horrible attitude to letting people remove it once they were “outed,” or MS, who is only using this as a thinly-veiled play to increase downloads of their Giant software, which really has little other purpose than allowing MS to scare the bejesus out of any normal user who installs anything that keeps IE from diverting a whole mess of free traffic over to MSN, (you didn’t seriously think anyone actually _chooses_ to go to MSN for anything other than Hotmail, did you?)

Scylla and Charybdis all over again….

I know I am hardly the first blogger to deal with this situation, but wanted to send along a nice, positive “may you roast upon a firey spit” to our friends working with Online Poker and Phentermine, (there, you got your one mention, and no, you’re not getting the links). Now piss off, (and yes, I know perfectly well that not only is there not a chance in hell that these folks are actually listening, but even less of a chance of them actually heeding me, but sometimes a good “shaking your fist at the sky” is important, nonetheless - keeps you strong on why you don’t want to engage in these kinds of business practices when confronted with folks who keep pushing to swim deeper and deeper toward the darkness! )

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For those of you who don’t know what comment spam is, there are some seriously scummy companies - they used to work with porn, where they used to try game my index on ATW.com* all the time - but apparently have found online gaming and prescriptions at least as profitable - out there who build bots to find blogs, and then submit random, utterly unrelated crap as comments to those blogs, which include their links, trying first and foremost to build up their Google PageRank** numbers, as well as hoping to get the maybe one in ten thousand folks who might actually click on to find out what this random non-sequitor is all about to actually engage.

For those blogs / forums that are unmoderated, these links go up, and if Google / Yahoo, etc., haven’t yet detected their most recent bit of random crap, (i.e. they change IP’s, emails, text, doorway pages, etc. all the time, and am sure have gotten smart enough to ensure that the true IP’s are entirely masked, and the ones they submit are sufficiently randomized so as to make it more difficult to connect) for at least a point in time, they get to profit from the connectivity calculations to boost their ranks within the algorithmic portion of these search engines, thereby attracting more extremely cheap leads, (though Teoma, in using their more “segmented only to the query” version of connectivity should at least isolate these idiots to fighting back and forth to only their own sewers).

Is forever the anti-spam / porn / spyware economic problem - there is much more profit for the companies doing this than there is for the companies trying to resist, (where usually doing a better job in dealing with is only a cost***). And so long as this remains the case, (which’ll be nigh unto forever) we’ll have to deal with, and lose the economic value of the time spent in all of us dealing with, (i.e. how much cash could we all generate in the same amount of time it takes us to moderate our blogs / forums to make these things go away and go away and go away…. And yes, I know WordPress 1.5+ has some method of decreasing comment spam, but afraid I haven’t yet been able to get my webhost to upgrade me beyond 1.0.x even after repeated requests - and yes, this indeed may turn out to be enough of an issue for me to move webhosts - or, via the extreme power of inertia - it may not! )
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* Have I told you how much it hurts my heart every time I have to type the link to ATW anymore? What’s there is nothing more than a tired shell - my Old Girl, as a distinct entity, with its own advantages and disadvantages is long since gone, (though at least adding nicely to Yahoo). It’s as sad as when Disney bought Go.com, gutted it, refused to do any work to keep it up, refused to sell it, (I tried! ) and killed it through neglect, (and that wasn’t nearly as interesting a search engine) as happened with:

AV, (I almost never used, but I’m sure I’m far from alone in missing them having their full boolean advanced search - some things are important just to _be_ - as something in the World - even if only 4 people on the planet actually use - this is one of them), as happened with

Hotbot, as happened with

Northern Light, (one of my old personal favorites on the relevance front - from a business model perspective, were clearly always one of the weirdest), as happened with

….,

but as will unfortunately never happen with MSN even though looking at the mistakes that they continue to make that all of us already went through and solved years ago, it probably should, (but MS has to remain MS, and do it their own way - their focus has always been on how things can be best for them, rather than how they can be best for the consumer, and luckily, they have more than enough cash to continue to totally not care, and there are more than enough people whose most important market trait is inertia).

** And yes, I’m well-aware that Google doesn’t actually use PageRank, the algorithm, anymore. Am referring to the PageRank _concept_ - i.e. weighted link popularity to approximate concepts of authority, which I’m sure they’ll always use in one way or another, (if only to keep a tight, well-understood PR message). And if you’re _seriously_ picking these kind of nits, am sure there are plenty of other folks who would be much better foils for random, senseless and otherwise unproductive argument, (i.e. I never understood the point of debating, either).

*** Even for the anti-spyware guys, who do get comped specifically to fight, they get comped to remove stuff, and if that means wiping out a whole mess of false positives, who cares? They don’t get paid to work hard on parsing the nice ones from the nasties, they get paid to make things go away, plain and simple, with the specific exception of never tagging Google or Yahoo since the bad PR would kill them, regardless of the practices of their apps - i.e. did you know that if you have the PageRank button active on your Google toolbar, (which is the default condition) that they’re watching literally every single site that you, your husband, your wife, your children, go to, (though I suppose if your child is an early-pubescent, it might be a good thing to scare him a bit about people watching what he’s watching! )? Did you know further that both Google and Yahoo update their toolbars to do whatever they’ve chosen to do without your knowledge or consent? This stuff certainly scares the bejesus out of me!

YES!! Absolutely love this - found an excellent page that shows exactly how to set up sshd on a WinXP box, (via Cygwin). Perfect - now I can finally shell in to my home box whereever I am to get files, do work on my home PC, finally fully access the PC’s in my home, etc., (ok, not “fully” - I’d need a gui login for that - but getting closer - then I could finally only load up programs, etc. on one box and run them from anywhere - dealing with lag, of course - ’tis one of the prime reasons that I keep playing around with Linux - that, and my just general aversion to any one firm having that much power over something, especially one with the highly questionable business practices of MS).

Note for most solo-WinXP owners that’s not in the article - you will need to put a password on your user account to SSH in. Go to Control Panel>User Accounts, click on your user, (if you’ve never dealt with users before, there should be only one) add a password and click “Ok.” This will make logging in a bit less seamless in that there’ll be a logon intercept page that you’ll now have to enter your new password for every time you reboot / startup, (which is a bit of a hassle) but it’s not terrible, (at least until your wife, daughters, etc. want to get on the computer and don’t know the password - ah well, security’s always a bit of a pain in the butt).