"Adverse Blogger Selection"?

Does the blogsphere suffer from "adverse blogger selection"? A tendency for those with real expertise in an area sit on the sidelines reading blogs but not writing since they are actually in the action... leaving only those with limited expertise to blog on a topic.

Does this theory help explain why the best blogs are often written by those in the analyst or venture capital community, where they are essentially marketing themselves and their services by demonstrating a strong understanding of various industries?

I have a strong feeling that "adverse blogger selection" is at work... and that the majority of blog readers haven't even thought about this issue.

BitTorrent & The Long Tail

I first found BitTorrent about 2 years ago when I missed an episode of Alias, the TV show on ABC which has a bit of a cult following. Like most that have used the P2P application, I found the networks efficiency at dealing with huge files astonishing. My first impression was that BitTorrent would take over the P2P world for large popular files, but that it would never be very good for "the long tail" of content. The reason is that you need someone always "seeding" content in the BitTorrent world, and I believed content that didn't have mass market appeal wouldn't be able to maintain trackers.

Well BitTorrent, like most disruptive technologies, evolved to meet the needs of users with long tail content needs. Applications like Azureus and others make it easier to seed content and gather content via RSS feeds. Today there is content like sporting events, TV shows for kids, 80s TV content, etc. all over the net. Missed the last Illinois basketball game??? you can find it on a site that hosts the most recent games as well as classic games from the '89 team.

What does this mean for content providers? With the shut down of centralized tracker sites like Suprnova, it means that hundreds of micro content hosting sites will emerge with out much fanfare... like they have been for the last few months. Content providers will think things are under control, but it will be too late... the masses will have adopted BitTorrent as their portal to the long tail, and once your unmet content needs are fulfilled by a service, it is hard to turn back.

What a big news day....

There has been some big news today:

Microsoft has launched their search engine replacing Yahoo!

Netscape is getting ready to launch Netscape 8, which will be marketed around security

Looks like Wal-Mart will be selling iPods

Is Microsoft reconsidering integrating search into the OS?

What the heck... I just can't resist.. NEITHER ARE BLADES!!!

Somewhere in my reading today I came across a post that pointed to an interested discussion happening in the blogsphere about the iPod. I stumbled across the discussion at slashdot posting and this posting by Robert X. Cringely.

Here is the abridged version of the current discussion: Everyone knows that Gillette (recently purchased by P&G) mints money from essentially giving away razors and charging a high price for the blades. Well, people are now asking which is the razor and which is the blade in the iPod/iTunes world. I think the discussion has gotten so far off base that I had to suspend my personal embargo on commenting on the digital music space. (When I started at RealNetworks I decided to not comment on areas that pertained to my work, but I think I can comment here w/o getting myself in trouble ;-)

While in business school you couldn't go a week with out someone saying "That is like the razor & blades approach" or "They should try and follow an 'Intel Inside' strategy"... When a business strategy has success you often see people try and impose the concepts of that strategy on everything in sight. This is clearly the case with the discussion happening around iPod/iTunes and Razors/Blades.

Neither the iPod nor the songs sold for the iPod are the blades. First off, the songs can't be blades because they don't "wear out" and unlike blades, if you don't buy new ones, you won't be looked at funny by your wife/girlfriend. More importantly, the songs don't possess the margins necessary for being the "blade" in this strategy. The iPod itself clearly can't be the blades... while the product contains the margins needed (especially when sold directly) it simply isn't being replaced on the cycle needed to be called the "blades" in this strategy.

I think the best case scenario for Apple would be that the industry shapes up to be along the lines of the telecom industry, where the songs are the service, essentially undifferentiated, and the real value is captured by the hardware makers (cell phone makers). I personally don't think the industry is headed in that direction, but it is clearly where Apple should hope it heads...

I don't think the relationship between the music player and content will be like the relationship between the cell phone and service. I honestly believe that in the long run it is content that is king, not hardware. It is the overall music experience that will dictate where the dollars are spent. If history has shown us anything, hardware commoditizes over time, and eventually the basis of competition shifts to some other attribute, preferably not price ;). Do we know of any industry where hardware is a commodity and it is the consumer experience that matters??? Can you say PCs & Software.

So what is the proper "business analogy" for the iPod/iTunes combination? I don't think there is one. It CLEARLY isn't razors & blades. It hasn't turned into Cell phones/service or PCs/software either.... to me the critical question isn't "What is the analogous business model for iPods/iTunes today?"... the critical question is "Where is the headed? Is it a unique model or will it head to a model we all understand today?"... I have my opinion on that, but I think sharing would get me in trouble, so I will stop here.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! agree on something!

Adam Smith reportedly said when a group of capitalists gather under one roof the talk eventually turns toward collusion against the public. Well today Google announced that they have been working with Yahoo! and Microsoft around search technology... but rather than collude against the public they have taken a major step forward for the good of the public.

While unknown to most of the public, there has been an underground war occurring on the net for the last couple of years... that war is around links. Because of the value of links in search results, people have created programs to create links to their sites. This is especially a problem for popular blogs and bloggers. See if you are a popular blogger you can't link to a site you don't like because that link will HELP that site, Robert Scoble has a good example of that here. Well now the search engines have come up with a way to "disable" the positive impact of a link, and that is great news for consumers. This means that search results will only get better over time. All 3 major engines will observe the same "disable" meta data, so there is a consumer standard!

Adam Smith would be proud!

CES - Incremental innovation vs. Disruptive Innovations

I had the pleasure of working CES for my employer this year, and it was a very interesting 5 days down in Vegas. I was last at CES 2 years ago, and from my recollection, I had the opportunity to check out many disruptive technologies, including satellite radio, Plasma / LCD / DLP TVs, and many others. This year the show seemed to be all about incremental innovation. While I did spot numerous small companies with innovative products, I didn't find the "next big thing" like I felt I had when I saw XM 2 years ago. While this year seemed slow, I am confident with broadband speeds increasing, 3G networks being deployed, and moore's law still kicking, we should expect a big CES next year.

The devil you know vs. the devil you don't

Is it the late 1990's all over again? Remember in the 90's when the music labels took Napster to court and put the company out of business... it was hailed as a win against digital music piracy. Only month later new applications like Morpheus and Kazaa emerged which have proven impossible for the labels to shut down due to their lack of a centralized server.

So here we are 5+ years later and with broadband penetration on the rise, sharing movies today is as easy as it was to share music 5 years ago. So when the movie studios looked at the hub of digital movie sharing, Suprnova, I hoped that the companies would seek to find a way to turn Suprnova into a legitimate operation. Instead the MPAA has shut down Suprnova and other BitTorrent sites and again it has been hailed as a victory over movie piracy.

Sometimes it is better to deal with the devil you know rather than the devil you don't, because I expect the P2P community to come out with brand new file sharing applications this year that will make the MPAA whish they had a centralized source to deal with. There has already been some hype around an application called eXeem, which is supposed to in essence reproduce the Suprnova experience, but in a decentralized fashion.

The game of "cat & mouse" between the content owners and those interested in sharing content will not end due to lawsuits... it will end when consumer needs are being met and when the cost associated with stealing content is greater than the cost associated with purchasing content.

Help those in need....

If you can, go over to Amazon and donate to the American Red Cross to help those in need from the catastrophe in South Asia.

The link is on the home page, they have raised $5 Million dollars already.

Browser Share On The Move...

Overall Browser MS
Originally uploaded by mwillmsn.

A month and a half ago I blogged that Firefox was up to 28% of my browser market share... well now that figure is all the way up to 45%. While I get a lot of traffic due to firefox related searches, it is hard for me to imagine that FireFox isn't continuing its gain on IE.

Consumer Technology Adoption... and other ramblings

While I love trying out new technologies, I am FAR more likely to try out a technology if the "trial cost" is low. For example, the cost to try out a new HD-DVD player is high both from a monetary and time perspective. At the same time, the cost for me to try out new software is very low... it is often just the time to download / install since most software has free trials and can be downloaded off the net.

In order for me to try new tech products that carry an up-front cost they must have a crystal clear value proposition which is differentiated from what I am currently using. Well, VOIP has finally hit this point for me... my last bill from Qwest was $77, and that is FAR too high for local and long distance telephony over a landline. Vonage at $25 bucks a month will end up saving me a great deal of cash but also provide cool services like being able to listen to voicemail over the net and take my phone number with me when I travel.

I find many companies simply don't focus on the correct factors when it comes to driving consumer adoption. For example, if you are selling hardware technology products you should focus on different factors of technology adoption than software makers. Let me list out some factors of consumer technology adoption:

Relative Advantage - How do consumers perceive your product compared to the competition?

Ease of Testing - How hard is it for consumers to test your product?

East of Evaluation - How difficult is it for consumers to evaluate your product in comparison to the alternatives?

Compatibility - Is your product compatible with other products within the same ecosystem (example to follow)

Complexity - How complex is the product for consumers?

As you can easily imagine almost all of the factors listed above are easier to overcome if you are a software company compared to a hardware company. Imagine you are TiVo... You have to worry about:

Relative advantage - Do consumers really see a NEED for TV "time shifting"

Ease of testing & evaluation - TiVo's were expensive in the past so it made it difficult to test, but once someone used the product evaluation was simple.

compatibility - The funny thing about adoption of products "in the CE stack" is that most consumers expect that new products ARE NOT compatible with their current CE products. A study last year showed that only 52% of consumers felt that a DVR was compatible with their current TV set.

Ok... think about this for a second, if you are a TiVo exec, which factor of consumer technology adoption should you be focusing on... and how should you address it?

Hotmail finally responds

Well it looks like hotmail finaly got around to increasing their storage capacity. I only noticed because my MSN messenger popup told me I had 100+ emails, which I knew was way more than my old 2MB capacity could handle.

Work has gotten really crazy, but I hope that in the next few weeks I can get back to posting on a more frequent basis.

The "Lock in realization"

Disclosure: I am a product manager for RealNetworks... but the below story simply represents facts.

A good friend of mine is working on Wall Street and he shot me an email yesterday with a question I have gotten from numerous people. Here was the question:

"What if I have 4GB worth of songs on a laptop and want to get them to a new laptop... how can I easily do that?"

Easy question to answer, but while answering the question I learned that the 4GB of songs were purchased from iTunes and that this person was scared to move them from PC to PC because he heard about the limitations put on the number of PCs a song can be on.

Now for the "lock in realization"... I told my friend not to worry much about the PC issue, but that songs purchased from iTunes can't be put on other MP3 players and his response was "I didn't realize that". Ok... here is someone who has made a $1,000 investment in music and now is locked-in to the iPod.

If he wants to play these songs on a different device he is screwed. He will have to go through the hassle of burning hundreds of CDs and then ripping them. I of course went on to tell him that songs purchased from Real are portable to the most number of devices, including the iPod....

The reason I am raising this issue is that this is something thousands of consumers across the country are dealing with, and they won't be happy to learn they bought songs that lock them in to a platform.

FireFox ... not a flash in the pan.

A story over at News.com details the continued acceptance of FireFox in the market. Mozilla based browsers (of which FireFox is one) now represent 6 percent of the market up from just 3.5% in June. I expect that the trend will continue given the lack of innovation from Microsoft on this front and the impending media hype around FireFox hitting 1.0 status.

It was reported about a month ago that tech sites like News.com had seen Mozilla based browsers representing around 20% of their traffic. At that time I saw essentially the same trend,... now my Mozilla based browser share is up to 28%.... with MSFT taking the other 72%.

At a little less technical site, MarketingPlayBook.com Microsoft has a 75% share with 7% safari and the remaining 18% mozilla based. Two different blogs, each on the technical marketing side, but not targeted toward the developer community seeing huge non-IE based traffic.

Get out the vote!

Not that anyone reading this doesn't know it, but make sure to vote today! I ran into a bar tender the other night who said he wasn't going to vote b/c he didn't think it would matter, well the last election was decided by a few hundred votes in FL... so get out there and make your voice heard.

Where have I heard this before?

According to News.com, Microsoft has stated that by the end of the year they will launch a desktop search tool to compete with Google's Desktop search (and their own junkie windows search).

Hmmm, I think I have heard of this one before. This past summer Microsoft announced that by the end of the summer they would increase the storage capacity for Hotmail in response to Gmail... well we are now deep into Fall and hotmail still has not upped their capacity.

Microsoft has lost all credibility around hitting ship dates, so I wouldn't hold your breath on this one.

Google Desktop Search - Changing Mass Market Behavior

A lot has been written about Google's desktop search, but many writters focused on the obvious short term implications and not on what Google is trying to accomplish in the LONG RUN and how this application fits into that strategy. So, let me take a stab at articulating what Google is trying to accomplish.

As I have written about in the past (See my posting on how Google could topple Windows)Google wants to create a massive network computer that is the platform... essentially completing the vision of McNealy and Ellison, making the network the computer. Given this long term goal, how does Desktop search fit in? The critical aspect of Google's desktop search is that the only way to access the search app is through the Google WEB interface. The company could have simply created a desktop app to present the results, but they made the decision to put the desktop search results within the browser. They did this because it helps to train computer users that if they want to find personal content just go to Google.

It is very hard to change the behavior of consumers. In talking with TiVo execs they told me that they were surprised how hard it was to get people to change their TV viewing habits. They called this the inertia in the market... that consumers would just go on doing what they were doing, even if there was a better approach. By creating a desktop search application that works through the Google interface, the company is investing early (before their huge network computer is ready for the masses) to change market inertia.

Just think about it, if you are always connected to the net do you care where your files are stored (assuming privacy/security is addressed)? Heck, in using the desktop search application I am already ready to unload some data onto the Google network just to make it accessible in other places.

Is MSN asleep at the hotmail wheel?

It has been over 180 days since Google announced Gmail. That means any company in the web based email business has had 180 days to react. It didn't take long for most... Yahoo! responded quickly and raised the capacity of Yahoo! mail accounts from 4 MB to 100 MB. Microsoft also announced that by the end of the summer they would raise the hotmail storage limit... well it is now October, clearly in the middle of Fall, and my hotmail storage is still a lowly 2 MB. I hate my hotmail account, with all the junk mail I get to that account it is constantly filling up, and I have to check it all the time just to make sure something that is important doesn't bounce.

So what are the boys in Redmond up to? Are they asleep at the hotmail wheel? I will tell you this much, I am ready to shut down my hotmail account because it is just too much of a pain to deal with compared to Yahoo! and Gmail. Why can't a company that dumps Billions into R&D with little to show for it pour some resources into being competitive in the web-based email market.

How to get your Gmail Atom Feed

So I noticed that icon for my Gmail ATOM feed went missing yesterday, but yet the feed was still active. I assume this means that all of you who never saw the feed can probably get yours anyway by adding the following feed to your news reader.

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom

I am currently using FireFox's "Live Bookmark" functionality for this. Let me know in the comments if this works for you in other aplications.

New Gmail functionality signals a Google Browser

The Gmail team over at Google has been busy lately. Today they have added two pieces of functionality: (There might be more additions but I haven't seen them yet)

1) Improved contact management
2) Atom feed for your email

The Atom feed is what has me VERY intrigued. While many will look at this little feed as just a feature for ubber geeks, I view it as a major signal of Google products to come. Follow my logic for a second:

Gmail is a great application but it has a major drawback... you can only access it if you are online. This means that you can't make Google your primary mail application because if you find yourself without an internet connection, you can't email... Well inserting an Atom feed is a first step in fixing the connection problem. Using this feed Gmail users can now pull down their Gmail to a local client application. The feed today contains only summary information, (like subject, who the message is from, etc.) but there is no reason this can't be expanded to contain the full text of a message.

So, now that we know you can pull down part of your Gmail messages into a client application should we assume that Google will stop there and let random applications handle the user experience or do we believe that Google will want to have an application that controls that user experience? They will want to control the user experience, that is for certain.

So now I believe that Google will want a client application to help manage email that can be brought to that client in the form of an Atom Feed. Well, lets see... recently there was a high profile application that launched with the ability to pull such a feed... it is called FireFox.

Therefore I believe it is just a matter of days or weeks before Google announces their own browser based on FireFox that has built in support for Gmail. I am sure that any Google Browser will have additional functionality than just Gmail integration, but this is a big first step.

Cell phone saturation

Anyone in the tech industry thinks a lot about consumer adoption. Growth is often powered by consumers accepting new technology to make their lives easier. When there aren't any new customers to aquire, a market is considered "saturated", which causes a problem since firms then simply fight to steal customers from other firms.

This weekend I saw something that shocked me, and led me to believe that the cell phone market has reached a critical saturation point. While my wife and I were walking to dinner this past weekend we walked by a homeless person in downtown Seattle talking on his cell phone. If this isn't market saturation, I am not sure what is.