Category Archives: microsoft

Digging Copyright Infringement?

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Today’s excitement at Digg regarding posting codes to override copyright protection on HD DVDs, combined with the pending Google v Viacom showdown, may be referenced for some time to come as the “starting date” of the online revolution against old notions about copyright and intellectual property.

My take on this is, as usual, unusual in that I think two things that everybody is arguing about are actually very clear:

1) Based on existing law, YouTube and DIGG have an obligation to remove offending materials, and probably are in violation themselves for posting those materials, basically ignoring the rights of the copyright holders in favor of community enthusiasm for the coming IP revolution.

2) Existing law is outmoded (perhaps more accurately it should be considered irrelevant and unenforceable, and won’t stand much longer without significant modifications.

Diggers, YouTubers, and other online enthusiasts seem to think that becuase 2 is true, 1 is not true. That’s silly. law is law, and these are violations and everybody knows it. The copyright laws are not outrageous or fundamentally unfair in their *intentions*, and thus they’ll continue to hold up in the courts until we see new laws enacted that are relevant, enforceable, and in line with new sensibilities about what constitutes fair use.

Personally, I’d like to see more experimentation with dramatic expansion of the principle of “fair use” to basically include all non-commercial uses. We see this principle in play in the open source community and even at Google, Yahoo and MSN with many of their web innovations. This openness has arguably done more to foster creativity than any proprietary projects could ever do. Examples: Linux and Firefox to name two of thousands of brilliant and innovative projects that thrive, unencumbered by most old fashioned copyright restrictions.

So, what needs to change here? The law, and thus it’s up to congress to enact new rules that make more sense. Perhaps these could be as simple as suggesting that the commercial benefits of programs and music and other creative stuff should be controlled by the creator of those programs, but that the *societal benefits* should be considered part of the obligation of any artist or creator to contribute to society at large.

Who owns your attention anyway?

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Too deeply buried in the (very interesting) discussion here  and here bout how hard it is to get enough traffic to a website to make it generate big money is a more provocative question, to wit:

Who owns YOUR attention and how much is your attention worth?

Big players are making huge profits reselling your attention in the form of placing targeted advertising while you search and surf for info. I have no complaints about that in principle (in fact I feed my kids from that!) , and even agree, somewhat reluctantly, with the assertion that advertising can often enhance the search experience by providing you with sales info on products related to your searches and surfing.

However I’m not sure the power curve is properly placed right now. Rather the big players like Yahoo, Google, MS call most of the shots and reap most of the profits while we, the little sheeples, use their (good) services, often at no charge. It’s certainly a win-win scenario for most, but you can make a strong case that Google, as the big recipient of the big bucks, wins more than you do. Frankly though I don’t know the equation here – what am I worth to Google or Yahoo or MSN?

Over at Battelle’s during a discussion of Microsoft’s new plans to pay big users to use MS products a reader suggested it would take over $50 per month for him to switch to MS search rather than his preferred Google. This raises a very interesting question about what he’s worth to them. I wrote over there:

Pay to use may be the shape of things to come as users begin to realize that they, and not the big players, are the key to internet success. Yaacov’s point is key – would he really want $600 annually to use MS search? If so he’s not typical. I bet you could get most people to abandon Google in favor of LIVE (which is close, but not as good as Google), for $50 per year or less.

In fact I bet you could get most people to switch engines for $10 per month and some for $5 or less. Why don’t they do it? MS had plans and I think they eventually will try this “pay to search” model, which is strong and moves closer to the user ideal of owning their own attention.

When you sell my attention to the highest bidders, shouldn’t I get a piece of the action?

Another related NYT Article

Fixed mindset vs Growth mindset = Microsoft mindset vs Google mindset?

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Google’s legendary success, especially in light of Microsoft’s lackluster performance, leads one to wonder about the differences at these two techno behemoths.

Stanford Magazine has a nice feature on the work of Carol Dweck on personal achievement. Here is a summary of the work in a single diagram.

Perhaps the big difference between Google and Microsoft is that the Google culture inspires what Dweck calls a “Growth Mindset”, which the MS culture inspires the “fixed mindset”.

Supporting this model is the idea that where MS seems to ignore criticism Google often embraces it. Also, Google remains open to change – flexible – while Microsoft seems to resist change or even force square pegs into round holes with bloated or “bad fit” applications. For Google, the modifications to the world view are reflected in Google products. This leads to the simpler, more friendly technologies Google is known for.

Meanwhile the MS products rely more on their virtual OS monopoly, big businesses reluctance to change, and their sheer size which allows them to move the market.

Where does Yahoo fit in all this? (disclaimer – I have Yahoo stock) . I think they are the sleeper here, with a culture and people that have the potential to adopt the growth mindset but are currently stymied by market forces and the Google glow.

Related:  Scoble today bashes his ex, Microsoft, for talking BS before action.

Microsoft to move almost all ads online over next three years. It’s about … time!

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I’ve been wondering how long it would take for the big players to shift the big money online, and it looks like Microsoft is heading powerfully in that direction based on this story from Media Daily News.

I’m not sure Microsoft is really a bellweather for corporate ads as MS is a technology company that does a huge amount of business online and has a huge online customer base, but whenever close to a  billion dollars is shifted from conventional media to online it’s a significant development in the advertising landscape and probably an indicator of things to come from other major advertisers.Since I did several conversion studies many years ago in the travel sector it’s been clear to me where things were headed as these strongly indicated that online advertising is far more effective than print ads.   As an online marketing guy for Oregon travel projects we ran full page Sunset ads featuring huge displays of separate domain names that I assigned specifically to each campaign.    This made tracking easy and also kept users from having to type in long, cumbersome URL strings.  Despite this we saw very modest traffic increases from major print exposure.    A 20,000 full page print ad would only yield a few thousand extra website visits over the next month.   Initially this came as a shock to me but after dozens of experiments in many magazines, and an examination of other print advertising campaigns, it became clear that it’s foolish to try to drive web traffic using print.   Although we did not run any signifiant TV or Radio campaigns I examined some data from Texas’ Travel web efforts and concluded that TV was also a prohibitively expensive way to drive web traffic.    Online methods generally outperformed offline by a factor of perhaps 10x, and this advantage does not seem much less today.

Yet there is a type of momentum that comes from human stubborness that keeps TV, print, and radio advertising over-funded even as conversion studies are now abundant indicating the superiority of online advertising.   Recently I think it was Ford that decided to increase the online spend considerably, though I think this news from Microsoft is the first time a major advertiser has chosen to move most of their spend to online venues.

Eventually online costs may catch up to conventional media in terms of ROI, but I think this is not the case yet.    That’s not to say that positive ROI in online ad campaigns is a simple process – it is not and many millions are squandered in bad online campaigns.  But this pales in comparison to the *billions* that are squandered every month on ineffective offline media campaigns.   The offline advertising Emperor has very few clothes, but few will notice until people start doing quality mathematical analyses of advertising campaigns and stop listening to self-serving research.    I’m not holding my breath for that.

Apple announces the new iPhone. Stock soars, tech peeps rave.

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Apple’s news today is shaking MacWorld and the Tech world.  They’ve got an iPhone, and it’s looking nothing short of spectacular.

In contrast Microsoft’s “big news” today was more pitiful than interesting:
“Zune will have video games by July 2008” 

July of 2008?  MS dudes, at the rate you are innovating you should just be hoping you’ll still be around in 2008 to play with your own little Zune.

Bill Gates and the Bloggers

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here | Mount Hood Climber Search

Some very high profile and clever folks in the blogging community got to head up to Microsoft HQ and meet with Bill Gates yesterday to discuss the future of the internet, especially ways to make the upcoming MIX07 conference relevant to the needs of those attending.

I missed meeting Gates at MIX06 earlier this year but I know several of the bloggers that were invited so I’ll have to settle for one degree of separation. I’m a huge fan of Bill Gates’ superb global health initiatives though not at all a fan of many of his “old style” ideas about computing and the internet. I think he, and MS at large, continues to view the internet as primarily a technological rather than a sociological development (clue: it’s 80% sociological, 19% technical and 1% electrical)

The reports are starting to come in:

Mike Arrington

Steve Rubel

Ryan Stewart

Niall Kennedy

Liz Gannes

Todd Bishop

Going Techno Postal?

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

OK, I’ve really missed ranting about technology things for the past few weeks so I’m going to take a look at what’s going on over at TechMeme.

Jeremy over at Yahoo is always very honest about Yahoo’s shortcomings so it’s good to see him get to take a shot at Google even though the transgression is not exactly earth-shaking, more just a funny oddness that gets internet people all worked up. Google copied Yahoo‘s IE7 pitch page. (It was changed to this today or last night). Here’s a great graphic which shows the smoking gun evidence: http://chir.ag/stuff/yahoo-to-google.gif

Matt Cutts is a totally stand up guy and this is not his department but he’s Google’s ambassador to the blogging masses so it fell to him to address this. Now, you don’t dis Google or Matt may go Inigo Montoya on you. Matt’s lackluster “apology” sounded more like an attack on Yahoo’s own copycat behavior even though he noted that it was Robert Scoble‘s excellent advice – which was totally not taken – that led him to post about this. Robert suggested the Google peeples take out the Yahoo peeple for a fancy lunch in a limo, which would have been a neat PR gimmick.

This is superficially trivial but actually has deeper significance as a measure of the overall online sentiment about Google. Google is still in the driver’s seat with respect to most things internet but I’d suggest that we are now seeing a tendency for the knowlegeable users to reevaluate their relationships with Google, Yahoo, and even Ask and MSN. This reminds me in some ways of the days when Yahoo was totally in the online driver’s seat and Google – with clearly superior search – started to eat Yahoo’s lunch but still had only a tiny market share. Had Yahoo bought Google back then, rather than just using their search algorithm and helping to make Google the online behemoth it is today, the online landscape would sure look different. I’m glad they didn’t though because Google’s new approaches and “techno centric” business models have arguably done more to change the way we all do business than any other recent global business developments.

Ironically in this little debate is the fact that when Yahoo FINALLY figures out how to effectively copy the gist of Google’s contextual ad matching systems (adwords and adsense) we could see a huge change in the online search game as publishers would have more choice in who they align with.

Disclaimer: I’ve got some Yahoo Stock so I root for them to succeed even though I try to post honest comments about what’s up.

Dvorak on Vista

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John Dvorak is not impressed with Vista’s advertising or prospects as a buzz-worthy application, saying the promotional web info …

looks like an advertisement for an expensive prescription drug for constipation

and suggesting the market impact will not be very big.

I actually think he’s wrong, and Vista will usher in some significant changes, especially as users integrate sidebar and desktop “gadgets” and we see the desktop and websites look more like myspace pages, littered with dozens of mini applications. If Vista realizes the promise of facilitating RSS and gadget centric information architecture I think it could be a significant part of the significant changes sweeping the online environment.

Google vs Microsoft reveals a pitiful MS

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Today’s Tech headlines:

Google Aquires JotSpot

Google shares ad wealth with videographers 

Microsoft has a new image on their boxed software 

Who’d have thunk just a few years ago that so many would be pitying Microsoft as the “has been” of computing innovation?     Sorry, but Ms. Dewey is just not going to head off Google, MS guys.

Microsoft Vista – a nice lookin’ blog for a nice looking OS.

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Wow, Microsoft Vista has a very slick looking blog up here that mimics the look and feel of the new Vista which, for reasons I don’t understand, really had a great look at MIX06. I think it was simply the use of very appealing full screen pix in a copycat move on the new MAC Operating Systems. Dropping in MS LIVE sidebar gadgets (and hopefully Google and Yahoo gadgetry as well) will allow a user to have a wonderfully customized and functional desktop – looking forward to that.

I also really want to give them kudos for making registration (needed to comment) very simple (name and email). MS registrations tend to be so complex I actually almost left thinking “I’m not going to go through a 5 minute registration just to leave a comment!”.