Curiously, the on-demand subscription music services like Spotify, Deezer, Rdio and Beats Music are all priced the same at more than twice consumer spending on music. They largely land at $120 per year (although Beats has a family-member option for AT&T users at $15 per month.) Which means, logically, that something's gotta give. And you're not going to get those huge numbers of people to suddenly spend more on music, when that hasn't happened over generations - we spend no more, on average, than our parents did on music. (Pakman has been at the sharp end: he used to work at eMusic.)]]>
I was stunned. There was no way I could run my business giving him 50% of my product revenues. I started to defend myself, stammering about the economics of my side of the business. He tore up the contract and handed me the pieces. “Come back at 50%, or don’t come back,” he said.
I slogged down to my car feeling like I had just blown the biggest deal of my life. Lucky for me, someone had followed me out.
Dan’l Lewin, one of the NeXT co-founders, had a cubicle within earshot of Steve (actually, at that time, every employee was within earshot of Steve.) Dan’l had been working with me in background over the last few weeks and we’d developed a good relationship. If this deal did not get done, it was going to end up being his job to find someone else, so he really wanted me to get the business. Dan’l put his arm around my shoulder, and said one sentence, which I will never forget.
“Make it look like fifty percent,” he said. The upshot is a brilliant lesson for entrepreneurs and, well, anyone who needs to write a contract with someone who has a big ego.]]>
But they are--sort of. Most of DuckDuckGo's 20 or so employees work remotely. Doug Brown, a front-end dev specialist, lives in Toronto, making the trip to the small Philadelphia suburb periodically. The company's newest hire, a developer named Jag Talon, started working for the company from the Philippines before his family relocated to New Jersey last year. When we visited their office in January, fewer than a dozen people roamed the halls. This, we were told, was more than usual. DuckDuckGo is still microscopic in comparison to Google, but the part on how it manages remote working is illuminating.]]>
It’s true that a few companies—Disney, say—have been able to consistently ride the Zeitgeist. But King has the misfortune to be in an industry where this is especially difficult, simply because it faces so much competition. The illustration is especially wonderful.]]>
But say you find TPM on Flipboard, decide it's great and add it to your viewing routine on Flipboard. Probably you just keep reading us on Flipboard. Clearly you like Flipboard or you wouldn't be using it. So why would you start visiting TPM? You likely won't. That may be great for you. It's definitely great for Flipboard. But is it great for us? Not really. Never understood why you'd be on a service which holds the users and doesn't pay you.]]>
What could help? Trials would help. That would allow someone to download an app and see the difference first hand, not just trust a screenshot. Apple has been clear, though. They prefer freemium. Getting out of the App Store itself can help. Building enough value to charge a subscription could help.
Productivity apps can’t survive and bring the long-term value customers demand at $2.99 or $4.99. At the end of the day, though, the app stores, whether Apple, Google or the like, are not going to solve our problem [2]. The only thing that will is rethinking the products so we can get out of the app stores and differentiate. Loren Brichter (author of Tweetie, which became the official Twitter app) then responds in the comments with data showing that trials can hurt sales of games. So what is the answer?]]>
Chrome is the focus at Google; Android is just an afterthought. For Google, it is Chrome that fits this focus on a multi-screen world. Chrome shouldn’t be thought of as a web browser; rather, it’s an optimized bi-directional delivery vehicle: the best experience with Google services for users, and maximum user data for Google. And it runs everywhere.3 This is why Google has been investing millions of dollars in building the Chrome brand for some time now.
Android, on the other hand, enables several of those verticals, and keeps Apple honest in phones especially; however, by virtue of the hardware world it lives in, it’s not the best vehicle for reaching all users, and Google is fine with that.
Google isn't that interested in phones anymore. The only notable thing about Android phones at yesterday’s announcement was their absence. Ironic if Google's really next big thing is its browser - such a 90s concept. But it does look that way.]]>
Amazon is a vertical search engine focused on helping users find products. The overwhelmingly dominant way to find things on their site is the search box. Users enter a keyword phrase and are presented with results that match his or her query. The order of the search results is determined by algorithms that seek to optimize relevance and monetization. Sound familiar?
In my personal website use, I increasingly find myself searching for products on Amazon instead of Google. Shopping on Amazon is a superior user experience and it runs the table on the magical retailer formula of selection, price and convenience…
Buying on Google takes chunks of an hour, not an Amazon minute.]]>
Slowly their in-game funds dwindle, and new games they create have a high chance to be pirated until their virtual game development company goes bankrupt. Neat illustration of life. (Thanks @clarkeviper and @blossiekins who sent this separately.)]]>
The biggest problem is that Motorola's patent portfolio doesn't appear to be worth anything close to what either company assumed: the judge in the Microsoft v. Motorola patent case ruled yesterday that Redmond owes a paltry $1.7m in annual royalties for using Motorola's standards-related Wi-Fi and video-encoding patents in every Xbox 360 and Windows 7 PC sold, rather than the $4 billion Motorola had originally demanded.
To put that in perspective, it would take 3,235 years for Microsoft's royalties to pay off Google's $5.5bn valuation of Motorola's patent portfolio. Motorola Mobility is looking like one of the worst acquisitions ever.]]>
…Facebook has loudly and confidently entered an arena it has no prior experience in, and has set a clear path to expand its influence at its own pace. Facebook Home will provide a halo effect to current Android users that warms them up to a full-blown “Facebook phone” in the years to come.]]>
In this, Gmail is a good example. Google just needs me logged into their system so they can amass data on my browsing habits. That’s the business. They don’t make their money by giving me — or even letting me pay for — a superb e-mail program that offers unlimited storage. That’s just how the business was sold. But perhaps that’s the business I need.
Together, the Gmail experience, the death of Google Reader, and the closure of Picnik all have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in “free” Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do. Google Reader's closure is a milestone in Google's relationship with its users.]]>
DRM's purpose is to give content providers control over software and hardware providers, and it is satisfying that purpose well. Hickson is a Brit who works at Google. It is the music business's biggest regret that CDs were not encrypted. ]]>
Get people to use the Internet more.
That’s it. The more time people spend on the Internet the more time they’ll engage in revenue generating activities [for Google] such as viewing and clicking display ads and performing searches. And then goes on to analyse Google's products in the light of this analysis. It's completely correct, but people tend to overlook it in favour of more complex "strategies".]]>
Remarkably, a large part of the Internet community — by which I mean that tiny number of social media fanatics who spend their days on Twitter, looking for the next cause to rally behind or the next bad guy to boycott — will agree with him. (Thanks @jseths on Twitter for the link.)]]>
He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking. Fantastic advice.]]>
I realized that I’d enjoyed [the book Sandman] Slim’s company and the dark sparkle of the conversation so much that I’d ignore the silly back story and cartoon theology and give the sequels a try. I’m glad I did, because they’re terrific fun.
But then I noticed people talking about how the book was on sale cheap, like for 99¢; I’d paid a lot more. Experimenting with two browsers, one signed in and one not, exposes this.]]>
But what the startup has most struggled with is remaining relevant in an unforgiving app market dominated by one of the hottest spaces in tech: photos. They thought Instagram wasn't interesting because it was built around "social", launched a terrible limited-pictures product, and turned down overtures from Twitter. Apart from that though.. ]]>
Now Apple waits for markets to mature a bit before they enter. They've de-emphasized "first" in favor of "best". Facetime is just video chat. Retina Displays are just higher resolution. Siri is just voice recognition. But in all three cases, they grabbed a tremendous amount of mindshare in a short time. These days, Apple generally lets other people build the jet packs.]]>
That growth, along with a 9% increase in business spending on Macs to $6.7bn, will help offset what Forrester expects to be a dismal year for PCs and tablets that run Windows. An unimaginable headline only a few years ago.]]>
Anyway, that’s what Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette is seeing. He says that recent retail checks show not only a significant decline in BlackBerry inventory, but shelf space pressure and lackluster sales as well.
“Our sell-through checks in the United States indicate that BlackBerry sales were largely unchanged in August versus July; however, we detected meaningfully lower inventory levels versus a month ago,” Faucette explains. “In terms of sell-through, we believe that current run rates are roughly one-fifth of those we saw in the United States just eight months ago. Further, we found a meaningful number of carrier retail locations which had not sold a single BlackBerry in over a month.” That is a very serious problem if broadly repeated. RIM reports its quarterly results to the end of August on 27 September.]]>
By the way, one thing I should tell you is that our approach is our approach, and we don’t even claim it’s the right approach. It’s not something that’s new, but it’s something we’ve done since the founding of the company. In my view, you set up the business in a way that is aligned with the customer, or you can set it up in odds with the customer. When you have the option, you should figure out a way to be in alignment. Sometimes that requires you to be more patient, so it’s part and parcel with long-term thinking.
But if you were a short-term-oriented share owner, you might say let’s get the money up front. That’s where I decline to say that approach is wrong. I won’t say that. But it’s not ours. I work with the teams to set up the business models.
Q: How long-term are you thinking for the Kindle?
Bezos: This one is pretty straightforward. We don’t want to lose a lot of money on the device. Really fascinating.]]>
The UK-based company allowed anyone to publish data sets, create APIs and use tools to combine and recombine them with each other. It was spun out of Talis, a semantic web developer that focuses on moving information to the web, last year.
But after just over 12 months on its own, the parent company said that while the opportunities were still interesting they were too large and too slow-moving to be sustainable. It said that the market for linked data wasn’t panning out as it expected, and it was “time to admit that Kasabi is not getting the traction we thought it would.”]]>
Eichenwald talks with a bunch of former execs and documents Microsoft’s problems during the past decade — including its unsuccessful efforts to compete with Apple’s consumer devices, its stubborn insistence that products revolve around Windows, its massive online losses, the negative repercussions of its stack-ranking system for employee evaluations, and much more.
It’s a well-written tale, and an entertaining read. Unless I’m missing something, Microsoft won’t be able to point to any significant inaccuracies. There aren’t any huge surprises for anyone who has been following the company. The internal emails cited by Eichenwald, for example, have all been made public previously through leaks and court cases. (I felt at times like I was reading a synopsis of stories I wrote years ago.) See below for the link you should read.]]>
But Apple detractors ask why should the most valuable technology company on the planet — with a large patent portfolio, unrivaled in-house industrial design capabilities and enormous influence over its supply chain and component pricing — fail to offer the best hardware specs in the industry for its premium products? There are a few basic reasons why Apple doesn’t believe it’s in a hardware race. A post that gets better as you keep reading.`]]>
Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true. A dramatic exposition of what happens when growing inventory (space to put ads in) meets limited advertising numbers. Extreme, but none of it seems impossible.]]>
Yet critics complain that Google is buying up enormous amounts of virgin digital land in Africa at virtually no cost. Within a couple of decades, without the regulatory oversight of the African Union or African governments, they say, Africa’s internet life will be almost entirely in hock to the Google giant. Even the company’s decision to go slow on seeking profits from Africa by offering cheap deals has been attacked by African would-be rivals, which say that such tactics are only extending Google’s unfair advantage.]]>
The two would likely be sold together as AOL Tech, possibly including smaller assets like TUAW and Joystiq.
The asking price? A hefty $70m to $100m. How much again?? Techcrunch is a Titanic: holed by the departure of its big-name writers and, more importantly, of the advertising and conference people who actually brought in the money and made it profitable. Truly, AOL has the Sadim Touch. (You can work that out.) Interesting stat: the "AOL Tech" chunk "represents a whopping 20m unique visitors a month". Our observation: stray adjective.]]>
In contrast, when a new iPhone model is released Apple doesn't shut down the line and liquidate inventory. Rather, Apple keeps some percentage of manufacturing capacity devoted to this legacy model. Samsung, it should be said, seems to be following the same path. The Samsung Ace, Galaxy S2 and other older models are still available with the S3 announced (though not yet shipped). If Samsung is following the same path, that's a real expression of confidence.]]>
But I'd like to suggest a thought experiment. Imagine that you and a large group of friends, or an extended family, decide to hold a reunion or big party that requires renting a space and some real expenses. You agree to share the expenses equally. Then one of you says, "I'm getting us a discount on the hotel from my friend, so I shouldn't have to pay my share." Another two or three say, "I'm helping with the catering, so I shouldn't have to pay." Another: "I'm willing to act as designated driver, so I shouldn't have to pay." Each time, you think, "Yeah, that's reasonable."
But before long, things get dicey. A good comparison (once you make the "family" large enough). Another point: many technology companies have founders who are libertarian in outlook - that governments hinder rather than help society.]]>
It seems increasingly clear, however, that whatever the expected returns, the costs of this practice outweigh them. Here are three reasons to consider dropping the policy of secrecy regarding technology usage.]]>
Private equity firms are in turn often keen to snap up these struggling businesses in the hope of being able to turn them around with radical management changes.
“A lot of UK technology companies are really stable, cash-generating businesses and are only in a loss because of poor managers,” says Mr Moulton.]]>