Dortch's Digressions

Apple and MacWorld: Who Needs Big Trade Shows Anymore, Anyway?

So Apple has decided that Steve Jobs will not give the Macworld Expo 2009 keynote address in a few weeks, and that the company will pull out of the 25-year-old show altogether after the 2009 edition. And speculation runs rampant across the Web and print media worlds, about (1) Steve Job's health and (2) that of Macworld Expo itself. I'll ignore issue (1) because it's none of my business, and focus on issue (2).

The large computer industry trade show has been a dying dinosaur for years, but has stubbornly hung on in many cases. However, there are now too many factors mitigating against the success of such events. These range from the abilities of companies such as Apple to turn retail stores and Web sites into far more manageable, controllable, and profitable "mini-expos" to growing requirements to reduce or eliminate costly, low-productivity business travel. (I mean, the MacBook Pro on which I'm composing this very screed already has built-in Internet connectivity, a microphone AND a camera...)

But don't cry for Macworld just yet. There is an awful lot of value to be gotten out of the event, even should Apple disappear from it entirely as a participant, or radically reduce its participation. I'm old enough to remember when networking pioneer all but owned the NetWorld trade show, but that event retained value beyond Novell itself, especially when it was combined with Interop, another pioneering big industry event. So there's semi-relevant precedent for the possibility of an Apple-free (or "Apple-reduced") Macworld continuing on successfully, at least for a while.

All depends on how Macworld Expo 2009 actually plays out, and what Apple does, if anything, before, at, and after said event. (If you want to read similar, more granular, and "closer-to-home" musings on this subject, I highly recommend "Apple at Expo: What went wrong?" by Jason Snell of Macworld.com, a corporate cousin of the company that runs Macworld Expo.) But regardless of how things play out at Macworld, what's happened to Macworld is definitely indicative of a larger truth: with few if any exceptions, the larger and/or more focused on a single vendor the trade show, the more likely that its days are numbered. And those numbers, if used to measure years of remaining longevity, are in the low to very low single digits, at best.

Sprint Nextel to Troublesome Customers: You're Fired!

So Sprint Nextel has "fired" some 1,000 of what it says are its most troublesome (and apparently troubled) customers. The company said in published reports that these customers made as many as 40 to 50 calls to the company's customer service team every month. And yet, there are folks out there in the blogosphere chalking this up to callously typical Big Business behavior, and stating with falsely ironic wistfulness that it must be nice to be able to fire customers at will.

A few things.

1. ANY business has the right, if not the ethical responsibility, to part company with any customer that business cannot satisfy. As long as the business makes the customer contractually and financially whole, which Sprint Nextel has done with its 1,000 former customers, why stay in a relationship that's not working? (Hold on, hold on -- let's stick to business relationships here, people!)

2. Sprint Nextel says it researched its customer base and complaint call logs extensively before doing this. The fact that the company was able to find 1,000 people who averaged 40 to 50 complaint calls monthly out of a claimed subscriber base of 57 million seems to indicate at least some research was in fact conducted. It should have taken a fair amount of digging -- any wireless carrier where a majority of customers were that unhappy would have gone out of business before most of us would have heard about them. (Fill in your preferred former carrier here.)

3. What happens if customer service and satisfaction levels increase measurably for the 56,999,000 or so Sprint Nextel customers still under contract? Will critics of the move lapse into grumbling silence? (Unlikely.) Will Sprint Nextel seek out the next 1,000 most complaint-prone customers and send them warning? (Possibly.) Will other wireless carriers or other types of companies follow Sprint Nextel's lead? (Unlikely, at least "out loud" among wireless carriers; possibly, in other cases.)

4. This is not about Big Bidness trampling the individual, something that constantly troubles me personally, make no mistake. Nor is it, I believe, anything about getting people to suck it up, shut up, and stop complaining about what they perceive as poor service. I do that all the time, but would have to give up blogging, if not working full-time, to get to the level of 40 to 50 calls a month. This is about a company using business analytics, business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) tools and processes to identify a relatively minute set of apparently extremely, chronically unhappy customers, and walking away from them rather than draining significant resources continuing to try to satisfy them. If it were your business, and you could, why wouldn't you, if it offered a chance to make life better for you and the vast majority of your customer base?

That last is not a rhetorical question. If you have an answer you'd care to offer, as Ross Perot said when he ran for President, "Ah'm all ears!"

Apple's iPhone: Yes, But...

Yes, the iPhone's cool and all, but...

1. If you aren't already an AT&T/Cingular Wireless subscriber, is a $500, unproven telephone worth switching networks for, no matter how cool it is?

2. Does it do anything that you know about that you've been able to duplicate otherwise or live without until now, but for some reason can't duplicate or live without once the iPhone is available?

3. If you use corporate e-mail, unless you're the CEO or the CFO or similarly senior/powerful, is the IT department going to jump through sufficient hoops to make your e-mail and calendar accessible from your iPhone before you get frustrated enough to break something...or someone?

4. Can you honestly look at yourself in the mirror and swear that you were in no way disappointed or frustrated any of the previous times you bought the first edition of some cool technology, only to see cooler and/or equally cool but cheaper technology appear almost immediately? (Hey, you early iPod adopters -- lose the earbuds, I'm talkin' to you!)

The iPhone is the Paris Hilton of new, cool, geeky gadgets. It's certainly fascinating to look at, and it's danged good at generating publicity for itself and those behind it. But I'm still waiting for proof of substance that I find meaningful or compelling. I'm not saying such substance isn't possible, or that it won't be there eventually -- just that it ain't there yet. So I, at least, will wait, and see, and wait to see.

What about you? Let me know, via e-mail and/or a comment post. Especially if you turn out to be one of those irrepressible early iPhone adopters, once you finally get yours...so to speak...

Two Takes on Modern Technologies and Real Life

Earlier today, at a blog I write about business process management (BPM), I used the example of the French government banning BlackBerry handheld wireless e-mail devices from its ministries and other buildings, fearing U.S. surveillance of those e-mails. Never mind that the system's been approved by security agencies in multiple countries, and that it employs encryption stronger than that used at some online banking sites.

Sigh. We'll see how that goes. Meanwhile, though, I stumbled across another, far more apparently positive example of technology colliding with real life.

My colleague and friend Ron Exler, author of the authoritative blog on everything geospatial, "The Geo Factor," tells me that where he lives in Maryland, Bank of America has deployed ATMs that let depositors insert checks with no envelopes or deposit slips. The ATM scans your check, displays what it thinks the amount of the check is, gives the depositor a chance to correct or verify the amount, and prints out a deposit receipt that includes an image of the check.

To me, this is a prime example of what modern technology is supposed to do -- give us options, while enabling automated systems to duplicate, if not improve upon, things we used to rely upon other human beings to do. If you've ever waited in line in a bank to deposit a check at the beginning, middle, or end of a month -- or especially if you've waited in line to do almost anything else -- this is something you should find it easy to appreciate.

Sometimes, electricity or fire provide light and heat. Sometimes, they can burn down a building. All depends on how they're deployed, and the thinking behind that deployment.

Can Print News Publications Be Saved? Should They Be?

Hmm. The venerable and respected InfoWorld's killing off its print edition. Other newspapers and magazines are doing the same, or just dying outright. Meanwhile, though, The Boston Globe has begun marketing its online edition as an add-on to its print edition, increasing online subscriptions by 145 percent, according to the folks at MarketingSherpa. And there are multiple, spirited debates taking place across the Web and the blogosphere, about what is likely to and should or should not happen to print newspapers and magazines. (Some of the most lively discussion has followed some opining from columnist David Lazarus at SFGate, the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle, another newspaper reportedly in trouble.)

In any case, maybe someone can explain to me why print publication owners have waited this long to do anything serious about the challenges to their "empires." Instead of or in addition to gutting editorial departments and relying more and more on packaged story sets provided by "others," why haven't they recruited frequent opinion contributors as bloggers or columnists, and sought sponsors for these? Why haven't they started working with journalism and business schools to change how graduates are trained, so they don't enter a not-so-brave new world with a bunch of old-world skills and attitudes about how things work in their world? And why, oh why, are they still bothering with legal wrangling about who has the rights to link to what, when they could just, for example, make their archives completely "open source," and therefore far more attractive and useful to readers, researchers, students, and others?

These are not new ideas, and I am not the first or the only person to consider them. In my darker moments, I fear that the reason they aren't yet being seriously considered by larger numbers of those involved is the same reason why the recorded music and movie industry is still so largely flummoxed by new technologies -- apparently intractable mental inertia, or the inability or unwillingness to face and embrace change. Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes, evolution means waiting for a critical mass of dinosaurs to die or otherwise get out of the way...

Steve Jobs and Digital Rights Management: You Can't Have it Both Ways

OK, NOW I'm really confused...

Steve Jobs of Apple wants the recorded music industry to consider getting rid of its various, insidious, and ineffective attempts at digital rights management (DRM), formerly known as "copy protection." This would open up the online music market considerably, and be something Apple would embrace wholeheartedly, Jobs said.

Wonderful ideas, all. Also only a matter of time, if the entertainment/"content" industry's history with home media recording and playback technologies ranging from the phonograph to television to the VCR is any accurate indication.

However, the very same Steve Jobs won't let non-iPod users become iTunes customers, not even if they were willing to pay a financial premium. That would open up iTunes considerably -- but it just might slow iPod sales, which generate far higher profits for Apple.

Apple's Jobs also won't let Macintosh users run virtual copies of the Mac OS X operating system. Now, there are all kinds of good reasons to be able to run virtual copies of OS X, for enterprises supporting Mac users and for consumers as well, as a quick search for online info on "virtualization" should make clear. This would especially be true if I could run Mac OS X on less expensive PC hardware -- you know, like the Intel Corp. chips now inside all the new Macintosh systems.

But of course, this might hurt Macintosh hardware sales.

It's not impossible to do technologically. There are already OS X images online that will run in virtual environments. They're not sanctioned or supported by Apple, and they almost definitely violate Apple intellectual property rights. But they demonstrate a curiosity, if not an actual desire, for features Apple could provide and support, but is not. (Microsoft is almost as bad, by the way -- you can only virtualize the more expensive versions of Windows Vista, for example. You can read a very informative blog about this by "The PC Doctor," Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, at http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/wp-trackback.php?p=257.)

DRM is like global warming -- it seems that all but the most die-hard contrarians have admitted that
both exist, and are inherently damaging to the larger ecosystem. But where DRM is concerned, at least some IT industry leaders appear to be speaking inconsistently. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have both been reported as not thinking very much of the current state of DRM, as reported by Playfuls.com. However, some of my industry contacts indicate that in the closed negotiations going on among IT and content vendors and standards promulgators, things are very likely to get much worse before they get any better for business users or consumers.

Post-Holiday Gifts for Yourself: Free, New Views of the Web (and Information, and Knowledge...)

A happy and peaceful 2007 to you and yours. I thought I'd ring in the New Year by offering some tools that might help make this year a bit less chaotic and perhaps even more interesting than 2006.

I'm a big fan of things that help make the Web and information on it more easily or rapidly navigable, or that help me to see things differently. I'm also a big fan of "free." So I'm always on the lookout for free tools that promise such benefits, at work and more broadly.  In fact, tips about such tools are often the most immediately useful nuggets in some of the blogs I read. Herewith, three recent examples. Enjoy. As always, your thoughts welcome.

Alexaholic -- If you aren't yet familiar with Amazon.com's Alexa search tool (www.alexa.com), you should be. Web search plus traffic information and rankings equals frequently fascinating fare. (Or maybe I'm just easily fascinated.) Whether you are "Alexa-enabled" or are not, if you're interested in seeing traffic information about a particular Web site, and especially if you'd like to compare that site's information with that of other related sites, you should definitely check out www.alexaholic.com. I've used it to compare traffic at my company's Web site to that of competing providers, and to compare multiple competing IT vendors' Web sites as well. You might find it useful for evaluating and comparing potential business partners, employers, or sellers.

Cooliris -- If you use one of the more popular browsers (including Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari for the Mac, among others), you can download a plug-in from www.cooliris.com that lets you easily hover over Web links on one Web page, and preview the destination of those links before clicking on them. Yes, I know it's not that difficult to click on the link and go to the next page, but Cooliris saves me a lot of back-and-forth and frustration over page-loading delays. This is especially true when I'm trying to compare multiple information sources or vendors online, things many of us do frequently, both at and outside of work.

 

Kartoo --  www.kartoo.com provides a familiar search engine interface, but presents its results in a very non-typical way. I will say no more here about that bit -- you should just point your browser at the site and take it out for a spin. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I have already found Kartoo results very good at stimulating new consideration of connections among initiall disparate pieces and sources of online information. You might find it useful for tasks ranging from thinking about topics for upcoming research or writing projects to unearthing innovative gift suggestions for a loved one, to get the jump on Valentine's Day or the 2007 end-of-year holidays. Never too early, you know...

The great thing about the Web is its ability to help aggregate experience, information, and knowledge in new ways, which in turn can stimulate new experience, information, and knowledge. Which, oddly enough, is what I think the creators of the fundamental technologies supporting the Web actually had in mind. Who knew?

Three Recent Things that Trouble Me

Thing One: Apparently, growing numbers of localities, spurred largely by concerns over injury and liability, are banning schoolchildren from playing the game of tag.

Thing Two: In at least two reported cases, drivers, confronted with variance between what their eyes (and, one hopes, their brains) told them and what their on-board Global Positioning System (GPS) widget told them, opted to believe the widget. One drove directly into a large pile of sand.

Thing Three: The new video game "Bully" was railed against for more than a year before it actually became available, decried as everything from a "negative influence" on children to a "Columbine simulator," referring to the tragic massacre in Colorado in 1999. This about a video game which, it turns out, contains numerous on-screen fistfights, but no blood, death, weapons, or sex. This makes the "T"-for-teens-rated game tamer than, oh, say, almost anything on broadcast television (let alone on paid TV services or the Web), from sitcoms to the news. By the way, the hand-wringers who decried the game had not seen it before its recent release. Nonetheless, efforts to ban the game in outside the U.S. got at least one UK retailer to pull it -- even though the chain will continue to sell games in the "Grand Theft Auto" series, from the same folks who developed "Bully". That M-for-mature-rated series features opportunities for players to act as criminals that shoot at and kill numerous other characters, including police.

What does all of this mean? I have no idea. But I'm pretty sure it helps to explain why so many bad IT decisions get made, and why so many get made badly. And maybe why the same dynamics often apply to life beyond IT and the enterprise.

It is incredibly difficult to strive to achieve and demonstrate leadership or innovation, let alone daring, in a culture that would rather have their obese, unhealthy children likely to turn into prematurely dead adults than to risk a skinned elbow or knee. (Or perhaps they're afraid that if their young one causes another to injure themselves, that other will show up in school the next day armed to the teeth -- but that's another, far more thorny set of issues.)

Nonetheless, to make IT in the enterprise -- or childhood, or traveling unknown roads, or, really, almost anything -- all it can be often requires daring, innovation, and leadership. Despite the currently prevailing cultural winds or societal predispositions. And despite those often unshakable companions of the new and different, "fear, uncertainty, and doubt," or "FUD."

The only effective defense against darkness is light, and the only effective defense against FUD is undeniable fact, something with which FUD typically has only a glancing relationship, if any. (This is why Stephen Colbert, in character as host of his wonderfully chilling show "The Colbert Report," once said he wasn't "a big fan of facts," putting more stock in "truthiness," or that which sounded most like what he wanted to believe.)

Hands-on experience. Anecdotal evidence from reliable sources. The opinions of credible others. Basic research. Those are the things that get past FUD, and get to where things happen. Sometimes, a surprisingly high percentage of these things turn out to be good.

Identify opportunities to try something that look like they might deliver benefit and/or value. Then do them, learn from what happens, refine your approach, and start again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you're making or affecting IT decisions, you could become a hero. If you're doing anything else, it might be interesting, too.

Outsourcing Works -- Except When it Doesn't...

Here's a thing:

Information Week reported last week that AT&T is replacing its India-based providers of support for its consumer DSL services with 2,000 unionized, U.S.-based workers. Tier One support providers will earn $30,000 per year, plus about another $10,000 annually in benefits, which AT&T says are "competitive" rates. (Information Week says these rates are actually some four times what workers in India typically earn, but never mind...)

In 2003, Dell Inc. announced that it had stopped using support providers based in India for corporate users of select Dell models, although the company said at the time that it planned to continue supporting consumers from India. (Interesting trade-off, since consumers seem likely to have less complex problems, but also likely to need more custom-tailored hand-holding, but never mind...)

Other U.S. companies appear to be moving support back to the States from India as well, although few are talking about it openly -- yet.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of U.S. workers seem to feel their work histories are incomplete without a stint in India, at least according to some media reports from outlets in and near Silicon Valley.

What's going on here?

Well, exactly what everyone paying attention should have expected, although only some predicted publicly. Expectations, living standards, and wages are going up in India, which makes Indian workers more expensive than they used to be. Meanwhile, technologies and labor relations are evolving in ways that make domestic support providers less costly and more attractive to U.S. companies.

Throw in the near-constant barrage of complaints about India-based support providers unable to say anything meaningful other than what's on the scripts they're given -- and complaints about difficult-to-understand accents -- and this turn of the outsourcing tide was almost a given. (Some of the ways some Americans have reportedly berated India-based support providers for their "theft" of "'Murican" jobs, seem culturally insensitive at best, and racist and xenophobic at worst, but never mind...)

The thing is, this isn't about India, or outsourcing, or cost reduction. It's about U.S. companies seeking the best ways to provide adequate support at reasonable, supportable costs -- while minimizing their political and reputational risk. If users perceive support as inadequate, it's inadequate, wherever the support providers are based (and whatever their nationalities). So those people responsible for making decisions about where and how to deploy support providers should focus less on geography, and more on user experience. In other words, they should occasionally play frustrated user, and periodically call and interact with the support providers they're paying for -- or have their parents do so. To badly paraphrase the late Johnnie Cochrane, "if the experience isn't great, support must relocate." Not to a different geography, necessarily, but definitely to a higher level of performance.

HPGate: What did the CEO Know, and When Did He Know It?

Sigh.

I knew there was trouble when the HP "news conference" featuring CEO and recently minted chairman Mark Hurd began with the announcement that neither Mr. Hurd nor his "independent counsel" would take any questions. Then, Mr. Hurd admitted knowing about the investigation of other HP board members and industry journalists, and that he had received but not read at least one written report that provided details of what was being done in HP's name. Then, he refused to disclose details of his independent counsel's initial findings, but said that they were "disturbing." Oh, and by the way -- former HP board chair Patricia Dunn, who was planning to remain on the board until January, according to earlier announcements, is instead resigning now, Mr. Hurd said.

Whether all of this will significantly affect HP's long-term ability to deliver enterprise-class solutions and services is impossible to tell yet. (I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who is reconsidering their personal and/or professional relationship with HP, in fact.) But it is already clear that short-term effects are greater than any of us outsiders knew a week ago, and that this drama will take longer than most of us expected to play out. Meanwhile, those of us of or beyond a certain age hear echoes of Watergate-like whispers, and lament what appears to be the final, irrevocable death of what used to be broadly trumpted and admired as "The HP Way." And my late father-in-law, who worked at HP for decades, is either rolling around Heaven laughing, or spinning in his grave -- or both.

Enterprise IT decision-makers and the vendors who do business with them can already take several lessons from the events surrounding HP's board and the reporters who have been following the company. One is that no matter how many IT-empowered tools one throws at the challenges to privacy and security, these are human and cultural, not technological issues, and that tools without policies and processes sensitive to these issues are useless. Another is that personal and corporate reputational risk are serious and significant. Let's hope the folks in and around HP who know these things can explain them effectively to those who don't -- or replace those folks with others who do.