clintboulton's Space http://clintboulton.posterous.com Most recent posts at clintboulton's Space posterous.com Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:19:47 -0700 Trying to Change E-Commerce is Like Trying to Change Search http://clintboulton.posterous.com/trying-to-change-e-commerce-is-like-trying-to http://clintboulton.posterous.com/trying-to-change-e-commerce-is-like-trying-to

I just read this piece by Zmags President and CEO Michael Schreck on GigaOm and I don't particularly agree with the gist. 

Schreck believes Amazon's antisocial selling model -- read, old fashioned -- is antiquated and in need of a change from a social commerce:

Amazon’s model is out-dated and, by its very design, anti-social. It is terrific for directed purchases (low margin) and awful for offering engaging shopping experiences (high margin). 

Groupon and "discovery commerce" will rule the world if Schreck has his way.

But he won't have his way, for much the same reason people still go to Google for search. Schreck sounds a lot like those social search startups, many of whom are now defunct. The guys who proclaimed Google is broken and a wasteland for poor search results.

This thinking, while admirably progressive, is a sign of too much wishful thinking and dreaming, the kind that aims to bend reality but can't quite reach those Inception-like heights. 

Amazon isn't broken and people don't want to huddle over tablets or Facebook to discuss what to buy. At least, not the majority of people.

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Sat, 24 Mar 2012 19:23:00 -0700 Google's Unified Online Identity Crisis http://clintboulton.posterous.com/googles-unified-online-identity-crisis http://clintboulton.posterous.com/googles-unified-online-identity-crisis

Google can't explain its privacy features properly, so why would it explain why unified online identity is a good thing?

It's more complicated than that. As I've pointed out before, Google can't really lay out why it needs to streamline identity. To do so would be to acknowledge it requires a larger digital dossier on people.

My problem with this is that there is no evidence that suggests SPYW or any of the other social functionality makes Google services better. That's the challenge therein; for a company so reliant on algorithms and math, it can't accurately the impact of social. 

So saying trust us, SPYW will make us better for you isn't really comforting to people. Hell, most people don't even know what Google is doing anyway. The ones that pay attention do, and those are the people that are smart enough to know Google is bullshitting them. 

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Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:50:00 -0700 Google FAIL Whale in Social http://clintboulton.posterous.com/google-fail-whale-in-social http://clintboulton.posterous.com/google-fail-whale-in-social

James Whittaker, now of Microsoft, says he left Google after it lost its way as a slave to advertising. He liked it better when Schmidt was running things. He also lamented Google's failure in social versus Facebook. We must remind James that is was under Schmidt that Google fell far behind FB!

P.S. Whittaker acknowledges Google+ as a failure one week after Google+ shepherd Vic Gundotra boasts of the platform's success:

Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Just. Wow.

 

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Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:17:00 -0800 Apple’s New iPad Heavy on Cognitive Dissonance Factor http://clintboulton.posterous.com/apples-new-ipad-heavy-on-cognitive-dissonance http://clintboulton.posterous.com/apples-new-ipad-heavy-on-cognitive-dissonance

The third iteration of the iPad, which for the record is just the new iPad and not the iPad 3, presents a curious case study in cognitive dissonance. I don’t mean for consumers, who are frothing at the mouth to fork over their hard-earned dollars at the temple of Apple. I mean for enterprises.

On the one hand, the device fairly screams business use with a crisper screen and faster data speeds. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the new iPad boasts an “unusually high-resolution screen, support for the 4G technology known as LTE and a microprocessor chip with more powerful graphics circuitry that helps render realistic-looking videogames.”

Super powerful HD screens also mean superior resolution for presentations and better video conferencing for business meetings. Salespeople and marketers, the corporate road warriors who are arming themselves with iPads as alternatives to laptops, will relish the better horsepower the new iPad’s A5X chip and 4G LTE capabilities will afford them.

Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi told ComputerWorld UK that the screen and the retina display are certainly great assets of the new iPad at a time when many clients she talks to use iPads to show brochures or other marketing materials.

Yet there is a downside to the great graphics and 4G LTE firepower from Verizon Wireless and AT&T: bandwidth chomping, which means higher data costs. AT&T data charges start at $30 a month for 3GB of data for tablet users. Verizon's data charges start at $30 a month for 2GB of data.

Industry analyst Jack Gold told ComputerWorld that companies paying monthly fees for 3G and 4G LTE services for iPads from Verizon Wireless or AT&T may want to restrict downloading of HD movies and other bandwidth-intensive content and applications.

But what if Sam Salesman wants to watch a movie from his iPad after a three-hour presentation of selling product X?

There’s the cognitive dissonance in action; you want the benefit of more computational power for your traveling salespeople, but you have to somehow mitigate this by controlling what applications and content these corporate users consume.

At the end of the day, the CIO must decide if the tradeoff of furnishing their travel-happy employees with new iPads is worth the extra cash in data costs the company will be shelling out.

It could be that CIOs decide the iPad 2, now at an attractive starting price of $399, is looking mighty good right now.  

It will be interesting to watch what the enterprise uptake is for the new iPad. My guess is the iPad train's momentum won't slow anytime soon. 

 

 

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Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:46:00 -0800 Google Continues Search March Through February http://clintboulton.posterous.com/google-continues-search-march-through-februar http://clintboulton.posterous.com/google-continues-search-march-through-februar

Google's Search share still rising while Bing continues to slowly erode Yahoo from search existence, according to AllThingsD. At what point does Yahoo just simply rebrand its search with the Bing name? Yahoo's name is clearly poisoned.

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