Freemium

Tyler Nichols has a blog post that's making the rounds on the internet.  He talks about giving up the "freemium" business model after a very disappointing experience trying to make it work.  I have to say, I agree wholeheartedly with his argument:

I have come to the realization that most people who want something for free will never, ever think of paying you, no matter how valuable they find your service.

I can't argue with that.  In fact, I think that's it points to a very large problem in today's economy.  People expect high-quality products and services for free.  At the same time, Tyler is talking about giving up a business model that would have been baffling to many, many people as recently as ten years ago:

The site uses a freemium model allowing people to create personalized printable santa letters for their children for free. In addition to the free version, I also offered a paid version that includes a higher resolution letter, a personalized envelope and door hanger for a nominal cost.

He created a business that let parents create letters from Santa Claus for their children.  For free.  But they could pay for a higher resolution of the same letter they just got for free.  Really?

Let's play a game.  I'll give you a newspaper, competitive with any of the leading, daily, American newspapers, for free.  Or you can buy the same newspaper with fewer ads and nicer typography.  I'll give you James Patterson's next book for free.  Or you can pay to read the same book on thicker paper.  I'll let you watch next summer's blockbuster, say, Prometheus or  Men in Black 3, for free.  Would you pay to watch that movie on a bigger screen?  How much nicer would that paper have to be to pay for a free novel?

Let's play another game.  I'll give you Miles Davis' first album for free, but you're going to pay for Birth of the Cool.  You're definitely paying for Bitches' Brew.  I'll give you Haruki Murakami's first book for free, and I'll give you his second book for $2.99.  But you're not getting 1Q84 for free.  I'll give you a free letter from Santa, but you're going to pay for the followup "are you being a good boy?" letter from Mrs. Clause in June. 

#The tyrranny of the hashtag

Do you know what you should be talking about right now?  A TV show just told me what I should be talking about.  Most shows implicitly hope that you do talk about what you see, but this one told me–explicitly–to talk about it, and how to talk about it.

I used to watch quite a bit of the Food Network, and I credit Mario, and Emeril, and Alton, and David Rosengarten for whatever cooking ability I have.  I don't watch much of the network anymore, but I just watched an episode in the series that promises to answer the very pressing question, "Who will be the next Iron Chef?"

The episode featured a lineup of chefs I've seen on other cooking shows over the years competing in standard Top Chef/Iron Chef-type challenges, but it featured a new element.  Throughout the show, there was a line of text sitting in the top left corner: #NextIronChef. 

The #hashtag started as an interesting, original concept to aid searches.  It's a new step to have a show take up screen real-estate telling me just what #term I should use just in case I should happen to mention it on a social network. 

On Google Reader

Have you ever had a skill or a talent that everyone loved?  Well, everyone but you?  Like a talented juggler who cringes every time someone asks him to juggle at a party.  That's how I imagine Google feels about Reader.

Google finally unveiled their facelift for Reader.  Before today, quite a few people have been up in arms about Google's decision to kill the "sharing" and "following" functions.  I barely used those features, but it struck me as really odd to kill features that have very loyal fans (including Iranian revolutionaries) and cost nothing to maintain.

Reader is not a product for casual users.  It's a powerful tool for keeping track of of literally thousands of articles and posts from many, many sources.  It lets you make snap decisions about what to read, what to skim, and what to skip without navigating away from the Reader page.  If you polled a thousand users about interface updates, I don't you'd get too many responses begging for way less information per square inch of screen real estate.  But that's exactly what they did.

I get that Google+ is not the smash hit they'd hoped for, and I understand their plan to nudge more people into the service.  But how many times does Google get to take a hatchet to successful products with loyal fans before they lose their golden status?

It's like they decided to double-space everything.

They were good, until they weren't

 I like Netflix.  I immediately liked their DVD by mail service, and when I later started using their streaming service, I fell in love with it.  I was able to catch up on several TV shows I'd put off watching for years.  All three seasons of Arrested Development took me less than a week.  It was a great way to unwind after work, or over lunch.  It had a pretty good library, and it worked very well.


Netflix got a lot of attention for their unconventional policies:

At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they'd like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days.

 They also got a lot of attention for the stock's uphill sprint.  They could do no wrong.  Until they messed up royally.  The stock closed at $80.86 today, down from a high of nearly $305 just a few months ago.

This recent article, about Groupon, reminded me of Netflix's meteoric rise:

Only a few months ago, Groupon was the Internet's next great thing. Business media christened it the fastest growing company ever. Copycats proliferated. And investors salivated over the prospect of Groupon going public.

The title, "Groupon is a Disaster," manages to succinctly convey the writer's opinion of the company.  Time will tell whether Groupon and Netflix are solid companies who've hit rough patches, or whether they're two ships of fools who managed to stumble into favorable winds (and piles of money) en route to shipwreck.

A big company that turns out to be have been run by nitwits isn't exactly remarkable.  BP's oil spill and Borders' last decade in existence are good examples of this.  But it amazes me that there are so many tech giants with who can't definitively separate themselves from the Pets.coms and the Myspaces.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Twitter all have long lines of eager, would-be investors, and long lines of fawning journalists at their doors.  Just like Netflix did a year ago.  

I found my To-Do progam

I've been looking for a great To-Do program for a while.  Google Tasks was promising, because I've usually got Gmail open in one tab, but it just never worked for me.  It took up a small corner of the screen, so if you've got 50+ items on a list, which is easy when you're trying to capture "open loops" like David Allen's Getting Things Done system recommends, you have to scroll through a large list in an unwieldy window.  And the fact that it shares the screen with your email inbox and–quite likely–Google Chat buddy list, means that you're fighting distractions every time you look at your To-Do list.

Google doesn't publicize this, but they have a website for Tasks.  It's used on smart phones, where you can't split the screen between email and a To-Do list.  Here it is.  It looks very much like your inbox, but for tasks.  No distractions, no frills.  You can organize your tasks into projects on the side, like Gmail labels.  Perfect for me.

E-tailing's beautiful argument

I'm not positive, but I'm fairly certain that random pedestrians–not paying customers–don't stroll in and out of Amazon's buildings all day long, clogging their toilets, breaking their toilet paper dispensers, and stealing their soap pumps.  I'm also fairly certain that few people have decided that Amazon's buildings are a good place to sit down and read a magazine or take a nap while they're drunk.  Or high.  Again, I can't be sure, but I'm pretty confident that no ever successfully wheedled, guilt-tripped, intimidated, or threatened their computer screen into giving an extra parking validation or into accepting an expired coupon.

I've seen lots of talk about how online retailers don't have the same overhead that brick-and-mortar stores have, and they have lower labor costs, etc.  There's one aspect that isn't talked about very often, at least not in brutally honest terms. 

E-tailers have a barrier that keeps out the 20% that aren't worth anyone's time.  You have to have a credit card and you have to be savvy enough to use a computer.  That means they can focus on the 80% who are interested in exchanging money for a good or service at the listed price.  They don't have to deal with people whose only interest in any given store is as a place to have a nice bowel movement or a good nap.  They can focus on the 80% who actually want to, you know, buy stuff.  They can deal with the 80% of consumers understand that haggling is not a generally accepted practice in American life instead of the 20% who think that a wink and a smile or a raised voice and threat to "speak to your supervisor" justifies the off-chance of a 50¢ discount.

Once upon a time, a customer could bang a can of beans again their shopping cart and noisily tell a clerk, "I'm a loyal, paying customer!"  There was a pretty good chance they'd get a discount on the dented can, or the scuffed book, or whatever it was.  I'll be amazed if there comes a point in my life where I can't go to some kind of store and buy a loaf of bread.  At the same time, I'll be amazed if I can still go to a store and buy a new book, poster, or movie in twenty years.  I'll be shocked if clothing stores look anything like they currently do a couple of decades from now. 

The shift from X% vs Y% in the online% vs brick-and-mortar% ratio is going to keep moving.  But I just started wondering how much of that is driven by retailers realizing that some customers just aren't worth chasing.

Was it a letdown?

Apple's big announcement–the Beatles are now in the iTunes store–let a few people down.  It wasn't a steaming music service and neither was it some combination of iTunes, Twitter, and/or Facebook.  I'm certain that I will, in fact, forget Tuesday, the 16th of November, 2010.  Still, it is interesting to see them working to fill the biggest hole in the iTunes catalog years after the Beatles' absence stopped being an issue.