I read frequently about one-trick companies like Nokia, HP, Rim, Yahoo, and BofA that are on a hopelessly slow and irreversible downward spiral. The CEOs of those companies publicly lament their bad fortune or how cruel the market is to their wonderful company. Really, they need to just man up and admit that they were too slow to respond to take serious action when their company experienced a major downturn. Their lameness rendered their company powerless to respond to major market shifts. Begin the intellectual property & patent firesale! Break the desks into kindling and put an ad on craigs list for firewood at $1/pound!

Companies like Sony and Samsung and IBM can have massive business failures and do just fine because they have mutliple lines of revenue (Sony – studio, consumer electronics, gaming network, software; Samsung – consumer electronics, commercial electronics; IBM – hardware [formerly], consulting, software, data center).

Take Sony as an example of good, responsive management.  As the whole video game market begins to move overwhelmingly towards casual gaming, Sony has jsut barely started to suck it on the gaming side of their business. So they dropped the price of their TVs and electronics and everything balanced out over the last few months for them.

If a company does one thing (Nokia, RIM – phones; HP – computers; Yahoo – web properties; BofA – toxic loans), then the CEO’s job is to be extra responsive when they find their single-market company taking a dive. They have no fall back. Look at your myriad of reports and respond decisively.

Nokia’s phones are nearly irrelevant now. Perhaps the new Lumia 900 with Windows Mobile 7 will save them, but likely not. Windows Mobile 7 is a risky semi-player in the smartphone OS world. It is a distant third behind iOS and Android. Is Nokia really so well-positioned to make that surefire turd their last-ditch? Nokia began becoming irrelevant about 4 years ago. As platform-based smartphones became the de facto standard in handset purchases, Nokia continued to make lame RAZR wannabes and unsexy wedge-shaped, plastic-y semi-smart phones. They raked in the cash and refused to evolve while RIM scooped up the corporate market and the power users with mature smartphones. It was clear where the market was headed. Nokia refused to create a platform or commit to a single platform. Their strategy? Develop for EVERY platform, but do none of it well. Gargantuan budgets were pissed away making phones for Symbian 7 thru Symbian 10, webOS, Palm OS, Java ME, BREW, WebKit, mobile FX as well as developing numerous half-baked homegrown mobile platforms. Most projects — mercifully for the public — never got released. Sometime late last year, they dumped it all to go Windows Mobile 7. This came from the top. Their CEO sent out a company-wide email that declared “the sky is falling” and they needed to remove huge layers of management and internal bureaucratic processes. Possibly. It seems to me that trying to license iOS (tough) or developing a killer handset that runs the latest Android version (ice cream sandwich) would be a better bet. They have the programming talent, no doubt. It would have been an easy call for the CEO. But directly due to his bad call, they are downsizing rapidly. Sucks for Finland.

It’s the same situation at RIM. The BlackBerry is accelerating rapidly towards the grave. RIM’s terribly named PlayBook tablet was stillborn before it even got to market. It didn’t help that it was released without a mail client, calendaring app, or Skype. A complete lack of 3rd party apps was a big problem (see also HP’s TouchPad). Ok, very few tablets can compete with the iPad. So if your company is struggling badly, why jump into that uncompetitive market at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars? Kill the project, take the codebase and put it toward a killer Android phone or television or who knows what. Now the CEO of that company is taking about selling off patents. That’s not a very odd and unsustainable form of revenue. That, as I’ve heard it, is the ONLY plan. Now that is a real dipstick of a CEO.

These CEOs have very good data and personnel at their disposal. It seems to me that egos are preventing good job-saving decisions from being. Shall we just chalk it up to a wave of capitalistic Darwinism?

If you’ve launched it already and you’re making money, then you are lucky.  Pat yourself on the back.  Then quickly go into code red mode and keep reading, because you have a big target on your back.  The competition is gunning for you and they are actively building your app but with an effortless experience.  At the other end of the project spectrum … if you are pre-launch (beta, alpha, dev, or wireframe) and you’ve already got usability issues, you’re just plain dead in the water.  I’m involved in a couple of projects and competition analyses right now where these issues will undoubtedly kill the project before it ever goes live.  Or, if we are analyzing the competition, we know exactly how to hone UX to launch with a superior product.  Here are some flags that UX is “effort-full”:

• Unclear sign up (yes, some startups know “better” and still want to make it tough for users to pay them — entrepreneurial darwinism)
• Non-graphic workflow / too much text
• Inconsistent workflows as users hop from to different traffic paths (ex: reviewing final product before checkout has a diff interface than pulling old orders)
• Poor mobile strategy; today, users are web/app connoisseurs … you “afterthought” mobile strategy looks crayola; mobile should enhance the core app, not replace it
• If an app, no in-app purchases
• Inconsistent and random help (spotty help is worse than no help)
• Too many user types (adds $$$ to your project, too)
• Multi-screen checkout with a million options (like a two-year-old, you need to guide users down a path — give them options, they wander off)
• Irrelevant social components … if you don’t complement Facebook or Google+, you are missing the point
• Alerts — too many / not enough / inconsistent — it’s easy to annoy with these

Step back and look at your project with they eye of a skeptic.  Oh wait, you can’t do that — you are too emotionally / financially invested in your project (financial investment = emotional investment, right?).  Then hire a focus group.  If you can’t afford that, then ask all the techie jerks that you know (not your friends — they’ll only tell you what you want to hear) to use the product and don’t listen to what they say, just watch them use it.  When do they pause to talk to you? That’s the critical mass point when users are losing focus!  Remove those sticking points.  If the user completes an entire workflow without looking up, then you’re got a winner.  They can be talking the whole time, that means nothing.  It’s when a user looks away that they consider the current step “done” or annoying enough to pause.  It’s a mental comma.  By the way, when running your official or unofficial focus group, videotape them and replay later, over and over.

Usually, you need to launch with a simple Phase 1 to figure out what the Crowd needs for a real Phase 2.  Phase 2 is where the real work begins, eliminating the obstacles that get in the way of effortless user experience.

Go to File | Create | “PDF from Web Page…”. In the window that pops up, type in the url of the site you wish to traverse. The trick here is to click the odd little button on the left, “Capture Multiple Level”. The window will expand to expose a few more options. Select the “Get entire site” option and click the Create button. There is a warning that you will create gargantuan files that will grind your computer to a halt, but ignore it. I converted an entire 20-page site and the resulting PDF was under 900k.

Now you can open the PDF, email it, or print like any other document.

He had some good advice how to guide on how to handle acquisition offers, and gave interesting insight on how he kept his focus on building a lasting corporation despite a culture of “flipping companies”.

We really had one phase of this and the only reason why its’ this big story that everyone knows about us turning down a lot of money is because I messed up the process. It’s one of the biggest management mistakes I made through Facebook’s whole history. I learned a lot about the team at that time, and ended turning over a lot of that same team. I wasn’t in it for the acquisitions, and I wanted people around me who were in it for the long-term.

He also had this:

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you need to centralize things to continue growth.

So the fastest-rising (and most enduring) star of Silicon Valley tells us to focus on the long-term and build a culture of stability within your startup.  Very, very wise words.

The “.htaccess generator” at this location allows you to type in variables and different conditions like error pages and password protection and get an htaccess file that you can upload to your server.  Super easy.

Or you could stay up to 2 am and write your own.

Statement 1: HP is perceptive & brilliant.  Realizing they had made a fatal decision with their tech platform (webOS tablet), they did not opt for the dumb decision that so many US companies go for.  Usually, a company rides a bad tech decision down, like a very slowly sinking ship.  Submitted for your approval: Motorola’s RAZR which turned into the ROKR which turned into a failed division which turned into complete patent liquidation.  Yikes, failure on an epic scale and it can all be traced back to an awful tech decision.  And this is all over the place:

• Apple’s attempt at allowing 3rd parties to build Macs (upside: allowed Jobs to buy back into Apple for dirt cheap)
• Border’s stupid, junky, and expensive Kobo e-reader and now, bankruptcy
• Sirius & XM had great ideas and just couldn’t quite make the tech small or easy enough for anyone (if I can’t use it … then you’ve got a prob)
• Could Palm make a cool phone?  ever?  technological darwinism.  Too bad, because their Exchange & Outlook integration is still unparalleled
• Lotus Notes, 1-2-3, and everything else they made.  Lotus dominated in the DOS era and then just sort of sat on their butts once Windows came along.  Phhht!

Anyway, HP decided not to follow that path and dumped their tablets for $100 and scored a massive win.  WebOS is kinda ok and also kinda not (big reason is the lack of apps), but it’s just one of many low-resource OS’s out there now … iOS, Chrome OS, Android, Moblin (now MeeGo).  App developers can probably only build for 1 or 2.  So webOS is probably not one of them.  Dying platform webOS was formerly a punchline, but within a week, it’s relevant because of suddenly huge market saturation.  A major manufacturer has a $100 tablet?  Hell yeah, I’ll buy one, I don’t care what’s on it.  It’s cheaper than a baby camera or a GPS.

So HP put on a clinic on how to bail out a slowly sinking ship.  The same CEOs that I previously mocked are now acting in an impressive manner … yikes!

Statement 2: Netflix is a dying dinosaur.  My favorite company ever made a disastrous choice when they decided to increase & complicate their fees by creating one fee for streaming video and one for physical DVD rentals.  Archaic and complex billing is the domain of the most reviled of all industries — phone carriers (AT&T, Sprint, and all those vomitous pigs).  Can you decipher your phone bill?  Why do you sign up for a contract at $70/month and end up paying $90/month?  I hate them, like we all do, and yet I pay them, like we all do.  Deep loathing is the natural universal response to complex billing (loans, telephone, cable, etc.).

Netflix has proven that the honeymoon is over by unnecessarily eliminating the simplified billing.  Their service may even be worth what they are saying it is … but you can’t pull that shit and not expect an immense and immediate backlash from your client base.  If they just would have let existing customers get grandfathered in on the old billing and then apply NEW billing to NEW users, all would have been dandy.

The downward slide began there and now Starz (who provides Netflix with rights to stream new movies from Disney and Sony) is bailing out on Netflix.  I bet 30% of streaming video is kid’s stuff and 99% of THAT is Disney.  When you are in line at Costco and your 3-year-old begins getting that shifty frown that means “tantrum ahead”, you’re five finger taps away from getting her Cinderella fix from Netflix. You might even deal with that crappy billing system to have a surefire meltdown-stopper at your fingertips.  Oh, but not anymore.

Why did Starz do it?  It cannot be coincidence that Netflix made a hugely backhanded and crappy maneuver with its userbase.  Perhaps, Starz is savvy enough to realize that the unsinkable behemoth has momentarily exposed a weak side.  Now is the time to strike or, with all of the recent expensive infrastructure and asset acquisition, Netflix is over-extended.  I would never characterize Netflix as a particularly vulnerable company, but due to a series of poor decisions, they might have just given themselves the ultimate smackdown.  They can’t afford to battle a large competitor … SOOOOO Starz may be angling to launch their own streaming service, after realizing just what a monster pile of internet gold they are sitting on.  Might they be prepping to feast cheaply on the corpse of Netflix’s streaming infrastructure.

As Radiohead sang in “Just”, “You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts.”

As a web developer with loads of startup experience, it is my job to give entrepreneurs direction with their web presence, but I am still amazed at how many people ask me “how much should I charge? or should it be free?” at the beginning of the project.  Don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoy the process of helping people derive a dollar value for their service based on their expenses.  It’s actually quite fun and gives me unparalleled insight into how their biz will operate both logically and financially.  I rarely build two web apps that operate in a similar manner or industry and, so, I hardly ever have “all the answers” at the point when I initially engage with a client.  Therefore, that process is necessary.

But the part of this process that is silly is why am I the one that is instigating it?  When entrepreneurs are deciding whether their idea is financially viable, the core part of the exercise should be computing operating expenses (especially marketing — which everyone neglects — e.g. “I’ll send out emails to all my friends” … ugh).  Weigh cost of operations against startup capital to see how long you can last in the negative.  Now you know if you need a primary revenue stream (advertising, for example) and whether you can afford to offer a free service.  Generally, after about 15 minutes of work, entrepreneurs see that they cannot support a free model.  And even better, it’s pretty clear how much needs to be pulled in each month.  Divide that by the number of users you are going to have.  Now divide that by 10 because that is the REAL number of users you are going to have.

I don’t expect enterpreneurs to come to me saying, “We need to bill $3.14 every three weeks”.  I expect lots of gray area.  However, sharp entrepreneurs should really be asking me the questions that allow them to refine their costs.  Like, how much is hosting?  How many servers do I need and what will they cost and can that be amortized over X months?  These questions indicate to me that the entrepreneur has determined that his model is at least somewhat financially viable.

Worse than this, however, is the client who tells me that pricing should be $9.99 per month “because it sounds good”.  I’ve heard it way more than two or three times.  To this day, I still can’t prevent my jaw from dropping when a prospect says this.  Next time, I should probably tell them that their project will cost a flat $69,500 … and when they ask why … wait for it … oh, hell, you complete the joke yourself.

Anyway, fon’t be a tool; run through this process and be hugely conservative when it comes to the number of advertisers, users, and revenue streams you’ll have.

Now I know I am going to catch flack for the in-your-face title, so I’ll give a brief explanation.  If you are an entrepreneur and you can’t check your ego and absolutely inhale all of the data that is out there (mostly bad, some good), then you don’t belong in this game.  That MBA from Wharton isn’t going to get your site launched, real life lessons will.  Every biz-related datapoint that you run across needs to be weighed and you need to make a case as to why it doesn’t apply to you.  Don’t put up a wall and claim that you are immune from idiocy and failure.  Wholeheartedly accept that failure is your project’s most likely end point and move forward keeping that very real prospect on your short-list of outcomes.

That said, if you can’t make the case against a datapoint, then you indeed have that problem.  Don’t fight it.  However, that isn’t what makes you so foolish, sir.  It’s your inability to accept and adapt your strategy.  Once again, check the ego.

Many years ago, a friend pointed out that I had no backup for my lead programmer in my development workflow.  I railed against that concept of single point of failure, claiming it was not a valid concern so why should I invest time in training senior coders to be architects.  Care to guess what happened?  I lost my lead, nobody could take her place, the client lost faith and walked a short time later.  Single points of failure nearly caused the doors to close back in 2005.  The lesson: I was a fool with an ego.

Alright, so now that we have a level playing field, mistake #1 is trying to launch a project without a recurring revenue stream.  Google will not buy you.  Google buys about 10 to 15 companies in a really big year. I launch about 30 sites a year and I am one small developer.  Seriously, you have no chance if this is your strategy.  You have to have some incredible, patented tech to even catch their eye at all, much less get purchased.  Profitable operations is one sign that a technology is solid (when the crowd opens their wallets, that heralds mainstream acceptance).  That last sentence there, THAT is your datapoint.

Anyway, there is one seemingly innocuous feature that blew me away.  If you have existing mp3 files, you can upload those to iCloud under the auspice of backing up your files.  In order to prevent users from driving iCloud’s server and bandwidth resources into the ground, iCloud performs some sort of comparison — perhaps bit matching or ID3 tag parsing — to see if that song already exists in iCloud’s database of music files (which is really just the iTunes catalog).  If it matches something in there, the file is not uploaded.  Instead, a DRM-free 256 kbps AAC original is copied from iCloud’s servers and added to your iCloud folder.

The end result is that if you have 20 gigs of low bitrate dodgy, crackle-prone pirated music, iCloud is going to replace that with high quality retail files.  And it is all going to be automated and free.  Yikes!  Apple better rethink this, otherwise the RIAA is going to be circling it’s greed-based wagon train around Steve Jobs’ skinny butt and extracting a pound of flesh that the Turtlenecked Scarecrow can’t spare.

The beauty of this is that Google doesn’t charge for any aspect of it.  They are going to pull the bottom out of the RIAA’s argument that music download services contribute to piracy (and they do, but only because a CD is $14 … if CDs were under $5, and downloaded tracks were 20 cents, nobody would bother with piracy … duh).  The RIAA can’t sue Google for much if Google gives it all away and therefore doesn’t generate revenue.  I’m sure the RIAA will desperately cling to some argument along the lines of “this service promotes illegal activity”, but seriously, who will buy this?  The RIAA is a dinosaur and Google is the meteor in that shall cause the dinosaur’s extinction (bad metaphor, I know, but this is stream of consciousness stuff).

An unintended casualty of this battle will probably be Amazon’s fledgling mp3 service.  It’s really solid, but it limits you to 5 Gigs of music.  This seemed completely adequate a few weeks ago when that service launched (with RIAA approval), but now it seems a paltry size.  Amazon has loads of storage — hard drives are cheap, after all — with their cloud-based S3 storage system.  So expect them to up that size, but I still feel that they’ve picked the path of pandering to the RIAA.  Perhaps they lack the funds to fight such a massive war.  Even Apple is toeing the party line, but iTunes is a little dystopic microcosm of Apple hysteria anyway.  Don’t look for innovation from the Cupertino crowd.  Their slavelike fanbase doesn’t care.  They’ll buy the next little shiny product from them no matter what.  Apple makes their money and stays in their sheltered closed-source phony world.  Amazon may just walk away rather than take on the entertainment giants.  After all, in the lawsuit against Google, the RIAA need only add a line that says something like “and Amazon was a jerk, too” and they’re on the line for billions.

If you are the early adopter type, then check out Google’s new adventure by requesting  an invite here.  If you have an Android, go download Google Music Beta from the market now .  Currently, you only get the ability to play music but I bet in a few weeks, you’ll be able to upload your music collection.

I’m sure Amazon considered this and then threw it out the window … but with a few recently successful service launches, the dynamic has changed.  Amazon could combine their streaming movies, cloud drive (for storing music), android app store, and excellent mp3 store — many of which have just been released to the world.  All of Amazon’s services are very solid, so along with books, they could just offer a flat monthly fee for the whole thing.  Essentially, “media as a commodity”.

I’d pay $50/month for books, streamed movies, music, and 5 apps.  And if the delivery systems were as seamless as the mp3 store OR the ebook to the kindle, they’d have an exceptional system.  Amazon is already a primary destination for product purchases, so it amazes me that they have not yet made the leap to service provider.  An author will make less per sale, but they are selling more units.  If I am paying $50/month for any number of books, I am going to read (and toss) tons of them.  Same with movies and music.

Netflix optioned the rights to first broadcast (and probably syndication) for a BRAND NEW tv series with Kevin Spacey.  Looks badass.  And like all things that Netflix does, it seems soooo sensible and timely.  Of course their stock jumped up the next day.  I’m not a knowledgeable investor, but a 24% increase in value in one day seems outstanding.  The Blockbuster down the street closed … good riddance.  Next in the Internet Conquests of the Real World, I want Amazon to take out Best Buy.  Evolution is decisive.

Speaking of the big bookbeast, I see they have added an app store for Android.  You have to tweak a technical switch in your Android settings.  Will this be a monster barrier to entry?  Amazon’s enticement (and a nice twist on an app store) is that they offer a free paid app every day.  Still not enough?  Well, if you install, you get a sequel to the hugely addictive Angry Birds for free.  That got me to make the leap.  I’m sure most others will too.  I like Amazon’s mp3 Store a lot.  It is really easy to use and not as mind-numbingly possessive as iTunes.  Apple’s iTunes is like a horribly possessive hipster friend.  Fun at first, and sleek enough to get your geeky butt a ton of attention, but then you realize you are locked into a huge a time commitment … and whenever you try to move on (to another app or mp3 player or friend), iTunes/hipster says, nope, I own your music and videos (and social connections).  Messy analogy, but you get the point.  Amazon’s mp3 Store is better than iTunes, so I assume that Amazon’s Appstore will blow the Android Marketplace away with superior usability.  It already has one or two less clicks for all actions.

Link provided here, again, just for good measure.

If you need industry reinforcement of this trend, look no further than Disney’s recent acquisition of Rocket Pack for the usual  20 million.  Rocket Pack is an platform for building and delivering games that is rendered through HTML5.  In fact, in that small arena, they are the massive industry leader.  It’s a real bleeding edge acquisition for a behemoth like Disney, but it’s a big picture move.  [The tech "behind" the tech, so to speak.]

All of a sudden you can play standard def graphic games (comparable to a Wii) directly in your phone’s browser without Flash!  Realtime and networked, no less.  Despite my reliance on sunblock to setp outdoors, I’m no gamer, but, on the tech level … wow.  So for all you biz people that are concerned with applications, there’s an under-exploited (for now) technology in HTML5 called Web Storage.  This will essentially allow instant data manipulation, similar to working with a local database, but over the web.  This is achieved by dynamically caching large chunks of data using a really huge cookie.

This caching serves the double purpose of speeding up your data interactions AND allowing you to use data-intensive apps across spotty mobile networks.  Imagine having a local copy of your entire Salesforce CRM sitting on your phone.  Oh, it’ll be encrypted, of course.  Now when you are at a client’s site just before a meeting searching for an old proposal, it’ll take a few seconds to view, rather than a couple of minutes.  This tech will greatly accelerate sort, indexing, and searching data on low power devices.  I really like the possibilities and I’ll expound more in the future.

Today, Nielsen released stats for the the mobile phone market.  From November of 2010 to January of 2011, Android represents 29% of market share with Apple and Blackberry each at 27% .  However, without time constraint, total market share for Android compared to all smartphones is at 19%.  That’s fairly rapid adoption.

Blatant opionion:  I don’t think any iPhone users are jumping ship to go to Android.  Former Blackberry users and first-time smartphone buyers are snapping up Androids (probably due to cheap price … and the fact that you aren’t forced into a draconian contract with AT&T’s sub-par service).  Windows Mobile will always have its little sliver of the market.

Blatant opinion 2:  If you’re considering building an iPhone app, you need to consider an Android version as well.

For now, if you are considering an Android for your phone and you think it won’t handle your calendar and meeting invites, you can happily reverse that line of thought.
- VPN works
- Remote Desktop works
- Every app you can imagine
- Remote wipe and monitoring
- Flash and Adobe Air support
- Exchange and Outlook synchronization

Also, Google seems to releases major updates to the Android OS roughly twice as often as Apple. I’m getting exceptional data and voice service through T-Mobile.  Incidentally, I have an HTC G2 from T-Mobile.  See below:

A client of ours for the last year or so, CubeCheck, just got profiled on the The Street’s biz news site, MainStreet.com.

Read the article here.
CubeCheck is a service that allows users to rate current or former employers. I imagine that occasionally somebody will enter a positive review … but we all know that this is a great avenue to vent on what a lamebrain your old boss was. And, no, topLingo is not on there (we programmed in a filter to auto-remove and posts with the word “topLingo” in them, of course <– joking!). Anyway, users can enter these reviews either anonymously or — if they are especially brave — as verified, non-anonymous users. In the profile, CubeCheck is described as Yelp for your employers.  It’s super easy to use … a stellar example of usability.

Go ahead, see if your company is in there … http://www.cubecheck.com

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Here’s a 30 second office tour, and ignore the moving boxes as we’re in the aftermath of the move.