- John Gruber, Dell Executive: ‘We’re No Longer a PC Company’
I like that Gruber has a memory. He cites Michael Dell in 1997 suggesting that Apple — facing financial difficulties — should shut down and return the money to investors. But regarding Dell: I think he really means it.
Ouch.
A quote from that site I refuse to link to:
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between last September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.
3 minutes versus seven hours. I mean, 3 minutes!
The sad thing is: I bet when mobile usage is counted, the gap is actually worse.
We keep hearing over and over how Google+ is on the up-and-up — from Google. 10 million sign-ups here. A billion more there. So many fucking sign-ups.
The reality of the situation sure seems to be the opposite. The only people I know that use Google+ regularly are people who work at Google (and Robert Scoble).
It’s just not working. For fundamental reasons. Millions more in TV ad spend won’t fix that.
Yammer raises $85M in a third round, bringing total investment to $142M, after tripling sales, head count, and paid seats in 2011.
Says a lot about the maturation of the work media marketplace.
Hopscotching between new Metro programs and old Desktop ones–which is what most Windows 8 users will do at first–is going to be an inherently disjointed, unsatisfying stopgap. Windows 8 will only be a landmark operating system if consumers embrace Metro. And they’ll only do that if developers write outstanding Metro programs, and if PC manufacturers create machines that are truly designed with Metro in mind.
That’s a lot of ifs. Most of them will be tackled by other hardware and software makers, not Microsoft. And even once Windows 8 has been released, it will take years, not months, before it’s clear how well they’ve addressed them.
Which is okay. Microsoft is intent on getting this operating system out the door in time for this year’s holiday PCs, but Windows 8 isn’t primarily about moving boxes in 2012. What it’s trying to build is a foundation for a Windows that stands a chance of being relevant a decade or two from now.
” —- Harry McCracken, Windows 8 Consumer Preview: One Step Closer to the PC’s Future via TIME.com
Microsoft’s huge gamble. If they lose with Windows 8, they will be just another enterprise software company, with a number of shrinking divisions that should/could be sold off or spun out.
I confess that I hate using wikis. They’re a mess. I like more fundamental structure, like posts on a group blog, or explicit interviews, and old style long-form writing.
I was having a discussion with Will McInnes about this, and I decided to solicit others’ thoughts, leading to this:
I received an email today from Amplify, a Gimme Bar like service that has been around a few years (and a former client of mine), saying that the service was shutting down immediately, which is a bit ungracious. Usually a service will give users a month or two to export or transition. I tried to open my old account but access seems to be closed.
There is the hope that the closed-beta alternative Clipboard might allow transition, but it sounds iffy:
via Clipboard Blog
I am a Clipmarks / Amplify user and I want my clips preserved. What do I do?
We can’t guarantee that all of your clips will be preserved. But if you want all of your clips preserved, you’ll want to look for an email from the Amplify and Clipmarks teams, which contains an invitation to Clipboard. From the registration page, you will be able to request that your clips be migrated from Amplify or Clipmarks into Clipboard.
The Clipboard team will assess the demand for having old clips preserved. If it is sufficiently high and technically feasible, they will build a custom tool to automate the clip migration process. In the event that they have decided that there is not sufficient demand or other complicating issues, they will notify users of that outcome as well.
Ouch.
I found Amplify interesting, but annoying. For example, the tool enforced a 1000 character limit on text clips, which was arbitrary and painful.
Purportedly leaked documents make it seem that Facebook is planning to depart from conventional advertising, where brands can muster ‘stories’ from your friends to make the case for their products rather than advertising content:
E.B. Boyd via Fast Company
“When people hear about you from friends, they listen,” the Facebook materials say. “We’ll expand your ad with stories from friends who have already connected.” (“Stories” is Facebook’s shorthand for a wide varitey of interactions on the site. In the case of ads, it seems to refer to the fact that the ads will display which of a viewer’s friends have Liked the brand.)
Reminds me of BzzAgent, the company that enlists people to talk up products with their friends. Sketchy.
In the case of Facebook’s plans, we’ll have to see if the materials are real. But if they are, this social spam marketing gives people another good reason to leave Facebook.
[originally posted on Aug 20, 2006. I dug out of the archives because of the Knight News Challenge on Networks, which refers to Reed’s Law. It’s still topical reading.]
Back in 2003, at my old, old blog, Timing, I wrote a post, that laid out the basis of Reed’s Law, which is now relevant because of the of the recent IEEE Metcalfe’s Law brouhaha. Fred Wilson recently noted that he wished that Metcalfe had enlarged his arguments to include Reed’s Law. So I unearthed this from the time vaults:
[from Re: Social Disutility and Competition in Network Ecosystems]
Tim Oren writes about Ross Mayfield’s thoughts on ecosystems of networks.
First of all, this seems to all have grown from David Reed’s “Sneaky Exponential” piece, where he introduces Reed’s Law, and contrasts the various stages of value as the network grows. I wrote about this at some length in a recent tissue of Message.
Finding the Value of the Network: Communities
The conventional wisdom about the value of a communication network is embodied in Metcalfe’s Law, named after one of the founders of the Internet. He said that the value of a communications network grows as the square of the number of people using it, or 2 to the Nth. Metcalfe’s Law is focused on the point-to-point, pair-wise communications between individuals. It is a linear model of growth.
But this model seems wrong, and does not account for the non-linear effects of social groups. David Reed is a well-known exponent of the observation that the value of a communication network grows with the number of groups it supports.
“Reed’s law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is 2N, where N is the number of participants.
This grows much more rapidly than either
- the number of participants, N, or
- the number of possible pair connections, N(N+1)/2 (which follows Metcalfe’s law)
so that even if the utility of groups being available to be joined is very small on a per-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system. (Wikipedia,
Stated another way, any communication network’s value is best estimated by the number of groups that exist in the population of users. The value of a network like the Internet, Reed is telling us, can not be effectively measured by the number of financial transactions it can support, or the number of messages being sent through its millions of routers, or even the number of people using it at any time. The only reasonable way to measure its value is to count the number of groups that it supports, or so he asserts.
Accelerating Collaboration: Communities of Purpose
While its wonderful that Internet-enabled fans of the newest heavy metal band can swap gossip, MP3s and revealing photos, and this may enrich western civilization in some way, it may seem a long way from the factory floor or the pressing realities in the CEO’s suite. But it is exactly this sort of social interaction that forms all groups, even the most practical and purposeful, like those within the enterprise.
Turning Reed’s Law into a tool to enhance value for the enterprise may seem to some to be a bit out there, a bit too new age, like bringing in a Feng Shui geomancer to avoid building the new corporate headquarters in the wrong orientation to the Cosmos. But it is simply pragmatic. Obviously, work gets down by groups, Obviously, you want to harness the value of closer, more productive relationships with partners, suppliers, and customers. And, yes, it is becoming obvious that any significant enterprise performance improvements will require interactions with people – and applications – outside the enterprise.
Tim Oren’s final observations — that people generally contribute significantly to around 2.5 groups, and that groups hit size limits (the Dunbar 150 person max rule) — return to the core theme of social groups and network value. Size does matter. People can only meaningfully be involved with a limited number of groups, and groups lose group cohesion after some ceiling is reached.
But the value of the network is a function of the number of groups supported, even if the membership of each group is bounded. The flexibility associated with group transience is an additional factor — so it’s not just a static equation, its a non-linear flow equation. All of the laws that Reed compares — Sarnoff, Metcalfe, and Reed — are statically defined.
In a recent report I wrote for Cutter (now in production) I argue that real-time groups create value for companies as an extension or corollary of Reed’s Law, which I humbly have dubbed Boyd’s Law. Ahem.
As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets, they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise.
This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners – passing information from application to application, or conducting real time communication between members of real time communities – and as a result, the latency in information transfer decreases.
This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to act on this lower latency information earlier, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise. Or put another way, decreasing latency in the individual communication events translates into higher probabilities of increased parallelism in the overall network. This emergent property of increased real time communication in networks is exactly the value creation David Reed was getting at.
In human terms, and leaving the queuing theory aside, this value increase grows from the power of social groups. It’s not quasi-mystical chaos theory – it’s just practical.
So, you have to look at other factors, not just size, or even who is a member, but things like the tools being used to communicate in order to understand the components of value arising from social interaction.
And today, in 2006, it’s even stranger to see some IEEE article attempting to peg the value of a network on some sort of stock market economics, as opposed to the utility of the network in practice: the value created for individuals, groups, and the network denizens as a whole.
[And today, in 2012, I am totally unsurprised that folks are still referring back to statically defined rules instead of something like what I was poking at in 2003: Boyd’s Law. I would now define it this way, taking the perspective of the value of a person in a social network:
The value of any new node in network — and in social networks, a node is a person — can be characterized as the increase in network-wide parallelism caused by the connections the new node establishes.
Nine years later.]
Eyal makes a good argument: that virality — users inviting their friends to try an app — is less important (and more annoying) than habitual use of apps: habit is the new viral.
Nir Eyal via TechCrunch
The Curated Web Will Run On Habits
Increasingly, companies will become experts at designing user habits. Curated Web companies already rely on these methods. This new breed of company, defined by the ability to help users find only the content they care about, includes such white-hot companies as Pinterest and Tumblr. These companies have habit formation embedded in their DNA. This is because data collection is at the heart of any Curated Web business and to succeed, they must predict what users will think is most personally relevant.
Curated Web companies can only improve if users tell their systems what they want to see more of. If users use the service sparingly, it is less valuable than if they use it habitually. The more the user engages with a Curated Web company, the more data the company has to tailor and improve the user’s experience. This self-improving feedback loop has the potential to be more useful – and more addictive — than anything we’ve seen before.
However, I think Eyal’s characterization — helping users ‘find only the content they care about’ — is too limited. Steve Jobs said the users don’t know what they want, so by extension, they don’t know what they care about.
Getting back to Eyal’s habituation remark, these new tools will have to meld into the user’s existing behaviors and amplify them in some adjacent way.
For example, I’ve started to experiment with the user of Timely.is instead of Bitly as a way to publish Tweets. It ‘fits the hand’ in the sense that it works much like Bitly: a bookmarklet in the browser that creates an editable tweet with a shortened URL back to the source. Like Bitly, it provides stats on clickthroughs, but adds one additional feature: the ability to queue tweets and have them post over time.
So, I am able to develop a new Timely habit because it is similar to my habituated use of Bitly, but adding an additional capability. And there is a viral vestige: the promotion of Timely in the footer of the tweets.
