Five installs of Apple's Mac OS X Tiger

I have now done five home installs of Apple's latest Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger." on a variety of machines (the Family pack is handy, since it includes licenses for five machines) from an iBook G3 to a dual-processor G4. The only problem I've run into is that an old GPG package for encrypted email crashed the new Mail 2.0. But once I uninstalled the encryption stuff, it has all worked like a champ. My favorite parts so far: the ability to create smart email boxes like "Today's email" in Mail, and being able to track flights and weather from Dashboard.

Oh, one other glitch; I needed a new copy of eMacs for my Web page and statistics program editing. If you are wondering what eMacs is, you probably don't need it.

On the upside, the multi-threaded kernel makes the system feel much snappier. And Safari, the native Web browser, is much zippier as well. All in all, a delightful and relatively trouble-free upgrade.

Next week: upgrading the 10.2-based laptops my partners are running when their copies arrive.

Infoworld comments on the tyranny of too much

Tom Yager posted a great column on how Apple's value is throwing away the 99% of software and features that you don't need. He definitely gets the tyranny of too much.

Blackfriars new favorite tool for crunching statistics

Blackfriars is currently in the process of analyzing all the survey returned from our new, larger marketing survey. But as we got into the analysis process, it became clear that Excel really wasn't the right tool for this job. After all, not only do we need to do tests on 300 answers to each question, but we also have to look at industry specific slices of the data, compare responses of B2B, B2C, and nonprofits, and also analyze the effects of company sizes on the responses. Frankly, the possibility of being afflicted with the strain of staring at Excel for days on end was too much for us.

We were considering buying either the SAS or SPSS tools when we stumbled across
The R Project for Statistical Computing. This open source statistics analysis package is actually a clone of the S language developed at Bell Labs. As a former Unix afficionado, I have the greatest respect for the work done at Bell Labs, so we decided to give it a try. The results have been wonderful.

Now we will say that R is not for the faint of heart. Unlike a lot of systems that are presentation systems that know how to read databases, this is really a programming language that knows how to do scientific and statistical plots. That said, it provides us with powerful automation for crunching data, and the speed that that automation gives us is worth the steep learning curve. For Blackfriars, it is the right tool for the job.

Clients won't see the R graphical output in our published research; we publish using the Adobe Creative Suite, and that isn't going to change because of the page and color control needed for professional publishing. But we do believe that clients will see more insight in our published research because we are now spending our time thinking about what the data means instead of fighting with Excel. Pictures communicate better than spreadsheets any day of the week; R is letting us see pictures in minutes instead of days. We can't say enough good things about the package.

A humorous take on a real issue

Alex Beam writes in today's Boston Globe about attending a course on how to deal with difficult people. Blackfriars actually offers a course with a similar title, but a different emphasis. The one Alex talks about is more about tact and empathizing with the other person's personality style. Ours is much more about purposeful communication and why what you think you are saying isn't what the other person hears. Regardless, Blackfriars wishes more people would take courses like these. With the deep divisions in politics and dialog nowadays, if we don't do something soon, we might be assaulted by the likes of Unitarian Jihad.

At Microsoft, a Smart Guy Has His Hands Full With the Smart Phone Business

The New York Times today had an article on the new head of Microsoft's Mobile software business, Ya-Qin Zhang. I give him credit for the point he made in the article:

Magneto will test what Dr. Zhang said was his attempt to create a new focus on quality software - a break from the Microsoft practice of emphasizing a cascade of new features in each successive product release.

"Now the first thing is quality," he said, adding that his second priority is building partnerships for the Windows Mobile business, which has so far failed to replicate Microsoft's impact in the desktop computer world

Quality will definitely help. But Microsoft has never had any shortage of smart people working there. Their challenge ahead is actually much more one of marketing and communication as noted by an analyst.

"In the cellphone industry, success has more to do with market structure than technology," said Michael Kleeman, a telecommunications industry consultant who is a policy researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

And the telecom companies, having seen what happened to IBM in the computer industry when it engaged Microsoft, isn't about to hand over power to Bill Gates. Good luck, Mr. Zhang.

The value of Longhorn is a new user interface?

The Wall Street Journal says Microsoft is now touting its new Avalon graphical user interface as the answer to user's challenges.

Long a flash point in competition with Apple Computer Inc., the "GUI" is emerging as perhaps Microsoft's key selling point to Longhorn, scheduled to be released in a test version this summer and to customers late next year. Beyond just changing the look of the software, the interface is designed to work closely with technology that makes it easier to find information on a PC. Microsoft is attempting to use the combination to reduce the complexity of personal computers that now store a growing amount of files and information.
....
Files and documents can be arranged in stacks of different heights that give a rough visual cue as to the number of files in a group. In the demonstration, a group of sample files organized under "advertising" are easily seen to number more than "legal" files.

Other tricks to improve organization include the ability to add identifying keywords to files, including photo files, Word documents or other data -- manually or automatically as a feature in new application software. Each file has a pop-up window that displays basic information about the file such as author, keywords and other comments that can be used to search for the file.

We are all in favor of adding visual cues to help users understand what is happening on computers. But Microsoft has a history of focusing on features instead of usability. For example, one of the features currently on Windows that many users find frustrating is menus that continually rearrange themselves to put the most recently used items first. That sounds great to a computer scientist, but ask an ordinary person about the feature, and they'll tell you it makes them feel as if they don't know where to find things. It also creates uncertainty for most users instead of the "I know where to find that" effect that most users actually desire.

And manual tagging of files through info boxes? Who has time for that?

All we can say is that we hope Longhorn goes through a whole lot of usability testing before it hits the streets. Meanwhile, we'll let you know how the competition does -- we're upgrading Blackfriars to Apple's Tiger next week.

Google to Sell New Types Of Ads

The New York Times noted today that Google is expanding into awareness advertising from its base of text-based ads. I think Google had an interesting insight here: the value of their ad system comes from allowing customers to quickly create ads that will be displayed automatically in the right contexts. There is no question now: Google is quickly moving into other types of ad-supported media. Don't be surprised if you see them attack the cash cows of other media companies as they fight for more than their share of ad dollars.

Does watching TV make you smarter?

The New York Times Magazine argued Sunday that today's TV plot lines on the top dramas put more cognitive load on viewers and therefore improve their thinking. It pointed at the fact that most modern dramas such as "24", "Alias", and even "The West Wing" now have so many story interwoven story lines that they could be considered calesthenics for the brain.

Now Blackfriars knows that entertainment is a different animal than our work in business communications. Great art does not have to be simple and clear; the musical works of Bach and Mahler are good examples of very complex structures that have great emotional impact. But we do see a danger in this author's hypothesis that we don't have to design and tell stories well. And while the shows cited are all quite good, many of them don't do nearly as well in attracting viewers and selling advertising -- the goal of any commercial TV show -- as single story line shows like the "C.S.I" series of shows. And lets face it: if intellectual challenge were ne plus ultra of TV, PBS would be the top rated network, and Fox would be dead last. TV reality is otherwise.

Blackfriars is all in favor of great and challenging programming for TV and other performance media. But producers have to recognize that the harder you make viewers work, the more comfortable they are going to be changing the channel. Look at shows like "Arrested Development" that may win critical acclaim, but struggle to win ratings. Producers should be careful to challenge viewers when it is appropriate, but not to view the technique as a panacea for poor (and expensive due to maintaining all the characters and plot lines) story-telling. The proof? None of the challenging shows the author cites are in the top 10 rated shows today.

Translation From PR-Speak to English

Daring Fireball has done a brilliant job of translating the usual corporate doubletalk of press releases into more direct statements. After you've had a few laughs, ask yourself how many of those Adobe/Macromedia phrases you've seen in your press releases.

The Birth of Public Relations -- Via Freud

NPR had a great piece on this morning about Freud's Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations. Edward Bernays was the first PR person to move away from the rational argument approach toward more emotional and needs-based marketing. It's a good foundation for why Apple's marketing works so well compared to more traditional "look at all the great features" PR more commonly done in high tech.

A stupid Apple marketing stunt

Let you think we only say good things about Apple, today's Washington Post is running a story previously broken by the Wall Street Journal noting that Apple Computer was among the firms who paid tech editors to praise the iPod. With the iPod riding high with consumers, the value of this pitch was certainly not worth the negative publicity that will undoubtedly come from it. Just shows that even good marketing firms sometimes ignore the first law of business: never do anything you wouldn't want publicized on the front page of the New York Times (or in this case, the Washington Post).

Mini-Microsoft: Better off without Ballmer?

Blackfriars has previous noted Microsoft's under-the-radar business problems. Others are starting to notice as well. This blog (which amusingly uses the same blog template as Blackfriars), has a lot of detailed evidence why the company is in serious trouble, despite seemingly rosy business results. Their suggestion? Dump CEO Steve Balmer.

Blackfriars believes that the company's problems are bigger than just one person. But the detailed indictment given in the blog shows a series of missteps that is actually quite long. We always say that marketing is the public face of corporate strategy; now we know why Microsoft's marketing has been so poor over the last five years or so.

Guess what? Consumers don't like advertising

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times is talking about market research around advertising today. That topic is being much discussed at the 51st convention of the American Research Foundation continuing in Manhattan today. Most interesting in the article is some research on receptivity to advertising that was performed by Yankelovich Partners.

"There are those looking for the new media to be the saviors for advertising," Mr. Smith said, "but we can use the new media to be ever more intrusive and saturating, creating ever more clutter."

That may be a reason for the new survey's finding that "there are still a lot of things consumers don't like about advertising," he added. "There probably hasn't been as much progress in changing that as we think."

For instance, 56 percent of survey respondents said they avoided buying products that overwhelmed them with advertising, up slightly from the 54 percent who said so in the 2004 survey. And 69 percent said they were interested in ways to block, skip or opt out of being exposed to advertising, the same percentage as in the survey last year.

Said another way, the tyranny of too much is quite real, and consumers are looking for ways to fight back.

Nine Inch Nails does viral marketing

This weekend created an interesting development in the music wars: Nine Inch Nails just made one of its songs available as a downloadable Garage Band file, allowing Mac users to remix and rework the song. The RIAA undoubtedly would have fits about this, but Blackfriars thinks its a smart move. After all, a band that gives users this type of value is going to generate buzz, and buzz generates sales. And we have to say, it's generally pretty cool to be able to edit a hit song yourself.

Baba Shetty, Fallon's Head of Interactive

Baba Shetty is an old friend of ours, since we both were analysts at Forrester during the Internet boom and bust era. He's now at Fallon Interactive and heads up their interactive marketing efforts. If I have a question about auto marketing, he's the person I'd turn to. But now I don't have to;
ClickZ just ran an interview with him. The interview isn't particularly great, but I pay attention to anything Baba says.

More power of aligned communication in the Senate

This article in The Hill leads with commentary noting that Sen. Reid's communications war room is what is beating the GOP's current campaign to eliminate the filabuster in the Senate. But more interestingly, it names some of the players on the 20-person team.

Corporate America should be watching this and asking themselves if their spokespeople are speaking with one voice. Because that's all this war room is doing -- they are just making sure all the Democrats speaking on the topic communicate one strategy. Powerful stuff.

What a week!

As predicted, Apple blew out its numbers on Wednesday, showing a 70% bump in revenue, a factor of five improvement in profit, and amazing iPod and Macintosh sales. In fact, according to Gartner, Apple has now leapfrogged Toshiba to become the number five vendor of computers in the US. Note that this is not an example of a rising tide lifting all boats; companies like IBM and Sun didn't have nearly as good a quarter. Blackfriars believes the difference was not only execution, but marketing as well.

On that topic, Blackfriars also received the results of our expanded Q2 survey of senior executives this week. This survey of 300 senior executives will allow us to start looking at marketing budgets, attitudes, and spending by vertical industry and start comparing how different sectors market differently. We've also now started accepting pre-orders for that report, which means we now have a lot of number crunching to do.

And on top of all that, we all had to pay our taxes too.

Apple's busy month

Business Week has an article today casting some skepticism on how much Apple's release of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) will help the company. Apple just yesterday announced that it will release the system on April 29. Meanwhile, the company will release earnings after the close of the market today which will provide some insight on how iPod and Macintosh sales have fared in the first quarter.

Blackfriars bet on both earnings and Tiger: expect Apple to do very well on both fronts. The company now occupies the premiere brand spot in computing; in fact, Apple laptops are now so hot even died-in-the-wool Microsoft and Linux developers are starting to use them. Even Robert Scoble, Microsoft's Scobleizer recently waxed enthusiastically about his brother's 17" Powerbook. And the iPod phenomenon shows no signs of stopping. We here at Blackfriars will be installing Tiger on all our laptops at the end of the month too, just for Tiger's new Spotlight tool for tackling our personal Tyrannies Of Too Much.

Their flaws are everyone's business

Alex Beam's Boston Globe column today piles onto the story about GM pulling its ads from the LA Times because of a critical article. But he goes one step further -- he spices it up with similar accounts of media foolishness by Fidelity Investments and Jack Welch. Just shows that even the famous and the successful confuse spite and good business, usually to their detriment.

The fragmentation of audiences again

NPR's On the Media had a terrific radio piece on the coming chaos being caused by a tyrrany of too much media. While this is an issue for consumers, it is an even bigger problem for big advertisers like Proctor and Gamble. Definitely a good show. The transcript should be up about Wednesday of this week.

A great piece of political satire

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle has written probably one of the funniest -- and truest -- pieces of political and religious commentary in recent years. The piece is funny to anyone, but it is even funnier to those of us who are Unitarians.

GM makes another marketing misstep

Stuart Elliott writes today that GM has picked a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, in this case the Los Angeles Times. GM has decided to pull their advertising from the LA Times in response to a critical comment regarding GM management by one of their writers. Needless to say, this is a bad idea, as noted by one of the marketing executives quoted.

"It's archaic and naïve to not recognize that there ought to be a strong dividing line in the media between editorial content and advertising," said Michael Draznin, president of Marketing Branding Communications, a consulting company in New York. "They should not influence each other."

"Companies that deal with negative perceptions by withdrawing their ads are playing right into the hands of the critics," he added. "What they ought to do is keep the ad space, but change the message, addressing the negatives and keep moving ahead."

This just proves again that GM has forgotten a lot of the great marketing that made them the largest US carmaker.

The success of alignment in politics

In January, Blackfriars predicted that the Democrats in Washington would be more successful this year because they had set up a war room to coordinate and align their message. This article in the Boston Globe today notes the progress they have made in becoming an effective opposition party and lays some of the credit to the communications coordination provided by the war room.

But 100 days into the new Congress, Democrats have rarely strayed from the party fold. Senate Democrats for the first time have a communications team that operates out of a ''war room" on the third floor of the Capitol, an innovation that has helped solidify opposition to changing Social Security and to some of Bush's conservative judicial nominees. Democrats have resisted calls to offer a competing proposal to overhaul Social Security, preferring to attack Bush's plan.

How should we measure TV viewing and advertising?

Anyone who reads Blackfriars' research and blog knows that we believe measurement is essential to marketing success today. But measurements of TV viewership and advertising have always been reported through intermediaries like Nielsen and Arbitron -- and there's some evidence that those measurements may not be accurate any more. Today's New York Times asks the question of "What is the best way to measure TV viewing?" in Our Ratings, Ourselves. One of the great insights:

Change the way you count [television viewers and what programs they watch], for instance, and you can change where the advertising dollars go, which in turn determines what shows are made and what shows then are renewed. Change the way you count, and potentially you change the comparative value of entire genres (news versus sports, dramas versus comedies) as well as entire demographic segments (young versus old, men versus women, Hispanic versus black). Change the way you count, and you might revalue the worth of sitcom stars, news anchors and -- when a single ratings point can mean millions of dollars -- the revenue of local affiliates and networks alike. Counting differently can even alter the economics of entire industries, should advertisers (thanks to the P.P.M.) discover that radio or the Web is a better way to get people to know their brand or buy their products or even vote for their political candidates. Change the way you measure America's culture consumption, in other words, and you change America's culture business. And maybe even the culture itself.

Defining brand

Today's New York Times Magazine is full of great marketing articles. We'll start with Brand, a great article written by Willian Safire on what branding really is about. Just the beginning will draw you in:

When the New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg asked Senator John Kerry whether the Democrats had a credibility problem on defense controversies, the party's titular leader replied without equivocation, ''Look, the answer is, we have to do an unbranding.'' As Kerry saw it, the political problem had to do with salesmanship: ''We have to brand more effectively. It's marketing.'' An editor on the linguistic qui vive titled Goldberg's article about the Democrats' need to shuck off the appearance of weakness ''The Unbranding.''

The hot word in the field of sales -- indeed, pervading the world of perfect pitching -- is brand.

No blogging the first half of this week

We here at Blackfriars are participating in a big client project that concludes on Wednesday. Regular blogging will resume on Thursday, 4/7. Meanwhile, just talk quietly among yourselves.

Best Buy to end rebates

This is a retailer that understands that good marketing is about delighting your customers, not about making them jump through hoops. My big question: why does it take two years instead of two months to stop using rebates?

Details of Groove Networks' sour deal

Robert Weisman has done some digging on the acquisition of Groove Networks by Microsoft in today's Boston Globe. And what he found was not gold, but dirt. It turns out that Groove was actually sold at a loss of about $35 million -- that's $35 million less than what investors had put in. When you take into account that Microsoft was a majority investor in the company, this feels a little curious. But what was worse was that there were several types of stock, and since the company was sold at a loss, some stock holders -- mainly rank and file employees -- got nothing at all. Who was the biggest shareholder that did get fully compensated? Microsoft, who PAID ITSELF $80 million of the $120 million purchase price.

Now one might just write this off as typical business wheeling and dealing. But there appear to be even more unsavory business practices involved in the acquisition as well. Mr. Weisman notes:

''Stockholders were not provided with the supposedly final merger agreement . . . until 9:53 p.m. on March 8, 2005," the complaint said. ''Stockholders were then asked to give their written consent no later than 9 a.m. the following morning, thus giving stockholders zero business hours in which to conduct their review of (and seek advice regarding) the supposedly finalized merger documents."

Many articles were written about this deal and how it validated Ray Ozzie's vision and business model (here's one from CNET). Somehow, I don't expect we'll see a similar flood about this lawsuit being brought by one of the Groove investors. But it does indicate any company -- no matter who is running it and how smart their investors -- needs to count their fingers and toes after shaking hands with Microsoft.

Think. Feel. Drive. Subaru's emotive messaging

Subaru has full page ads in all the major newspapers today announcing their new Think. Feel. Drive. marketing campaign. I have to say I like it because it creates an emotional connection to the brand in just three words. Advertising doesn't get much better than that. Now if they could just lose the rest of the ad copy.

You can download the Think. Feel. Drive. complete ad from the bottom of the site link listed above.