MattMaroon.com

As Apple fanboyism has spread throughout the tech publications, so too has Vista-bashing. In short order it went from being the Windows operating system that even Mac users were digging to the biggest mistake Microsoft ever made. The major media outlets who in tech, as with a lot of niches, take their cues from the blogs these days, have slowly followed suit, though they’ve been much more guarded about calling it a disaster.

I think it’s a bunch of bullshit. Vista is faring almost exactly how you’d expect it to, and most of the common complaints are the same ones that crop up with any major overhaul of the OS.

First people complain that old programs and hardware don’t work. I installed both Vista and XP the day they came out, and let me tell you, they did a far better job this time. I haven’t found any software that failed to run yet, and the vast majority of my hardware worked perfectly. In fact my TV tuner (purchased in 2004) was a bitch to get working on a new XP install, and worked immediately with Vista. From reading around, there clearly are driver issues, but I think anyone who remembers the XP launch will tell you it’s improved quite a bit. And with millions, of pieces of hardware made by thousands of manufacturers, can you really expect it to be flawless?

Also, everyone is pointing out that a lot of enterprise customers aren’t upgrading. That, too, was the case last time. The reason is that enterprise customers don’t upgrade much. Inertia is a tremendous force in enterprise IT. Many companies have hundreds or thousands of computers, all of which are running however many pieces of software from however many authors. Upgrading takes a lot of time and manpower, so they don’t do it until they have to. They drive the metaphorical car until the wheels fall off, the doors rust shut, and the engine sputters to a halt.

If you don’t believe me, go into a bank and look at a PC. Chances are you’ll see one that looks like the old Packard Bell models from the late 90s, and an interface that looks about as user-friendly as a BIOS screen. In fact, I once entered that screen while fixing the computer of a friend who worked at a Fortune 500 company in order to make it boot from disc, and he remarked that the UI must have been made by the same people. The fact that these people aren’t clamoring for a new OS is somehow taken as a failure? Half of them are still running Pentium 2s.

Also cited are customers wanting OEMs to keep offering the old OS on new PCs. People did this when they retired Windows 98 as well. Probably many of the same ones. You didn’t hear as much about it back then, but “blog” wasn’t a word yet and Digg.com didn’t exist because you could probably still register Dig.com. People seem a lot more vocal this time, but that’s because they have a million times more places to shout.

Which is not to say that Microsoft didn’t make some mistakes in launching the OS. They clearly made a few. For one, they gave OEMs too much leeway in deciding what they could or could not slap “Vista Capable” stickers on. And even though it wasn’t entirely their fault that manufacturers screwed this up, it reflects badly on Microsoft. It’s just like when a program crashes your PC. It might not have been Windows’s fault, but you get pissed at it for not preventing it, because that’s its job.

They also should not have shipped with User Account Control on by default. It just doesn’t improve safety. Maybe in a perfect world where people actually paid attention to nag screens it would, but it quickly becomes so repetitive that any normal human being finds themselves just blindly clicking OK to everything. In a matter of minutes it becomes nothing more than a severe nuisance.

For the most part though, I greatly prefer the OS to XP. The built in search capability is what does it for me. I can hit the Windows key, then type in “poker”, and up will pop a list of any poker programs, any documents with that word in the title, and even Word documents or Outlook emails with that word in it. I can launch any program with just a couple keystrokes.

I could go on with a list of likes and dislikes, but this post isn’t meant as a review. It’s just to say that Vista is certainly not the abortion that the tech industry seems to think it is. The Silicon Valley groupthink never gave it a fair shake. It mainly just suffers from the same problems that anyone who has had a market leadership position in the OS space for decades and does a significant amount of enterprise sales could not possibly avoid. And MS undoubtedly made a few mistakes along the way, but for the most part, I think the launch went far better than XP’s did.

Some people have asked me why I write about Facebook so much. It isn’t because I hate them, as some have suggested. I don’t. I kind of like Facebook actually. I mean, I could just as easily live without it, but I log in a couple times a week, which probably puts it in my top 10. I log into MySpace maybe once a month, on average, and then only when I get a message, and I’ve never signed up for any other network. Well, LinkedIn, I suppose, but that’s more like a digital business card than true social network, and I don’t really visit that site much.

It isn’t to be contrarian either. I do realize my blog sort of comes off that way sometimes. That’s mostly because I find it more interesting to write about popular opinions I disagree with than ones where I agree. I could explain why I think cloud computing is going to be big in the future (in the business and hosting space anyway, I’m still not buying the “thin client in the home” vision) but what fun is that? I’ll just nod my head silently.

And I don’t write about Facebook to troll or drive traffic. In fact, until a week or so ago, I didn’t have any form of monetization on this blog. I’ve now got SnapTalent, which is actually providing a fantastic CPM rate (relative to what I’ve traditionally gotten with Google Ads) but my traffic is so low, even when I get a few links, that it’s basically irrelevant. And if I were angling to promote my personal brand, right now I’d be far better served writing about sports and getting page views from on Yardbarker.

So I write about them mostly because I just don’t like hype. It blinds people to reality. And the reality, I think, is that Facebook has a lot of traffic, but maybe nowhere to go with it. They’ve got a $15 billion valuation, traffic that appears to be leveling off, and no real monetization prospects. Some or all of those might change, but until they do, it’s a little premature to call them the next Google, or even the next YouTube.

Also, unlike most, I don’t think that they are really that smart. That’s another one I get sick of hearing, how they, as a company, are so brilliant. Maybe when it comes to engineering that’s true. People seem to be complaining a little about its speed and responsiveness these days, but it’s still light years beyond MySpace. Even beyond where MySpace was when it had Facebook’s US traffic.

But remember Beacon? Really, who greenlighted that one? My eight year old cousin could have heard the elevator pitch for that one and realized it was a bad idea.

“Well, what we’re going to do is give people a cookie, and then any time they do anything on a partner site, we’re going to put it in their mini feed whether they like it or not. We’ll spy on them everywhere they go, and then tell all of their friends what they’re doing”

How intelligent can a group of people who approved that idea really be? I wouldn’t even want to put someone that dumb in charge of a Dairy Queen, let alone a tech company. I only wish they had partnered with some porn sites. Imagine this feed entry:

It just boggles me that something so obvious could fly right past them if they’re really that brilliant. I’d be happy to sanity check future ideas for them at a rate of $100 per elevator pitch. It’d be a hell of an hourly rate for me (I could probably do at least 20 an hour) and might be the best ROI any corporation ever earned for them.

Also, my post pointing out why advertising won’t work well for them was a little inaccurate. I should have said that it won’t work as well for them as it does for Google. It still clearly can work, in fact, they’ve already got decent revenues, mainly from it. I imagine that at some point they could scale back the employee base and exist rather happily off of the few hundred million they’re pulling in.

A lot of people pointed out that untargeted ads do work for television. But the problem with Facebook, in that regard, is the medium. A picture is worth a thousand words (or so they say, I’m still a little skeptical of the conversion ratio) and a video is 30-60 pictures per second, plus audio. It’s a lot easier to convince someone to drink your beer by showing them computer-generated talking frogs than it is to do in a few lines of text or a 468×60 animated gif.

And a lot of people don’t understand that about branding ads. It’s all about the content. If people like the content, the ad works. If they don’t, it doesn’t. On television or radio, the content is the commercial. On a website it isn’t the banner, because that’s too small to put anything in. It’s the website you land on once you click the banner. Budweiser doesn’t sell beer from their website. They stamp their brand onto your cerebral cortex, so you’ll buy the beer at a bar or a grocery store.

So if Facebook can’t get the click throughs, they’re still lagging, even with branding type ads. And that’s the problem they’re having. Even though they have better information than a television station and can therefore target much more accurately, the limitations of the medium are just too strong. That’s why TV ads cost 15 dollars CPM and Facebook costs 15 cents.

So they try to go the social route by using friendship and connections to sell you stuff, telling you that this person you know ordered some shoes from Zappos so that maybe you will too. But that’s not going to work for privacy reasons either, as Beacon so clearly showed. People don’t want that happening automatically, and they’re too lazy to do it manually. It’s just more work and more noise for them.

Affinity groups are more or less a joke for that reason. I might love Sam Adams beer, but I’m not going to join any Facebook group for them (even if they had one and I somehow found out about it) and get bombarded by spam. People aren’t opposed to marketing brands they love, but they aren’t going to go out of their way to do it either.

So the long and short of it is that I just don’t think there’s any rational basis for calling Facebook the next Google. And it’s not so much Facebook that I dislike, it’s just the over-hyped tech industry mindset that keeps spitting out that phrase. I’m all for optimism and open-mindedness, and I’ll be the first to admit that maybe somewhere, around some corner that nobody sees, is some fantastic future strategy for social networks. But for now all of the hype is just an industry’s over-inflated collective ego talking.

I really don’t mean to come off as the eternal skeptic, because I’m just not. Hell, I’m running a startup. I just don’t think that irrational exuberance is healthy. There’s a fine line between that and optimism, and I just think that on this one issue, we’re way past it.

I’m going to propose that we in the tech industry retire the word “viral”. It has, over the last few years, become meaningless. Ever since it started being applied to videos, it’s just become a synonym for word of mouth, a phrase which didn’t need a refresh.

It used to be that viral meant something. A viral app was one that’s very use spread it. You didn’t have to tell anyone about the product, you just used it and they heard.

The best example is the original, Hotmail. You’d get a free web-based email account, and whenever you sent someone an email, there was a message at the bottom that said “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com”. You didn’t have to tell someone about it, or link to it from your blog. Simply using the product made others aware, and it spread through the internet like Ebola through Zaire.

A good, more recent example, is the Sell Your Friends Facebook application. You install it, and then you begin buying and selling people from your friend list. And every time you do so, the friend who has been bought or sold is notified and learns of the app’s existence. It has a tremendous install base because of that.

And really, what is a virus? It’s something that travels from one host to another without any effort on the host’s part. Hotmail was like AIDS, which is generally spread by people who don’t even know they have it. Telling someone about a video is more like someone with a cold purposely coughing in your drink (unless it features Avril Lavigne, that’s just plain rude).

So now people refer to a YouTube clip or a blog entry about how great Ron Paul is as viral, and it isn’t. Watching a video or reading a poorly-spelled article about a politician who is going to get some tiny fraction of a percent of the popular vote doesn’t make anyone else aware of its existence (the blog entry’s or Ron Paul’s). They have a couple features that make it easier to tell people about the video (embeds, share links, etc.) or blog post (Share This links) but the main action itself does not spread the meme. It’s no more viral than toothpaste. Which, by the way, the lemon-flavored Crest: fantastic. Like a meringue pie on a stick.

So let’s all agree to either redefine viral back to something useful, or just retire it all together and go back to just saying “word of mouth” and stop sounding like hipster dufuses. I’m fine with either. It’s your call.

I think the one thing about Google that has changed about us that we don’t even realize is that it has given us many of the benefits of omniscience without the any of the drawbacks.

For instance, a month or so ago I was at Whole Foods and saw some raw shrimp. I’d never cooked shrimp myself before, though I’ve certainly eaten my share of it, and I was curious what it would taste like. Back in 1990 figuring that out would have been laborious, even excluding the fact that I would have been 10 years old. Maybe I would have picked up some of the shrimp and then set about calling the women in my family until I came across one who had done it before. Now I just throw it in the cart knowing full well that when I get home I’ll be able to figure out what to do with it in under a minute. It turned out to be the best cocktail shrimp I’d ever had.

More recently I was looking at counter tops because we’re thinking of redoing the kitchen. Previously I might have gone to a store and asked the employee about the benefits of Corian vs. granite or whatever else. And the answer I got might not have been entirely dishonest, but it probably would have steered me toward whichever was higher markup. Whether the salesman was on commission or, in the case of Lowe’s, worked for a company that was, somewhere along the line someone would have an incentive to ensure that I was being pushed into the material that was most profitable for the seller rather than the one that fit my needs.

But now I just note the prices in my head (I don’t have to write them down because if I forget, I’ll just Google them) and then go home and get unbiased information. Turns out granite is superior in almost every respect, other than it comes in fewer colors, costs a little more, and requires sealing. But you can drop a hot pan on it like it’s hot, and I like the idea of having countertops that are over 1 billion years old, so I think it’s going to win.

Writing something for a blog or a paper and need facts or historical precedent? Google it. Want to know why there are interstate highways in Hawaii? Google it. Want directions to somewhere you’ve never been before? Google it. Want to know when Arby’s closes, because you’re up late and don’t want to eat Subway and contribute to the world’s overpopulation of Jared Fogles? (One is clearly too many.) Google it. Want to know who won the Bengals game? Google it. Or just guess the opponent, and you’ll probably be right because the Bengals suck.

I even use Google as a grammar check, or a spell checker for proper nouns that Word doesn’t recognize. Sometimes I’m unsure if something should be hyphenated or not, so I just type it in and see what pops up.

I have to think that true omniscience would be depressing. I have a long-held theory that no two people could ever be friends if they knew everything the other thought. (Wait, should long-held be hyphenated there? Let me Google it. Yep.) And I can’t even imagine how horrible the rest of the world would be if you knew everything about it. But with Google, you only get the information you want, when you want it. And the stuff that you think you want but don’t really, Google doesn’t even know.

In fairness, I shouldn’t chalk it all up to Google. We were half way there before it. But there’s a big difference between half way there and all the way. Access to information encourages more information to be accessed. There wouldn’t be anywhere near as many blogs as there are now without good search, for instance, because nobody would find them. Wikipedia would be a fraction of what it is today if it wasn’t in the top 3 results any time you query a proper noun.

I probably could have figured out how to cook the shrimp in 1999 using Yahoo. But how to make that awesome potato side dish I had at Flemings? No way. But here‘s what my first Google search turned up. And whoever put it there probably only did so because they know that, via Google, someone could actually find it.

And this is why I think that it’s going to be a long time before the “next Google” comes along. It’s fundamentally changed the way we use the internet. It started a self-perpetuating cycle of free information that persists even today. Nothing on the horizon promises this. Something will come along, it’s inevitable, but we I don’t think we’ll see it coming, the same way we didn’t see Google.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out what to do with these escargots I bought.

So Carl Icahn is now apparently going to play the role of activist shareholder and try to replace Yahoo’s board in an effort to get the company sold to Microsoft. The most humorous part of it, to me, is that Mark Cuban sits on his proposed board of directors. Cuban was formerly a large Yahoo shareholder when they bought his company broadcast.com at the height of the first bubble. And the funny part is that he sold it faster than a crack addict that just stole a VCR. And now there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be part of the team saving shareholders from a sinking ship whose hull might have been first pierced by the atrocious acquisition that made Cuban so wealthy.

From Jerry Yang’s perspective this has to be the exact opposite of Jobs’s return to Apple. Instead of the founder who made a company successful getting kicked out and coming back in to rescue it from the hardship it suffered in his absence, it is the guy who helped a company tank coming back to kick it while it’s down.

Only in Silicon Valley.

I’ve said a few times in various places that I don’t think the iPhone will ever make serious inroads in the corporate world without a dedicated keypad (and a few other things, like making it not suck as a phone, that I’m sure they’ll fix soon) and also that I didn’t think the BlackBerry would make much headway in the consumer space due to Apple. I might be wrong on the latter.

An interesting post by Fred Wilson yesterday made me also realize that the needs of the corporate world are strikingly similar to the desires of the teenage girl demographic. SMS is the young person’s email + Exchange Server.

Then RIM today announced the BlackBerry Bold, which looks so good that I wish I weren’t locked into a contract with Verizon. It’s got the BlackBerry keypad that everyone who gets paid more than $50,000 a year has come to know and love. It’s got a high-res screen (for a phone), Wi-Fi, GPS and a few other goodies for the consumer set. And call quality will probably be 5x better than Apple’s.

So we’ll see. It will be an interesting battle. Is the keypad as important to people as I think it is? (And can’t Apple just make a keypad/case combination that gives people that?) Is RIM brilliant for not making the touchscreen only model everyone thought they would, and fighting a war they can’t win? Or are they missing out on the next wave?