Pointless trials

I had a play with the trial edition of Webcentral's Promotions Manager as a substitute for our current cranky and unreliable newsletter system.

Very quickly I hit the limits of the trial; specifically the limit of ten recipients per email.

That's a plain stupid limit. You cannot test a bulk emailing program with a limit of ten users. It's like taking a car for a test drive but being unable to take it out of the driveway. Sending ten emails is very different to sending five thousand.

WebCentral and other vendors need to understand that crippleware like this is a waste of time. If you aren't going to let the customer trial the full product in real circumstances, then you may as well not bother.

As it stands this trial version is useless. It's simply not worth bothering with. It's a classic example of bean-counting managers not understanding their market.

Frustrated with DMOZ

The Open Source Directory project is a great idea, but it needs more transparency.

DMOZ is a free, not for profit version of Yahoo! and Alta Vista. Inclusion in it helps a web site's rating on web searches. It's considered important to getting high listings on your website.

The problem with DMOZ is the process of adding a site seems to be arbitrary and totally opaque; submitters have no idea if the site has been reviewed or declined. All you can do is wait and see if your site appears in the directory.

Today I submitted the PC Rescue site for the twelfth time in ten years by my count (it may actually be more). Not once have I succeeded.

I've tried different categories in case I've chosen the wrong section and different wordings in case the editors thought my descriptions were inadequate. The response has always been the same; nothing.

Lest I be accused of spamming DMOZ, the submissions have been months, if not years apart.

Yet strangely, IT Queries appeared of it's own accord. All I can assume is a DMOZ editor
stumbled on it and thought it was suitable for inclusion.

I have a lot of sympathy for the DMOZ volunteers. Their workload must be huge and the backlogs in some categories must be horrible.

But I think DMOZ can improve things by more being transparent. Giving a little bit of feedback on whether the site has been evaluated and the reasons if rejected would make the job easier for everybody. It would also defuse a lot of the criticisms DMOZ receives.

As I said at the beginning I'm at a loss to see how to get PC Rescue into DMOZ. So from last month, I've decided to resubmit my application every six weeks. Perhaps this might eventually get some response.

My apologies to the hard working editors if I'm making the work load worse, but I don't see any other way of dealing with it.

Which is BS? Productivity or John Dvorak

On ZDNet John Dvorak tells us productivity gains are BS.

John's point seems to be that fact the receptionist is filing her nails it means her productivity can't be improved.

Doris on reception or Bruce in Accounts may only do four hours productive work a day, the idea is we make those four hours more productive.

Today's office is far more productive than the office of twenty years ago; computers, broadband Internet, colour printers and mobile phones mean today's office worker can do in ten minutes that would have taken weeks in even the biggest corporation.

I love it when people tell us the days of the abacus, slide rule or carbon paper were easier. My advice to them is to try it.

Lack of innovation

Are many of the problems too many product ranges, a lack of innovation or too much reliance on planned obsolescence?

An article in Baseline Magazine caught my eye this week about GMs decline and suggesting that Apple is going the same way.

Basing Apple's decline on reports that Microsoft's poorly named and badly executed Zune has outsold the iPod is a bit flakey in my view. But there are some good points in this argument about innovation and it's role in keeping businesses and economies vibrant and growing.

While I agree Apple's strategy with rolling out too many versions of the iPod is confusing , even I have trouble keeping track of what iPod does what, and perhaps Apple's motives are a bit cynical, Apple are actually the poster child for innovation.

The real battle here isn't innovation; it's about quality. Apple and Toyota are perceived as putting out higher quality products than GM and Microsoft.

Because customers believe the quality is better, they are prepared to pay more for it.

Innovation is essential to keep ahead of the pack, particularly in markets like consumer electronics and motor vehicles where's a bunch of low cost commodity manufacturers are constantly snapping at your ankles, but it's quality that is essential to grabbing the high margin customers.

In the case of GM, I'd argue they've failed on counts; in Microsoft's case many innovations haven't added much value and their quality, particularly in the last two versions of Windows, has been dire.

Mac shipments up

Well, it looks like my eyes didn't deceive me; Mac sales are up. It's barely surprising, given how badly Microsoft have dropped the ball with Vista and just how badly PC retailers are bodging the sales process up.

How long can the Freesphere survive?

Following up my post on the curse of the free, Alex Isgold of the Read Write Web blog raises similar concerns.

Alex's points are quite right and I agree with most of them, where I disagree is that teens are to blame for this; this is a far deeper, more entrenched mentality that goes back to the roots of the PC and the homebrew hobbyists.

The comments in reply to Alex's post are instructive for the mentality they reveal, the bulk of comments are on the side that all is free and all is good. These show the how deep this belief is.

One comment that sprung out to me though was Hank Williams' comment about this actually being an intellectual property issue. While I think it's bigger than this, he has a very good point that people are ignoring or just have contempt for intellectual property.

Personally I think the IP system is broken and in disrepute. This is largely the fault of the incompetence of the US Patents Office and large corporations abusing legal process. It's part of the picture, but not the whole story.

Regardless of what is the cause, the fact is everybody needs to paid for at least some of their work and that is ultimately why the Freesphere cannot survive.

The top of Web 2.0

If we needed any evidence of the dot com 2 boom being at it's top it's this article in the New York Times.

It's not that plenty of fish's founder, Markus Frind, is making a killing with the web site, I admire him and wish the best.

What I think indicates we're at the top of the market is the fact his advertisers are paying affiliate commissions of 100%. That is just plain silly and clearly unsustainable.

Markus' business model illustrates the point of my curse of the free post a while back; Plenty of Fish is popular because it is free and is profitable because it gets free labour. If Markus had to pay the 120 volunteers who vet photos for the site, that 10 million suddenly looks pretty ordinary.

Anyway, the real gains for people like Markus haven't been in the turnover of the business, it's been in selling the business to big operators. I wonder if that business model too may be coming to the end given the recession talk we are now hearing.

trusting people

I've read a few of Bruce Schneier's articles in the past and I'll certainly defer to him on specific matters of security.

However I have to disagree with his steal this wi-fi article.

Quite simply, Bruce is wrong on not securing his wireless network. He alludes to it himself,

I know people who rarely lock their front door, who drive in the rain (and, while using a cellphone) and who talk to strangers.

His first point sums up the problem. In an ideal world we could leave our doors open and trust our neighbours and passers by.

Sadly, in today's modern world you can't always trust your neighbours and passers by. Just as some of them will steal your DVD and laptop, some of them do want use your Internet connection for bad deeds.

One of the main reasons why hackers and criminals spend so much time developing malware is so they can steal bandwidth and spoof IP addresses. Being able to use someone else's connection is incredibly useful to the bad guys.

Leaving your wireless network open only makes the job easier. In fact, it probably encourages people without the skills or work ethics of the serious hackers.

The part of Bruce's article distresses me the most though, is his comment about being prosecuted for something done from an Internet connection as being "far fetched".

Bruce lives in the same land as Julie Amero. Her case alone proves in US that the combination of an incompetent cop, a gung-ho prosecutor, a lazy judge, a clueless defense attorney and jury of morons is more than enough to get someone convicted of serious crimes.

But the risk of prosecution isn't the problem, an investigation alone is a costly, stressful exercise. Just being investigated for child porn or cybercrime offenses may be enough to destroy marriages and careers.

Having your computers confiscated for weeks as investigation goes on would cost people like Bruce and myself a lot of money.

Bruce's opinion in Beyond Fear, that security is actually a series of trade offs, is quite right. In this case though I think Bruce has the trade off wrong; the convenience of being able to access free Wi-Fi does not justify the substantial risk of bad guys piggy backing on your Internet connection.

The moral is quite clear. Protect your wireless network.

Weathering the storm

The talk of the United States going into recession really focuses the mind on how this is going to affect the IT industry.

Greg Linden in his Geeking with Greg blog has a very good take on some of the effects on the industry. I particularly like his view that the 2001 dot com crash was part of the reason for the spyware explosion.

Personally though, I think Greg is understating the effects of a full blown recession. I suspect the VCs are going to find their cash reserves largely aren't there and the "Google dollars" that have funded much of the dot com 2.0 splurge will either be greatly devalued or turn out to be ephemeral.

As we've found in previous downturns, when homes and businesses fall on hard times the first thing that gets cut is IT spending. It doesn't matter if we're talking about household luxuries like iPods or business necessities; it all gets cut.

This means problems for everyone in the industry.

For the smaller computer tech, there's two big effects; first your customers stop spending money and, second, thousands of new businesses start up as unemployed programmers, web designers and even carpenters who "know something about computers" setup their own tech support businesses.

This puts the local support guy in a squeeze his income's cut as customers stop buying or calling, customers become more price concious and the competition is going to get much, much more intense.

A storm is coming and all small business owners need to be trimming their sails, but proprietors of IT related businesses really need to be reviewing their costs and operations and looking at just what they currently have stashed away.

The curse of the free

One of the toughest problems for IT businesses is the fact computer users, both consumers and small businesses, expect many products and services for free. This makes it difficult for anyone trying to make a living in the IT industry.

A recent question on our IT Queries site is a good example. A lady asked what free programs she can use to remove popups.

You can see the problem here. The customer asks a free advice site for a free program to fix the problems caused by her grandkids looking for free music.

Now I'm not criticising this lady, she's just doing what millions of computer and Internet users do every day.

Of course, this is nothing new, even Bill Gates found himself dealing with this thirty years ago.

Nick Carr wrote in the Guardian a few days back about the Internet increasing inequity and hollowing out the middle classes. I'm not sure this is the case, I suspect it's the free mentality that makes it harder for the smaller operators and contractors make a living.

For the moment, the big boys prosper and some of that money trickles down to those they take over. But I'd suggest the big boy's business models are just as unsustainable as the little guy. What's kept these businesses going were surging stock markets, forgiving investors and cheap money.

Now the party in the stock and money markets is over it will be interesting to see how this pans out for the industry. My guess is some of the bigger players will suffer just as much as the little guys have.

In the long term the free mentality has to change; because there's no way IT workers can earn a living if customers expect everything for free.

The reformat kiss-off

One of the things that really gets me cranky is the "reformat your computer" solution to software problems. A question we have on our IT queries website is from a gentleman who has been told he should reformat his computer to reinstall Pinnacle.

What a load of rubbish! The thing with this blind "reformat your computer" advice is that it's the IT equivalent of a doctor telling you to "take two asprins and call me in the morning".

The difference is the two asprins are relatively harmless while a reformat can result in hours of work, frustration and lost data.

Put simply, reformats are the last resort and usually are only necessary for fixing major spyware infections.

In this case, it's the classic example of an incompetent computer tech fobbing someone off with some nonsense.

A competent computer tech should be able to resolve this problem with a few hours work. The problem though is clients often don't want to pay for that work.

Which is probably why so many incompetent techs survive and even prosper; they may not be good but they are cheap.

The dangers of upgrading your website

It's always risky updating your website as you never know what will break. I changed the layout of my IT Queries site a week back and promptly messed up the ads and Google Analytics.

So it's with sympathy I note the problems on the Newsagent's blog, particularly with posting comments and linking to posts.

This is why the PC Rescue site looks so bloody awful. I designed it in 1999 (if design is the right word) and I'm loathe to change it because of the risk of breaking it.

I know the site would work a lot better in a blog format, but the thought of getting the design right, the inevitable teething problems and the time and effort importing the old posts into the new system gives me a headache.

Still, editing posts in Notepad gives me a headache too, so I'm working on it.

Getting your store right

One thing I noticed when I went to Myers to look at the Eee PC was the difference between the PC and Apple departments.

The PC sections were dingy and unimaginative while the Mac areas were lively and well lit.

More importantly the Apple staff were bright, cheery and helpful while the PC staff gave the impression they'd rather be in working in the menswear section.

It can't be understated how important presentable, friendly and knowledgeable customer service is in the consumer sector. As we constantly see in the newsagent blog, service is important for small purchases such a magazines, but it's even more important for big ticket items like computers.

Another strike against the Eee PC was the Chatswood Myer store keeps theirs under glass; there's no opportunity to play with it or see how well it works.

It's another reason why I think Asus made a mistake choosing Myer. If they were serious, they should have insisted on properly trained staff, separate areas and distinct branding. Just like Apple do.

Ten reasons why are Macs hot right now

One thing that's jumped out at me over the Christmas break is how hot the Apple Mac currently is.

I noticed this first hand when I popped into Myer to have a look at the EeePC, there was a reasonable number of people looking at the Asus device, but the real crowds were in the Apple section. The PC section was very quiet indeed.

The experience of Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider over Christmas indicates this was a world wide phenomenon.

Added to this Amazon claim the Mac was their hottest selling computer up to Christmas.

It's interesting how the Mac's regaining ground. The question is why and how. I suspect there's a number of reasons.

1. The iPod and iPhone: These devices have exposed millions of users to Mac products who simply wouldn't have bothered otherwise.
2. Reduced prices: The switch to Intel chips has reduced the price of systems. While they are still pricier than similarly specced PCs, the price difference isn't the issue it once was.
   
3. Viruses and spyware: People are sick of this garbage. Families don't want their kids infesting machines with offensive and damaging malware.
4. The failure of Vista: Microsoft have bungled the roll out of Vista. It's a major turn off for consumers but the alternative in the Windows world is the malware prone XP.
5. Boot camp: The ability to start into Windows gives switchers an exit. If they aren't happy with the Mac OS, they can always go back without having wasted a couple of thousand dollars.
   
6. Increased use of web applications: One of the big objections to the Mac was being unable to run Windows based applications. With the rise of web based apps, this argument loses ground.
   
7. Ease of use: The difference between Windows and the Mac has reduced over the years, particularly since the improved GUI of Windows 95, but the Mac still has the edge. Put simply, most things work on the Mac.
8. Good design: Apple's designs look and work better.
9. Good engineering: This is reflected in points seven and eight. The Mac is better put together than most PCs, this means things work better.
10. Better marketing: I hated the Mac versus PC ads and still do, despite the odd triumph (the bloated PC skit). But the marketing is more than the ads; the packaging looks good, the stores look good and the resellers look better.
    

All up, Apple are just offering a far better experience for both consumers and power users. All of that said, their market share is still a fraction of that held by Windows.

Personally, I doubt they will ever overtake Windows in the PC market place. However this is not such a bad thing.

The big risk in computing is getting stuck in the commodity end of the market. Dell made that mistake as did HP, Packard-Bell and Gateway. It ends up eroding your margins and trashing your reputation.

Apple haven't gone there and it doesn't look like they will.

This means better margins for Apple and better computers for the customers who are prepared to pay a few bucks more.

It's a pretty good story for Apple. No wonder their shares are up.

Artificial shortages

Like many others, I swallowed the line that the Eee PC was completely sold out.

Apparently not. The Sydney CBD Myer store had a sign announcing a limit of four per customer.

So supplies can't be too short if there's only four per customer.

Making an artificial shortage of stock is one of Steve Job's old tricks. By restricting supply, it only makes the product more desired. This also worked for Cabbage Tree Dolls.

Looking at my fellow gawkers, it seemed to me most of the interest for the Eee PC was with techie and tinkering types. The mums and dads seemed more interested in the Apple section.

I still reckon Linux was a mistake for Asus.

Computer Christmas present problems

A Merry Christmas from the Cranky Tech.

One thing that gets all techs cranky are phone calls from upset computer users on Christmas day.

So we've put our tips on how to avoid Christmas Day tech disasters on our PC Rescue website.

Happy holidays.

Waiting for service packs

I'm currently working on getting the PC Rescue newsletter out, one of the things I'm mentioning is how home users shouldn't play with beta software.

One of the things I can't believe is it's been over three years since the last service pack for XP was released.

IT won't support the iPhone?

I've just read the Forrester Research findings in this week's Fortune magazine on why IT departments won't support the iPhone.

All the reasons are good, but it misses the point about modern IT.

IT departments don't dictate what users use, users decide. Fake Steve Jobs makes this point very well.

While all the points made in the Forrester paper are true. I'd suggest that these limitations need to be flagged to those who insist on using iPhones and other devices, but they won't be able to stop these being used.

IT can't stop staff using the iPhone. It's going to happen, so deal with it.

Skype chat spam evolves

I previously mentioned my scam chats from Skype. These seem to be getting more sophisticated as Jeremy Wagstaff in the Loose Wire Blog found in his chat with sexy Veronica.

Skype don't seem to be too concerned about this. They darned well should be. Nothing will kill a service's reputation quicker than than spammers and scammers infesting it.

I'm wondering if Jeremy's chat was related to this project. I imagine having a real live crook posing as Veronica is a quite labour intensive for our scammer friends.

Are Dell services doomed?

Forbes magazine describes how Dell is going to reinvent itself. Central to the idea of the resurgence is services. Now I have a problem with this on two fronts.

The first is channel conflict. Dell's move into services directly cuts into the business of resellers and integrators. Given the channel is key to growing their sales into the SMB sector, they will have a serious problem getting the local IT guys on board.

More importantly though, is this idea they know how to provide services. My overwhelming experience with big businesses in the IT and Comms sectors is they are genuinely clueless when trying to run a service business.

Dell's recent track record in customer service shows this. In fact, I would go as far as to say the decline in service levels is the number one reason for Dell's fall in market share over the last five years.

This isn't to say Dell can't succeed in this area, it just means that Dell have to invest in the infrastructure, staff and training so they can offer a compelling and useful product.

To do this, they have to have decent margins on the product. If they sell cheap, the product will fail. This is why most service offerings from big corporations are rarely successful.

Margins are at the core of Dell's problems. They made the decision to chase the bottom of the market and now they are paying for it in declining margins, declining customer satisfaction and declining long term prospects.

All of this said, I love the idea of a suicide chip. Blowing laptops up remotely sounds like fun. Although given Dell's experience with exploding batteries, one would think they've had enough of self destructing laptops.