The China Vortex

It has been some time since I last posted an article, so I thought I better give you a pretty good excuse.

Long story short: I have said goodbye to my old Windows (Averatec) laptop, and have bought and am using a brand new MacBook Pro 2.4G 2/250 15″ laptop running OS X (Leopard), which I bought directly from Apple. After buying the laptop, I swapped out the 2G RAM for 4G, so now I have one sweet top of the line Mac. Right now, I’m basking in the moment since I’m sure that Steve Jobs will introduce something more cool at Macworld 2008.

Oh well, that’s the Apple tax…

My first computer, bought in 1989, was a Macintosh SE 4/40, which had its operating system on a floppy disk. From 1989 to 1997, I used Macs, and owned about eight Macs. In 1997, when I moved from Taiwan to the US, I moved to the Windows platform because the Office suite on the Macintosh was not compatible with the Windows version. At the time, Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple as CEO (for several years he preferred using the term interim CEO, or iCEO, because the company was in such bad shape.)

For a long time, I was a satisfied user of Windows. Unlike many Mac users, I don’t think that Microsoft is evil, and overall, I believe that the company has tried to develop and launch decent products which bring value to their customers. But I think that there are problems.

First of all, Microsoft has too many product lines and business units. The end result: there are too many mini-business kingdoms fighting for their piece of the pie. Apple does not have this problem; it is run by only two people, Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive. By any definition, they are very smart, even brilliant. Ultimately, they make the call about every product and service Apple ships. This means that there are no mini-business kingdoms at Apple.

Unlike Microsoft, Apple is run by designers. Engineers are interested in technology and features; designers are interested in how to make technology usable. For designers, user experience is everything. Jobs and Ive are designers, not engineers. Most people are excited by design and usability, not by technology and features. Since Apple controls the hardware and software, Jobs and Ive are in a unique position to control and shape user experience in a way no other company, not even Microsoft, can. This is why the iPhone has been a runaway success, not just in the US where it was first launched, but all over the world. When it comes to the space where technology and design meet, Apple is in a league all its own, and the market is now rewarding it.

But Jobs doesn’t just understand design, he also understands marketing, which is all about managing peoples’ expectations and perceptions. Even though he is widely respected, he never hogs the spotlight; by saying less, he puts Apple’s products and services in the spotlight where Mac aficionados can work themselves into an excited frenzy and become evangelists for the company. By saying and doing less, Steve Jobs does more for the company.

Enough big picture stuff; let’s talk about the experience. Long story short: I love it. The OS feels mature, and it does everything I want it to do, and fast. I tend to be a fast thinker with bad short-term memory; when I want something I want it to happen right away. There is a Chinese saying xinxiang shicheng which means “to get something as soon as you can think of it”. That was always the ideal when talking about computing for me; why couldn’t the computer do what I wanted it to do NOW? For the first time, I feel that I’m close to that goal.

While Windows has been generally satisfactory, I have never been satisfied with Windows registry. While a new Windows computer was snappy, it would quickly decay into molasses mode when the registry got all gooked up. During the ten years I have been using Windows, I have used several different versions of Windows (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 2000, and Windows XP). And this does not include the software patches for all the different versions. From a business and customer point of view, it makes no sense that Microsoft could not take care of the registry problem over the past ten years. During the same ten years, Apple has been able to shift to an all-new Unix-based operating system which is rock-solid and continues to improve in performance.

At the same time, with Windows I still have to put up with some DOS commands and foibles such as the backward slash for directory navigation, instead of the forward slash used by Unix, and Windows failure to differentiate between upper- and lower-case in naming conventions. (I have a real problem with the backward slash “\” even though Bill Gates invented it himself.) If I’m spending most of my time on the Internet, why not just deal with Unix on the computer’s OS, which is the native language of the Internet?

Microsoft should be more like Apple and just explain to their customers why they are phasing out a lot of the obsolescent stuff including DOS commands and navigation, and should bring Windows naming conventions in line with Unix.

I bought and installed a copy of Windows XP so that I could run my favorite Windows application, MindManager Pro 7. Since Mindjet also makes a Mac version, I have downloaded the trial version and have been using that. Result: I haven’t been running Windows XP at all.

I can see that I’ll be doing some prototyping and maybe even development on this computer. For this reason, I’m keeping the configuration relatively simple and clean. Web servers use port 80; since Skype uses port 80 too, I’m keeping it off this machine. I’m thinking of getting a new ASUS Eee PC to cover that.

But then, maybe not. I have also bought an iPod Touch and a Nokia e61i.

They should keep me busy for a while…

Technorati Tags: Apple, billgates, design, e61i, experience, iPod, ipodtouch, jonathanives, macbookpro, microsoft, mindjet, mindmanager, Nokia, OSX, stevejobs, Unix, user, windows

Scott Karp had an excellent article about how Facebook’s Beacon messed up and created such a reaction from Facebook users.

My explanation for Facebook’s policy re Beacon is that all the press, plus a 15B valuation on a company which does not have significant cash flow will get management to adopt all kinds of dumb user-privacy violating tactics to justify the valuation in the hope that the company can garner significant ad revenue.

In short, Facebook’s Beacon policy of spying on users’ activity across the Internet was a panic move…

Some hokey marketers get so wrapped up in the data that they can garner that they forget a lof the information is, frankly, useless.

“Look! We can target albino 16-year old Chinese boys who play more than 20 hours on the PS3 in Nome, Alaska during the winter and who had the Nintendo Wii recommended to them on Overstock by a friend in Wichita, Kansas!”

Now, many have put forward basically a Bill of Rights for users, and user control of their own data. Dave Winer has said that the user should be able to control how his/her data is used, right down to being able to to keep a copy for him/herself.

Giving the user control over his data? What a revolutionary idea! (There I go again…)

I think that there is a simple and elegant solution which will take some hard work and years to perfect.

Here it is: Why do consumers have to give their data for free to advertisers and be only consumers? Why can’t consumers be advertisers too? And why can’t they be credited or paid for advertising products/services they like? In return for being paid/tracked, they would give up their anonymity. Should they want to become anonymous again, they can do so, and they would not be tracked. But they would not be paid. If they wanted to become tracked/paid again, they could do so. Anytime. Anywhere.

In this scenario, the user would control what ads he wanted to receive in his user profile in real-time; this could be done with a system of checks or tags or something else. To opt out of “auto ads”, just to use an example, all he would have to do is uncheck it.

Basically, the user is selling his attention information to the advertisers. I look at it another way; the user is selling his time to advertisers to get data; relevant advertising data will be deemed useful and passed on, while irrelevant data will not be used and will not be passed on, and will be treated by the user as spam. In return for passing meaningful data to another prospect or customer, the first consumer should be reimbursed with money for exposing his data, and making a meaningful referral which eventually results in a sale.

And so on and so forth. Here is the trade: Give us your name, identity and user info, and let us follow your activities, and we will pay you. You can opt out anytime, and you will not be paid.

Simple.

I have always wondered why consumers are always treated by advertisers as consumers, when in real life, people have multiple roles such as father, husband, son and manager, or mother, wife, daughter and VP, just to use a few examples. So why should people only be consumers? Ask people for their data, then pay them for it.

That’s what I call a fair trade.

Now, if Facebook did that, that would be really something. And if Facebook doesn’t, then I hope that someone else does.

If they do, they’ll have my business.

Whatever Facebook does, let’s cut the spyware bullshit. That’s a real business killer. Those guys just dug themselves a big one with Beacon, and I’m wondering how they’ll get out.

Technorati Tags: , advertising, attention, beacon, consumer, davewiner, facebook, profile, user

One the things which has been interesting to me are visual maps of the Internet, which show the main websites, and usually, how much traffic they attract. One of the leaders in measuring Internet usage all over the world, and in Asia-Pacific, is Comscore, which recently prepared a report on Asia-Pacific Internet usage.

Today, we are swamped with data and different sets of variables, so much so that most executives prefer to have their data presented in some graphic form. One great pioneer in this field is Edward R. Tufte, whose book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is considered a classic for all communicators who need to provide snapshots of large data sets in a simple and clear fashion so that business decisions can be made quickly and efficiently.

iA Japan has recently released a map of the Internet presented as a variation of the Tokyo subway map. Broadly speaking, larger sites are larger, while sites with less traffic are smaller.

Now, I find myself spending more time thinking about how to visualize human behavior. Advertising and marketing have everything to do with understanding group behavior and psychology. While there have been books written about it, there has been almost no research done about how to visualize it. I find myself most interested in how groups of people move from one interest and website/s to another.

In the map, for example, I can see that among Chinese sites, Sina, Sohu, Netease and QQ are big, but I don’t know how people move to and from these sites, and to other sites. Static maps are about nouns; I’m also interested in the verbs and the adverbs. And not on a static basis as a snapshot, but in a live, ongoing, continuously evolving and changing basis in real-time.

How would online user behavior be visualized? One thing for sure: no static image would capture it; it would have to be like a video, constantly updated in real-time. And what insights would it give to marketers, advertisers, psychologists, anthropologists and linguists? My guess is that it would show that online user group behavior really has a lot in common with members of the animal kingdom which travel together in large groups, such as fish and starlings.

How about you? How do you think this data should be represented?

Since Google just announced a new university search API for research, maybe this could be a project it could be applied to.

Technorati Tags: animal, behavior, google, human, information, maps, netease, online, qq, sina, sohu, Tufte, user, visualization