Beauty & The Beast – Part 4 – What the !@#$ Does Marketing Do

This is the link to the full series.

When I first decided to start writing up these marketing snapshots I had hoped that I’d never get to “The Press Release”. It’s such an emotionally loaded topic for me. I love them and hate them. But when the iPhone Mega Event occurred a few weeks ago, I was pushed over the edge. I loved the stark contrast between chip press and appliance press. I had to say something.

The first “interesting” item was my “chip guy” envy. Let’s observe “beauty” and “the beast”. I’ve spent my career delivering “beasts” … bummer

• iPhone is “beautiful” and “simple”
  • clean lines and almost no documentation required.
• chips are “ugly” and “complex”
  • chips are marked in braille so that they can be identified with our eyes closed & require 1,000′s of pages of documentation (literally).

The second “ironic” item that made me laugh were all the blog articles and Wall St. analyst reports speculating on whose chips were inside the iPhone. What made me laugh? The fact that people had to speculate. Why hadn’t the chip guys made announcements as well? You’d figure that this is significant, if iPhone ships 5M units this will be a $50M-$100M design win for a couple vendors.

So What’s up with Chip Press Releases? I’ll discuss that in my next post.

AT&T (and US Telco) wireline losses (GigaOM)

Om continues to dig into access line losses at US carriers. A snippet follows. It is this ugly reality that makes me believe that the carriers will work very hard for a “legal solution” to their woes. ( ie net neutrality ).

AT&T Unity, or a desperate cry to save wireline: “So here is a reminder. In 2001, there were a total of 152 million retail lines, and that number is estimated to be down to 125.9 million at the end of 2006.

In other words, the Bells are losing their grip on their core business: the retail customer. UBS Research shows that by the end of 2006, the households served by Baby Bells (or their aggregated new parents) would drop to 68.9 million. By 2010, the spreadsheet of phone company horrors says that the Bells will serve 49.2 million homes. In other words, 41.54 percent of the homes served!”

(Via GigaOM.)

More Top 2006 Music

I put all the music I discovered and liked in 2006 into an eMusic list. Also, for this year 2007 Discoveries.

couple of notes on eMusic. I really like it. It has all the new indie music and lots of old catalog, it only lacks mainstream stuff. Which is okay by me. Trying to digest 40 tracks a month takes all my music time anyway.

There is a great catalog to wade thru — Coltrane, Pixies, Funkadelic, Asie Payton, Bill Evans … kind of overwhelming.

The only bummer …. It is kinda like watching Junior Hockey, or College Sports, in that if an artist gets successful they are gone to the big leagues. This happened o the Black Keys this year. Bummer

Canada Sleeps Through War to ‘Save the Internet’ (TYee)

There are loads of articles on Net Neutrality. I’m kinda burned out on the topic, it seems out of my control, and is one of those political issues that is beyond politicians.

Today my friend Pierre reinvigorated my interest in the topic. He referred me to the following article which covers it from a Canadian perspective. Non-Canadians will find it interesting because provides a WW view and compares with US ( which has been covered well/adnauseum).

Canada Sleeps Through War to ‘Save the Internet’ (in Mediacheck): ”

Digital democracy at risk if telecoms get their way say opponents.”

(Via Tyee – Home.)

*** The article also includes a link to

This site is unique in that it lists “Violators” and examples of what they are doing. Very interesting. This is much more tangible for me. I’m gonna dig into it this week.

My Favorite Blogs

In a past lengthy post Apologies — I was an Over Zealous Blog Fan I spoke at length about how my blog addiction went bad. Here are my favorite Bloggers/Blogs. Cheers guys, great stuff! I hope I didn’t bug you too much.

• Om Malik’s GigaOm
• Andrew Schmitt @ Nyquist Capital
• Fred Wilson’s A VC
• James Enck’s EuroTelcoBlog
• Martin Geddes Telco 2.0
• Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed
• WR Koss’s Technology and Geopolitics – Relatively new for me.
• Andy Kessler – very infrequent posting, but his “Media Uh Oh” was great.

iPhone v2.0 is the Real Weapon (Nyquist)

Andrew@Nyquist has some good thoughts on forecasting iPhone units. I think that his comment

iPhone v2.0 is the Real Weapon: “The only area I could be wrong is if the iPhone creates a new class of consumer device, and raises the price/pain level consumers will accept for a mobile phone – by A LOT. I don’t think this is the case.” (Via Nyquist Capital.)

on this new class of device needs some thought. In my household, my wife looked at it and said, “That’s my new phone.” I replied with, “pretty expensive”. She said, “I want an iPod with a big screen. The fact that it has a phone is a bonus, and it is gonna be offered by my existing carrier Rogers (Canada).

It’s a done deal in her mind. I wonder how many of her there are?

Apologies — I was an Over Zealous Blog Fan :-(

I’m finding it hard to post this apology, but its got to be done.

Recap

In October I packed in my year old Bloglines clipping blog which I was using to aggregate news for friends and co-workers. It was working well, but it appeared that I could do better. I moved to WordPress and I purchased NetNewsWire & Mars Edit to complete the package. It has been great because it allows me to follow many more blogs, I can clip much better ( I could easily add full posts in Extended field with all attributions included … I could be very clear about where the material came from), post my own stuff, and with the stats I could get a feel for what is read.

But then it became apparent that I’d crossed the line of being a blog fan to blog pain in the !@#.

Last weekend, just before I left for my meditation retreat, Om Malik surprised me with the following post. “Full Reprints Bother Me“. I found it via the WordPress stats included with my blog. There were lots of people coming from Om’s site to mine … for all the wrong reasons. I posted comments, apologies, and my proposed actions on his site last saturday. Om, and others, voiced some good points for others clipping, or linking, and it appears that the misunderstanding was closed.

Upon my return yesterday I’ve found one other post on this topic. Re-posted content, is it an issue?

Going Forward

I will not be posting full reprints anymore. It is clear that I was riding a fine line between spammer and super-fan. My purpose is to be “the super-fan”, and like many “super-fans” I got over-zealous.

I really like the sites that I’ve been clipping from, and want them to do well. They sure beat reading regular news. What I missed is that many of these guys have put “their skin in the game”. To help them to thrive & survive I’ve got to drive all traffic I can to them. My readership may be puny, but there should be no doubt about whether I’m helping, or hurting them. I’ve got to be helping. Period. In this way they’ll be able to continue to post great stuff.

Who am I? One other thing that contributed to the misunderstanding was that I wasn’t explicit about who I am. I had stated explicitly what I was doing in my “about” field and included my full name to allow people to Google me if they wanted to know more about me. I had thought that this was enough, because a quick Google of my name is easy to do and reveals much. Also, I’m not comfortable posting personal information on the public Internet. ( even though I’ve been using the Internet for almost 20 years ( got my first Internet e-mail address in ’89 & learned to browse on Mosaic ) I still find it hard to put personal information on the public Internet.)

The quick Google of “Iain Verigin” will tell you that I haven’t done much from 2001 to-date. You’ll find that I’m an early employee of what eventually became PMC-Sierra ( started in ’89), did a brief stint at GigE start-up Packet Engines (’97-98 ), returned to PMC in mid ’98, made a few donations during the “glory” years, and then lots of blog stuff. Wrt specialisations, you’ll see McGill Physics, UBC Eng Phys (EE), SFU MEng; and that I did lots of standards work in a technical marketing capacity – ATM Forum, GigE, 10GigE, OIF (SPI 3 and SPI 4.2), & IETF RFC 2615 “Packet-Over-Sonet”.

Filling in some blanks … I have not done much from 2001 to-date because I got really sick in late-2000 and am still recovering. Major bummer, but I don’t like to dwell on it, it already takes up too much of my time. One of the few things work-related things that I can do is read for a few hours a day. I work micro-part-time and have no explicit duties. I’m either a sage, dinosaur, or combination of both. I spend my limited work time reading reports, blogs, mentoring a few people, a couple scheduled chats a month w/ colleagues in coffee shops, maintain a research related Wiki site, and I rarely go the office (it is too difficult). (This probably too much info. C’est la vie.)

This Blog I think that good blogs are “diamonds in the rough”, and need to be continuously identified, and talked about. I think that Delicious and other tagging methods are useful, but I find the best stuff by reading other peoples blogs. I get to learn, and get a feel for, what they are reading & thinking. Using a music analogy, my views on blogging are similar to my view on music recommendation services like Pandora and Last.FM. In that debate I side with Last.FM. I like to look at my neighbours accounts to see what they are actually listening too. Pandora is immediate & fun, but Last.FM is so much better. The only drawback to Last.FM is that it requires time and effort.

This means that I’m going to continue to model my blog on Fred Wilson’s fantastic A VC blog, and attempt to provide my friends with a Last.FM-style blog friend.

On a serious note, this is a personal blog and does not in any way reflect the views of my benevolent employer (PMC-Sierra) who happens to have supported me in my “endless” recovery period.

Closing

Blogging is a re-mix beast and it is fast & loose with “rules”. Like re-mix music — samples are cool, but full copies aren’t. ( no matter how much attribution comes with it … I got that now ).

Away ’til Jan 22

Off on yet another retreat.

Pirate Bay To Buy Sealand – Launches donation campaign…(BBReports)

I remember the wired article on Sealand years ago. I think Neal Stephenson wrote it, and of course his novel Cryptonomicon has a data haven in it. It all fits

— iain — full post follows ————————————

Breaking Decision Loops, Creating Thought Leadership and Decision Making Ecosystem Marketing (WRKoss)

WRKoss has thoughtful/mind_bending (and long) post on the process of making decisions. I’m in full agreement that teams need to manage the process of “Listening & Reacting”, but otherwise his post is hard to digest quickly. Hardcore marketers should read his full post when they’ve got a free 30min.

After reading it “hardcore marketers” should note that it is never good to say “that you’re managing the “Listening & Reacting” process” to any senior executive. They expect this to occur, and know that this is an entry into a very long discussion which they don’t have time for. That is why they want to hear what your decisions, and specific actions are. The best way to get them to agree to your ideas is to implement something like WRKoss mentions. Your team will make much better decisions, and will be ready to support them if required. Supporting your decisions will be required 1-on-1 & in the back rooms, but never ever present it to a full audience. This is a show stopper. It’s not personal, it is just the fact that this discussion quickly becomes information overload. The litmus test of “show me in 10 slides or less” is time honoured for a reason. If you can pass it, then you’ve done all this other stuff, and then you’ve earned the right to go into depth. If you haven’t done this other stuff, or have never heard of it, You’re toast. The sooner you realize this the better.

— iain — Here is the link

Breaking Decision Loops, Creating Thought Leadership and Decision Making Ecosystem Marketing

(Via Technology and Geopolitics.)