Category: Internet

Why the Microsoft Faithful are wrong about Windows Phone

Is it too late for Microsoft beat Apple and Google in mobile phones?

Late last year an event organiser recounted how she’d been told to only approaching Microsoft for event sponsorship if the occasion was related to mobile telephony as “all of our marketing budgets are focused on Windows Phone.”

So it wasn’t a surprise to read at the beginning of this year that Microsoft were allocating $200 million for marketing Windows Phone in the US alone.*

The Consumer Electronics Show is the high temple of tech journalism with thousands flying in from around the world to breathlessly report on the latest wide screen gizmo or mobile device

At the 2010 show, 3D television was going to be the big consumer item while at the 2011 event it was going to be Android based tablets that were going to crush the Apple iPad.

Despite the millions of words written and spoken about these products, both flopped. So it was no surprise we were going to see plenty of coverage of Microsoft given the budgets available and it being the last time Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, would give the CES keynote.

Microsoft’s CES publicity blitz kicked off with a rather strange profile of Microsoft’s CEO in BusinessWeek which if anything illustrated the isolation and other worldliness of the company’s senior management.

The PR blitz worked though with Microsoft tying for first place in online mentions during the show according to the analytics company Simply Measured.

After the show the PR love for Microsoft continues with Business Insider having a gorgeous piece about why Windows Phone will succeed and criticising tech blogger Robert Scoble’s view that the mobile market is all about the number of apps available.

Scoble replied on his Google+ page explaining why apps do matter and adding that most of the people he meets hate Windows Phones, the latter point not being the most compelling argument.

The most telling point of Scoble’s though is his quoting Skype’s CEO that they aren’t developing an app for Windows Phone as “the other platforms are more important, so he put his developers on those”.

Microsoft spent 8.5 billion dollars buying Skype and intends to lay out over $200 million promoting Windows Phone. Surely there’s a few bucks somewhere in those numbers to pay for a few developers to get Skype functionality on the new platform.

Since writing this, Robert Scoble has issued a correction from the Skype CEO stating a version is being built for the next version of Windows Phone

The fact Microsoft can’t organise this seems to indicate not all senior executives share the vision for Windows Phone. It’s difficult to image Google or Apple having this sort of public dissent on a key product.

Management issues aside, Microsoft’s real problem are they are late to the mobile party and don’t have anything to gain attention.

There’s nothing wrong about being late to the party – Apple were late to enter the MP3 player, smart phone and tablet markets – but in each case they bought something new that changed the sector and eventually gave them leadership of each sector.

With Windows Phone, there’s so far little evidence Microsoft are going to deliver anything radically new to the sector. With Apple’s iOS and Android dominating, it’s going to be a tough slog for Microsoft and they are going to have to have to carefully spend every cent of that big marketing budget.

At least Microsoft’s PR team is doing a great job, the challenge is for the rest of the organisation to sell it as well.

*As an aside, it’s interesting the author of that article about Microsoft’s marketing budgets boasts how he “been sitting on this information for weeks so that Microsoft can make its big announcement at CES this coming week”. It’s good to know where Paul Thurrott thinks his responsibilities lie – certainly not with his readers.

Has Google peaked?

Does altering a business’ core product destroy trust in a business?

This article originally appeared in Technology Spectator as Google’s Wavering Trust Presumption.

Google revolutionised the Internet when the service appeared just over a decade ago, the search engine’s clean and reliable results saw it quickly capture two thirds of the market from then competitors like Altavista and Yahoo!.

One of the keys to that success was trust – Google’s users had a fair degree of confidence that the service’s results would be an accurate representation of whatever they were looking for on the web.

With the continuing integration of social media services, local search, paid advertising and travel services into those search results, it’s time to ask whether we can continue to trust what Google delivers us.

Google’s attempt to become a social media service is seeing results being skewed with by Google Plus profiles. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan yesterday illustrated how Google+ profiles are changing Google’s search results.

One thing that notable in these searches – and Google’s behaviour in enforcing “real names” on its Plus social media service – is the importance of brands and celebrities.

It’s no coincidence in the example Danny Sullivan shows above that typing “Brit” into a Google search comes up with the instant suggestions of Brittany Spears and British Airways.

More troubling is Google’s foray into travel with the purchase of  travel software company ITA. The travel industry site Tnooz recently looked at how searches for flights is now returning results from Google’s own service before the airlines or other travel websites.

Another of Google’s search strengths was the clean interface. When advertising was introduced, most users accepted this was the cost of a free service. Today a search result on Google is cluttered with Google+ suggestions, local business locations, travel results along with the ubiquitious advertising.

Suddenly Google’s search results aren’t looking so good and when you do find them, you can’t be sure they haven’t been skewed by the search engine’s determination to kill Google, Facebook or the online travel industry.

If it were only search and online advertising that Google was tinkering with, we could excuse this as being an innovative company experimenting with new business models in a developing industry, but a bigger problem lies outside its core business.

The purchase of Motorola Mobility – which is still subject to US government approval – changes the game for Google. Motorola Mobility employs 19,000 staff, increasing Google’s headcount by 60%.

Even if Google has only bought Motorola for the patents, closing down or divesting the operations and laying off nearly twenty thousand staff would be a big enough management distraction but there is real possibility though that Google want to make phones.

Google as a phone manufacturer, their previous attempt with the Nexus One wasn’t a great success, creates the problem of channel conflict with its partners who sell mobile phones with the Android operating system installed.

Right now those partners are having great success selling phones through mobile telcommunications companies who desperately want an alternative to the iPhone given they perceive, quite correctly, that Apple is taking their customers and the associated profits.

Apart from Apple the incumbents of the mobile phone industry are failing as Motorola have given up and are selling themselves to Google while Nokia are desperately seeking salvation in the arms of Microsoft.

Microsoft’s failure to take advantage of Google’s missteps is also instructive. Microsoft seem to be unable to capitalise on the conflicts in the mobile handset industry with Windows Phone while their competing search engine, Bing, seems to following Google’s cluttered inferface and anti-competitive practices.

With Microsoft largely out of the way with as an innovative competitor, it has fallen on newer business to challenge Google.

In social media we clearly have Facebook and Twitter while in phones Apple is by far the biggest and most profitable opponent, something emphasised by Google giving Android away for free.

The biggest question though is who can replace Google in web search, while there are worthy attempts like DuckDuckGo, Blekko and even Microsoft Bing, it’s difficult to see one of these displacing the dominant player right now.

Which isn’t to say it can’t happen; as we see with the examples of Nokia, Motorola and possibly Microsoft, the speed of change in modern business means empires fall quickly.

For Google, the lack of management focus on their core businesses may well cost them dearly in the next few years if web users stop trusting the company’s search results.

Tightening the screws

Cloud computing changes business IT economics, but it isn’t a magic pill.

Google had a big boost this week with Spanish bank BBVA announcing its 110,000 staff will switch to use the cloud based productivity software.

This wouldn’t be good news for Microsoft as their struggle to retain their almost monopoly position in corporate desktop applications and will undoubtedly mean reducing licensing fees and accepting tighter margins on their products.

BBVA’s move is interesting on a number of fronts although there’s a few myths among the trend towards cloud computing services and office productivity.

Cost saving myth

Part of the focus of selling these products is on cost and the head of Google Enterprise apps in Europe, Sebastien Marotte, said that his corporate customers on average achieved cost savings of between 50% and 70%.

The cost aspect is interesting, I’ve posted before about exaggerated claims for cloud computing savings, and Marotte’s statement deserves a closer look.

It’s highly likely the claimed cost savings are based on licensing – the standard Google Apps cost of $50 per user per year is substantially less than even the discounted rates large corporations receive on Microsoft licenses.

While the licensing cost is a serious line item, particularly when you have 110,000 employees, it isn’t the whole story; there’s training, maintenance, disaster recovery, security and a whole range of other issues.

Cloud computing services address a lot of those costs, but nothing like the order of 50 to 70%. In fact, it would be hard to find an enterprise that had the sort of slack in its IT operations to achieve those sort of savings.

In one respect, this is where its disappointing that cloud computing vendors tout those sort of savings – not only does it commoditise their industry but it perpetuates the myth amongst executives that IT staff spend the bulk of their time playing video games.

While there are real savings to be made for businesses switching to cloud computing, any sales person claiming a 50% or greater saving should be asked to justify their claims or shown the door.

Clean slate

Another interesting point with BBVA switching to Google is how the bank wants employees to leave all their old email and data in their old systems. Carmen Herranz, BBVA’s director of innovation, says we “want to start from scratch… don’t want to carry across old behaviours”.

Not migrating data is an interesting move and how BBVA’s users deal with retrieving their contact lists, dealing with existing email conversations and how staff will deal with feature differences like document revision tracking – an area where Microsoft Office outdoes Google Docs.

Internal use only

BBVA are only applying the Google services to internal documents as well which means the bank will be using other software – probably Microsoft Office – for corresponding externally.

This makes it even more unlikely the touted cost savings of 50 to 70% are achievable, and may actually increase support costs while reducing productivity as many customer facing staff will have to deal with two systems.

Having one system for use inside the business and another for external communications seems to be a European trend – before Christmas French company Atos announced it was abolishing email within the company but still using it for outside messages.

Both abolishing email and moving to cloud based office packages are really about improving productivity in a business while cost savings are nice, the main focus on adopting cloud computing – or any other new technology – should be on freeing your staff to do more productive work.

Blinking

Sometimes a business has to change, despite customer opposition

A while back I wrote about leaving customers behind. As a business grows or evolves some customers are left behind.

That’s not to say those customers are wrong or bad, just that they are not the right fit for the long term objectives of your business.

Sometimes those customers are raving fans and passionate patrons are important; if you can meet your clients’ business and emotional needs then you, and your customer, are in a great place.

But not always, sometimes those fans are a boat anchor to your business.

In 1998  Steve Jobs announced he was ditching the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) standard for Mac computers and moving to the USB standard for new computers. Thousands of outraged Mac fans swore they would never buy an Apple computer again.

Henry Ford is quoted as saying if he’d asked 1890s what they wanted, he’d have built a better horse cart rather than a motor car.

Sometimes customers don’t know what they want and sometimes those who do know what they want aren’t the customers you want.

If you have to make that decision, it has to be firm – blinking in the face of opposition doesn’t work. You’ve shown you’ve blinked on one thing and you’ll be blinking on more. You’re now owned by your customers and the most conservative, risk adverse ones at that.

Once you’ve given ownership of your business to your most conservative customers, you’ll have to fight to regain control.

It’s much better to make a calculated, informed decision and go for it  – if you’re right, your business is going to be stronger without those risk adverse and often low margin customers.

A lot of people decided they wouldn’t buy Steve Jobs’ or Henry Ford’s products again. Eventually they did.

Strategic lessons from a security breach

What businesses can learn from Stratfor’s data lapse

2011 has been the year of the IT security breach. Big and small organisations around the world ranging from major corporations like Sony through to smaller businesses such as security analysts Stratfor found their customer data released onto the web.

The frustrating this is most of these breaches are avoidable and “hacking” is often giving too much credit for the security used by the targeted companies.

While the ‘hackers’ themselves may be skilled, the compromised organisations are often easy targets as they don’t follow the basic rules of protecting their data.

Standards matter

Customer payment account details are covered by the Payment Cards Industry -Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) operated by the PCI Security Standards Council.

The PCI Security Standards Council helpfully has a range of information sheets for merchants of all sizes and if you are taking payments off the web you should make yourself aware of the basic requirements.

For most businesses, the cardinal rule is not to save customer’s card details. Once the payment is approved, you have no business retaining the client’s credit card or bank account numbers.

In Stratfor’s case, they were almost certainly processing payments manually and credit card details were being saved on customers’ records in case of errors or to make renewals easier.

Call in the professionals

There’s no shortage of payment companies, ranging from PayPal through specialist services like eWay to your own bank’s services. Choose the one that works best for you. If you have no idea, call in someone who does.

One of the arguments for using outsourced services, particularly cloud computing, is how data security is a complex field that requires professional and qualified expertise. The internal systems of Sony, Telstra and Stratfor were not up to the demands placed upon. A professional service is better equipped to deal with these issues.

Size doesn’t matter

A major lesson from the last year’s security breaches is that it’s not just the local shop or garage e-commerce business that is careless with data. Some of the world’s biggest companies and government agencies have been compromised.

If anything, Sony’s experience has shown the double standards at work in the application of security rules; there’s no doubt that had a local computer shop been as thoroughly compromised as Sony were, they would have been shut down on the second breach and the management would have been carted off to jail well before the twelfth.

For the management of Sony, there seems to have been little in the way of sanctions of the people nominally responsible for this incompetence. This has to change both within organisations and by those charged with enforcing the rules.

The lesson for customers is you can’t trust anyone with your data; don’t assume the big corporation is any more secure than the serving staff at your local sandwich shop.

Passwords matter

Every time one of these breaches happen we hear about password security, with “experts” pointing out that some of the subscribers were using passwords like ‘statfor’ or ‘password’.

For customers, this actually makes sense if you can’t trust third parties with your details so specific, disposable passwords for each site should be used. There’s little point in having a complex password if some script kiddie is going to post your login details onto 4Chan.

Naturally your passwords for banking and other critical websites should be very different and far more secure than those you use for sites like Stratfor and the Sony Playstation Network.

Will 2012 be any different?

Given the data embarrassments of 2012 for businesses and government agencies, can we expect lessons to be learned in 2012?

While many businesses are going to learn specific lessons from these breaches, there’s a management cultural problem where any spending on information systems is seen as a cost that has to be minimised.

This cost cutting mentality lies at the core at many organisations’ failure to secure their systems properly and until a more responsible culture develops we’ll continue to see these lapses.

Good managers and business owners who understand the importance of guarding their organisation’s and customer’s data are those who are ahead of their competition. Over time, these folk who will have the competitive advantage.

For customers, the sad lesson is we can’t trust anyone and a layered approach to security along with keeping a close eye on our bank accounts and credit card statements is necessary.

Lords of the digital manor

How free content and expensive management can’t live together

There is something fundamentally wrong with AOL’s media business states a Business Insider headline.

What is fundamentally wrong is quite basic to anyone who has owned or managed a business – money.

The problems at AOL illustrate the deep flaws in the “digital sharecropper” business model of putting free or cheap content on the web to harvest online advertising.

Lords of the digital manor

Sites like Demand Media and Huffington Post can’t make money from content if too many staff expect to get paid. Chris Anderson illustrated this in a rebuttal to Malcolm Gladwell where he examined the economics of his GeekDad blog and the work of its manager, Ken;

So here’s the calculus:

  • Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
  • Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
  • The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

It’s almost touching to picture the modern day digital serf touching his flat cap and murmuring “thank you m’lud” on receiving a ha’penny from the lord of the digital manor before scampering back to working on becoming a well read, but unpaid writer.

We don’t pay writers

The business model of the Geek Dad blog or the Huffington Post relies upon these unpaid writers donating their work and time –the digital sharecroppers as described by Jeff Attwood.

Low paid or free labour is essential to the success of these site, when the bulk of advertising income goes straight to the proprietors the digital aristocrats – Lord Chris of Wired or Duchess Arianna – can live well.

The business model falls apart when management starts taking a cut of the profits; install a highly paid CEO and management team with their squadrons of Executive Vice Presidents or Group General Managers with the Medici-esque perks and entitlements these folk demand and the profits disappear.

AOL’s problem is it has too many highly paid managers extracting wealth from the company’s cashflow.

This is exactly the same problem print and television media empires have, once the rich rivers of gold allowed them to build up well paid management castes that are now crippling the businesses as revenues can’t support their financial burden.

Paying for digital media’s future

Over time, online media revenues are improving. As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker pointed out in 2010 that U.S. consumers spend 28 percent of their media time online, yet in 2010 only 13 percent of ad spending goes to the Internet. As advertisers follow consumers, publishing on the web will become more profitable.

The risk for big media organisations is their money will run out before the digital renaissance arrives and when it does, they may have squandered their natural advantages by shedding quality journalists, experienced sub-editors and good editors in an effort to prop up executive bonuses.

AOL’s management problem is part of a much bigger problem across markets and industries, we can call it managerialism – there are too many highly paid managers getting in the way of the writers, engineers, scientists, artists and tradesman who add real value to their organisations.

Strangely, it may be Chris Anderson’s “free” model that kills the managerial culture as enterprises that can’t afford to pay product creators certainly won’t pay an Executive Vice President’s entitlements.

Quitting our email addiction

What can we do to reduce the size of our electronic inboxes?

This post originally appeared in the Xero Accounting Blog on December 9, 2011.

With 74,000 staff, you’d expect the CEO of French technology company Atos to be buried in email, but Thierry Breton hasn’t sent an electronic mail message for three years.

As the US ABC news service reports, Atos and Breton are implementing a zero email policy for their employees, steering them to use instant messaging and collaboration tools that reduce the need to send attachment heavy messages.

Breton claims only one in ten of the 200 messages his employees receive each day are useful and 18 percent is spam which – given some security companies estimate over 90% of world email traffic is unsolicited messages – shows Atos has a pretty good spam filter.

Email has been one of the main applications of business technology for the last twenty years, so how feasible is it really to move away from the inbox as being the first and last thing you check each day?

Instant Messaging

The ability to send quick messages between computers has been around since they were first networked in the 1950s but consumers and business largely ignored these clunky features until they were made popular in the late 1990s by the web based AOL and MSN Messenger services.

Most business communications platforms like Microsoft Office, Google Apps and  Novell Groupwise have an Instant Messaging (IM) tool built in which can be easily turned on.

None of this is new technology and it’s probably one of the most used business features in the Skype Internet telephone service.

A downside with IMs is they generally demand immediate attention and can distract someone from their work. They also leave detailed logs so don’t for a minute think your rant about a customer or staff member hasn’t been recorded.

Social media

Many of the social media tools have their own built in instant messaging with LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ having their own services with Google’s service offering the Hangouts feature to create impromptu video conferences.

By definition Twitter is an instant messaging service offering both public and private channels. The Yammer platform is a grown up corporate tool that offers all the social media functions for a business environment.

The downside with using social media platforms as mission critical business tools is their reliance on the best efforts of external providers that can raise security and reliability issues.

Wikis

Atos makes specific mention of their company wiki. Simply put, a wiki is a website that can be easily updated by anyone with permission to do so.

It’s possible to lock wikis, restrict access or to undo any changes that aren’t suitable so all the information is controlled and subject to review. These can be run on your own office server or hosted on an outside cloud service.

Wikis are a fantastic tool for building a corporate memory and developing standardised procedures and policies across an organisation.

Collaborative tools

One of the big changes in the modern office is the rise of cloud office software services like Google Docs, Basecamp and – of course –Xero Accounting that allow people to work together on the same files at the same time.

In the past, office software has locked individual documents while one person used them and that aspect alone has probably been responsible for many of the emails spinning around corporate offices.

Another benefit of the new breed of collaborative tools is they make it easy to control documents as all team members are working only one version of a file, meaning there’s no uncertainty of who has the latest version.

External risks

There are some outside risks with some of these services as they are cloud based so Internet access is important and there can be some questions of security and reliability with trusting processes to outside providers.

Email itself is evolving into a cloud based commodity as many businesses move to Gmail or hosted solutions rather than running their own email servers.

If those external risks are a concern, then it is possible to run these services on your own networks although most businesses are comfortable with outsourcing their technology.

Discovery

One of the first things that jumps to mind from a business IT point of view is that moving to a non-email environment reduces the risk of having to provide masses of data in the event of a legal dispute.

Many organisations have been caught out by a “smoking gun” message hidden within the pile of emails sent within an organisation every day.

The reality is that instant messaging, wikis and collaborative tools all leave their own “digital fingerprints” and if anything the non-email platforms may make it harder to hide evidence from a determined investigator.

Outside parties

Atos aren’t banning electronic mail with outside parties though, with a company spokesman quoted saying their goal is focused on internal emails rather than those from outside the company.

This makes sense as email is still a key business communication tool and not using it to talk to suppliers and customers wouldn’t make sense. For most organisations such a ban would make it impossible to send invoices.

Email is a key part of business and probably will continue to be, what we are seeing though is an evolution of how it is used in the workplace as new tools are developed.

The last word goes to Thierry Breton who said when announcing the policy, “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives”. He has a point.

How are you managing your business email and would you abolish it if you could?

The dying Yelp of Sensis

Can a social review site save a fading directory company?

This story originally appeared on Technology Spectator

Fifteen years ago Sensis, the directories arm of Telstra, was untouchable. A listing in the Yellow and White Pages was essential for every business and Sensis’ monopoly was a true river of gold.

Sensis’ launch this week of an Australian partnership with the US based review site Yelp is Telstra’s desperate throw of the dice to survive in a market where its directories business has become irrelevant.

Attempts to stay relevent

There have been many attempts by Sensis to overcome this erosion of its core maket including purchasing an IT services business and unsuccessful forays into publishing and online search with Trading Post and CitySearch.

Probably Sensis’ lowest point was the squandered millions of dollars and years of management time wasted in trying to compete against Google after Telstra CEO Sol Trujilo made the sneering comment of “Google Schmoogle”.

Declining values

At the time of Trujillo’s comment in 2005 Sensis was valued at $10 billion as a stand alone company. After last week’s disappointing results that saw revenue drop 18 per cent for the year, the value of the division is an optimistic $5 billion.

Yelp itself is unlikely to help Sensis’ revenue woes. Despite filing for a $100 billion public offering, Yelp has never made a profit in its seven years of operation. Although licensing their service to failing directory companies around the world might prove to be a handy revenue stream.

That lack of profit – on North American revenues that are tiny compared to Sensis’ Australian cashflow ­– shows the fallacy in the social media business model that many of the popular online services are faced with.

Users of social media services like Yelp are looking for a community of trustworthy and relevant referrals. The directory sale model is based on displaying the biggest advertisers prominently, which is exactly what social media users don’t want.

Yelp also comes into a marketplace already crowded with competing, established services like Word Of Mouth Online, Eatability, and the faster moving social media platforms like Foursquare.

Competitors’ Missed Opportunities

In many ways Sensis has been lucky in that most of the competition has been from smaller upstarts while their bigger competitors haven’t capitalised on the market opportunities.

Google Places, the biggest competitor to the world’s Yellow Pages directories, is mired in bureaucracy and isn’t doing a good job in telling business its story while Facebook’s local search function isn’t getting much traction either.

Of the local Australian incumbents, ninemsn isn’t interested in local business with its international partner Microsoft not offering an Australian product and the local team preferring to deal with big spending advertising agencies, while Fairfax squandered its early advantage and eventually sold the CitySearch service to Sensis.

News Limited’s True Local is having limited success while it struggles with the transition from print to online. At News’ recent launch of its new digital platform, the company’s executives stated they expected journalists to develop a “digital mind”.

Lacking a Digital Mindset

That “digital mindset” is the key to the problem at companies like News Limited, Fairfax and Sensis. In a marketplace where customers, advertising and readers have moved online it requires management, not just the lower workers, to “think digital”.

Sensis’ key problem is its management structures – and more importantly its sales teams’ commissions and KPIs – which are still based around its traditional business models that will make selling services like Yelp difficult.

The phone directory business model is a product of the 1920s and in many ways Telstra and the other Yellow Pages franchisees around the world should be grateful it has lasted so long.

Whether the phone directories that have been so profitable for phone companies can make it to their one hundredth birthday is an open question. One thing is for sure, bolting on an unprofitable and late to market social media service isn’t the answer.

Cloud Computing Explained: 702 Sydney Weekends

This month’s 702 Sydney Weekend spot looks at cloud computing.

What on earth is cloud computing? Is it just another IT buzzword or something that you can use in your home and business?

On the November 20 ABC Weekends show, Paul and Lex Marinos discussed what cloud computing is and how it can help you.

We also helped out listeners with various computer and tech questions, including the following;

Malware

Sue was caught out by the DNS Changer Trojan that was recently busted by the FBI. Probably the best fix for this is downloading and running the free Malwarebytes software.

Our IT Queries site has instructions on the somewhat convoluted process for removing this Trojan and other viruses from your computer.

Synchronising an iPhone with iCloud and Google Calendars

One advantage we have with the cloud is that it means you can use devices anywhere, however there is a bug where iPhone calendar functions aren’t synchronising with Google Calendar.

Unfortunately the problem is the iCloud and Google services aren’t compatible on the iphone so one has to be turned off.

If your preference is to use the Google services, then you will have to turn off the iCloud services through the iPhone’s settings app and turning off all of the calendar and contact settings.

You may then want to check your Google services are being synchronised through the iTunes settings.

Sharing data between laptops.

One of the advantages with networking is that you can share data between computers. Sonya wanted to know how she can setup her windows 7 laptops to share data to an external drive.

The best option is to use a Windows 7 compatible Network Area Storage device that sits on the network.

For the setup to work, the network name has to be the same on all three devices, Microsoft has instructions for setting Windows7 network name and the hard drive will have the instructions included for setting it up correctly.

It’s also worthwhile using Microsoft’s Active Sync software to synchronise machines as well so you have files stored on your computer.

If you missed Sunday’s ABC program, there’s more details at Netsmarts’ Cloud Computing explained and The Networked Business, we’ll also be running a Demystifying the Cloud webinar on the Australian Businesswomen’s Network at the end of November.

That will probably be the last ABC 702 Weekends spot for 2011 unless there’s something else that comes up.

Subscribers to our newsletter get early notice of any upcoming programs and other useful information on getting more value online. Don’t miss the next program.

The IT industry’s damaged business models

Can the Information Technology industry deal with a radically changed business environment?

JT Wang, Chairman of personal computer manufacturer Acer believes the release of Windows 8, Microsoft’s next operating system, will see a resurgence of sales for Windows based computers. Market trends suggest those hopes are in vain.

Right now the Personal Computer market can be roughly split into two camps; those happily running Windows XP who have no need to upgrade and those who are delighted with Windows 7 who have no need to upgrade.

Short of their computers breaking down, neither group have any good reasons to change to the new operating system as, unlike Windows 3.1, 95 or XP, there is no new technology breakthrough or advance to warrant making the jump.

To make things worse for the PC manufacturers the rise of cloud computing services extends the life of older Windows XP systems and eliminates the biggest driver of new computer purchases in businesses – the software upgrade.

During the PC era one of the banes of business owners were enforced software upgrades where vendors would release a new version of a program every year or two and withdraw support for the older editions.

Frequently the newer software would require the latest hardware, forcing the business into an expensive and disruptive upgrade of all their IT systems.

Today, software companies following the forced upgrade model are finding customers have viable cloud alternatives which destroys the revenue stream behind those frequent releases.

When a customer moves to a cloud service, they also delay buying new desktop or server hardware which is partly driving the steady increase in the age of business computers.

For computer manufacturers the release of Windows 8 could actually be bad news as customers will probably postpone system upgrades until the first service pack of the new operating system is released.

Even if Windows 8 does deliver increased sales as JT Wang hopes, the trend of steadily falling PC prices as smartphones and tablet computers take market share is inevitable.

The PC industry in both laptops and desktops has been a commodity industry for some years and any hope of establishing premium pricing from tablet computers has been dashed by the iPad’s competitive price points.

Regardless of the hopes of the IT industry’s leaders, both the hardware and software sectors are under a lot of stress. It will be interesting to see who adapts to today’s market.

 

Technology’s magic pills

How a social media or cloud computing ointment won’t solve your business problems

As railways rolled out across the US in the mid 19th Century, the snake oil merchants selling dubious medicines weren’t far behind.

Communities that had never before seen things that were taken for granted in the big cities were easily fooled by miracle treatments that would fix all their ills. By the time the locals discovered the scam, the snake oil salesman and his shills would be well out of town.

Technological change always brings out hype and over the last few decades we’ve seen a similar thing happen with the tech industries, as products and services were sold on the back of claims that could be described as ambitious, if not outrageous.

The Y2K bug was a good example of this as planes were going to fall from the sky and dams collapse if we didn’t hire an expensive consulting firm or buy a widget that would remind our computers they were now in the 21st Century.

A similar thing is at work with Internet names, where the current push to sell Top Level Domains – a bargain with their $385,000 application fee – is being touted as the fix to everything that is wrong with web addresses.

With digital snake oil it’s interesting how often big organisations sometimes act like 19th Century American sharecroppers – all too often we seen ministers and CEOs announce an outsourcing deal that will save taxpayers or shareholders millions only to later find the only winner was the consulting firm that sold the idea.

A similar trend is at work in the PR industry, Sky News presenter John Kerrison has an entertaining look on his personal website on how social media is being sold as an easy fix for a business with far more fundamental problems.

The sad thing is that there are real benefits behind the grandiose claims; Y2K was a real problem, money can be saved through intelligent outsourcing and social media is a great PR tool.

Eventually hype backfires, consumers are rightly dubious about anything that has the slightest hint of PR spin while the IT sector is viewed with well-earned suspicion by business proprietors, executives and managers.

A good example of this was last week’s Digital Readiness report from Optus that found businesses aren’t particularly interested in cloud services. This mirrors similar studies by Sensis, MYOB and MelbourneIT which all find organisations aren’t too fussed about the online world in general.

The danger with this is there is fundamental shift happening in society and technologies like websites, social media and cloud computing  – just like the railroads in the 19th Century – are part of those changes which businesses need to understand.

In an era where snake oil is a commodity there are two challenges for business people; the first is not to be perceived as one of the charlatans and the second is to see the miracle cures for what they are.

Probably the best tool for dealing with the digital snake oil merchants is turn on your own, old-fashioned bullshit detector and treat the shills with the suspicion they deserve.

Using free services

What traps are there when using free online services

The lure of free is attractive – free web hosting, free software or the free lunch always grabs our attention.

Deep down though we know there’s really no such thing as a free lunch and the same is true with all the other free deals, there’s always a cost of some sort.

Often the definition of free can be a problem; there’s the social media model of free that harvests your personal data, the Silicon Valley version that hopes a big company will buy the service, the earnest work of volunteers and the freemium marketing model.

Most computer users have used the freemium model, this is where the business gives away a basic free version in the hope of encouraging enough customers to the paid premium version that has support and additional features. Common examples are AVG Free Antivirus, Google Apps and Mailchimp’s Forever Free plan.

All of the freemium services come with a catch, AVG’s free software is only licensed for home use ­– so no using the free version on your office computer – while Google Apps only supports ten unpaid users and if you have more than 2,000 people on your mailing list then Mailchimp is no longer free.

Developing a free product to raise your profile is a common way for entrepreneurs to enter markets and establish a reputation. This is particularly common in the software and web design industries where coders and designers offer free applications or templates to build their portfolios.

These products developed by entrepreneurial designers and programmers are often great, but as there is the risk the developer will lose interest as their business evolves. The WordPress Guy, Tony Constantino, warns “when a free theme stops being supported in 6months you will get left behind”

By far the most lucrative free model to date has been the advertising supported business. This is nothing new as commercial radio and television stations have had this model for nearly a century, but Google have taken this online with their advertising platform that funds their search tools and many other free services.

A variation on the advertising supported model is the data mining carried out by social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. This isn’t as transparent and may be a problem for business users who don’t want to share their client details with an internet service.

Increasingly the free services are based around the Silicon Valley model of a deep pocketed venture capital company funding a business with the aim of building the customer base through offering freebies services with the aim of selling to a trade buyer.

The danger with the Silicon Valley VC model is its instability as most companies shut down without finding a buyer. Even when they do find someone to buy the venture the service often doesn’t last as we saw when the once popular free hosting service Geocities was shut down by Yahoo! in 2009.

Despite the traps free can be good for your business but you should understand the terms, conditions and hidden costs that come with the products. Often you’ll find paying for a product delivers a much more functional and better service that requires less of your time.

One service that might help businesses choose the right free or trial online services is Cheapstart, that compares the various services available for entrepreneurs starting out.