Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: rants

  • How Google’s identity obsession hurts

    How Google’s identity obsession hurts

    Imagine giving a presentation at a conference where you fire up a live demonstration of a product you’ve been urging the audience to use and the audience start giggling.

    You turn around to find a bright red message at the top of the screen stating your account has been suspended. It wasn’t there the night before and you certainly didn’t receive an email warning you this had happened.

    Embarrassing or what?

    That happened to me with Google Local earlier this and the many stories like it illustrates a serious management problem within the world’s biggest search engine company.

    Local search – where businesses can be found online based on their location – is one of the main web battlefields with Google and Facebook, along with outliers like News Limited and Microsoft, are competing to get business of all sizes to sign up.

    Recently though Google seems to be going out of its way to squander the massive opportunity they have in this sector despite the CEO, Larry Page, identifying local services as one of their priorities.

    Despite Google’s intention to promote Places – as their, and Facebook’s, local search platforms are called – many businesses are finding the company’s arbitrary and often incorrect application of its own rules and Terms of Service difficult to understand and use.

    “I have found that with the ‘moving target’ Google is presenting to businesses” said Bob, a commenter on one of my blogs, “is paralyzing them from doing exactly what Google wants, which is updating and providing fresh content on their listings pages.”

    In many ways, this is a small front on the “nymwars” that has broken out since Google introduced their Plus social media service and started enforcing their “rules” on “real names”.

    Unfortunately their real names “policy” – and I use inverted commas deliberately – is vague and arbitrary with users finding their accounts suspended despite signing up with “the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you” as required by Google.

    Account suspensions are wide and varied; some people, quite legally, have a name without a surname, others have a combination of languages such as Chinese or Arabic, while others have simply fallen foul of the computer and Google’s secretive bureaucratic culture.

    This secretive bureaucracy would be funny if it wasn’t so downright hypocritical. Any correspondence with Google about account suspensions either on Places or Plus is signed off by an anonymous functionary from “no-reply” email address. So it appears real identities, and accountability, don’t extend to the company itself.

    Last week at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, announced Plus is not a social media platform, but an “identity service”. Good luck with that, Eric as your staff’s arbitrary and often incorrect interpretation of the company’s own rules doesn’t engender confidence in any identity verified by Google.

    That announcement by Google’s chairman should worry investors, as this is a company that is first and foremost an advertising company powered by the best web search technology.

    Management distractions such as becoming an “identity service” or buying a handset manufacturer distract focus from the core business and result in the mess we’re seeing around business and private accounts.

    For the moment, Google Places remains a service that businesses must list on given the visibility the results have when customers search the web for local services and products.

    If you aren’t already on Google Places, do sign up but make sure you get your listing right first time as editing your profile once it’s up risks your account being suspended or cast into “pending” purgatory.

    Should you have already an account, leave it alone as any change risks coming the attention of Google’s anonymous bureaucrats.

    Hopefully, this madness will pass and Google will clarify their policies, ground them in the real world then enforce their terms fairly and consistently. Until then, you can’t afford to rely on your personal and business Google accounts.

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  • Choices

    Choices

    “It’s too hard to keep up with all the choices. I can’t decide whether to use Facebook or Twitter, Microsoft or Google, Dell or Apple? Doing business today is just too complex…”

    Maybe it’s true we have too many choices but yesterday’s business people had plenty of hard decisions to make.

    Business people a hundred years ago had to choose between steam, gas or electrical power. If  they chose the latter, there was another decision between AC and DC electricity.

    There was a further choice between keeping your horse drawn cart or buying one of those new fangled motor vehicles, which could either run on kerosine or steam.

    So our great great grandparent’s weren’t easier and, unlike the relatively small investments we can make in technology today, their choices could easily bankrupt them if they made the wrong decision.

    When we’re fretting over choices at least those on offer aren’t the simple alternative of whether we send our children down the mine or to the mill at the earliest possible age.

    Instead of worrying about the choices, it’s time to get informed and understand what the alternatives mean. The time to worry is when our competitors, or the market, is leaving us behind because we didn’t care enough to find out what was happening around us.

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  • Is there a need for digital literacy?

    Is there a need for digital literacy?

    In preparing for tonight’s ABC Nightlife segment I was re-reading the Australian government’s National Digital Economy Strategy when I twigged what was bugging me in the first few pages; the talk of “digital literacy“.

    As part of the plan, the Federal government intends to setup “digital hubs” in the each of the 40 communities that will first benefit from the NBN, these will “assist local residents to better understand how they can benefit from the NBN and to improve their digital literacy skills”.

    The whole concept of digital literacy is worrying; it assumes there is something unique about using technology and that the concepts to use web services and devices are arcane and difficult to grasp.

    Such a belief might have been true in the days of the command line interface where obscure commands and strange keystroke combinations controlled how you used a computer, but in the age of the touchscreen and intuitive systems the majority of people, regardless of age, can pick up the basic concepts with a few minute’s instructions.

    A bigger issue is genuine literacy and numerical skills. Without these, we’re not able to understand or properly evaluate the data that is being presented to us.

    Even more important are critical skills, the volume of information on the net demands we have the ability to filter fact from opinion and truth from misinformation if we don’t possess these talents we’re condemned to being unable to filter the gems from the dross that masquerades as fact on the net.

    Clifford Stoll said “data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom”. Without basic literacy we’re unable to process the data we see on the net, without the critical skills we cannot understand that information.

    That’s the real challenge the connected society presents, how do we develop and nurture the critical skills that lets us identify the scammer, the knave and the ill-informed – all of whom thrive in an environment that gives their views equal weight with the wise, honest and knowledgeable.

    Probably the best thing we can do for our children, and ourselves, is to work on developing those skills.

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  • So you want to be an entrepreneur?

    So you want to be an entrepreneur?

    There’s a school of thought that starting your own business is the passport to independence from the rat race or liberation from the servitude of employment.

    A lot of blogs, books and writers encourage this idea and there’s no shortage of multi level marketers telling you self employment is the pathway to wealth and status.

    On his Planning Business Stories blog, Tim Berry looked at one of the other sides of self-employment, that you’ll become unemployable.

    Tim’s observations are right, but there’s a few other downsides to consider before trashing your cubicle, cashing out your savings and establishing that radical startup or buying a doughnut franchise.

    I don’t want to work for a boss anymore
    If you think your boss is an unreasonable swine wait until you deal with customers, particularly those who don’t pay their bills. Then there’s shareholders, business partners, suppliers and the taxman.

    You’re leaving the rat race
    No you aren’t. As a business owner you’ll find there’s a lot more rats than you thought when you worked for The Man, as the man employs lawyers, debt collectors and HR staff to deal with the rats.

    The sad thing is you’ll probably end up being even more in the rat race, it’s just that you may not realise you’re racing the other rats as you aren’t stuck in traffic with them anymore.

    I want to be the boss
    That’s a noble and fair aspiration. Just be aware that in your own business, you take the risks and responsibilities too.

    The boss at BigCorp can often mess up and move onto bigger and better things as the organisation is usually big enough to hide the mistakes and it’s often in senior management’s interest to hide their subordinates’ mistakes from the shareholders or taxpayers. In your own enterprise, it’s your own assets at stake.

    I’ll get a better share of my rate
    A common gripe with skilled workers, like plumbers and lawyers, is they get ripped off by their employer who pockets 3/4 of their hourly rate.

    When you start your own operation, you’ll learn the existence of overheads and soon realise why you were only paid a quarter of what you were charged out for.

    The only way to get rich is to work for yourself
    Kind of sort of true, except there’s a big survivor bias in that saying. The people who do really well out of building a business receive accolades and boasting rights, those who don’t get quietly on with their lives if they are lucky.

    In a capitalist society we reward risk, and the biggest risk you can take is setting up your own business. If you’re successful you’ll be rewarded, but the risk of comparative failure is high which is why successful entrepreneurs get more money and accolades than successful managers or politicians.

    You’ll work fewer hours
    This is probably the greatest myth of all, usually perpetuated by someone selling a multi level marketing scheme. In truth, you’ll work longer hours and many of those will be unpaid as you chase up debts and fill in government paperwork.

    On the rare occasions you do get to sit down and catch up on the news, you’ll learn to dread reports that the government is going to “simplify” or “reform” something. This will almost certainly mean more paperwork for you.

    Keep in mind that no politician – be they Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal, New Labor or Labor – is “business friendly”. At best they are sympathetic in the way a non-lethal host parasite is to a warm mammal.

    You’ll never work in this town again
    Tim’s article makes this point well, that if you spend any considerable time working in your own business – be it a startup, consultancy or small business – you’ll find it difficult to get a job in the corporate sector.

    I personally found this after 12 years of running a moderately successful business, basically I was told all of that experience was irrelevant to a corporate management position. In big business terms, I’d have made a better career move if I had been driving a bus for those dozen years.

    All of this isn’t to say you shouldn’t strike out and build your own business, for many of us it’s the course in life that suits us and what we work best at. But it isn’t the lifestyle for everyone.

    We certainly shouldn’t be saying those who aren’t suited to this lifestyle are bad or inferior people; most folk simply don’t want to take the risks and demands on family, finances and nerves that running your own business entails and this is fair, sane attitude to take particularly in a time of uncertainty.

    Successful entrepreneurs have certain skill sets and a focus which can be tough on families, friends and children. For many there’s an element timing and luck as well.

    For the success of a capitalist society, we need to celebrate and reward the entrepreneurs and risk takers, but before anyone dives into a start up or small business it’s best to understand the risks and costs involved.

    Good luck.

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  • The good news story

    Last night, 700 children gathered at the Sydney Opera House for The Festival of Choral Music. Over the four days the event is run, over 2,000 kids will have performed in the choirs, bands and ensembles.

    Why aren’t we telling these stories of talent, potential, happiness and beauty? Why are we bogged down in the negative, backward looking view of the world we see in much of our commentary of the world?

    Maybe it’s time for a rethink about the stories we tell.

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