cloud computing | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

How Green is the Internet?

What are the environmental costs of the internet, cloud computing and big data?

Earlier this month Google hosted “How Green is the Internet?“, a summit which looked at the environmental costs of the connected society and technologies like cloud computing and Big Data.

The environmental impact of the internet and related technologies is a subject worth exploring, like all industries there are real costs to the planet which usually aren’t bourne by those who make the profits or reap the benefits.

In complex modern supply chains which often span the globe, the costs are not often apparent either. What appears to be a relatively clean, innocuous product to city consumers could have terrible environmental consequences for others.

Google’s summit is a good example of overlooking many external costs in that most of the conversations looked at reducing energy usage, understandable given the company’s dependence on power hungry data centres which drive their cloud computing services.

Energy usage is important in the discussion about digital technologies – the businesses of bits and bytes almost wholly relies upon having constant and reliable electricity supplies and power generation is one of the most environmentally damaging activities we engage in.

Focusing on energy consumption though is not the only aspect we need to look at when examining how green the internet is, there’s many other costs in building the supply chain that enables us to watch funny cat videos in our homes or offices.

The entire supply chain is complex and the session on infrastructure costs by Jon Koomey of Stanford University touched on this; there’s the environmental costs of building data centres, of manufacturing routers, of laying cables and – probably the most difficult question of all – what do we do with the e-waste generated by obsolete equipment.

Little of this was touched on in the Google conference and it’s interesting that the tech industry is focusing on the energy costs while overlooking other effects of a global, complex industry.

That isn’t to say the energy story isn’t valid. A number of the Google speakers emphasized the indirect energy saving costs as cloud computing and Big Data allows more intelligent business decisions that make industries and daily life more efficient.

A favourite example is the use of car parking apps where drivers save energy and reduce pollution because they aren’t driving around looking for the parking spaces. This puts Google’s acquisition of traffic app Waze into perspective.

Reducing driving times is just one area of where the internet is improving energy efficiency and these are important factors when considering the ‘greenness’ of the web.

However without considering the full impact of building, maintaining and disposing the equipment that we need to operate the internet, we aren’t really looking at the entire impact the internet is having on the planet.

Google’s conference though is a good starting point for that discussion which is one that every industry should be having.

Is there a tablet to cure the reality distortion field?

Microsoft founder Bill Gates puts up an argument for Windows 8 tablets. But is he living in a reality distortion field?

It’s hard not to be impressed by the calibre of guests CNBC’s Squawk Box when they’re able to get Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on together for an interview.

During the interview Bill Gates made an interesting assertion about Apple’s iPad, ““A lot of those users are frustrated, they can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there.”

Bill’s undoubtedly right, some iPad users are frustrated by the device’s limitations. However for every irritated iPad user there are a dozen baffled by the lack of a Start button on Windows 8.

The reality distortion field though is strong, “Windows 8 really is revolutionary,” says Bill. “It takes the benefits of the tablet and the benefits of the PC and it’s able to support both of those.”

The Microsoft founder is enthusiastic about the company’s Windows tablet, “you have the portability of the tablet but the richness, in terms of the keyboard and Microsoft Office, of the PC.”

It’s notable Gates mentioned Microsoft Office, particularly given the question was about the cloud. It’s clear one of Microsoft’s priorities is to maintain their strength with productivity applications and move with their customers onto the cloud.

The problem though for Microsoft is that Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are dominating the cloud focused operating systems, leaving Windows behind.

Making matters worse for Microsoft is it’s clear Windows 8 tablets are never going to catch their competitors. Consulting group Gartner last year predicted the global market for tablet computers will double over the next three years, but Microsoft will capture barely 10% of the sales.

OS	2011	2012	2013	2016
iOS	39,998	72,988	99,553	169,652
Android	17,292	37,878	61,684	137,657
Microsoft	0	4,863	14,547	43,648
QNX	807	2,643	6,036	17,836
Other Operating Systems	1,919	510	637	464
Total Market	60,017	118,883	182,457	369,258

Sitting in a reality distortion field is fine when things are going well and you dominate your world, but Microsoft – despite still being insanely profitable – no longer dominates the markets that made it into one of the world’s leading companies.

The challenge for Bill Gates and Microsoft’s management is adapting to those changes, projecting your own frustrations onto the users of a competitor’s product, isn’t a recipe for success.

Breaking out of the gilded cage – Microsoft’s challenge with Windows

How can Microsoft adapt to a market that’s shifting away from the products which have delivered spectacular profits over the last thirty years?

Update: With the announcement that Steve Ballmer will be stepping down as Microsoft CEO, the future direction of the company now becomes the biggest challenge for his replacement.

Over the last three weeks the news for the personal computer industry has not been good. How does Microsoft, the business that leads the sector, move on from the product which has been its mainstay?

Three stories in the last three weeks have shown how dire the situation is for personal computers, Windows and Microsoft.

Consulting firm IDC’s report that global PC sales had dropped a stunning 14% was a clear signal the PC era is ending.

A Gartner report two weeks ago warned that Microsoft faces a slide into irrelevance as Android device sales dwarf Windows’ numbers and Apple sales catch up with PCs.

Industry commentators Asymco made similar observations about the state of the PC industry noting that Apple takes 45% of all profits from an industry that is in decline.

In the past Microsoft has responded quickly to industry threats, one of the great management feats of the 20th Century was Bill Gates’ turning the company around to meet the challenges of Netscape and the newly popular internet.

So how can Microsoft meet the challenges of today’s much more competitive world, while protecting their impressive revenues and profits?

Replace the management

Steve Ballmer was employee number 30 at Microsoft having been hired in 1980. Since his appointment as CEO in 2000 the company’s stock price has wallowed.

Regardless of Ballmer’s performance, 13 years is a long tenure for a CEO in an industry that has radically changed in the last decade. A new perspective in the executive suite may well help the company leverage its strengths and weaknesses.

Microsoft’s management problems shouldn’t just be blamed on Ballmer however, a stunning Vanity Fair profile of the company last year blamed human resources policies, specifically ‘stack ranking’ employees, for poor performance.

Overhauling the company’s notoriously siloed management would give Microsoft much more flexibility in meeting the cloud and mobile challenges to its business.

Ditch Windows

At the core of Microsoft’s success is the Windows operating system which in 2012 delivered a quarter of the company’s revenue but has reported no growth for two years in a stagnating PC market.

It is still a cash rich business though and as a stand alone entity, the operating system division could still be an attractive private equity investment.

The story of Michael Dell’s attempt to take his company private is instructive as investment companies fight for a stake in a business with a turnover is less than Microsoft’s Windows division and far less profits.

Double down on Windows

The counter view to floating the Windows division is to double down and concentrate on the company’s core business. While the PC industry is fading, the need for embedded systems in machines is growing.

Microsoft though hasn’t executed well with non-PC operating systems – the continued failure of tablet versions of Windows XP is a good example – so it may mean a new management team to guide the company down this path.

Claim the cloud

The biggest cash generator for Microsoft is their business division that includes their Office and Dynamics products. These are most at risk by the market’s move to cloud services.

Paradoxically, Microsoft has a track record on the cloud products having acquired Hotmail in 1997, developed the Azure platform and taking steps to move its business products across to Office 365.

Microsoft’s experience with Hotmail is instructive of the company’s uncertainty with cloud services having renamed the product constantly. Currently its incarnation as Outlook.com indicates further integration with Office 365.

With a focused management, Microsoft may well be able to compete against both Google and Amazon on the cloud by leveraging its traditional market strengths and its army of evangelists, developers and support partners.

Buy Nokia

So far the alliance with Nokia has been underwhelming with Windows Phones being met with market indifference. A purchase of the struggling mobile phone giant would give Microsoft more depth in understanding the mobile marketplace.

A more interesting aspect of Microsoft buying the mobile vendor would be the acquisition of Nokia’s mapping technology. This would give Microsoft an advantage over Apple and give them an opportunity to compete with Google in the still developing mobile and local markets.

For Microsoft, sticking with the status quo is tempting – a business with seventy-three billion dollars income and $17 billion in profits still makes it one of the world’s most impressive businesses.

The risk though is all of the company’s major revenue streams are being challenged by mobile and cloud service and Microsoft have to adapt to a world very different to the one they grew in.

As Gartner have pointed out, the company risks becoming irrelevant in an era of mobile devices accessing cloud services.

The Challenge for Microsoft’s management and board is to find the spark that keeps the company relevant in a marketplace where the company is no longer the dominant player.

Moving to a subscription economy

Customer subscription models are changing many industries which opens up opportunities for smart businesses

One of the biggest changes in business is the move to subscription based services rather than selling one-off, lump sum products. This is affecting industries ranging from the motor industry to software.

Business Spectator has a good interview with Tien Zhou of Zuora on the subscription economy and how it’s changing the business world.

We’re pretty passionate in our belief that every company will be a subscription business in the next five, 10, 20 years. That’s certainly what we’re seeing with digital companies, whether they are technology firms (software, hardware), media and publishing firms, or telecom companies. The ideas of content and access are starting to blend together and we are seeing more and more commerce companies dip their feet as well. So we’re really see this as an across the board phenomenon.

Probably the industry most focused on the subscription model right now are newspapers – subscribers have always been an important revenue stream for the print media and the loss of their advertising rivers of gold means they are looking at ways to get more money from readers.

As Tien Zhou points out, businesses moving to subscription services is an across the board phenomenon.

Yesterday I mentioned the Google Maps connected treadmill, that is a subscription model where the treadmill seller gets money from the initial purchase, but also a revenue stream from the services attached to it.

The same business model applies to connected motor cars or the social media enabled jet engine. The aim is to replace lump sum purchases with lifetime subscriptions.

Getting customers onto lifetime subscriptions has been one of Microsoft’s aims for the past decade as the company realised that software users, particularly those using Microsoft Office, hung onto their CDs for years and increasingly decades.

Perversely it took Google and Apple to show Microsoft how to wean customers onto subscription services.

That Microsoft Office is a good example of the evolution of subscription software, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), isn’t an accident. The enterprise computing sector is currently the most profoundly affected as companies like Google and Salesforce threaten high cost incumbents.

A good example of the changing economics of software is the supermarket chain Woolworths moving onto Google Docs.

With 26,000 seats, the reseller can expect to make $260,000 a year in commissions based on Google’s standard terms of $10 per seat per year.

That total sum is less than the commission a salesperson would have earned for a similar sized IBM, Oracle or Microsoft installation.

A whole generation of IT salespeople who’ve grown fat and comfortable on their generous commissions now find their incomes being dramatically reduced.

Similar things are happening in industries like call centres with Zendesk, point of sale systems and event ticketing with Eventbrite – incumbents are finding their incomes steadily being eroded away by online services.

At the same time agricultural and mining equipment suppliers are introducing big data services for their customers where the information gathered by the sensors built into modern tractors and bulldozers are providing valuable intelligence about the crop and ore being gathered.

The subscription business model is nothing new, King Camp Gillette perfected the strategy with the safety razor at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The razors were cheap but the blades were where the money was.

Microsoft and the rest of the software industry tried to introduce subscriptions in the late 1990s with Software as a Service, but failed because the internet wasn’t mature enough to support the model. Today it is.

Like many things in today’s economy, the subscription model is going to change a lot of markets. It’s a great opportunity for disruptive businesses.

Subscription envelope image courtesy of jaylopez through sxc.hu

Sports cars, the cloud and the need for broadband

How the V8 Supercar races use the internet and networks shows why businesses need reliable communications and the way organisations are using cloud computing.

My relationship with sports cars is similar to horses – I have a vague idea of which end water goes in and where not to stand.

So Microsoft’s invite to the Launceston V8 Supercars to showcase their Office 365 cloud service as the race’s official sponsor wasn’t expected but it was a good opportunity to see how a sports organisation uses modern technology.

Riding the cloud

At the opening media conference V8 Supercars CEO David Malone and Finance Director Peter Trimble described the IT problems the organisation had in the early days.

“We were penny wise and pound foolish” said Peter about their small business system that couldn’t grow with the event.

To properly meet their needs V8 Supercars would have needed a bank of servers, cumbersome remote access software and a full time team of several IT staff for their scattered workforce and constantly changing locations.

With cloud services, they eliminated many IT costs while simplifying their systems.

That staff can now access documents regardless of location is a very good case study of where the cloud works well and understandable that Microsoft wanted to show off what their services can do.

Networking the cars

When challenged about the point of car racing, enthusiasts cite how the sport is a test bed for the motor industry.

The motor industry is one sector leading the internet of machines with one car manufacturing executive recently describing the modern motor vehicle as being a “computer platforms” on wheels.

Eventually we’ll see our cars connected to the net and reporting everything from the engine’s servicing needs to the driver’s musical tastes.

That’s reality in today’s high performance racing, both the drivers and the cars are in constant contact with the crews as sensors report everything from engine performance to the foot pressure the driver is putting on the accelerator pedal.

As continuous data feeds from the cars is essential to the teams the event has its own trackside network with receivers located along the course that are used for both vehicle telemetry and the video feeds from both car mounted and fixed cameras.

Owning the rights

In what’s becoming the future of sports broadcasting, the V8 Supercars organisers run their own camera crews and provide the feed to their broadcast partners and media outlets.

This allows them to control all the rights across TV, cable and online channels.

Having full control of the pictures also gives the V8 Supercars more revenue through signage and sponsorship by guaranteeing advertising placements which wouldn’t be available if they didn’t manage the feed.

Connectivity matters

v8-supercars-launceston-communications-cable — Spaghetti Junction as the various feeds come together

Getting the images out to the media and broadcast partners along with delivering the in car data to the racing teams is major challenge for organisers. The communications centres resemble a giant bowl of cable spaghetti as various groups plug into the network.

It’s no coincidence that part of the deals the V8 Supercar management strike with track owners and governments includes providing fiber and microwave links to the venue.

That single factor illustrates how vital communications links are to a modern sporting event.

Another important factor is that everything will be packed up and taken away. Following Launceston, the entire show is packed up and moved onto Auckland, New Zealand. This in itself is a major logistic challenge which would fail without good connectivity and reliable systems.

v8-supercars-launceston-truck-fleet — the fleet of trucks ready to move on

It’s easy to dismiss the V8 Supercars as a bunch of testosterone driven rev-heads, but the challenges in staging these complex events fifteen times a year shouldn’t be underestimated.

We also shouldn’t underestimate how important communication links are to any business. It’s why debates about the need for high speed internet services are last century’s discussion.

Apple and the argument for hybrid cloud computing

The argument between cloud computing purists and hybrid advocates continues with both sides suffering setbacks

There’s two different philosophies about cloud computing, hybrid and ‘pure’. In recent days the hybrid school hasn’t been doing so well, but the matter isn’t settled yet.

Pure cloud computing means doing everything in the cloud with all your software running over the net with the data stored on other people’s computers and everything is accessed through web browsers.

Hybrid cloud is where some of the work is done on your computer or smartphone with data often being synchronised between the device and the cloud storage.

Most smartphone and tablet computer apps do this and increasingly software like Microsoft Office and Apple iLife have a hybrid cloud computing angle.

Apple’s hybrid cloud service, iCloud, promised Apple users the ability to work on any device – laptop, desktop, tablet or smart phone – with the synchronised with central servers. Every Apple product you own can then access your iCloud data.

Recently though stories in the The Verge and Ars Technica report how Apple’s developers and customers are becoming steadily irritated by the lousy reliability of the company’s iCloud service.

Incumbent software and hardware vendors like Microsoft and Apple are pushing the hybrid idea for a good reason, it allows them to maintain their existing PC and laptop based products while being able to offer cloud services like their competitors.

For Microsoft and Apple, along with companies like Oracle, Dell and MYOB, the hybrid cloud gives them an opportunity to wriggle out of what Clay Christensen called The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Customers actually like the hybrid cloud as many distrust ‘pure’ cloud offerings as they don’t trust the providers or their internet connections. Basically they like to have a copy of their data stored in house.

The problem with the hybrid cloud is that it’s complex as Xero’s founder Rod Drury, one of the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists, said at his company’s conference last year, “hybrid technologies are cumbersome and add far more complexity into software. Cloud technologies are the right technologies.”

Complexity is what’s bought Apple’s iCloud unstuck as even some of best developers struggle with getting their programs to work with it.

All is not well for the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists either, as the shutting down of Google Reader has shaken many technologists and made them question whether the cloud is as safe as they would like.

Added to this uncertainty about the cloud is lousy service by providers, arbitrary shutting down of user accounts and the corporate boycott of Wikileaks – all of which have forced people to reconsider the wisdom of saving all their data or running applications in the cloud.

So the debate between the cloud purists is by no means over and it may well be that some form of hybrid, even just for local backup to your own computer, may turn out to be the common way we use cloud services.

What is for sure though is cloud software is biting deeply into the revenues of established software companies as people find the attractions of running programs and storing data on other people’s computers outweighs the risks.

Like all relatively new concepts it’s going to take a while for us to figure out how to use cloud computing most effectively in our business. The first step is how we manage the risks.

Does Google have corporate Attention Deficit Disorder?

Are Google paying the price of not paying attention to their core business?

The news that Google were releasing a service called Keep designed to store things you find on the web for future reference received a hostile response yesterday.

It seems the company’s dropping Google Reader into the deadpool proved the final straw for many of the tech early adopters who’d invested too much time building their feeds and other digital assets only to find services taken away from them.

This isn’t just Google Reader, various other services are suffering; Google Alerts has become functionally useless while the Frommers guide book franchise is slowly dying after the company bought it from John Wileys.

Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder

Google are suffering corporate Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) where management find a bright shiny thing, play with it for a while then get bored and wander off.

This is trait particularly common amongst cashed up tech companies. In the past Microsoft and Yahoo! were the best examples, but today Google is the clear leader in the Corporate ADD stakes.

Corporate ADD requires a number of factors – the main thing is a big cash flow to fund acquisitions.

In companies with this luxury, bored managers find themselves looking for things to do with all the money flowing through the door and when a hot new product or market sector appears those executives want to be part of it.

So a company gets acquired or a project is set up and the advocate drives it relentlessesly within the corporation, usually with lots of PR and write ups in the industry press.

Then something happens.

Usually the advocate – the manager or founder who drives the project – gets bored, promoted or sacked and the project loses its driving force within the organisation.

Without that driving force the service stagnates as we saw with Google Alerts or Reader and eventually company closes it down.

This has unfortunate effects on the marketplace, users invest a lot of time in the company’s service while innovators in the affected market struggle to get funding as the investors say “we can’t compete with Google’.

A changed perspective

What’s interesting now though is the sea-change in the attitude towards Google’s Keep announcement – rather than dozens of articles describing how competing services like Evernote are doomed in the face of the search engine giant entering their market, most are saying this validates the existing startups’ investment and vision.

More importantly, most commentators are saying they are going to stick with the services they already use because they no longer trust Google to maintain the product.

This is what happens when you lose the trust and confidence of the market place.

One of the mantras of the startup community is “focus” – focus on your product and the problem you want it to fix. That large businesses lack that focus shows how far from being a lean startup they have become.

Google’s real challenge is to regain that focus. Right now they have rivers of cash flowing through their doors but in an age of disruption, it may well be that they could dry up if no-one pays attention.

Ritalin image courtesy of Adam on Wiki Images

Democratising customer service

How a cloud computing service wants to radically change customer service and business

“Nobody got girls on the helpdesk” says Mikkel Svane, founder of online customer service company Zendesk.

Mikkel hopes to make customer service sexy again as businesses find they have to focus on keeping clients happy.

This is a reversal of management thinking of the 1980s where, as Mikkel says, “customer service is a cost centre, outsource it, don’t spend any time on it and don’t let customers steal any of your time.”

Now the internet gives customers to tell the world about a company’s service, the days of outsourcing or disregarding support are over.

Mikkel Svane and Michael Hansen of Zendesk

Cloud technologies are changing how software is used in business, as Mikkel found when he and his partners started Zendesk.

It became very obvious that building something that was easy to adopt, web based and integrated with email, websites. Something easy to use that didn’t clutter the customer service experience.

Something that moved from managing the customer service experience to focusing on customer service.

We built it, put it out there and customers starting coming.

A lot of these companies thought they could never implement a customer service platform. Suddenly small companies found they could compete with bigger competitors.

The appeal to investors

Having customers signing up proved to be a big advantage in Silicon Valley, no-one knew anything about a Danish company, but with local customers starting coming on board US Venture Capital firms understood what the company does.

That customer base proved powerful as Zendesk has to date raised $84 million dollars over four rounds of VC funding and is looking at a stock market float with an IPO in the next few years.

“Silicon Valley has a great tradition of building businesses.” Says Mikkel, “coming to Silicon Valley was such a big step for Zendesk, in taking it from being some little startup to being a real company that could scale very quickly.”

A question of scale

Groupon is a good example, when Mikkel and his team first met the Groupon team the group buying service was a team of four guys in Detroit. Groupon founder Andrew Mason personally signed off on the initial Zendesk subscription.

“What the hell is this company, we don’t get it.” Mikkel said at the time.

Three years later Groupon was the fastest growing company in history with thousands of support agents on their systems supporting hundreds of thousands of products.

Despite Groupon’s recent problems, Svane is proud of how Zendesk helped the group buying service with growth that no business had seen before.

“With Zendesk they got not only a beautiful, elegant system they also got the scale and the trajectory. Imagine if they’d tried to do that with an Oracle database? You’d have never been able to grow so quickly.”

On being a good internet citizen

In the past we talked about platforms – the Oracle platform, the Microsoft plaftorm – today the Internet is the platform.

“We are a good citizen on the Internet platform,” says Mikkel. “Shopify is a good citizen of the internet platform, these type of tools are easy to integrate. We are all good citizens of the Internet platform.”

Having these open system is the great power of the cloud services, they way they integrate and work together adds value to customers and doesn’t lock them into one company’s way of doing things.

The threat to incumbents

Vendor lock in has been a curse for businesses buying software. The fortunes of companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM have been built holding customers captive as the costs of moving to a competitor were too great.

Cloud services like Zendesk, Shopify and Xero turn this business model around which is one of the attractions to customers and it’s why huge amounts of money are moving from legacy solutions to cloud based services.

Another reason for the drift to cloud services is the reduction in complexity, the incumbent software vendors made money from the training and consulting services required to use their products.

Having simple, intuitive systems makes it easier for companies to adopt and use the new breed of cloud services.

Focusing on the business

Mikkel’s aim is to help businesses focus on their customers and products rather than worry about IT and infrastructure. In the long term it’s about helping organisations establish long term relations with their clients.

“Companies today realise that it doesn’t matter how much it matters how much I can sell to you right now, it pales into in comparison of how much I can sell you over the lifetime of our relationship. This ties into the subscription economy. It’s much more important for companies to nurture the long term lifetime relationship.”

Having a long term relationship with customers is going to be one of the keys for business success in today’s economy.

The days of transaction based businesses making easy profits from skimming a few percent off each sale are over and companies have to work on building long term relationship with customers.

Services like Zendesk, Xero and Salesforce are those helping new, fast growth companies grab these opportunities. For incumbent businesses, it’s not a time to be assuming markets are safe.

Ending the era of the computer password

Has the humble computer password reached the end of the line?

Earlier this year, Wired Magazine writer Mat Honan had his entire digital identity stolen from him when hackers cracked his email password and then systemically took over all of his cloud and social media accounts.

Matt writes of his experience on Wired and proposes it’s time to kill the password.

The problem with Mat’s proposal is that he doesn’t suggest an alternative.

The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet. And no one has figured out what will take its place.

Every alternative authentication method to passwords has flaws just as serious, if not worse. Many are plainly impractical.

All of them, including passwords, have the common weakness that those holding the information can’t be trusted either – one of the greatest ways for passwords to get into the wild is when incompetents like Sony give them away.

Security is evolving, in the meantime we need to keep in mind some basic rules.

Use different passwords for different accounts
Only access accounts from trusted and up-to-date computers
Create strong passwords for accounts that matter, like online banking and email
Strong passwords are multiword phrases
Use two-factor authentication if its available
Don’t link unnecessary social media and cloud accounts together
Be very careful

We should also remember that a skilled, motivated hacker will probably break into your account regardless of your computer security. In this respect it’s no different to the physical world where a determined criminal will get you regardless of the locks and alarms on your house.

It’s also important to remember that security is more than just evil hackers; data can be damaged or given away by a whole range of means and people breaking into systems is only one risk of many.

Computer security is an evolving field and while it might be premature to declare the password dead, we’re going to see big changes as we try to lock down our valuable digital assets.

Listener’s questions – ABC Nightlife computers

As a follow up to last night’s ABC Nightlife computers here are some of the promised answers to listener’s questions

As a follow up to last night’s ABC Nightlife computer spot where we looked at who owns our online data, there were a few questions which we’d get back to listeners on.

The entire show can be listened to online through the ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy website and includes some of the issues we’d get back to listeners on, but first an apology.

Bruce Willis never sued Apple

One of the callers Mark mentioned the story of Bruce Willis suing Apple over ownership of iTunes tracks.

It turns out this never happened as Charles Arthur of the Guardian explains.

While Charles can be a cranky bugger, he’s right in this case that the media didn’t a very poor job in regurgitating an untrue story without ever checking its veracity. Luckily it’s not one that I cited in the program.

Protecting your Twitter Account

One of the topics we discussed was the threat of accounts being hijacked and Twitter is one service that is constantly being compromised because of poor policies. An important part of protecting a Twitter account from being taken over is to make sure an extra level of authentication is used by clicking the “Password Reset” option in the Twitter Account settings.

Recording online

Des asked about recording his own message for an audio Christmas card to his friends and relatives.

On Windows computers, Sound Recorder is the long standing built-in app while on the Mac, Garage Band is the built in application.

There is a free third party application available for both PCs and Macs called Audacity which also allows you to record and edit on your system.

US customer service

One interesting thing about the conversation was how many callers criticised the “US mentality” of providing lousy service. This probably isn’t true as most American businesses provide some of the best customer service in the world.

The lousy service from online companies is more a function of the computer engineering and venture capital background of the entrepreneurs setting up cloud computing and social media services, while the majority of these companies are from the US it wouldn’t be fair to brand this as being an American cultural issue.

Our next Nightlife spot is on December 13 at 10pm and we’ll be looking at Windows 8 and what type of computers should people be considering. Hope you can join us.

ABC Nightlife computers – who owns your data?

For November’s ABC Nighlife we look at how digital rights management can affect you.

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For the November segment we look at the perils of digital rights management.

If you missed the spot, the podcast is available from the ABC Nightlife website and the answers to listeners’ questions is available in the following post.

We all value our collections of CDs, books and photos, but what happens when we completely lose the digital equivalents? Tonight on the Nightlife we look at who really owns e-books and computer programs.

Last month a story appeared on the Internet where Linn, a Norwegian lady, lost her entire collection of eBooks from her Kindle reader when Amazon decided she had breached their conditions.

What happened to Linn and her ebook collection?
How did Amazon respond when she complained?
So who actually owns those ebooks?
Is this shutting down of accounts common?
At their big event a few weeks back Apple focused their iPads and iBooks on education, could this happen to schools?
It’s not just ebooks though, can this happen with other online services?
Is this a problem with cloud computing services?
What about the data you’ve saved, do you lose that if the account is shut down?
What about businesses and all the work they go to build a Facebook or Pinterest following, are those online friends the business’ property?

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Rethinking customer support

As the computer power at our fingertips gets more powerful, the tools to help customers are getting smarter and better.

One of weaknesses in most organisations is getting customer service right, good support takes time which costs money and leads many big and small companies to scrimp on support to save a few costs.

In a conversation with BMC Software’s Suhas Kelkar about customer support – Remedy, one of the biggest helpdesk software packages is a BMC product – the discussion turned to how the process has changed in recent years.

Not too long ago we reached for manuals, but those vanished as CDs and then downloads became common. Then we’d call the manufacturer’s helpline or our unfortunate store who sold us the item.

Today we Google a problem to see if we can find a quick solution and if that fails we reach out to our social networks by posting the question on Twitter or Facebook. We may even post the problem to a support forum to see if anyone has an answer.

Only if can’t find the solution anywhere else do we call the support line, for most of us it is the last resort.

In some ways this is a success for corporate cost cutting as most of us call a “helpline” only in desperation as we’ve trained to expect long waits, confusing menus and poorly trained operators.

That model developed in the 1980s – in order to pay rockstar salaries to executives it was necessary to cut staff wages and training costs with after sales support often being the first business area to suffer cuts.

Eventually this started to backfire and the Dell Hell saga as one of the leading examples where the computer manufacturer’s lousy support became industry legend. It’s fair to argue that Dell has never quite recovered from the damage the period of poorly outsourced support did to their brand.

To repair the damage to their brand, Dell adopted a crowdsourced support model where company forums were available for customers to ask about problems with the hope other customers could answer before expensive staff became involved. Eventually other companies adopted this system.

Social media has created a doubled-edged sword for businesses, it’s easier for people to ask their friends for help but it also increases the risk of brand damage if online posts aren’t monitored and responded to.

All of this is forcing a rethink of how customer support works. For businesses big and small, social media and crowdsourcing tools are changing the way we talk to customers and how they can talk about us.

The big data push is also changing customer support as businesses now have the computing power available to mine knowledge bases, issue registers and call logs to identify market trends and weaknesses in their products or sales teams.

For business owners and managers stuck in the 1980s ways of customer support, they are in for a wretched time over the next few years.