A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

I’m playing around with ifttt.com and it is intriguing. I remember an earlier effort, yubnub, that I always found compelling. A general script interface to all my Internet data and services so that I can do interesting things across sites seems good. 

I remember the evolution of Lotus Notes. A super general collab platform that let you store anything, write nice scripts and forms on top of it. The generalness of the platform was appealing and a certain set of early adopters went for it. But there were many more customers who didn’t want to create their own collaboration apps, but needed some pre-built apps. And so then Lotus made the “nifty fifty” most popular apps available — email, calendaring, candidate tracking, simple CRM, etc etc etc. And that was good, and more customers bought it. But ultimately Notes got washed out of the market by Microsoft Exchange, for many many reasons. But one simple view is that, while Exchange was a collab platform too (although terrible to code against), Exchange really focused on the high volume apps of mail and scheduling and just made those apps work. And that is all most people really needed.

Competitively the ifttt.com guys need to be very cognizant of cherry picking. While it is great they have hundreds or thousands of canned scripts, I don’t need hundreds, I only need a couple. And that is probably true for most users. And if the couple that people need a common across large groups of users, then some competitor can sweep in and just do those couple scenarios really really well and ifttt.com will remain a niche tool. I’d bet that they will have to build a lot more code on top of their platform to make sure that the top scenarios are really slick and easy to use, to avoid losing users to alternatives.

For instance I can already pretty easily use a wordpress plugin to MIRV content over to twitter and then to facebook. Will I flip over to ifttt.com for this or will I keep using the solution that someone has polished and made fit into wordpress? I suspect I’ll use the one that fits really well in wordpress. Now if the ifttt.com guys wrote the code to provide an ifttt.com plugin for wordpress, that would be interesting…

Nice writeup of Apple’s manufacturing/supply advantage vs the PC OEMs. Reminds me very much of the way Honda and Toyota crushed the American car manufacturers in the 70′s and 80′s — GM in particular had overly complex product lines, cars with a gajillion options. Honda came in with a simple model, no options, and great great quality, and just crushed GM in core markets. Product line complexity comes at a huge cost, Apple is playing this hand well.

Some interesting commentary on Google’s business model by Gruber — a total Apple fan, doesn’t view ads as inherently evil, but says you need to be very respectful of your users. And referring to an original article by Aaron Swartz who says you can’t make things worse for users just to make money.

I don’t know what evil is when applied to technology business models. I do know that I feel very comfortable with my Apple transactions — they ask me for a lot of money, in return they give me a product that is mine to own completely. They give me the option of signing up for services for more money, services where they keep data about me, but it is up to me. It feels like a transparent and respectful model. Similarly, I feel good about my Microsoft transactions — they ask me for money, in return I get a software or hardware product that is mine to do what I want with (excluding Bing which I rarely use, and excluding some of their new online service offerings).

I feel somewhat less good about my Google relationship. I do like and use their products. But the fact that they are “free” is bothering, I know that Google is making money off me somehow, but there is very little transparency around it. Who is looking at my data, what are they paying for it, are there certain things I do that are very high value, are there people using info about me that I would rather not, ?

I don’t know any of this and it makes me kind of queasy. Enough to abandon products that are actually useful? Well not yet — and for search,it is not like there are alternatives that are more respectful of me. But I can’t imagine ever having the kind of respect for and attachment to Google products that I have to products from companies with more straightforward business models.

Kicking myself totally on this one, VMWare has been on a tear. Paul is a great guy, he has been hiring great guys (who wouldn’t want to work with Paul?), they’ve been acquiring lots of interesting assets.

And fundamentally they are on the right side of history. Paul has always been insightful and articulate on strategy and he says it well in this techcrunch piece : “The innovation in how hardware is coordinated today and the innovation in how services are provided to applications is no longer happening inside the operating system.”

This is dead on. You can debate whether VMWare will be the primary beneficiary of this trend versus other cloud providers, but the shift is undeniable.

OK so Amazon’s move against Macmillan was seriously ham-handed and Amazon is still caught up in their own undershorts. Some Amazonians deserve some serious reprimands, this is just not the way these things are handled. Now Amazon has created even more problems for itself.

That said — we are talking about 4-5 days of inconvenience Amazon has caused readers and authors. Stupid but fixable.

As Charles points out, Macmillan is trying to put the screws to all of us big time and for the long run. They are grabbing for more dollars out of out pockets at a time when book costs are heading down. Now, if Macmillan was passing all this on to authors, I might be OK with it, but I suspect it is being absorbed by a bunch of corporate suits.

Who is our real friend here? Shame on Amazon for being so clumsy, but greater shame on Macmillan.

• World’s busiest ports
• Fractal Nature of Legal Systems. Human systems/societies/cultures are capable of pretty much unbounded complexity. It is not just legal systems.
• Kid solves rubik’s cube while playing guitar hero. Ah, youth.
• Why are cheap airlines so cheap. Love the “passengers per employee” stat.

• My Favorite Things Mars. Amusing and entertaining
• Why Nokia and Sony are failing. Succinct. Complexity is a killer.
• Inflatable buttons. Cool, not sure practical.
• Computer Hardware Chart. Periodic table of connectors
• W* house. Your portal for great looking expensive sh$t.
• Ford developing laser ignition. Nice, car engines with laser beams!
• WarrantyElephant. Idea is promising but site useless. I need something that will automatically find the warranty policy for my products and summarize my rights for me — without me having to punch in the data myself. IE something akin to ManualsOnline but for warranty info

Apple’s quarter (NYTimes): “We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding”…”unexpectedly strong sales of Macintosh computers and a surge in iPhone purchases pushed Apple’s profit up 15 percent in the third quarter”…”PC shipments for the industry fell 3 to 5 percent over the last three months. But Apple said it sold 2.6 million Macs in the quarter, up about 18 percent from the 2.2 million it sold in the previous quarter”…”overall gross profit margin grew to 36.3 percent, from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter”…”Revenue rose to $8.34 billion, from $7.46 billion last year”.

MSFT’s quarter (NYTimes): “has been humbled, both by the recession and by problems of its own making”…”Year-over-year revenue and full-year sales of Microsoft’s flagship Windows software dropped for the first time”…”29 percent drop in net income”…”17 percent drop in quarterly revenue”…”warned that people should not expect a major bounce-back in technology spending when the economy recovers.”

Hmm. Apparently the economic downturn is worse among PC buyers than among non-PC buyers.

• FT.com / Comment / Opinion – Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world. Man some good common sense in here.
• Business plans a waste of time. Sounds like your typical entrepreneur would be far better off meeting people and networking than spending time on a plan.  There is probably some minimum level of plan worth getting to, and then after that it is not clear

“It’s time to let the sun shine in on this mess.” via Scott Loftesness: The AIG Firestorm Spreads.

Hear hear.

“It did good work on the collapse of Bear Stearns a year ago, but for the most part it has done a mediocre job of explaining all that has gone wrong with our economic system.” — I’d have to agree, the Journal is not getting it done for me increasingly. Instead they are wasting pages on crappy sports coverage, movie/book reviews, etc. I can get all that content elsewhere.

via Scott Rosenberg�s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Why is the Journal flubbing its biggest story ever?.

Madoff Story Smells Funny | The Big Picture. The WSJ and NYTimes seem to be hinting at this today too, investigators seem to feel that the sheer amount of work required more than one person working on the fraud.  Fascinating.

From Marginal Revolution: Economists Speak:

Hear hear.

From The Big Picture | The Innovator, the Imitator, the Idiot:

“Buffett once told me there are three ‘I’s in every cycle. The ‘innovator,’ that’s the first ‘I.’ After the innovator comes the ‘imitator.’ And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot.”

Great list up at The Big Picture | Bob Farrell’s 10 Rules for Investing — these three really resonate with me:

3. There are no new eras — excesses are never permanent
5. The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom
9. When all the experts and forecasts agree — something else is going to happen

• My Experience at IndyMac: Fraud, Corruption, Criminality. Wow.
• The 6 Laws of Customer Experience — nice, clear, succinct read about how to orient towards customers.

VMware shares plunge on CEO change, slowing growth — seems like a buying opportunity to me, it is hard to imagine a better systems software CEO than Paul Maritz.

Phil Howard – Organic Industry — nice charts, the industry is way more consolidated than I realized. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Ankur Jain: �I Would Like To Address My Dad�s Character�

OK Yahoo could have been a Microsoft division, all of Microsoft’s internet ambitions would have been handed over to them, they would have been able to run semi-autonomously.

Or they can be ripped apart by private equity guys like Icahn — massive layoffs, milking their current traffic levels for cash flow, spinning off parts.

This is preferable? Did Yahoo management not foresee this??