Answer Guy Central

Well, it’s happened again: a state has decided to penalize many of the small businesses operating in it by forcing Amazon.com to collect sales tax there. The “how ugly can you make your business change?” culprit this time around is Colorado. It’s just plain not OK. As I told you about as early as February of 2009, when New York led the way in this travesty, the conflict arises when a taxing authority says a company like Amazon.com is “in” their state because the people who sell their goods are located there.

Dig into this, and you can’t help but notice: what’s being flat-out ignored here is that sales taxes aren’t the responsibility of the seller.

States want their revenue, and when you fill out your state tax return you are specifically asked if you made out-of-state purchases on taxable goods that you didn’t already pay sales tax on. If you told the truth (ha!) you’d generate a tax liability for yourself.

That being the case, and given that you pay sales tax to a merchant for them to submit to your state, it seems obvious that it’s the PERSON who is responsible for the tax, and not the merchant.

Essentially, therefore, this kind of land grab by the states is an admission that they need others to collect taxes for them because they believe that their real constituents will lie, and not pay them.

Don’t blame the Amazons of the world. If we enact a national VAT, the issue goes away. If we don’t, the states need to take it upon themselves to find a way to collect that doesn’t put out-of-state companies in a position where they need to act as unpaid tax collectors.

And yes, passing that bill in Colorado, as with the situation that exists in NY, truly did put people out of business. Business Change? No. Business Death.

Ever wonder how your favorite television programs come to be on Hulu? Think about it: the studios that own the rights to those shows don’t like giving them away. They sell episodes on iTunes, they sell DVD collections of their programming, and they sell advertising on the networks that carry the programs, so why give away programming and let Hulu have their content for free?

The truth is, they don’t. When you watch a program on Hulu it carries advertising. Hulu sells those ads and some of the revenue from them goes to the owners of the programs.

It’s Coopetition at its best. And last week Comedy Central decided they didn’t want to play the coopetition game any more. They’ve pulled The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from Hulu. You can still watch the programs for free over the Internet, but now you’ll have to come directly to the Comedy Central website.

Just as putting the programs on Hulu was a business change, media companies taking the shows back and selling their own advertising is a business change, too. Wasn’t that fast?

It makes sense for big companies to do this. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, one of the largest media companies in the world. They have a sales force in place, so why pay Hulu to sell ads (the question is rhetorical)?

Remember, though, that Comedy Central produces their own programming. One company makes the show, owns it, and broadcasts it over their network.  Generally, networks buy the right to air programming produced by others, who retain ownership rights and need companies like Hulu to do sales at the next level.

Business Change is situational, and often time-constrained. The people who watch Comedy Central’s programming might not like having to make an extra stop to find it, but going to another website is really no different than changing channels on your television. And Comedy Central wants you to program them in directly.

Let us keep you up on these business change issues without having to make an extra stop at Answer Guy Central. You can have updates sent to you automatically through the Answer Guy Central iPhone App, or  the Answer Guy Central RSS Feed.

In today’s world, there are a lot of ways to get ripped off. Ever since software became a mass distribution item, companies have sought ways to protect their products from copying by people who hadn’t paid to use it. In the old days that was called “Copy Protection”, but now it’s Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

And let’s be honest: if it was you, you’d look for a way to protect your property, too. Forget the issue of many people truly not understanding that it isn’t OK to copy software (“but I bought it!“); the rampant, intentional piracy of software is and should be a concern for people who get paid for creating and selling it.

But the protection of your rights isn’t an excuse for trampling on the rights of your customers, and even if you think that’s wrong, ticking off customers when you have a different option is just not smart.

Hello, Ubisoft.

If you aren’t a gamer, or if you don’t have kids who spend way too many hours shooting things on TV or computer screens, you probably haven’t heard of Ubisoft. But they’re huge. Ubisoft is one of the largest games companies, regularly turning out titles that sell in the millions of copies. They’re a true consumer-facing success story of monstrous proportion.

And they make using their software not only difficult, but as all of their recent customers discovered yesterday, impossible. No, really: impossible.

Ubisoft’s latest DRM scheme requires that you have an active Internet connection at all times while playing their games. And no, the games aren’t on-line; you buy them and put them in your computer or gaming console. This would be bad enough under many circumstances, such as you being in a place where you have no Internet connection, or temporarily being without one if your connection was not working.

This weekend, though, Ubisoft’s DRM computers, the ones that your Ubisoft games need to connect to when you start the game, change levels, save, or do pretty much anything, went off-line. This instantly rendered all their customers’ games inoperative.

Now remember: the games are installed on your computer. You don’t need connectivity to play them, Ubisoft just won’t let you unless they can constantly check to make sure you aren’t ripping them off. Think about it: each copy of the game has a serial number. They could require you register the game when you install it and then disallow further registrations under that serial number. They could require periodic check-ins an any number of ways, actually. But this scheme is . . . ridiculous.

I’m not a gamer. I don’t care personally. In fact, I welcome a mechanism that gets my kids to play video games less from time to time. But from a business change perspective . . . Ubisoft, c’mon. Why is it that every time you enact business change it just looks like you’re caring less about your customers?

No uprising/revolt massage. Just the one that matters: business is not about beating up your customers. And even with teenagers hopped up on hormones and adrenaline there is a breaking point. Look at your customers and make sure you don’t cross theirs.

Think Customer Service is an oxymoron? Turns out you’re right.

I’ve written on this topic before. From the supposed communications expert who told me that she didn’t want to hear my opinion, to the software company that thought a good way of doing support might be to go for sympathy by telling me that software development is hard, to the company that just couldn’t communicate, the theme recurs anecdotally for me, you, and just about everyone.

And now Contact Center Industry Analyst ContactBabel has made it official: in the USA, in 2009, looking at 6.6 billion call center interactions, consumers felt overwhelmingly that the centers failed to actually provide support.

Well, OK, so customer service is bad. We knew that. The question is . . . why?

It’s difficult to do good customer service even when a company WANTS to. Finding the right people to staff a call center, training them to communicate the way you want them to, and then keeping them trained as both your product/service offering and general business surroundings change over time is a juggling act that even the dedicated and well-intentioned find challenging.  Once the support center becomes viewed as an expense item . . . or even worse, an expendable expense item, it’s over. And sadly, that seems to happen . . . every time.

Customer Service starts out as a way to win and keep business. Usually, as a company becomes successful, and certainly once it starts “answering to its shareholders” customer service goes into the toilet.

Walk into a Verizon Wireless store. Do you want to buy a phone? a Verizon Wireless employee will help you. Do you need service or repair? The less-cheery people in the back wearing what look like Verizon Wireless uniforms have an extra patch on their sleeves telling you what company they actually work for. That’s right: Verizon Wireless won’t trust their sales to anyone but their own employees, but service? Outsourced, right in their own stores, to people intentionally masqueraded as employees.

I’m a business guy. I understand the need to turn a profit and I know how to massage the resources. When business change becomes about that at the expense of doing the things that made your company successful, you’re missing the point. And it doesn’t need to be that way: like preventive health care contributing to overall wellness, real customer service adds to a business’ bottom line.

Next time you’re thinking about your customer service, remember: it’s the most important function in your company. 6.6 billion phone calls can’t be wrong.

Think you can do your own Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ? Think Again. Even Google can’t figure it out.

That’s right, the people who we all look to for SEO approval in practically the way a child tries to please daddy doesn’t do a very good job of optimizing its pages so it can . . . umm . . . find itself.

Google has released a report detailing their own SEO failings. You can download it here, or read what Google thinks about themselves here. Or . . . just read on:

First, let’s be frank; Google’s SEO doesn’t have to be very good; they’re Google. That said, though, the roadmap they provide to what makes good SEO is one that anyone looking to do their own Search Engine Optimization can learn from.

The question is whether you want to do your own SEO, or hand it over to someone like us. Either answer is fine; SEO, like most (not all, but most) of the services we provide at Answer Guy Central’s Virtual VIP isn’t rocket science. But it takes time. LOTS of time. And a devotion that not very many people trying to grow a business can afford.

Oh: and if want people to find you, you have to do it, period.

Read what Google has to say about Google. And then ask yourself if you can afford not to enact good SEO as your very next business change.

Wouldn’t it be great if software was free? Heck, wouldn’t it be great if everything was free?

And a better question: am I talking about “free of charge”, or walking a “Free to Be You and Me” metaphor? Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, thinks software should be free.

Since Mr. Buytaert is in the software business I presume he doesn’t mean that literally. And wow . . . imagine if he did! The software patent question we had a chance to look at yesterday when Apple sued HTC and last week when Facebook somehow won the ridiculous patent 7,669,123 just wouldn’t matter.

What Mr. Buytaert seems to mean is that software itself has no value and so shouldn’t be used as a weapon against the people who use it. In fact, Drupal is free, and you can use it on your web site without paying anyone a penny. On the other hand, if you love Drupal but would like Mr. Buytaert’s company to host it for you, or provide consulting in how to use it best, that’s not free. WordPress, a much more popular content management system, works the same way.

For that matter, Answer Guy Central follows a similar model. There’s lots of stuff we give away, including the words you’re reading right now, and the Answer Guy Central iPhone App. At some point, though, we certainly hope you become a paying client, be it for The Computer Answer Guy, Virtual VIP, PC-VIP, or any of the other services we offer.

Here’s the important question: what, exactly, should be free?

Last year, we did an experiment using a service called Hubspot. As I told you then, Hubspot is an absolutely great way for a business starting from scratch to attract lots of traffic and attention. Note, specifically that I said “starting from scratch”. Using Hubspot requires a commitment that’s just too hard to make if you have an existing web site and don’t feel like tearing it down and starting over.

What’s worse, though, is this: Hubspot’s business model involves holding you hostage. Once you’re in, there’s effectively no way out.

True, your data belongs to you. If you can figure out a way not only to get the information you create and store using Hubspot back out but also to replicate the connections and other important details that make Hubspot do its marketing magic, you are, as they told me when I brought this point up, welcome to leave any time.

But the whole point of using a hosted service like Hubspot (or  Drupal, WordPress, or anywhere) is to avoid the technical overhead. And I promise: if you had the staff and/or expertise to host the software yourself you wouldn’t have opted for the hosted version in the first place.

Mr. Buytaert’s point, on analysis, really means that hosted software needs to give you an easy way out that doesn’t blow up your other business processes. And he’s right. But that isn’t about either form of the word “free”. It’s about companies like Hubspot not creating business models designed to hold you hostage.

If you need help navigating this minefield, you know where to reach me . . .

Last week I made some noise about how ridiculous Facebook’s US Patent 7,669,123 is, and asked you to make noise too. Now, Our friends at Apple are showing us a real-world here-and-now example of why software shouldn’t be patentable under most circumstances.

Let me be clear, once again: software isn’t “unique” unless it does something that can’t be done some other way. By definition, then, the only time software should therefore “infringe” is when it uses exactly the same code to do exactly the same thing as what the Patents and Trademarks people call “prior art”. Apple, in suing HTC (manufacturer of the Google Nexus One Smartphone), isn’t so much defending its work or intellectual property as an “idea”.

Palm will be next. Motorola (they make the Droid) will get sued too, as will anyone who uses the idea of pinch/spread to zoom/widen. Again . . . Apple’s patent on exactly how to implement “multi-touch” might be unique, but the idea isn’t. The idea can’t be patented. Software patents are ridiculous.

Software patents are a business change that benefits no one except the attorneys who get paid to sue or defend against suits. Don’t fall into this trap. Make your next business change a real change.

Here’s a Business Change you need to think about right now: Are you speaking the same language as your customers? I have opinions about outsourcing to far-flung countries, but today’s context has nothing to do with that.

Today being the first day of the month, we were getting ready to send out the monthly Answer Guy /  Virtual VIP Newsletter. We use a popular email management service to send the newsletter every month, and something was going wrong. I used the vendor’s instant messaging application, got a representative on line in a matter of seconds, and . . . well, I won’t bore you with the details of this friendly-but-ultimately-not-productive customer service / technical support experience.

What’s noteworthy is how badly things can go when communications are something other than careful and precise.

After not being able to solve my problem quickly the customer service representative asked me a question: “Do You Have a Program Called Skype?”

Skype is a way of connecting with people over the Internet. Voice, Video Chat, File Exchange  . . . all free, and all very effective and efficient. Yes, of course I have Skype. It happens that I don’t use it from the computer I was working on, however, and assuming she wanted to watch what I was doing my answer was “Yes, but not on this computer. Give me a moment to Install It“.

But that isn’t what this technical support representative wanted. She was thinking that if I did have Skype, it might be interfering with her company’s software. This sounds unlikely to me, but the point is that she had asked me a question without context, and I had assigned one based on my experience.

I’m not trying to blame her for the mistake. I’m also not taking responsibility for it. We were simply not on the same page at the same time, and she failed to control the issue from her end, while I failed to control it from mine.

Wait a minute: come to think of it, this was her phone call with a frustrated customer: I AM assigning blame. Her company had not trained her in precise communications, and we wasted time, I installed software I didn’t need, etc., etc., etc.

Sometimes Business Change is about making sure change only happens the way you need it to. A simple “Be Careful” fits here!

By the Way: Since we’re talking about it . . .  we’d love it if you would subscribe to Answer Guy / Virtual VIP Changes. Just Fill in this box and click!:

How can US Senators be so unclear about the meaning of the laws they write?

Today Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, who not coincidentally chairs the antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked NBC to explain why certain Olympic events, available on NBCOlympics.com, can only be viewed there after you prove you have a subscription to a pay-TV service.

Really?

Let’s see:

• NBC’s ownership of paid-only television channels to augment their over-the-air broadcast stations was approved by the United States Congress. Congress didn’t think approving that was antitrust
• Not all events can possible be broadcast on the free channels; there just isn’t enough time
• Presumably, Mr. Kohl doesn’t believe that Congress or anyone else should dictate to NBC which programming goes on which channels

So if an event is only available on a paid channel, is it unreasonable to make that event available to on-line viewers only if they have those channels?

The question was rhetorical; “no” is the only answer to choose from.

Do I like that I can’t have everything I want for free? Of course not. But the business person in me wants Congress to keeps their hands off the operation of businesses and the way they manage business change.

And for members of Congress to understand their own jobs.

Hmm . . . maybe I’m just cranky that the Olympics are almost over . . .

Who Wants a Patent? Because they seem to be getting handed out for just about anything.

I’ve long believed that in general software patents are a very bad idea. This week the United States Patents and Trademarks Office set a new record for calling something unique that’s just not anything of the sort.

To start, let me state that I’m not an attorney. That said, I’ve dealt with Intellectual Property for a very long time and successfully defended against a trademark infringement claim when my software Uninstall for Windows was sued by the makers of the program Uninstaller. In fact, I got Uninstaller’s trademark invalidated. It was pretty much a matter of explaining common sense in a calm, rational manner to the USPTO.

So when Facebook received US Patent 7,669,123 this week I was dismayed. Patents and the applications filed for them are supposed to describe something unique, and as much as I believe that software is mostly a representation of an idea rather than a thing and therefore shouldn’t generally be patentable at all, Facebook’s patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network” doesn’t really even describe software.

Make no mistake: US Patent 7,669,123  describes the use of software, but it doesn’t actually lay out the software being used at all. 7,669,123 also tells what the use of the software will be, but functionally that use can be described very simply:

“We’re going to take information based on a set of criteria that we believe are important to you, decide what’s important, and show (only) that to you“.

You know, kind of like what the editors and staff at a newspaper do. Not New. Not Unique. Not Patentable.

In fairness 7,669,123 automates that process. And if Facebook described the specifics of the algorithm that they use in their application for what has become 7,669,123 then that specific process, if unique, might deserve patent protection. But they haven’t.

I don’t know whether I’m more upset that the USPTO has misunderstood the very idea of what a patent is, or that Facebook, with 7,669,123 in hand, is likely to start suing any and everyone who automates selective informational displays in anything that might be called a “social networking” environment.

Oh: and the very title of the patent application is not descriptive of what the patent does, which should have been enough to get the application squashed out of hand. The process Facebook describes does not “provide a news feed about a user of a social network”. It provides a news feed about the people the user knows.

If you’re at all concerned about this—and you should be—I implore you to contact the Office of Patents and Trademarks to get patent 7,669,123 invalidated. And if you’re MySpace, Twitter, or another social network and you don’t make big noise about this, well, enjoy the next thirteen years in court.