Why is it that the more successful a company becomes, the less able it is to manage that success? Is success the business change that inevitably will ruin your business?

There was a time when anyone who understood anything about either business in general or the technology business in particular would look at Microsoft and swear it was on a trajectory of success that would never end. Sure, that flies in the face of what anyone who’s studied business knows must happen over time, but with so many business changes obviously still in front of them and the amount of talent on their payroll, surely Microsoft was different, right?

Well, of course not. Last week, this article in The New York Times called Microsoft out for their now-over-a-decade run of mediocrity, and it got me thinking: inevitability of the slide notwithstanding, is there a way to know when a company’s slide is beginning?

Let’s revisit Apple’s iPad. I was strong in my technological criticism of Apple’s Giant New Binky. I gave Apple credit for how iPad might be significant if they can pull something together: the ability to create real change in the phone business . . . once the technological and form-factor issues get worked through and the market has a chance to react.

But this big change is in the way the announcement got made; the iPad isn’t ready, and yet Apple announced the product and their marketing and partnership plans. Is this am intentional about-face from Apple’s longstanding way of doing things, or have they panicked? And either way, was it the right choice (as in, carefully thought out and with a plan to manage the business change), or just the beginning of a run down the same path Microsoft took about fifteen years ago—we’re so smart we can’t make big mistakes or be hurt by our small ones ?

When you enact business change, you create business success. When you start to believe the changes you enact will automatically lead to better and better runs of that success, you start down a bad road.

Watch Apple. Watch the iPad. Most important, watch yourself.

Yesterday I came across an absolutely fascinating article about how much your Twitter Follower Count “matters”. It’s conclusion? Not at all. The article is ten months old, so this is a guy who was way ahead of his time in asking the question, witnessed by his reference to Ashton Kutcher trying to be the first person on Twitter with one million followers (he’s approaching 4.5 million as of today). That rate of increase, by the way, is a business change we could all live with.

He came to the conclusion that your follower count doesn’t matter. His point, well-taken as it was, was limited, though: the larger your follower count gets, the higher your percentage of not-real-people “followers” becomes.

A while back, I told you about Kim Kardashian ’s deal to be paid $10,000 per tweet by certain advertisers. I suggested that paying that amount of money to reach 2.8 million opted-in receivers of an advertising message was a relative bargain. Now, in light of the story I read yesterday I ask: what’s the real number of people being reached?

And the answer is: nobody knows.

There are services that will look at your followers and offer an opinion on how many are garbage, but that’s the easy part; if it turns out that 80% of her followers are garbage does that mean that the other 20% actually read what she writes? No; and . . . we don’t know how many DO, and as far as I know there’s no tool that will tell you that.

In fact, even if Twitter wanted to try to answer that question, it couldn’t.

I follow only about 50 people. Their tweets should up on my Droid. I scroll through them and scan for useful information, but let’s be honest: I miss a bunch. AND I’M ACTUALLY ONE OF THE PEOPLE WHO GOES THAT FAR. My fifty people, by the time I pick up my phone each morning, generally create about 200 stacked up tweets; people who follow lots of big names can’t possibly keep up!

Twitter is in no position to say anything meaningful on the subject, so there’s truly no fix. So can you even get a meaningful CPM figure to decide whether paying for access to Kim Kardashian ’s 2.8 million followers is worth it? No.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t invalidate the importance of social networking. Get on Twitter, and wherever else makes sense to you. Follow only people who are genuinely useful to you (ask us for help if you aren’t sure who that is).

And remember that business change, by its nature, is change. So don’t try to apply what you already “know”.

Apple is so afraid of Android, just mentioning it will get your app banned from the iTunes store. Yes, Seriously.

I understand not wanting to promote your competition, so not wanting iPhone apps to mention Android (it’s the software running the Droid, the Nexus One, etc.) “makes sense”. But telling a vendor / partner that mentioning an award their Android App has won is grounds for being banned from the iTunes Store?

OK, here’s the deal: The Answer Guy Central iTunes App mentions Android liberally. If you’re an iPhone user, click here to go and download it now.

And tell Apple what you think of them.

Wow.

Ah, to be Australian. Lower population density, plenty of beautiful places, great weather much of the year, and now a little bit more freedom to use the Internet to download movies illegally.

Hey! And Nicole Kidman is in Moulin Rougue!

OK, so that wasn’t her finest work, and not a great film, but many people disagree with me and at this very moment are trading little pieces of the film across the Internet. Which is illegal. But the Internet is such a wild and flexible place that the question of what exactly is illegal and who’s responsible has gone almost nowhere despite repeated efforts to create an answer. Today, a court ruling in Australia made things a little more clear. Or less. Or, if you don’t live there, had no impact at all.

Here in The States, where the number of people using the Internet and our prominent position in global business and politics makes us ” more important “, we’ve been struggling for years to find the right way to protect the rights of people who “own content”. It’s so complicated that even an intellectual property lawyer couldn’t really explain it, and certainly not before you lost interest. But the short is that when you create a movie (or music, or a book, or whatever) you own it and get to decide who can see it/hear it/read it, and under what conditions.

Or more simply: you pay when you go to the movies or buy a book or music, and whoever owns it gets some of that money.

But the Internet makes sharing those things very easy, and services like the original incarnation of Napster, file sharing libraries like The Pirate Bay, and software like BitTorrent make sharing more efficient and exist so that passing files around can be as simple and efficient as possible.

The Pirate Bay went away last year, when courts in several countries shut them down. Napster, of course, was shut down many years ago. The issue of why is still being debated, though. Napster held copyrighted materials for redistribution, and that’s pretty obviously a no-no anywhere with a developed legal system. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, merely told people where they thought illegal materials might be stored, which if illegal is not the same thing as what Napster used to do. Nonetheless, they’re gone, too.

Bittorent, the best software that’s yet come along to make sharing files easy, has a unquestionably legal purpose, so it continues to exist. But given their non-success to date, people who want to clamp limits on how their property is passed around need somewhere new to go. So why not try to make ISPs, the companies that give us access to the Internet, responsible for policing what we pass around?

Today, at least in Australia, that terribly Orwellian idea has been squashed. Let’s hope that ruling becomes a trend, or we’ll see a whole lot of stories like this one. And I promise: that’s not a business change anyone wants.

What may be the biggest business change of all is finally on the verge of becoming real. Interactive Television, an idea we’ve all known was “big” since way before the Internet destroyed the Yellow Pages and called the model that television stations and newspapers live on into question is coming to a place that actually makes sense.

In a way I haven’t quite figured out.

The Bravo TV channel has announced a deal with Foursquare.com, a web site that tracks where you go, what you do, and who else is there. It’s at least a little stalker-esque, but the idea is fascinating and potentially a way to make new friends in an increasingly disconnected time.

If you followed me on Foursquare, you would have known, for example, that I was with Mick Jagger at the Gagosian Gallery’s opening for Damien Hirst a few days ago. Live. And maybe we could have met.

I’m not going to try and explain Foursquare or similar ideas like Gowalla any further; to be honest they leave me mostly scratching my head. But as the New York Times tells us, the deal between Foursquare and Bravo TV will encourage television viewers to get up, go out, and collect points by making their way from one Bravo-endorsed location to another. Interactive television, Re-imagined.

Think that’s a lot of business change? Me, too. Here’s what I find most amazing, though: since the deal was announced and the Times’ story was posted three days ago, there’s been not one single comment on it. Not One.

Maybe nobody cares. Maybe none of the usual people who read The Times are using Foursquare. Maybe they are but think it’s such an unimportant idea that they couldn’t be bothered to post a comment. Maybe the staff at The New York Times is asleep and not releasing comments on that page Nope, I posted a comment and it was released almost immediately.

Or maybe the Bravo/Foursquare deal is an example of a new kind of business change: one nobody cares about.

Business Change takes many forms. For too many of us one of the forms that’s long overdue is putting a data backup and protection plan in place. Tell the truth: you know someone who’d have a very big problem if their hard drive crashed, right?

As we get more and more of the stuff we do and use into computers and need to get it back out, the issue becomes exponentially more important. This morning I noted a question at Droid Forums that got me thinking: what do you do to protect all that information on your SmartPhone?

As you know, I’m a Droid user. The device truly makes my life easier, 0rganization-wise, or I would have stuck with my old regular-phone-and-PDA way of doing things. And when there’s a problem, like the one the SplashID password manager creates on Android phones, I tell you so.

So I started thinking: what does backup software really do for you, and is it any different on a SmartPhone than on a computer?

To start, there’s a methaphorical difference: backup on your computer means (minimally) grabbing safe copies of all your work files and (ideally) a copy of the way your entire hard drive is arranged including software and its setting, the operating system, and anything else you’ll need to get back up and running quickly after a crash. On a SmartPhone like the Droid, there’s no such bit-for-bit backup, but also no need for one, since the operating system is built in and restores automatically if you ever need to reset your device.

I use a piece of software called MyBackup Pro to keep my Droid safe. It does two things: MyBackup Pro copies my data, and it copies the applications I have installed on my Droid. The concerns I addressed in that forum?: is MyBackup Pro getting ALL my data? The answer is no, and on an Android-based Smartphone, that answer is fine.

Remember that most of what you do on a SmartPhone is interact with programs stored elsewhere; out in “the cloud” you have many accounts with companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and if your Droid crashed, all that data would still be there. So the issue is much smaller: let’s protect your contact data (hmmm . . . also likely to be stored elsewhere . . .), call and texting history, and . . . . that’s about all!

The biggest problem if your SmartPhone needs to be reset is restoring your programs. That can be time-consuming, and who knows what you’ll remember to do when the time comes?

With Google and Android,  the Android store remembers what you’ve downloaded (including the programs you’ve paid for) and allows you to restore for free any time. All you need to do is re-download MyBackup Pro and then restore everything else. It takes literally under five minutes, and the software costs a whopping $5. Total no-brainer.

The larger question is this: what’s it going to take to get you to enact the kinds of business change that your business needs to make a difference? If you are the person I mentioned above who isn’t doing backups, please don’t wait another moment to start doing something about it. The Computer Answer Guy can even help, if you aren’t sure how to go about solving the problem.

But for goodness’ sake: if you use a Droid or other SmartPhone, please start using a program like MyBackup Pro, right now.

It’s true. Mick Jagger and I were rubbing elbows a couple of nights ago at the opening of the new Damien Hirst exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find Sir Mick at this event, since he’s one of the very few people in the world who could afford to purchase Mr. Hirst’s art. Sadly, I am not one of those people.

I don’t think Mick actually bought anything, despite being led around personally by Larry Gagosian, who himself may or may not be able to afford the art that Mr. Hirst produces. (To be fair, Larry Gagosian lives in a very expensive townhouse in Manhattan when he isn’t at his even more expensive property in the Hamptons, so maybe he can afford Hirst’s art.)

But this is a story about business change, and now I’m going a step deeper: Damien Hirst is a very wealthy man himself, and I don’t believe he can afford to buy his own art!

Huh?

Here’s the thing: Damien Hirst, if you aren’t familiar with his work,  produces art that can only be described as self-indulgent. Diamond-encrusted skulls, solid-gold-adorned bull’s heads in pressurized-gas environments. And at the event I attended, the unveiling of a thirty-foot long piece of wall art made of gold and holding—I’m not kidding—thirty thousand mid-size to large diamonds .

It’s both garish and, in its way, beautiful. And my immediate thought was “those can’t be real”.

The diamonds are manufactured rather than natural, and I can’t speak to their real value, but if you conservatively estimate their value at $1,000 each that means the diamonds are worth $30 Million. The gold case weighs many pounds, of course, and you have to believe that Mr. Hirst’s genius carries its own price tag, so let’s say that this piece has to be worth at least . . . oh . . . $50 million.

I sought out a person I know who can speak to the way the art business works, and asked: can Damien Hirst possible have enough money lying around to buy the raw materials for something of this magnitude?

The answer was: it doesn’t matter. Damien Hirst, or his benefactor(s) . . . Larry Gagosian? Mick Jagger? . . . go to a bank and put up the art itself as collateral for the value of its components, before that art is created.

You didn’t think artists were all still starving for the sake of their art, did you? Art is a business too, and this is a business change that makes sense. I mean seriously, what’s the worst thing that happens? A Mick Jagger – like buyer never materializes and the bank disassembles the exhibit and sells the gold and diamonds on the open market?

Don’t ever close your mind to new forms of business change. It’s everywhere.

By the way: my very short time with Mick Jagger tells me: he’s a nice enough bloke.

Yesterday I shared my thoughts about the Apple iPad. It’s the most-discussed business-slash-technology issue in years, and good or bad, bright future or dull, people are talking about it; on Twitter, the iPad was mentioned over a half-million times in the twenty-four hours after its announcement.

I believe the success of the iPad isn’t about its technological guts, nor even about whether its high sexiness quotient gets people to buy it; the iPad will sink or swim on the business relationships it creates or changes.

Suddenly struggling to maintain some voice, I present the Amazon Kindle. It’s the reigning delivered-paid-content champion, and many people with opinions about the iPad have pointed out that Apple is going after Amazon.com’s lunch with their new tablet. Apple even went so far as to demonstrate their new deal with The New York Times at the iPad introduction.

It’s going to be difficult for single-purpose devices like the Kindle to remain relevant when we can do everything from one. I can already read e-books on my Droid, for example, as can iPod users on their phones, so why would I need to carry a Kindle?

Amazon recently announced something that could impact the answer to that question. Last week, the Internet’s largest retailer started paying publishers and authors a higher portion of the revenue they collect when Kindle-based copies of the books are sold.

While you as the reader probably don’t care whether the money you spend goes to the author or the distributor, authors care a great deal. In turning on this business change, Amazon is doing what they can to keep the publishing community in their camp. Apple, notorious for ruling the iTunes store—and that’s where they sell books, movies, and all other forms of content in addition to music—with an iron fist, will have to decide whether they need to change the way they do business.

The iPad’s survival depends on Apple making the right decision. What business change do you have to get right to ensure you’re still with us next year?

Are they kidding?

OK, no, they aren’t. Apple’s new iPad has the potential to be at the center of the biggest business change ever, anywhere. And the way Apple announced the device yesterday is all the proof you need of that. So the question is: will it work?

Let me start as I sometimes do by tipping my hat to David Pogue of the New York Times. As usual (I’m so bummed that the phrase “as always” no longer applies), David spoke as the voice of reason: we really haven’t seen the Apple iPad in action or put it through its paces, and in some regard should withhold judgment. Fair enough. But it’s exactly that point on which the iPad needs to be judged.

So, technical reality: The iPad is nothing more than a giant-sized iPod Touch. Let me say as I have before that I think the iPod touch, though not my cup of tea, is an amazing device. But using an iPod Touch isn’t the same as using a computer for the simple reason that you have to back out of whatever task you are involved in whenever you wish to start another. It seems that the iPad will “save your place” in a way that the iPod Touch doesn’t, but the overall experience is . . . clumsy. This is no Macintosh. It’s not even as good as a Windows machine for getting serious work done. No matter what Apple tells us, the iPad is not a “real computer”.

Take that and reduce the issue to this: when you buy an iPad you are getting an iPod Touch at approximately twice the price. It has a big screen, so that may be worth it to you. The geek in me stops right there. Now let’s talk business change.

If you add $130 to the price of your iPad, it will also become a phone—or once again, a giant-size version of another Apple product, the iPhone. Now we’re getting somewhere. Forget about how you won’t be able to hold this thing up to your ear, and the became-ubiquitous-way-too-fast MaxiPad joke; add a Bluetooth headset, and you have an iPhone. I’m not sure many people will want to carry their iPad with them 24/7 the way we carry cell phones and SmartPhones, but time will show us the answer to that question. Here’s what’s amazing, and may represent real business change in a way that Google’s Nexus One fails to: there’s no contract.

That’s right. $130 buys you a phone, and if you choose to buy a GSM model you can—in theory, anyway—activate service with whatever carrier you want, pay as you go, deactivate service, and switch carriers whenever you wish. This is a big deal; it will makes business change for Apple, cell phone companies, and you, and the price is reasonable, if not great. In other words, you pay for the device up-front and add the phone instead of your phone carrier subsidizing the phone and owning you for two years.

Here’s that “how do we judge the iPad right now?” moment: Apple hasn’t quite figured out how any of this is going to work.

Notorious for never pre-announcing products, firing employees who leak information, and having new products on sale immediately after they are announced, with the iPad Apple has told us about its new baby months ahead of the device’s actual availability; best estimates are that the iPad will be available in March or April. That’s what’s huge about the iPad: you can’t have one.

In fact, Apple’s web site says they haven’t even received approval for the iPad from the FCC. They can’t sell you one yet. Technically, they can’t even do much testing. The iPad as it’s been described in the only version that (might) matter doesn’t exist!

So there you have it: the Apple iPad is an expensive iPod Touch that you can’t have, and that may make for huge business change one day—but not in the ways Apple is talking about. To be frank, the iPad feels like not just a giany iPod Touch, but a giant scam.

I’ll be keeping my Droid.

I’ve been known to pick on Michael Arrrington. I think he’s a whiny self-important blowhard whose words are often not worth reading. Also, I’ve said as recently as last week that blogging may be in trouble. Today, I wish to compliment Mike, and give you an example of when blogging is the most useful tool anywhere.

A few days ago, Harman Bajwa was quite unpleasantly surprised when he found that Facebook had taken away his page. Why did Facebook do that? Because Harman’s given name matches the name of a big company, and they had claimed that he was violating their trademark.

Umm . . . no.

If I wanted to claim /pepsi as my Facebook page, or if I registered pepsi.com as an Internet address, then Pepsico would have a valid reason to grab their property from me. Even if I was a fan and saying only nice things about them, disclaiming any official links between us, and not making money, Pepsi would have every right to say I was using “their” name.

Unless, of course, my name was Pepsi.

Back to where I started, now: Facebook has given Harman back his page, and two interesting things crop up: Mike Arrington helped make it happen, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now friended to Harman.

Facebook did the right thing, and quickly. Since most newsworthy stories seem to be bad this is now a non-story, right? Yes, unless you simply want to point out that Facebook is a good citizen (this time). And no lawsuits were filed! Are you listening, Facebook PR Department?

Or unless you need a lesson in the way social networking works, and why you need to be on top of the techniques and issues that drive it.