Answer Guy Central

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.

Business Change is a beautiful thing. Not always easy, not always obvious, and often painful, business change nevertheless pays off time and again for companies that plan it, enact it, and then look forward to their next form of business change.

Wal-Mart has enacted a business change that makes me cringe. This week, they laid off 11,000 employees with effectively no notice. That’s ugly enough considering the financial position Wal-Mart occupies; certainly there was no emergency that required such an action.

The lay-offs weren’t “real”; the employees were immediately re-engaged as contractors temporarily, while a new company Wal-Mart has designated to handle certain jobs on an outsourced basis interviews the once-and-future employees to re-fill their own jobs.

Does that sound a little bit odd? Wal-Mart knew they were going to outsource the jobs and created an orderly not-quite-a-transfer situation to another company, but laid off the employees first? Maybe it has something to do with the new company being based in Arkansas, just down the road from Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters. Wait a second: maybe Wal-Mart set up that new company themselves and owns it.

That would be OK, but . . . why fire the employees and have the other company re-hire them? Why not just transfer the employees from one company to another?

Assuming Wal-Mart owns the new company, there really is an answer: because to simply transfer the employees would confer longer seniority on them if a labor action involving the issue ever came to pass. Microsoft’s dealt with “you aren’t an employee/whoops, it seems you are” issues; ask them.

I’m not one of those “bash Wal-Mart” types. They deliver goods at a lower price than almost anyone and fill an important place in the US economy. They’re our largest employer . . . by a factor of almost three. I’m not interested in the debate about whether they underpay their employees and provide inferior benefits; business is about handling many different transactions well. I had no issue with their “no more pay checks” position a few months back; only the details were troubling.

But when you fire 11,000 employees after having set up another company to hire them back and demand that the employees give up certain rights to take action against you if they want to get severance pay (and, I presume, have any chance of BEING hired back by the new company), it’s obvious that your actions were specifically targeted at skirting the rules of good corporate behavior . . . and probably the law.

Oh and by the way: the employees that Wal-Mart has outsourced in this particular business change are the “free sample” people. Ever noticed that those people are always the oldest employees? That’s right; it looks like age discrimination. Tuck that into the point about interrupting seniority and the picture just keeps getting uglier.

C’mon, Wal-Mart. Business Change is great, but when you do things like this you only lend credence to the way so many people think about you.

Keeping Answer Guy Central running can be a complicated thing. The job of making business change by putting the right people in the right places to handle our clients’ needs isn’t always easy, and I’m constantly on the lookout for new talent. Last week, I was discussing the state of job search with someone who said:

“Job descriptions are of a person who doesn’t exist, and the applicant’s task is to pretend to be that person”.

While there’s always been some truth to that—employers put out a wish list and potentials employees do their best to look as though they fit—the Internet has made the problem much worse.

Now when you hunt for someone to fill a position at your company you get unlimited space instead of a predefined number of characters, or column-inches, or whatever format the newspapers you advertise in allow. It sounds great, but reality is that it encourages sloppy behavior by the person who write the job description. And that’s not even the real problem.

Now that your advertisement is read and responded to be people all over the world, the pool of applicants has gotten huge. That sounds like a great thing, but just as people who travel on business know how unglamorous business travel is, anyone who’s had to wade through hundreds of applications just to find a handful of people worth interviewing understands what a mixed blessing the Internet is to the hiring process. AND IT GETS WORSE: people don’t even have to spend money on a stamp or stationary any more, so the numbers get blown up by that “progress point”, too.

But those issues are just byproducts of “progress”. Let’s focus on the big problem ruining the could-be-a-great-thing business change: being able to describe the job you’re filling and the ideal applicant in as many words as you like means you’re going to add so many ideals and qualifications to the list that the person you describe won’t really exist. Or he exists, but there are exactly two of him, and they’re both busy.

Now go further: if person filling the slot at your organization is also screening the responses, he’ll be overworked, but at least he’ll have a shot at finding the best person in that mountain of paper.  On the other hand, if screening is handed off to a human resources type or worse yet is done electronically you’re going to be throwing away an awful lot of the best candidates because they aren’t “quite right”.

And again: NO ONE WILL BE QUITE RIGHT

Business Change requires flexibility. By all means, use Internet job boards. But then ask yourself whether you’re using them correctly. Finding the best people for your organization depends on you running the technology, and not letting it run you.

At least this one is over. Stay tuned for what’s next . . .

Last July, we told you about a young lady who, frustrated by the conditions in her rental housing, had posted on Twitter exactly what she thought about her landlord.

The landlord sued her for libel. Today, the case got thrown out.

I’d like to say “I told you so”, but I didn’t; not being an attorney I withheld opinion at the time. Now, with the court basically refusing to get involved one way or the other and going so far as to dismiss with prejudice (meaning the case can’t be refiled) my opinion deserves to be re-stated:

Business Change is hard, but unavoidable. USE TWITTER, but be careful how you do so.

Oh, to be Kevin Rose. The founder of Digg and several other “important” Internet companies has a problem on his hands.

Kevin is a smart guy, and—now into his thirties—no longer running on pure hubris. So I’m encouraged by his acknowledgment that Digg, one of the hottest companies on the Internet about 18 months ago, is about to undergo a major business change.

Here’s the question: When yesterday’s hot new property is today’s also-ran, is business change happening too fast?

Say the words ” social networking ” and even people who aren’t familiar with the phrase have a pretty good chance of mentioning Facebook and Twitter in response. But how many would name Digg? The news aggregation and recommendation service is very much a social networking site, and with our ever-expanding hunger for news so much in evidence it seem Digg is a better place for most of us to spend our time than on Facebook reading Uncle Joe’s latest musings on nothing or on Twitter reading Guy Kawasaki’s words on how brilliant Guy Kawasaki is. But it isn’t working out that way.

So kudos to Kevin Rose for seeing the business change writing on the wall. I wish him luck (although I’m guessing he’s already lost this war).

Now jump in a slightly different direction: five journalists are about to do the reality-TV thing in France, where their task will be to report on the news based only on information they gather on Facebook and Twitter.

I don’t want my news based only on what’s available on social networking sites. No matter how good these five journalists are at mining the social networking big two, not being allowed to also look elsewhere renders suspect the news they report.

Wasn’t it just yesterday I told you about The New York Times’ plans to start charging for their web site? Business Change is a tough sport. Find the balance between reactive and proactive, and keep watching for the next wave . . .

If a sentence falls on your computer screen and you don’t read it, did it make a sound?

In order to do my job, I listen a lot. I talk a lot, too, but if I don’t pay attention to what’s going on around me I really can’t be the kind of coach and mentor my clients need.

So I read. All the time. That’s great, because I really enjoy keeping up on what’s happening in the business and technology communities. Having it be a big part of my job makes everything even better!

It isn’t always easy, and the way I approach the task of keeping up on all that reading varies (as it should). Some things get mailed to me. Some show up in my e-mail or browser. And others come to me through an RSS feed (you can receive this feed by subscribing here) and land in my Droid SmartPhone.

Lately, there’s too much.

I don’t mean there’s too much for me to keep up with. What I’m saying is that there’s too much repetitive noise. On my Droid, I receive 300-400 articles each day, and a similar number of tweets from the people I follow on Twitter. It sounds like a lot, but I drink my own Kool-Aid and just as I put business management systems in place for others I have an information management system in place for myself that lets me get through that without missing much.

But I’m noticing that the 800 or so items each day are actually about twenty items worth reading re-issued over and over again, plus another dozen or so pithy remarks that catch my attention. I like the pithy remarks. But seeing the same story come across my plain of vision thirty times just tells me that there are too many people whose job it is TO TRY AND GET MY ATTENTION, instead of actually having something to say.

Yesterday, The New York Times announced that sometime next year they will start charging for access to their web site. They aren’t talking about what that will look like, other than to say that it will probably involve giving everyone a limited amount of free access, after which they will have to pay if they want to read any more that day/week/month.  They also aren’t saying how much it will cost.

The question now is this: will The Times and the rest of the “serious journalism world”  get us to pay, and will that spell the end of the amateur or underpaid blogging world, or will the opposite occur and we’ll be thrust into a world where more and more repetitive but mostly useless information is what we look at?

I hope paid content wins. You know that old line about “you get what you pay for?”. The words of bloggers are feeling more and more like they’re worth what we pay for them. And while I’m sad saying it, that’s a business change we all need to root for.

Does it matter if Bill Gates follows you on Twitter? You’d best hope not, because as of this writing he’s being watched by just under 200,000 people, but following just 40 in return. Here’s what DOES matter:

Bill Gates started tweeting just yesterday. He had 30,000 followers after fours hours, 100,000 after eight, and now, at approximately the twenty-hour mark, that number has doubled again. So the growth has slowed, as it does for everyone.

Most of the people Mr. Gates follows are not people at all, but charitable foundations. Makes sense; he’s the world’s largest philanthropist, and people watch those who are like them.

Bill also follows Steven Levy and Kara Swisher, technology journalists from way back. I’m a little jealous, since I actually dined with the then-Microsoft-Chairman twice back in the day, but Steven and Kara have stayed on the same path they were on once upon a time, while I went in a different direction.

And he follows Ashton Kutcher and Ashley Tisdale, which makes my head hurt.

Since the closest I’ve come to Bill Gates since about 1993 is when he and I went back-and-forth on LinkedIn last year I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m not in “the 40″. What I’m surprised at is that many otherwise-smart business people who tell me they understand the need for business change and the use of social media still aren’t doing this newfangled Twitter thing.

No, you aren’t likely to score 200,000 followers in twenty-four hours, and the chance of Bill Gates ever being one of yours is slim. But if that many people are looking, then you need to be in the place where they look.

The Business Change of Twitter, and social media. What are you waiting for? Lessons? Help? Guidance?

Please. You know where to look for that.

What do you do when your partner becomes your direct competitor?

You could stick your head in the sand, but I promise that won’t work. You could sue them, but unless you’re an attorney and in that business it isn’t a long-term solution. Or you could employ coopetition tactics.

Guess which one I recommend?

Proctor and Gamble has decided to start selling products directly to US consumers. Count on international expansion soon (hint, hint).

P&G is one of the world’s largest consumer products companies, and this announcement will create business change that many small retailers just won’t know how to deal with. Imagine you sell Tide detergent in your brick-and-mortar store and the company from which you buy the stuff for resale makes it so the people you sell to can get their soap direct, without visiting you.

What if they sell the product at a price lower than you do . . . or even lower than you can? You’re done.

You won’t be done immediately, of course. P&G doesn’t want you out of business tomorrow, but let’s face facts: over the long term if they can keep a greater piece of the retail price of everything they sell instead of letting you grab a share, then they will. And with companies like Amazon.com doing their distribution at an extremely low cost, P&G can get goods to consumers for a few cents less than they now pay at retail and realize a tremendous profit growth.

As I said above, you might try suing P&G to prevent this, but I’m guessing you’ll lose unless you have some contractual “we won’t do that” clause. And let’s face it; you probably don’t. And if you do, P&G will simply out-wait you as the legal process runs its course. You lose.

So what to do?

We preach two things here more than anything else: Business Change, and Coopetition. Business Change is something you’d rather create than wait around for, and coopetition is something you embrace as a whole new form of doing business; for many, it is the ultimate business change. So:

Maybe it’s time to start reaching out to your suppliers and offering them distribution solutions. And do it quick, because you aren’t the only one reading this!

That may not be easy, and you may not have thought of yourself as being in that business. But unless you want to subsist on the people who just can’t wait for shipping (there will always be some of those), or do business only with people who won’t buy on the Internet (a dwindling group), this is one business change you’ll undertake.

You can even ask us for help. Business Change ‘R’ Us, you know . . .

Last week, I told you about an easy way to alienate your customers (feel free to change the word customer to “reader”, “viewer”, “disciple”, or whatever fits). At the time, I promised to reach out to Arianna Huffington and Sarah O’Leary and ask for comment on the decision one of them had made to pontificate in public but disallow comments.

Ms. Huffington, either because she’s Arianna Huffington or because she’s more important than Sarah O’Leary, didn’t reply. Ms. O’Leary did, and her terse response plus the Huffington Post’s allowing stream-of-conciousness on their web site as indicated here suggests that she was the one who decided that you should hear what she has to say but then sit by, mute. (Note the links to Ms. O’Leary’s piece on the left and my Tweet on the right, about a third of the way down the page)

As Sarah O’Leary says to me here, we’re all entitled to our opinions, and if hers is that a communications expert ought to interact that way, then I’ll not contradict her, and I wish her the same luck she wished me.

But as I believe Dr. Martin Luther King would have said had he lived to see the world we occupy in 2010, communications is a two-way street, and we all need to take everyone else’s opinion seriously.

As you try to enact business change in this era of social networking, please keep Dr. King’s ideas of tolerance and openness in your mind, your heart, and your plans.

Who Runs Your Business?

I’ve made no secret about how smart I believe Dilbert creator Scott Adams to be. Today, he’s . . . confusing me. And that’s a good thing.

It takes very little time for most business operators to figure out that nothing stands still, and the greatest skill you can acquire is learning how to understand business change and when it’s times to implement it. So you learn and you tweak and you either hire someone, run things yourself, or you outsource to a company like (for example) The Answer Guy.

At some point, you move to the next decision: were you right? Then, the business change cycle starts all over again.

The answer lies in something simple: business change isn’t something you revisit periodically; practice business change every single day, or you become the monkey.

Ultimately, business change is realizing that you don’t have the answers, You don’t have them now, you won’t have them tomorrow, and by the time next year comes around it’s a pretty good bet that unless you keep practicing business change you won’t even know the questions.

Then again, maybe being a monkey is all you ever wanted. At that point the question becomes whether you want to be the one Mr. Adams is talking about in today’s Dilbert, or a different kind.

You heard it here first:

Two days ago, a Scam looking to steal your Twitter password ran wild. We warned you immediately. Twitter Phishing Scam!

A few minutes ago, I received notice from Twitter of the scam:

TWO DAYS, Twitter? And when you were warned?

Old saying: those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.

Aside from the value that old axiom has with keeping young children in line and in school, it carries a business change lesson, too, and I’ll phrase it as another old saw: if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

Henry Blodget is one of new media’s superstars, and with his business pedigree he has the right to boast. But Henry’s made a mistake this morning in looking at the words of Bo Peabody and laying them out as an example of business sense. And Henry had better be wrong, because his own business will fail otherwise.

Peabody made a large fortune selling early social networking company Tripod to early search engine Lycos in 1998 and has been a venture capitalist since then. And he’s arguing that Facebook and Twitter are doomed to failure. I really do want to agree, but here’s why that’s wrong:

Many earlier Internet properties were never monetized. That includes Tripod, and it includes Lycos and the many other search engines that you’ve likely never heard of. Facebook is making serious advertising revenue. Twitter is . . . going to.

Bringing up the other side of this: advertising revenue isn’t enough.

That argument falls flat when there’s ENOUGH ad money. Sure it’s harder to survive on just advertising revenue in the narrowcasting era (just ask the big television networks), but Facebook and Twitter are about as broad as you can reasonably ask for. Remember the Kim Kardashian / Super Bowl / Paid Twitter story? Look at the numbers again.

Remember that Google was nothing but an advertising company for years, and the other things they are adding that create revenue are just now happening. If Facebook and/or Twitter and/or whomever can get big enough and generate enough ad revenue, there’s no reason to consign them to the same junk heap as Mr. Peabody’s examples.

Today’s Business Change Lesson is this: you will repeat history if put lipstick on your pig. And both Facebook and Twitter could still turn out to be examples of exactly that. But if you see new ways to do business and carry them out, business change will make for real success.

Last week, Ford announced that they’re planning to add the ability to use Twitter through your Microsoft Sync-enabled vehicle. Yikes. I don’t want to tweet from my car, and it sounds like one more way of multitasking that isn’t just distracting, but dangerous.

I like the general idea behind Sync, by the way; distracting or not, Ford’s partnership with Microsoft to extend data services to your vehicle has some good applications, and by going beyond the almost-entirely-safety-related abilities in OnStar Sync gives us some real choice.

But Twitter?

Here’s the idea: assume that whether or not it’s safe—or legal—people are going to Tweet, text, and whatever else from their cars. Now try to make it safer; if you can dictate what you’re saying and never take your eyes off the road, that’s better.

Great so far. But as anyone who’s ever used dictation software knows, it isn’t easy to get exactly what you want to say in order when “in order” is the way you have to say it. Fred Wilson, a well-respected venture capitalist and angel investor with whom I often disagree, says it well in this blog post. And the people who are commenting seem to agree.

Now imagine taking the problems inherent to dictation and trying to jam a coherent thought into 140 characters.

Thanks, Ford. I knew there was a reason I keep buying foreign cars.