Broadcasting is dead; everything is about narrowcasting

Despite getting The Computer Answer Guy in front of a lot of people both through the radio and Internet and via CBS Television’s Up To The Minute overnight news broadcast, I was narrowcasting, and I knew it. I had no expectations of gazillions of people being aware of me, even being on national television, since the crowd at 3:36 and 5:36 AM is . . . thin, both in terms of numbers and demographic makeup.

Fast forward to now. When I write these words I’m certainly narrowcasting. I’m read by between 8,000 and 10,000 people each month. But here’s the funny thing: Being in that range actually puts Answer Guy Central’s traffic in the top 3% of all web sites.

Does that make me successful, or a failure? It depends on how you look at success. As a media company, one dependent on advertising revenue, I’d be in trouble. But as a small business promoting our business consulting and search engine optimization services, 10,000 monthly visitors keeps the phone ringing.

I bring this up because in a world shifted from broadcasting to narrowcasting, business change requires that you be able to recognize that change as it goes on around you.

Take a look at this article from Computerworld. It’s on a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention in the mainstream press. Computerworld, when I was more familiar with them back at about the time I had that broadcasting/narrowcasting conversation, circulated around 500,000 printed copies each week. And today their reach, compared to Answer Guy Central at 3%, is huge. In fact, at approximately .05%, Computerworld’s traffic is huge compared to almost anyone’s.

So tell me: Why is there so little social sharing of that article? Here, three days after that article getting posted, are the statistics for re-sharing via social channels, taken directly from the article, and similar statistics from a one-day-old article published here at Answer Guy Central:

Notice that Computerworld’s total “shares” for a three-day-old article are about four times the amount of shares we have here on a one-day old article. But then remember just how much larger Computerworld (back to that media company point) is than we are.

So What’s up with that?

Sharing only happens when you feel connected to the person or company you’re sharing with—or for—that’s what’s up. When Chris Brogan writes something it gets shared a lot. When I write something, my engagement can’t touch Chris Brogan’s, but it sure looks like I’m blowing Computerworld out of the water.

Which brings me to Mommyblogging.

Nuke the cute nomenclature if you prefer; Mommyblogging refers to media creation by smaller entities that nevertheless attracts traffic and advertising revenue. And it seems that mommyblogging is making some (women, presumably) some pretty healthy incomes.

This is a turn-conventional-wisdom-on-its-head business change.

I’ve been in business a long time, and on the media side of things have been both producing content and selling it through various channels for over twenty years. And advertising revenue is almost always tied to volume of traffic; it’s the reason that Superbowl television commercials cost so much.

When advertising is less expensive it’s typically because it’s been sold as a more speculative “sponsorship” deal. For example, Citicorp pays the New York Mets $20 million per year for right to call the stadium where The Mets play baseball “Citifield”. How many people ever see that moniker? How many realize that a huge bank is the naming partner? It’s difficult to say. Why? Because you can’t value the deal simply by counting the three million or so annual patrons of New York Mets baseball games and the eighty million or so viewers of New York Mets games on television. Citifield is Citifield all day, every day, and the Mets, in selling the naming rights to their stadium and Citicorp in buying them, used different (and no doubt, differing) math than a simple “83 million people see this advertisement, so you’re paying 24 cents per impression”.

Mommyblogging is like that. Advertisers are buying impressions, because advertisers are always buying impressions. But they’re also buying mind share. Mommybloggers have a relationship with their readers, and so their readers are more likely to engage, just as Answer Guy Central readers are more likely to tell people about what we write here than Computerworld readers are.

As you plan your business change, and ask yourself about such esoterica as the right way to use social networking, I hope you’ll keep engagement in mind. And of course, if you want help crafting your engagement and social networking plans, you know where to reach me.

Yes, that 60 Minutes. A few months ago the several-decades-old, started-it-all television news magazine created a Google Chrome App to make watching the TV program on-line as easy as possible for you. Then yesterday, when a new version of the Chrome Internet browser hit my computer, the 60 Minutes App became a privacy and security hazard. And Google’s browser caught it, and stopped 60 minutes from stealing my browser history.

Sort of.

The first time I started Chrome after yesterday’s update, I saw—just for a moment—this warning message:

That warning disappeared from my screen as quickly as it showed up, and has continued to behave that way each time I’ve started Chrome since the update. Interesting that Google throws a dialog box with two options at you but that the dialog box disappears so quickly you can’t make a selection, don’t you think? It’s almost a “press any key to continue” situation!

I figured out how to click that re-enable” button, and here’s what popped up next:

EXCUSE ME?

Thank you, Google, for having my back on security, by disabling a piece of software that had decided to steal my data and violate my privacy. And while I’m not happy that I had no control over the process until I Computer Answer Guy‘d it up, at least you had my back. But 60 Minutes . . . seriously?

This is not a business change you want to emulate. Dear 60 Minutes: If you want your customers’ viewers’ private data, you need to ask for it.

On the user side, there are some simple lessons.

First, please keep your browser software up to date. Odd as this might sound, Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla are the best friends you have in the privacy game.

Second, whatever you think “privacy” is, the sad reality is that there’s really no such thing as private information.

Finally, Computers are too hard. They just are. If you want to avoid issues like Spotify destroying your remote access, there’s a simply choice: Let The Answer Guy Manage Your Computers For You.

And hey, 60 Minutes? Stop Stealing Peoples’ Data!

Maybe Warren Buffet is right to use Internet Explorer. Oh, that crafty guy!

We have three major themes here; Customer Service, Search Engine Optimization, and most broadly, Business Change. All of those are general enough that I have a lot of fodder to pull from; especially on that business change topic, finding things to write about is rarely a struggle for me. But some themes keep showing up.

The Music Business is one of those. As I write this post, there are twenty articles at Answer Guy Central that contain the phrase “Music Business” (you can see them by clicking the link). And when it comes to the idea of customer service, well, all you need to see how important I think great customer service is to your business is a visit to The Answer Guy’s Verizon Wireless Customer Service Wall of Shame.

I just took a close look at the Wall of Shame for the first time in a while, asking myself which of the examples of awful customer service was “the worst”. Nissan of Manhattan Customer Service, our very first Wall of Shame enshrinee, was pretty bad. and Verizon Wireless Customer Service was so bad it was almost comical; we did rename the Wall of Shame in their honor, after all!

But the absolute worst customer service example on our customer service wall of shame belongs to A&E Factory Service Appliance Repair. A&E’s customer service is so bad that when I was faced with seeking repair for a clothes washer this week I thought first about replacing the washer instead just to avoid the possibility that A&E might be involved.

Instead, I have a great story.

I visited PC Richard, where the washer had been purchased about ten years ago. PC Richard is a small appliance store chain that resisted the urge to get huge—and remains in business, probably as a result of that decision. The washing machine market has gone though some changes that make replacing the misbehaving washer a challenge, so I agreed to have PC Richard send a repair person.

Things didn’t start well. PC Richard couldn’t give me a time window for the repair visit until the morning of the service call, and by about 10:30 AM I hadn’t received the promised telephone call. I contacted them, and found out why; the PC Richard customer service agent had my phone number wrong.

But from there, all was . . . great!

The person I spoke with fixed my record, told me that I should expect the repair person between noon and 4 PM, and when the repairman showed up exactly at noon he was an actual PC Richard employee and not an A&E subcontractor. Or at least he had on a PC Richard shirt, which in the “perception is reality” game is a big piece of the puzzle (by the way, “perception is reality” is a big theme here, too, and Answer Guy Central’s Search Rank for that well-known phrase is similar to how Google sees us for business change):

It only got better from there. When the PC Richard repairman recommended that I reconsider my plans to repair the washer, he also declined to charge me for his service call. He went so far as to contact his dispatch center and speak with them until they agreed that I needn’t pay for him having shown up, and when they resisted he told them that since they had screwed up my phone number and inconvenienced me, it was the least they could do to make things right.

I never asked for that great customer service, by the way; PC Richard’s guy just delivered it on his own.

But back to that other business change topic. The music business is one that’s undergone tremendous business change in a (not-really-all-that) rapid manner. My favorite “real business change” story was when Neil Young called piracy the new radio. And maybe it still is. But yesterday The Counting Crows, no sales slouches themselves, went past a theoretical discussion of piracy, releasing four of their songs from their latest album via BitTorrent, for free—and in the process legitimized BitTorrent as a file sharing technology for the next time a government agency tries to shut it down.

As Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz points out, ‘It’s not just about getting music to the people who would buy it anyway — even though that is, of course, very good—the hardest thing to do is make new fans.’ That’s real business change.

All of this was running through my head today, so you can file it under “ramblings of a business consultant“. And in case you missed it, yeah, this piece was really all about search engine optimization and long tail marketing.

Want to talk? Reach me here. And remember: in both customer service and other business change issues, honesty works.

Thinking different pays off. It’s a lesson that applies to many parts of business change.

Perseverance pays off, too, but perseverance can get in the way of thinking differently, so as business people we need to find, but also constantly be re-evaluating the line between staying the course and business change.

Last week, Stephen Dubner at Freakonomics laid something out that illustrates this—and that I’ve said for years.

You Aren’t Paying Your Employees Well Enough

In the zero-sum game that business often feels like, the idea of giving more money to your employees or contractors sounds crazy, right? You should pay your people only as much as is necessary, so you can keep more for yourself (or your shareholders)!

No.

As I pointed out in my comment at Freakonomics, this is one of those amazing “think different” issues that we can debate forever. Here’s my very real experience on the matter:

PC-VIP, our fixed-cost business computer support service for the SMB space was conceived from day one with exactly this thought in mind. We hire contractor/technicians at a rate that’s about 2.5 times what the typical independent computer geek makes working for himself.

Those folks are loyal. We don’t lose them to competitors, and they don’t try to steal the clients we assign them to.

The idea is very much like the becoming-more-common “unlimited vacation” policies that companies are starting to adopt. Old-school thinkers believe that to be a a recipe for the the abuse of benefits payers, but smart business people see the truth; people with unlimited vacation work to get their jobs done, not to satisfy a clock, AND tend to take less vacation in protection of their jobs. Oh, and there’s no legal/financial issue over unused vacation time.

That’s thinking different. That’s business change. And it works. For realsies.

Perception? Reality? Foxconn overworking and underpaying employees in their Apple iPad sweat shop? Funny; their employees don’t see it that way. But manufacturing in China is different from your business in the USA; Foxconn’s business change strategy is different from yours.

Business Change is difficult; it can take a real genius to get you think different—and even more strength to actually do things differently. Case in point: Have you ever considered simply working for free?

Speaking of perseverance and business change, Google sees Answer Guy Central as ranking this high for search engine optimization on the phrase “business change” (and the use of both words without the specific phrasing and “business change”):

Want to know how perseverance got this little web site so highly ranked for such general and widely-used phrases? Contact me here.

Bing is changing what you see when you use them to do your searching. And Google, I hope you’re paying attention, because the new Bing gets it right.

If you take a look at this article from The Washington Post, you can both see how the new Bing will look and get an exhaustive analysis of the changes. For my part, I’ll say that the new Bing just plain makes sense. Search results are search results, your social recommendations are there but separate, and of course, advertisements are included—and segregated.

Microsoft, you’re getting smarter. I still don’t know why you paid so much for Barnes & Noble NOOK, but irrelevant, you are not.

Well, maybe not that smart. Bing has way too low an opinion of my importance as “Yablon”:

I’m not entirely surprised to be absent from page 1 of Bing. Google has me at position #8, and they’ve always had a way higher opinion of my importance to people searching for my surname than Bing has. But when Bing announced their upcoming changes to the way search results are presented I started playing around, and if you look at the image I’ve included here you can see something interesting. Sure, I’m still Yablon-non-grata, but that isn’t it. Take a look at the ads on the right of my Bing search. How is it that even in a search for which I’m invisible all of the paid advertisements are about either “computer care” or “answer guy”?

Bing, it seems, is getting pretty smart in more ways than one.

I’m still not a fan of Bing Editor’s Picks, for reasons similar to how I feel about Bing Rewards; search needs to be open; I’m never going to trust Bing employees or policy to decide what’s important to me (see my thoughts on Flipboard).

But it’s clear that there’s real business change going on at Microsoft. The folks in Redmond aren’t just getting into new businesses; Microsoft is changing the way it does business. Could it be that Microsoft is grabbing the long tail?

I’m not sure I’ll actually switch from Google to Bing; that’s a business change that I would find pretty difficult—for reasons that don’t even have anything to do with the search results you get from either. But I’m thinking about it, and unless Google adapts, it could happen. Bing, I salute you. Now if only you had as high an opinion of the way we do search engine optimization as Google does.

Real business change, and from a search engine!No wonder Warren Buffet uses Internet Explorer.

You have part of my attention – you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

Whether Zuck ever uttered those words or anything like them doesn’t matter, but during Facebook’s pre-IPO road show this week, young Mr. Zuckerberg made a even bigger statement without ever opening his mouth.

Horror of horrors, Mark Zuckerberg wore a hoodie to a meeting with a bunch of guys in suits.

Let’s pretend for just a moment that Hoodiegate matters. Let’s ask, was Mark Zuckerberg thumbing his nose at the Wall Street establishment, which would be, well . . . rude? Was Zuck specifically sending a “I’m more important that you” message? Or was he simply being young—and disconnected from social “standards”?

And yes, I’m aware of the irony of that last example—wherein the CEO of the world’s largest social network has no social graces.

Now let’s move on to the real point: none of this matters one bit. Whatever his reason was for wearing his standard uniform instead of the uniform preferred on Wall Street, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care what anyone else thinks—and doesn’t have to.

None of this is even worth talking about, except for the parts that have to do with societal and business change. Parse the now-infamous words of Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter:

“He’s actually showing investors he doesn’t care that much; he’s going to be him. I think that’s a mark of immaturity. I think that he has to realize he’s bringing investors in as a new constituency right now, and I think he’s got to show them the respect that they deserve because he’s asking them for their money.”

If you think Pachter’s correct, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Zuckerberg doesn’t have to show anyone respect, and much as I believe that A) Mark Zuckerberg is the wrong guy to lead Facebook as it moves forward and B) should not have the amount of operational control he’s being handed in the stock filing for Facebook, to suggest that he had to dress better for a meeting with a bunch of people he has no need nor desire to impress is just talking like a person trying to pump up his own importance by clinging to an outdated status quo.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about status quo. And neither should you.

Mark Zuckerberg is smart enough to know that even he can’t out-negotiate the President of the United States; when he met Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg put on a suit.

And not that I enjoy saying nice things about Mark Zuckerberg—or Facebook—but one that is incontrovertible is this: Facebook has created real change.

As the issuance of Facebook stock on the public market approaches, by all means be concerned that Mark Zuckerberg has the authority to drop a billion dollars on nothing more than his say-so on something as inconsequential as Instagram. Recognize that Facebook should be a little bit more concerned about the threat from alternatives like Google+ . Rant, if you like, about the brashness of young Mr. Z for wearing a hoodie to a business meeting with people he can buy and sell before lunch on any given day. Ask, even, whether that behavior is up there with texting during sex or texting during a meeting, right in someone’s face.

But please don’t get caught up in debates about hoodies. Mark Zuckerberg is simply not playing by anyone’s rules but his own. And he doesn’t need to. And that’s business change.

Hoodiegate:  it’s almost enough to make me question my oft-repeated statement that older people are smarter than younger people.

Flipboard is the future of journalism. Here’s how I know that’s true: I’ve just installed the Flipboard App on my Galaxy Nexus SmartPhone, hate it, and I’m still going to be using it.

The journalism wars are over. The bad guys have won. Go Home.

Flipboard, long a staple on iDevices, isn’t even supposed to be available for Android. It’s part of the pre-installed software package on the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S III, and was supposed to be an exclusive on that not-yet-available device for some months. But Flipboard for Android has leaked and is easily available.

In the image at the top of this piece I show you both Pulse, previously the closest thing to Flipboard on Android devices, and Flipboard itself. You may or may not feel that the Flipboard interface is superior to Pulse’s presentation, and you might catch on to the fact that in Pulse you get to select your specific news sources while—unless you dig deeper than most people ever will—Flipboard feels like it’s the sole curator of broad categories you select—and hate that.

But even seeming as though it’s cut you off from choice, Flipboard will  probably make you feel as though its seeming lack of user-configurable options—or perhaps because of that—is just . . . better.

Now let’s talk about those “bad guys”.

Since the earliest days of the Internet, one of the ideals that’s been espoused over and over is that on the Internet you have choices. You can pick where you get your news, when, on what kind of device, and. Flipboard ends that. Use Flipboard, and you’re probably going back to a time when somebody else decided what news was important for you.

Flipboard is the Internet equivalent of the Eleven O’Clock News. Sure, you still get to decide when, where and on what you read your Flipboard-icized content, but whereas Pulse and every other news reader I’ve looked at lets—demands, actually—that you decide where you get content from, Flipboard wants to be your editor.

I’m truly conflicted about this.

Flipboard is ridiculously good. It looks great. It works in a way that just plain makes sense. And once you figure out how to customize Flipboard you’ll find that it’s uncannily adept at showing you what you want to see, in the order you want to see it. But there’s that “It has no options” feel to Flipboard.

And for better or worse, that’s the point.

Does your news reader really need to have “options”? Flipboard isn’t productivity software, like Google Drive. And although I still say I find Flipboard to have an obtuse and unintuitive set-up, once it’s running Flipboard is easy (this is no “computers are too hard” issue). And presumably, Flipboard—at least once you can get a copy legitimately—won’t require you to make upgrade decisions.

No, the issue with Flipboard is that it’s so easy to believe it to be uneditable that for many users selecting Flipboard will amount to giving it de facto control over what news you see.

Which is great news indeed if you’re Flipboard. Business Change? You betcha! Flipboard can become the one and only news outlet you go to.

But that brings us full circle to an issue that I’ve talked about quite a few times. As a huge aggregator, Flipboard can become part of the problem with too-much-to-consume journalism, where opinion passes as fact. And more than likely that change will happen without Flipboard ever intending it!

Half-baked ideas aren’t journalism. If you work for the company you write about, that’s not journalism, either. Aggregation? Not the real deal, despite what AOL and The Huffington Post believe.

But Flipboard sure is one pretty App. Go get it. And then, before you rely on Flipboard to tell you what you need to know, please think.

I talk about the three computers I use as though that’s all there are, but of course I really use many more computers than that. Not including my SmartPhone, I also use cloud-based servers for hosting e-mail and the web sites that make up Answer Guy Central, for storage, and even for managing my appointments.

Those servers are improved so often that talking about their update schedule is almost unmeaningful. And they need to be updated; any server manager worth his salt will tell you that as our traffic grows, the Internet evolves, and components inside these heavily-used mission-critical machines just plain wear out a two-year replacement schedule is about as far as you want to push things.

And when you install new computers they come with updated operating systems.

On those two computers celebrating their birthday today, I run Windows XP. When I put those computers in service, Microsoft’s current version of Windows was Vista, and Vista was, frankly, terrible. I actually paid extra to downgrade the computers from Windows Vista to Windows XP.

Windows 7 supplanted Windows Vista a couple of years ago, and my Acer Netbook—the computer I carry with me when I’m moving around—runs Windows 7. But Windows 8 is going to be released in a few months, and now I have a problem, because I don’t intend to upgrade the two Windows XP computers to Windows 7 right now.

Why do I have a problem? because Microsoft is getting ready to stop supporting Windows XP.

Lest you think I’m just whining, check out this article at Neowin. Windows XP, despite being over ten years old and two three versions of Windows behind, is still being used on over 46% of all PCs.

That’s a lot of people who are now less than two years away from NEEDING TO throw their computers away and start over.

Let me be clear about why I phrase it that way.

My four-year-old computers are perfectly adequate for my needs. Aside from the operating system downgrade, when I bought them I specified the highest-end possible components, and with more and more of the work I do moving off “my” computers to The Cloud I’m pretty sure that when they’re six years old they’ll still be good enough for what I throw at them. But when support for Windows XP goes away, so will security updates. And not paying attention to that isn’t OK.

Big deal, you say. Just install Windows 8, right? Wrong. Microsoft tells me that my computers aren’t up to the task of running Windows 8.

So my computers aren’t upgradeable to the latest version of Windows, and I don’t have the option of not upgrading them. That leaves only the option of replacing them.

Maybe that isn’t such a terrible thing. Computers have become so inexpensive that I can just replace them even though there’s nothing wrong with them. That’s OK, right?

Well, no, of course not.

Take a look at this graph. It illustrates just how well one of the two four-year-olds is still running—and the more heavily-tasked one, to boot:

You can read that yourself, right? I don’t actually need to replace these computers, but Microsoft is leaving me no choice.

I’m not going to make this a customer service issue. Microsoft isn’t landing on The Answer Guy’s Verizon Wireless Customer Service Wall of Shame. Microsoft, being in the software business, needs to keep releasing new versions of Windows and it isn’t reasonable to expect them to continuing to support old versions forever. Unless almost half of all users are still using a particular old version.

Because here’s the problem:

Even if we all buy new computers to accommodate the problem Microsoft is creating by discontinuing Windows XP support, we’re still left with the various upgrade headaches that operating system changes create.

Microsoft, have you heard of Ubuntu?

I’ve told you before that while I play with Ubuntu a little bit I stick with Windows to maintain compatibility with a few programs that I like. But Windows 8 will make me have to give up a bunch of the software I like anyway, so as Ubuntu becomes better and better—and it’s already pretty darned good, and is free—I’m thinking that I might be defecting instead of buying new computers.

Is Microsoft really that stupid?

I’ve recently had a couple of discussions with Answer Guy Central readers who took exception to my position that Search Engine Optimization shouldn’t (generally) be undertaken by regular people. I’ll be sharing some of those details with you soon. But wherever your opinion falls in that debate, I think you’ll be able to see the point I’m making by comparing it to this Microsoft-induced operating system mess. Computers are too hard, and sometimes you just need to hire an expert to handle your computers.

Because real computer support isn’t always easy to come by. And it sure isn’t coming at you from Microsoft.

And frighteningly, that isn’t even the news here.

A federal judge has ruled that clicking the ‘like button’ doesn’t qualify as protected free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It’s a mind-boggling development in the “what is OK to say and do on the Internet?” branch of business change, and while this non-attorney is pretty sure the ruling will be overturned at a higher level, please be clear that if you fall into a Like Button Trap, ‘overturned on appeal’ isn’t going to help you.

Read the story if you want the details. Here’s the short version of what matters:

Free speech, a legal tenet that seems to have been at the center of nearly every important decision that’s come out of the US Judicial System for many years, guarantees you the right to express your opinion. At its simplest level the free speech idea means that you can’t be prosecuted or otherwise punished by our government for saying what you think.

But for the moment, the rule has been interpreted to mean “only as long as you specifically say something”, and somehow pressing the Facebook Like Button doesn’t qualify as saying . . . oh . . . “I like this thing”.

How hitting the like button is different from putting a bumper sticker on your car—which is protected speech— eludes me, and that’s why there’s no chance this ruling will stand up. Again, though, as you work the business change puzzle you need to keep in mind that being told you were right years after being legally wronged isn’t the same as having been OK from start to finish.

The Business Change side of this conversation is that Free Speech has been extended to apply to private entities’ also being prohibited from punishing or discriminating against you based on your opinions, which is the root of most anti-discrimination laws. So now let’s look at the implications of Facebook, once again.

Outside the United States, Free Speech is handled differently than it is here. Last week, for example, the High Court of the UK ordered ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. As I told you then, the action was laughable, and it turns out I was right; traffic to the Pirate Bay has increased dramatically since the High Court Ruling.

Whether these actions take place in the USA or elsewhere, as business people our goal needs to be staying out of the snare of the legal system whenever possible. Lawyers and judges can’t even agree on what free speech is, courts pass laws at lower levels that are overturned on appeal, and some pretty egregious behavior remains protected by the free speech tenet.

Simple, right? Just don’t do or say dumb things. Like, if you have something bad to say, don’t say it on Facebook.

That’s not so tough a rule to follow, is it?

I also talk about Piracy quite a bit. Media Piracy, be it movies, music, books, or software, is an incredibly complicated subject, and one that has many ways to link into a conversation about business change. This week, The High Court in The United Kingdom took aim at Piracy, and in mid-2012 I’m both amazed and a little frightened that they’ve pursued the particular action they’re attempting.

The High Court ordered that UK ISPs must completely block access to The Pirate Bay. Think what you will of Piracy or The Pirate Bay, singling out a web site as so bad that access to it must be blocked for an entire populace is an extraordinarily scary step. And not one that a supposedly democratic society such and The United Kingdom should be taking.

I’m not so foolish as to make this a conversation about free speech, privacy, or any other topic so nebulous as those.  But when even the government of France has been working with better ideas to combat privacy for nearly two years, I can’t help but be horrified that one of the UK’s top arbiters of law is still operating from so insular a position as to believe that they have any control over piracy. As the folks at The Pirate Bay pointed out in their response to the Court’s order, The High Court has accomplished nothing other than beginning a trip down an impossibly slippery slope.

It’s the antithesis of business change.

Piracy is an incredibly complex topic. Louis CK figured it out, but only to a point and only in a way that matters if you have the clout of a Louis CK. Some movie studios have figured out that piracy can be a pretty good business plan. Neil Young and Elvis Costello understand piracy and have embraced it. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson is a movie pirate. And of course, we have the mess brought about when MegaUpload was shut down without due process.

But sitting underneath all of these remains the reality that a lot of people don’t even know when they’ve “been pirates”.

Under those circumstances, and again without regard to the free speech and due process issues that many people will try to invoke, the idea of stuffing the piracy genie back in a small bottle is ludicrous. As an example: I know a fifteen-year-old, decidedly non-technical girl who figured out in a matter of minutes that she could watch, coincidentally, a UK-based television program she’s fond of by using a proxy server. And in bypassing the “UK-viewers only, please” position the program’s producers have attempted to set up she doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong.

Despite having been shut down in the past The Pirate Bay lives on. And UK Internet users will continue to use it regardless of toothless court orders. The issue, as always, is business change, and having the good sense and flexibility to embrace, rather than fight it.

May The Fourth Be With You.

But it also isn’t a safe topic for work, and maybe not even in your home, depending on your circumstances. Please do NOT click this link to Sex.com if you’re in a place where naked women are a problem. The world’s most expensive domain is now a social network. And I don’t want to belong, but if you’re interested in showing off your taste in naked and near-naked women, sex.com is the social network for you.

For the record, I didn’t find sex.com on my own; we have this story at TechCrunch to thank for today’s topic. And holy cow, is the connection apt; sex.com is now exactly the same thing as Pinterest, but . . . naked.

I’d be dumbfounded, but the truth is, a social network for people who like naked pictures makes sense; certainly it makes more sense than the vast wasteland of aimless meandering that is Facebook. Looking for your peeps? If you’re into naked women and don’t mind feel like admitting it look no farther!

Chatroulette, this is not; when you stumble upon naked people there, you may not have intended to do so. It’s not the silliness of YouNow.Com, either, and sex.com isn’t illegal felonious activity, at least not here in the USA, so long as you don’t visit your new favorite social network at inappropriate times.

By turning into a place where you can share your . . . umm . . . interests, sex.com is practicing smart business change. Now, please get back to The New York Times. Or better yet, contact me to talk about business change, personally. And you needn’t worry; I have all my clothes on.

Yesterday, the folks at Gizmodo published an article advocating behavior that’s pretty similar to what the no-longer-a-computer-consultant was convicted of. Essentially, the article says that if you’re a computer consultant, have access to your clients’ systems, and your client doesn’t pay you, you should A) mess around with those systems and B) then use your client’s systems against them to shame them publicly.

I’m not an attorney, but I’m pretty sure that would break a whole bunch of laws.

Let me be clear: while a well-written client agreement might give you leeway to come close to the behavior Gizmodo is promoting—maybe even do exactly what it says—I’m skeptical that any computer geek has ever presented such an agreement and gotten it signed. So essentially, Gizmodo is saying that it’s OK to be a felon. Nice.

I’ve had differences of opinion with Gizmodo before. Nick Denton, Gizmodo’s publisher, and I have even had it out over the way his company, Gawker Media, does things. Truth is, I’ve seen plenty of misinformation masquerading as Journalism thrown about at Gizmodo. But this one sets some kind of arrogance record.

In the United States, we have this ongoing “freedom of speech” debate, and because of freedom of speech the folks at Gizmodo have the right to say the kinds of things in that article. Cripes, even ACORN “Teaching Women How To Be Prostitutes” is protected speech here. But there’s another line that Gizmodo is crossing.

How in the world does telling people it’s OK to commit a felony qualify as journalism?

Sure, Perception is reality and journalists need to be just arrogant enough to say incendiary things to keep their readers interested. But don’t you feel as though this crossed the line?

Or maybe this is what journalism has come to. Track backward from this article to read about MG Siegler, Mike Arrington, AOL, and arrogance run amok. Or forget the noble profession of journalism; read this piece. Is this what discourse has come to?

Call it Journalism if you like. Or snidely refer to these people as nothing more than know-nothing bloggers if you prefer. But after you read nonsense like Gizmodo’s call for felonious behavior, please ask yourself whether this kind of attitude is a business change you’re behind.

You’d think Nick Denton, arrogant though he may be, would be smart enough to hire a business change consultant to manage this mess.

The fact that Microsoft bought their way into the eReader market isn’t much of a surprise. Microsoft’s been branching out from their declining Windows-and-Office business for a while now, and spending some of their considerable cash hoard getting into alternate markets is a great move. Maybe Microsoft can stave off irrelevancy, after all. Batteries? eReaders? Why not?

The question is why Microsoft paid so much for so little of Barnes & Noble’s Nook eReader business.

Sure, the latest Nook is the best e-Reader yet. But Microsoft paid $300 Million for a 17.6% share of the NewCo partnership with Barnes and Noble. Before the deal was announced and Barnes & Noble’s stock spiked from under $15 to over $25, the total value of Barnes and Noble was about $800 million.

Microsoft paid $300 million for just over one-sixth of a PART of something worth a TOTAL of $800 million?

Wow.

As our main topic at Answer Guy Central is business change, I guess I should step back and ask what circumstances existed that made that math look smart. And if I’m right about Nook’s place in the ecosystem of eBooks and eReaders, maybe Microsoft was smart to ignore Barnes & Noble’s stock valuation and instead value Nook at a high premium. After all, this is no “One Billion Dollars for Instagram” deal. And Microsoft is a mature company run by mature people; I can’t go on a rant about young people not being as smart as older people.

And sure, smaller chunks of technology and marketing ideas are becoming more valuable. Maybe Nook is like a great App. It’s Cool! Buy It! It’ll Pay Off!

But Microsoft still paid too much for their piece of the Barnes and Noble/Nook partnership. And here’s why:

Barnes & Noble is a publicly traded corporation. All Microsoft had to do was buy the whole company at a premium above the now-inflated price Barnes and Noble was trading at before the announcement of their investment in Nook, and they could have owned the whole thing.

Now sure, Microsoft probably doesn’t want to be in the bookstore business, and Barnes and Noble has announced that their Nook eBook business has already become larger than their money-losing brick-and-mortar operation. But so what? Microsoft could have paid $1.5 billion to buy the entirety of Barnes & Noble and sold or shut down the parts they weren’t interested in. Has no-one at Microsoft seen Wall Street?

Microsoft did a very smart thing grabbing a piece of Newco/Nook. And I’m OK with overpaying against a stock valuation that was probably too low. But paying this price just wasn’t necessary. If you’re a Microsoft shareholder you have something to complain about.

Looking for help planning your next acquisition or other business change? I’m right here.

Last week I celebrated my birthday. And Facebook celebrated right along with me; when I started my abbreviated workday on Friday morning I had a handful of Happy Birthday wishes from my social networking friends, and more rolled in while I was replying to those.

It may have re-created loose ties to people I had lost track of years or even decades ago, but Facebook is social networking done the wrong way. I enjoyed seeing those birthday wishes, and was enjoying responding to them. But then Facebook “helpfully” collapsed them, as you can see above. At that point, I lost (or felt as though I had, which is the same thing) the ability to respond. If you’re one of the people who sent me a “Happy Birthday” and you didn’t hear back from me, please accept my apologies. Facebook giveth, and Facebook taketh away.

At its worst, social networking causes isolation and depression. At its best, it’s a pretty cool idea, but so far about the only useful social networking model I’ve seen come along is interest-specific social networking. Doximity, for example, is getting doctors talking to other doctors using their computers. Talk about business change!

If you don’t belong to “special groups”, or haven’t figured out how to find members of yours, though, you’re left with the too-big-and-too-general Facebooks of the world. Facelift, my never-quite-got-completed stab at social networking, was conceived as a broad-but-more-controlled alternative to Facebook, and I believe that’s the way broader social networking will have to go to become truly useful.

Yes, I just said that in social networking broad needs to be narrow.

Smart journalists are figuring this out. On the other hand, letting your social networking consist of random clicks is a bad idea.

When all is said and done, and as our reaches get bigger and deeper, the important thing to remember is that in social networking, as in life, biggest and best aren’t synonyms.

Or as this salesman buddy reminded me earlier today, in a social networking world it can feel as though both the network itself and the people you’re connected to through it are trying to scam you. Your job is to create business change that heads that off.

Yesterday I promised to tell you everything you need to know about Google Drive. GDrive is a subject that been tossed around literally for years; we all knew Google Drive would show up eventually, and if “storing your stuff on line” was the only thing that interested you, it’s possible that you figured out how to create a virtual “Google Drive” years ago by putting your files into GMail.

From the moment Google Drive was announced on Tuesday, it was discussed, analyzed, sliced, diced, and flipped on its head by every technology pundit around. And Google Drive is a big deal. It’s one more way for you to get all of your stuff done, flexibly and without the need to figure out what yet another new thing from another company does and how to use it. Woo Hoo!

You know . . . as long as you trust Google and are willing to put everything you own in their hands.

I don’t actually have a problem with the “trust Google” thing. From a technological standpoint I have near-total faith in Google’s ability to keep all the things they want to run alive and secure. I have absolutely no reason to believe that Google Drive will be discontinued by The Big G. And as for privacy issues, I’m pragmatic on the topic. Unless you go completely “off the grid” (and you’re reading this, so, never mind that option), Google knows pretty much everything about you, anyway, so relax.

I’m a little bit concerned about Google’s Terms of Service, which in the case of Google Drive might be interpreted as meaning “if you keep your documents in Google Drive they belong to us”, but let’s assume that in the long term that isn’t how things shake out. In fact, Google’s introductory video for Google Drive might be too spot-on on this topic (note that I’ve cued the video to the point I’m talking about; you can restart it from the beginning if you like) :

“Just Share Them With Drive And Everyone Has The Same File, Automatically”

So what the deal with Google Drive?

Google Drive, as my old friend Rafe Needleman points out, is one of many cloud storage-and-sharing options. I’ve played with most of the products Rafe talks about in that piece, and I’ve happily claimed my little piece of several of the clouds he refers to, but I keep coming back to the one I’ve used for several years. I’m a Dropbox user. Dropbox works exactly the way a cloud file storage-and-sharing application should work, and for me Dropbox did away with the need to carry around a USB stick to transport my important files from computer to computer before “The Cloud” even became an overused, under-understood catchphrase.

And that point stands in the way of me wanting to use Google Drive. Regardless of the many very cool things about Drive, I’m comfortable with Dropbox. Google took about five years too long to introduce Drive, and I’m already happy elsewhere. It’s very much the same as when alternatives to PayPal started cropping up, the difference being that Dropbox is every bit as great now as it was before Google Drive came along.

But there are great reasons to take Drive seriously.

First, the simple act of turning on Google Drive in your Google account increases the amount of storage Google allots to your Gmail account. This might seem unimportant, but it signals a change in the way Google is doing business with us. Gmail was previously an ever-growing storage resource, but turning on Google Drive increases your Gmail storage allocation from seven-ish gigabytes to ten. I’m guessing that not very many Gmail users care about that specific two-plus GB of extra storage, but “Google just keeps adding storage space to my Gmail account” seems to be over.

Likewise, turning on Google Drive ups your storage allotment for GoogleDocs from one gigabyte all the way up to five. No, wait . . . it actually ups your allotment for files that AREN’T part of Google Docs from one gigabyte to five. It APPEARS that an unlimited amount of files created using Google Docs or converted to Google Docs format can be stored in your Google Drive.

Fascinating. As with Google Music, Google just wants you to use their stuff and will reward you if you do.

Google Drive, in fact, subsumes Google Docs; Docs is now a part of Drive, meaning that Google Docs needs downloadable file formats of its own; I noticed them right after I installed Google Drive:

See those gSheet and gDoc references? By merging with Google Docs, Google Drive gives Google one more weapon in yet another war. Microsoft Office, you’re becoming irrelevant.

So with “of course the documents and drives go together” and the security and privacy issues covered, let’s talk about the subject of Dropbox versus Google Drive.

If you read that piece by Rafe Needleman, the unavoidable conclusion is that there are plenty of places where you can get cloud storage. There are differences between what each of them provides in their free packages, and all of them have premium plans if you need more storage; in some cases you pay just to get the full suite of features. Well, for me, until Google Drive came along none were worth considering besides Dropbox.

Dropbox just works. You install a piece of software in each of your computers, and it turns a folder into your Dropbox repository. So long as you have Internet connectivity anything you put in that folder gets replicated both to the Dropbox servers and to each of your other computers or SmartPhones. What this means, aside from it being so easy that you never have to give the process any thought, is that you automatically have as many backup copies of the stuff in your Dropbox folder as you have devices attached to your Dropbox account, plus the extra copy on the server.

Google Drive works exactly the same way, with the added benefit of the Google Docs platform, which is getting to be almost good enough that most people can stop bothering to buy and install Microsoft Office or another office suite. And if you’re starting from scratch, that’s a great set of reasons to go with Google Drive over Dropbox. But here, as always, starting from scratch can be a pretty serious limiter.

I’ll illustrate that by showing you the preferences dialogs from Dropbox and Google Drive:

Aside from the amount of control over the way Dropbox operates that the multiple tabs hint at, do you see that “Dropbox Location” option? You use it to tell Dropbox where in your computer the special folder should be. Now, here’s Google Drive’s preferences dialog:

Almost no user control, and . . . you guessed it . . . you’ll store your Google Drive folder where Google says you will.

In other words, despite the incredibly long time Google took bringing out Drive, it still feels a little bit immature.

Maybe Google Drive is good enough that its warts don’t matter. Maybe you have no concerns about Google and Privacy or Google as a monopoly. For that matter, maybe you think computers are too hard, and leaving so few options open to user decision is a good thing. I sure won’t argue with that one; it’s been the focus behind how I’ve made a living for a very long time.

But for now, I feel like moving from Dropbox to Google Drive just doesn’t make sense. And that’s the whole story. Dropbox and Google Drive are the players in this game, and for a variety of reasons one isn’t very pretty.

Wanna talk some more about computers and business change? You can reach me here.