Answer Guy Central

I’ve mentioned Paul Krugman before. He’s one smart guy, and I’m not at all embarrassed to admit that he’s operating in an intellectual space that I’ve not only never visited but don’t even have an apt name for.

And Obama-administration-adviser-and-New-York-Times-Economist Paul Krugman says we’re in a Depression. Not just a recession, you understand . . . a full-blown depression.

The Status quo is broken. Change is here, and the only question is whether you’re going to enact business change fast enough and well enough to remain a “have” in a world more and more frequented by have-nots.

Let me begin by saying that just because Paul Krugman says we’re in a depression doesn’t mean it’s so. But if we look at the evidence he cites and conclude that he’s right, or even close, we have no choice but take swift and serious steps. So if this is a depression, what should your business change be?

HEADS UP: what follows can sound like a commercial for The Computer Answer Guy, PC-VIP, and Virtual VIP. And by definition it is. But that’s coincidence. It’s tough being smart!

In Paul Krugman’s depression-addled world, business is changing. In fact, everything is changing, but let’s focus on business. Sure, the big guys will find ways to leverage their positions, and a good number of them won’t have to adapt any more than they do in times of prosperity; they make the calls, and we all get dragged along.

But the little guy is facing something different. When every step you make has the potential to have huge impact on your success, you have to re-think the way you operate your business and the way you move.

You have to cut costs, even as you expand.

If that means farming out work, you do it. If that means traveling less and still communicating, you do that.

It means you have to change.

With free videoconferencing so easy to set up and use the traveling less part is easy, of course, and anyone who’s ever traveled on business will tell you that doing less of it is a win, not a loss. And despite the US Government’s newest attempt to make it harder, farming out out your work can be easy too, but you have to think about what that means.

Hiring good contractors is even harder than hiring good employees. Virtual VIP et.al. make it easier, and save you from many of the consequences of the pending new employment law. And All Of That Is About Efficiency. Use a cliché like “work smarter, not harder”, if you like; the point is that if a depression really is here, and people really are going to see the kinds of changes that Paul Krugman is warning us about, then business change is unavoidable.

Jump in. Business Change may not be easy or fun, but it’s your friend. And in this “Third Depression”, it’s more important than ever.

So the new iPhone is now official. And I have to hand it to Steve and Company: it looks magnificent.

No small compliment, that. I’ve never been an iPhone fan, and I have to admit that between the design improvements, some neat new  features, and the addition of a good enough facsimile of multitasking to make it far more usable, iPhone version 4 is a winner. Never mind that most of what’s happening there is more for Apple’s benefit than yours (I can only video chat with other iPhone 4 users? Seriously?)

But this isn’t an iPhone 4 story.

Yesterday, on the very same day that the latest iPhone was announced, The New York Times ran a story about the effects of multitasking on our brains. And it’s not pretty. As a reader you’ll understand that I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised; I’ve pointed out several times that multitasking is beating us all to a pulp, even as the need for it becomes more and more pressing.

Then I came across a blog post at Web Worker Daily. And I realized that the problem is even worse than iPhones, studies cited in the New York Times, or even my own words have thus far pointed out:

We can’t even tell the difference between the things we do any more.

The three tips offered in the WWD post are:

• Stop Scheduling Your Day
• Distract Yourself
• Allow Your Work To Be an Essential Part of Your Personal Life

Please excuse me while I pick up the fragments of my now-exploded head.

I understand the theory behind all of those bullet points, and I agree with what I believe the author’s intent was: life and business change are hard and getting harder, so chill out. But speaking of counter-intuitiveness, (as the WWD piece does), let’s be frank. Giving in to difficult situations may work for a little while, but ultimately you need to take control or the status quo will run away with you.

Looking at the situation point-by-point, here’s the happy(ish) medium:
First, the schedule/no schedule thing has no “answer”, so here’s the compromise: You don’t want to schedule everything, or your whole day, but there are definite benefits to doing some scheduling, both from a “getting things done” perspective AND from the point of view of controlling others so that their flakiness doesn’t murder your day. So do that.

The distraction thing is smart, but it needs to be . . . scheduled. Funny, right? Basically, you reward yourself for productivity by taking short breaks every xx minutes

As for mixing your work and personal lives: WOW. Yes, you need to love what you do. But you need even more to be able to shut it off. So while it’s a great idea to do what you’ve suggested, you have to be careful. This is the bailiwick of a scheduling professional, or a coach.

Want a new iPhone? Buy one. Enjoy the constant change and hustle that accompanies life and business? Thank goodness, because until you buy that private island you’ve been eyeballing there’s very little chance of getting away from it.  But manage your business change, your life, and your choices. And don’t expect technology to do it for you.

If you’re one of those “The Internet and Information Should Be Free” people, you probably don’t much care for the Wall Street Journal. The House that Rupert Murdoch Re-Built is one of the few places on the Internet where content has been pay-only since day one and has managed to thrive that way.

I admire Mr. Murdoch’s resolve, and his ability to make money where most others have failed, even if I believe he’s way off the mark in the way he goes about things.

But I more admire the management of The New York Times, who have signaled that when they start charging for access to their content sometime next year that they’ll not be roping off articles from their newspaper against bloggers and other outside links.

Personally, I’m relieved. There are quite a few links on the Answer Guy Central web site that point to articles from the New York Times, and I was worried that we’d have to either live with a lot of bad information here or go back and re-do lots of our content. Neither was looking like fun, and knowing that our existing content will be safe is a load off my mind.

And I’m happy to see that in Mr. Murdoch’s world the idea that “news is news” has trumped competitive silliness; the link I gave you above explaining the decision that The Times has made is to a story from the Wall Street Journal . . . or at least a blog by one of its reporters.

But the questions about information being “free” and what that means in the Internet era remain unanswered. Information IS free; what isn’t free is the way information gets arranged. So for example, when you hear that disclaimer about “unauthorized use of the pictures, descriptions and accounts of this game without the express written consent of . . .” on just about any broadcast sporting event, you’re perfectly safe describing what you saw. What’s protected is the actual broadcast, not the events being broadcast.

The only possible justification for wanting to lock down your information-based web site comes from a belief that what you provide is so unique that it deserves to be paid for. The New York Times is being very smart; their stories aren’t unique and so linking to them should be allowed. What’s unique—if anything—is the arrangement as the New York Times.

Sometimes business change is knowing what not to change. Good job, New York Times.

A dirty secret of the publishing business: most press outlets care more about the headlines they use to get your attention than they do about the stuff that comes after. Back in the day when I ran IYM Software Review and occasionally freelanced for big magazines like PCWorld, there were sometimes stories published over my name that looked nothing at all like what I had written, and had lost their relevance to the subject at hand. But BOY did they have snappy titles!

And on the Internet, that’s more true than ever. Big, little, or in between, the idea is to grab you by the throat and not let go. Headlines and titles are how this is done.

In the Sunday New York Times this weekend (and note that I wrote “Sunday New York Times” instead of “the New York Times this Sunday”), a piece ran explaining how headline writing works. Like always, it’s about getting your attention, but now it’s become about getting Google’s attention, too. It’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it’s one of the things we’re really good at here at Answer Guy Central.

Unlike the author of the New York Times article, I didn’t even know that small amount about who Taylor Momsen is. But the point is this: the business change that’s most important and most in-play—not just in the media business but in all business—is the way we get prospective customers’ attention.

I mentioned above the manner in which I’d spelled out “Sunday New York Times”. Google understands that string of letters differently than it would understand “The New York Times this Sunday”, and that’s why it’s spelled out that way. But you know what? In the first 300 words of this piece I’ve managed to use the phrase “New York Times” six times. And whether or not you noticed Google did. That’s SEO.

I put Jon Stewart’s name in this article’s title. Glenn Beck is in there, too. And now I’ve written both “Jon Stewart” and Glenn Beck”—twice—in this paragraph. Google loves that.

Will this get me any new business? That depends. I suppose that people who understand the importance of this technique . . . we call it long tail marketing . . . might be impressed; our most popular article on long tail marketing is here, by the way. Maybe traditional press outlets like The New York Times (that’s seven, folks) will beat a path to my door wanting me to write about business change, the Internet and technology for The New York Times! (eight).

Hey, maybe Jon Stewart or Glenn Beck will call and I’ll get a chance to talk business change on national television. I’m good at it after all; those years I did radio as The Computer Answer Guy and the time I spent being The Computer Answer Guy for CBS Television’s Up To The Minute prove that.

But really, I’m out for the Google SEO juice. This piece has been an exaggerated version of what we do every day both in this blog and for our clients, but while I’ve enjoyed taking the opportunity to create some extra long-tail marketing points for Answer Guy the real point was for you: if you want to see successful business growth and business change moving forward, you must start thinking about how Google sees you.

Oh yeah. And read all those articles about Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck in The New York Times.

Forgive me for lack of speed; I needed to let this one roll around in my head for a few days:

Motorola is enjoying a business resurgence. Owing to their decision to start making SmartPhones based on the Google Android operating system, Motorola has become profitable after many quarters of moving in the wrong direction. Palm, on the other hand, is no more, having been acquired by Hewlett Packard for reasons that HP has thus far kept close to the vest.

This article in the New York Times compares the fate of the two companies, and I wasn’t sure what the real point of the comparison was until I gave it some thought.

Palm all but created the market for Personal Digital Assistants when they released the Palm Pilot back in 1996. Sure, there were other PDAs that came earlier, but the Palm Pilot was the first one to gain any traction. Since then, Palm has floundered, being sold a couple of times and going through a couple of business change cycles when they weren’t sure if they were a hardware company or a software company . . . and even splitting the two.

Nobody says “PDA” any more. The things that PDAs did are now done by SmartPhones.

Motorola was at one time a phone manufacturer. Of course, Motorola makes many other things, too, but they created some of the most important cell phone technologies and were the runaway leader in that market for years. And cell phones need software, which Motorola wrote themselves. And the software was . . . well, who cares? It was phone software.

Now, Motorola has hitched its wagon to the Google Android star. In short, Motorola has enacted business change by acknowledging that they’re better off concentrating on the hardware and using someone else’s (free!) software. The Verizon (Motorola / Google) Droid sold many millions of units. Motorola is back, baby!

Or are they?

I’m not a stock prognosticator, but if I was I wouldn’t be so excited about Motorola’s future chances based on their recent success in the SmartPhone market using Android. Verizon released a second Droid model last November; the HTC (Verizon / Google ) Droid Eris came out at the same time, but Verizon didn’t give it the marketing boost that Motorola’s Droid received. And now, Verizon’s Droid Incredible is on the street. It also uses  Google Android. It’s also made by HTC. And Verizon has moved on; it’s the HTC Droid Incredible that’s now Verizon’s Droid Baby.

Wither, Motorola?

Motorola has all but remade themselves as a software company, but Google Android software is available to anyone who wants it. Companies like Verizon are marketing Android-based hardware from other companies. And Google has already shown that they have no intention of being part of this fight; their foray into the hardware and phone businesses with Nexus One was nothing more than a giant smoke screen to get companies like Motorola and Verizon to adopt Android.

And Verizon, by the way, is at is again; they’re about to release a tablet computer based on Google Android.

Don’t get too excited about the business change at Motorola; it’s going to be a short-lived success. And you do better: when planning your business change, make sure you look long-term.

I’ve picked on the iPad a few times. From the moment it was announced, the iPad looked to me like a brain-dead solution in search of a problem, and when Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal announced its pricing for reading WSJ on the iPad I told you how ridiculous it was, and why. I was hoping I was done; it’s almost like the iPad was created to carry a big “kick me” sign.

I’m not.

Jay Rosen, esteemed professor of journalism at NYU, made a point on His Twitter Page yesterday. Here it is:

No copy and paste, no links and no comments when you’re reading the WSJ and NYT on their iPad apps http://jr.ly/yic4 Explain the thinking…

I can’t, unless I go with something very simple: What may be the two most influential newspapers in world just don’t care what their readers think.

I’ve commented before on issues like this. The New York Times (and many other), for example, has a longstanding policy of using the “NoFollow” tag to withhold credit for posts from people who comment on their web site, and  CNet has actually asked me to give my opinion of and contribute to their content, but not identify myself.

The Internet doesn’t work that way. Or at least it hasn’t. And I’m concerned: the iPad is looking more and more like the chance that really big businesses have been looking for to control what happens on the Internet at the expense of free speech and the greater good.

Ironic that the very people who would be loudest in defending THEIR right to free speech are now becoming the ones looking to stifle it for everyone else.

Now I’m a business guy, and I too prefer that you pay attention to me instead of anyone else, so I understand the driving business change forces in play here. I even teach other people how to make that happen for their businesses. But something about making both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal locked-down countries really, really bothers me.

Tell me what you think.

It made the New York Times, so it must be true: women are blogging, and they’re passionate about it. So much so that they’re dropping everything that used to be important to them to spend more and more time in their hot new pursuit. Friends, I give you the MILB™.

By the Way, I hereby claim trademark in the MILB acronym. I’ve poked around, and nobody else has used it. I invented the term. It’s mine.

With due homage to the too-incredible-to-believe-except-it’s-true point that women are now getting together to blog in groups and that blogging has become the modern-day kaffeeklatsch, the story here is about the Internet and just how deeply it’s reached into our lives. While many if not most of the women that this story talks about will never build out the kind of brands they’re hoping to become, the fact that they spend so much time blogging, talking about blogging, and therefore being ever-more-real Internet presences says everything you need to know about the Internet’s importance to your business.

Business Change isn’t always about you and your business. In fact, it rarely is. Meaningful Business Change happens when you look at what’s happening around you and adapt. Find a way to reach groups of influence, and start today. And don’t turn up your nose at seemingly small niches like MILBs. They’re what the long tail is all about.

Who wants a MILF when you can have a MILB ? Or a few dozen?

President Obama is in a war or words with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. I find it unseemly, but that’s not important.

I bring up the subject because I happened across this article in today’s New York Times, and attached to it was a (slightly off-topic) comment on the Supreme Court’s ruling of last January that essentially gave corporations the right to make unlimited campaign contributions. And it asked a reasonable enough question:

If Corporations and People Are The Same Thing, Do Corporations have the Right to Bear Arms?

I referred to this Supreme Court Ruling in a recent post, and now I’m thinking: why is it so important to pick the correct business structure? Are Corporations really the same as people? The Right To Bear Arms example shows pretty clearly that the answer, if there is one, is “no”. But legally, corporations enjoy the same rights as people, don’t they?

A corporation and a person aren’t really the same thing, for a simple reason; it’s illegal to kill a person, but the board of directors of a corporation can end its life any time.

That said: our laws say a corporation has the same rights as a person, so until that changes (not gonna happen!), we work within the system to create change. Business change in this context looks something like defining what “the right to bear arms”—or any other right, for that matter—means to your business.

How’d you like to be review site Yelp? Before you answer “you bet!”, consider this blog post from The New York Times.

A real quandary.

Let’s assume that Yelp’s position (“we’re just the place where people say things and so we aren’t responsible for what people say when they come here”) is fair and right and legally correct.

Let’s further assume that in talking to businesses that contact them with problems their sales pitch includes careful wording, such as “we don’t police this stuff for strangers, but we do make calls to verify information on behalf of paying customers as part of our service to them”.

Have they then done anything wrong?

It SOUNDS creepy, but in my opinion they really aren’t doing anything wrong under those very specific circumstances. The problem crops up when their sales people are something other than clear  . . . or when people think they’ve been something other than precise.

Should Yelp and businesses that do things like what Yelp does be responsible for the actions of others? That’s like asking if  your Internet Service Provider should be responsible if you download something illegal. That’s already been more or less decided in Australia, remember?

More to come, I’m sure. Stay tuned . . .

Something’s gotta give. Something is going to. Business Change isn’t just an idea; it’s become an imperative.

In a world where the health care we provide for people isn’t even good enough for animals, where famous columnists like Nicholas Kristof and economists like Paul Krugman—very different guys with diverse right and left leanings— are stating the same thing, it’s time.

Politically speaking, it’s a hot potato. The number of people you cross by passing health care reform is huge and the number you cross by not doing so is equally high. And not being from California and looking at our left-coast liberal contingency in exactly the stereotypical way that we East Coasters usually do I see the nearly-forty-percent-jump in that group’s health insurance premiums and . . . shrug. But if President Obama fails to get a meaningful health care reform bill passed, and soon, very bad things are going to happen.

Doctors can’t afford to be doctors any more. Remember when you wished you had listened to mom and become one? I do. And I also remember being at a party with a very successful cardiologist over twenty years ago and him complaining that the best and brightest weren’t going to medical school any more. Things haven’t improved.

Be smarter than the US Congress. When things change in your business, have the nerve to do something about it. Watch for Business Change every day, and be fearless about enacting it.

The Whining Has Gone Mainstream. Even the Whining Required Whining.

Yesterday, there was a lengthy article in The New York Times about companies that buy patents and then go after companies using the matter covered by those patents for licensing fees. Specifically, the article talked about Intellectual Ventures, a company run by the guy who was in charge of much of the science in Microsoft’s early days.

Steve Lohr, the author of that article, is apparently so passionate about the subject that he needed to write a blog post follow-up this morning. And as blog posts often do, that article reads more like opinion than journalism.

I’m fine with that. Yes, newspapers need to be dispassionate to a point, but in a world of competing 24-hour news channels it’s OK to add opinion (so long as the opinion is kept separate from the news).

So here’s reality from the Answer Guy Central Business Change side of things: Patent Trolls Are OK.

Let’s start by acknowledging something; this issue can be a bit tricky morally, but is way less so when viewed from a business perspective.

If we start with the assumption that lawyers, for all the benefit they are supposed to bring to society, are adding nothing to the GDP or GNP and therefore are “evil”, we see the immediate issue: companies like these patent-hoarders that don’t actually innovate but which benefit from the innovation of others are . . . icky.

On the other hand: these guys bought the patents, either with money or by assigning the right to re-license something. They not only did exactly what the system was designed for (insert additional disparaging-to-attorneys comment here), but they PAID THE INVENTORS.

Nobody would blink an eye at the idea of an inventor selling the rights to something he’d invented to a bigger company. But if you’re an inventor (conjure up mad scientist in a small room image), making those deals is very hard. So the inventors sells to these guys and these guys—bigger, stronger, and well-funded—extract the licensing fees.

There is, in fact, nothing wrong with this. You know, unless there is. But that position is a bit too utopian to play in the real world.

Business is a tough sport. Business Change is even tougher. This is how the game is played.

This week in Barcelona, Spain a conference called Mobile World Congress is happening. The attendees are employees of some of the world’s biggest and most influential companies: AT&T, Apple Computer, Motorola, Google, Microsoft.

Their goal? To consolidate the market for the software that runs on SmartPhones. Summing it up if you’re from Apple, you might say: “there’s an app for that, but only if you use an iPhone”.

So let’s see: Apple, the undisputed leader in the SmartPhone market (but losing share quickly to Android), would like everyone’s software to run on everyone else’s phones? And Microsoft, who have released yet another version of their phone software, is looking to be cooperative with their competitors?

Yeah. This ought to work.

Yesterday, this article in The New York Times explained, correctly, that the market for SmartPhone Apps is fracturing in much the same way that the personal computer fractured. Apple Macintosh sucked off a small portion of the market from Microsoft Windows, Windows became “the standard” in businesses, and it took decades before Macintosh became a worthy competitor, market-wise. Mobile World Congress’ goal is nothing less than to stop that kind of thing from happening again.

Now if only a group of large companies with more to lose from coopetition that they have to gain would cooperate and create  . . . what? A single operating system?

Mobile World Congress has an admirable goal. But it’s unattainable. Large companies don’t make changes of that sort easily. And they sure don’t make them proactively. Verizon and AT&T have just started allowing data-based voice software like Skype to run on their phone networks, after years of fighting to keep them out. They enacted that business change only when they realized they had no choice and were better off doing business with their previous “competitors” than pushing the proverbial rock of refusal up the proverbial hill of “good luck stopping them”.

What’s Apple’s incentive for playing nice with Google and Android, or Microsoft and Windows Phone? Theoretically, being the leader of the pack will look appealing, but not for these guys.

Mobile World Congress is a big waste of time. Which is too bad, because I sure do wish I could run the Answer Guy Central iPhone App on my Droid.

Doug Leeds, US President of Ask.com, has a point to make: “at the end of the day, people would rather Ask for something than Google it”. (credit where it’s due: the quote is from this article from yesterday’s New York Times).

More credit: Mr. Leeds is correct . . . sort of. He’s wrong if he believes that people are interested in abandoning their Google.com search habit in favor of Ask.com, but we’ve all stared at that Google search box, not quite sure what to type in, then been frustrated by the results of our choice of search terms.

So wouldn’t it be better if you could ask your questions in natural language, have your search engine understand what you mean, and return the correct results?

In theory, that’s what Ask.com does. You’re encouraged to phrase your searches in the form of a question rather than combine words and operators such as “+‘, and “not“. Ask.com uses software to look at your question and decide what it means. You just have to trust it to do the job correctly.

Yeah, right.

I don’t trust it at all. That’s partly because I’ve tried it and not been any happier with the results at Ask.com than I am with what Google spits out. But the real point is that I’ve yet to see software that understands my questions well enough to trust. And that’s where social networking becomes social search.

The nature of the word “social”, when you strip everything else away, is that you trust people you’re social with. Trust can actually be negative, as in “I trust him to try and screw me over”, but it’s easier to deal from that uncomfortable position than to just start from scratch. It’s why I “trust” Google more than I trust Ask.com. I know that I get back exactly what I put in.

In acquiring Aardvark, Google is acknowledging that the next generation of search is trust. Aardvark is a search engine, but it uses the recommendations of people you already know to provide results. It’s like that “Ask a Friend” lifeline on the game show “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?“.

Social Networking, Social Search, Social Trust . . . business change that is all about who you know, and what they know.

Last week, a company called Foursquare announced a deal that vaulted them from interesting curiosity to game-changer, as what I told you at the time equals nothing less than the coming of real Interactive Television. Now, they’ve got something else happening: Foursquare has begun a deal with the venerable Zagat restaurant guide.

I was fascinated to note that three days after the Foursquare/BravoTV deal was written about in the New York Times, there were literally –zero– comments on the story. Today, there’s a new article in The Times detailing (perhaps) why: it turns out that as a general population, people who read things on the Internet may be more discerning than was previously suspected. In other words, we just aren’t as stupid as everyone thought were were!

So stand up straight, puff out your chest, and be proud: you’re doing more on the Internet than watching pornography and stealing music and movies! You’re actually communicating. This social networking thing isn’t just a huge “thing”; we’re exchanging ideas with each other that may be worth exchanging!

How does this tie into Foursquare? I’m still not sure; that service is mostly a game. But if “crowd sourcing” of information does, as today’s Times article professes, actually works, then using Foursquare for live recommendations and to meet people whose opinions match your must be . . . worth the trouble. And from a business change perspective that’s a good thing .

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.