October 27, 2006
Missing the point of "push" email.
Ian Bell writes on Web Worker Daily:
If not knowing I’ve got new mail immediately really makes no difference, I would submit that companies like Movamail and Phoneified, and the developers of some of the other Symbian-based email clients, are all working to produce perfectly capable email clients for mobile devices which fulfill the needs of 99% of the mobile-email-using public.
The problem here is that this completely misses the entire point of push email. Anybody who has had a blackberry for a while, and then switched to something else (say a Treo with IMAP/POP email) understands this.
The problem with push vs. pull email is that pull email requires synchronization of coverage and asking for your email. Or it requires that your phone be polling all the time to see if there is anything new. With pull email, I'm sitting in a restaurant or something and I want to see if I have mail. I pull out my Treo. In the best case scenario, there is good data coverage in the restaurant, and I wait while the mail downloads. In the worst case scenario, the coverage is bad, and I waaaaaiiiitttt for my mail to download, or maybe I just can't get it. By contrast, if I had push email, all message that had come to me in the last 30 minutes or whatever are already on my phone because they came in immediately when I was both in coverage and doing something else (like driving to the restaurant). So with push, there's no waiting, and the messages just show up when I am in coverage, without me having to do anything.
Sure you can set your Treo to poll for mail every 5 minutes. But, you'd better have an unlimited data plan and you'd better enjoy charging your battery a lot.
Posted by billo at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2006
Flickr is So Great.
I can't believe it's a Yahoo! service. That's not to say that Yahoo! stuff isn't pretty good. But Yahoo! stuff tends to be slathered in flash ads and have a vaguely 1999 feel.
Flickr is so user-focused. All the time, I find myself thinking "it would be good if I could do X from this page," and guess what? I can.
All for only $24/year. That's the way web stuff should be priced. Whoever thought $10/month was a good price for an web app was on crack. $24 is a no-brainer. $2/month? Of course I'll sign up!
I also love that they limit the account on bandwidth to upload, not total storage of photos. Brilliant! A great way to build-in loyalty!
Posted by billo at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)
October 06, 2006
Myths about starting companies
I like this post, and completely agree.
Posted by billo at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2006
Krugle: the next Kiko
Google launched Google Code today. It looks pretty good. It's not as nice as Krugle, but I don't think that matters. I think Krugle is about to be the next Kiko: sold on eBay or to someone for pocket change. I have no idea how Krugle planned to monetize a code search in any real way. I suppose if slashdot and digg can survive on advertising, then Krugle might have made a reasonable go of it. They probably had more ambitious plans: I'm sure they thought about it a lot more than the 15 minutes I spent.
The real problem is that what Krugle is doing is right in Google's wheelhouse: manipulating their massive corpus with their hundreds of thousands of CPUs. (Gosh, that sounds a little dirty.) Kiko's problem was that they were a little dog playing in the street where Google and Microsoft are playing a game of chicken in dump trucks. "Sorry, Kiko, didn't see you down there."
The one thing Krugle has going for it is this: since they target the developer community, it won't be that hard to spread awareness that they exist. So they can position themselves as the little guy against Goliath. I think in the market of developers, that actually can make some difference. I really hope they can pull it off.
Posted by billo at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2006
Yegge on Agile Programming and Working at Google
Steve Yegge has a great post about Agile Development and what a load of crap it is. It then kind of shifts into "what it is like to work at Google." It's kind of an odd segway, but that's what makes Yegge so much fun to read.
It almost makes me want to go an apply for a job there, but nothing is worth the commute to Cambridge. Nothing.
Update: thinking about it (the "Google Way" of motivating engineers), it seems to me that it is a perfectly plausible and interesting way of developing software. However, for anyone to actually replicate that process would be quite difficult. Essentially, you need to start off with a massive, nearly limitless cash flow to fund the 95% of projects with insane incentives that will fail. Then the 5% that succeed with 100 fold return on investment make up for it.
It sounds like they have created a startup incubator without all the hassle of pitching to VCs, and all the other headaches that come with starting a company, including the mundane stuff like finding office space, buying bandwidth and computers, getting data center facilities, etc.
The other part of it you need is the initial talent magnet. For Google, it is their smash-hit products (search, gmail, maps) and the reputation/fame of the founding engineering team. I'd say those are their only really big, industry dominating hits.
Only a few companies in the world even have the chance to pull off a process like this. Microsoft certainly could do it: they have the cash, and they have the talent, for now at least. The only thing working against them is that there are an awful lot of smart programmers who would never want to work on Windows, and you probably would need to do that if you worked for Microsoft.
It would an interesting private equity play. Suppose you were Blackstone, and had $4 billion (or $15 billion) lying around. Could you buy some successful startup, with a great team, and Google-ize it? Basically simulate the crazy cash flow that Google has to build up a meta-incubator tied by some common theme. The problem is that there would be a clock: unless you get a smash hit to replace the simulated cash cow in a few years, the money would run out and you'd have to shut it down.
Yahoo! could probably pull it off, if they wanted to. The big problem there is that there net income is only in the $100-200 million range, and their R&D expense is already around $200 million (quarterly). There's just not much room to say "free food for everybody." I think the main thing would be that the Hollywood types that run Yahoo! would need to start recognizing programming talent the way they recognize Hollywood talent. Seems unlikely.
Posted by billo at 09:37 AM | Comments (1)
August 16, 2006
Note to self: think of a clever Chuck Norris parody.
This one is hilarious.
The java one is older, but quite amusing.
Posted by billo at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2006
Going Private pwns
Going Private is one of my favorite blogs. It's half brilliant financial analysis, half brilliant satire. Figuring out which half is which is what makes it so much fun.
This article is a great example, especially for this nice payoff:
"I expect it is routine maintenance on the Exchange server," Todd stammers.
"You are using... Microsoft Exchange?" You would think Microsoft Exchange was illegal given her tone.
Posted by billo at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2006
Apple's DRM-LS
It's interesting how weak Apple's DRM for iTunes is, and how blithely the media seem to ignore this fact. I've never really seen any attention given to the fact that anyone can un-protect any iTunes music file, with no technical knowledge, and nearly zero effort.
This article in information week comes closer than anyone to stating this. That I've seen, anyway. The article is mostly about how DRM really usurps control of product from the content producers and transfers to the wanna-be monopolists (like ITMS.) It's an interesting point, and a nice new way of poking fun at the stupidity and greed of the music distribution industry. But here's the excerpt I'm talking about:
Removing iTunes's DRM is pretty straightforward. It's time-consuming, but it's not too difficult. You just have to burn a CD with the tracks, re-rip the CD tracks as MP3s, and re-enter the metadata, like title and artist.
In fact, this is overstating the actual effort by quite a lot. All you have to do is: burn audio CD; select audio CD you just burned; import audio CD. Since you create a playlist with all the song titles, and iTunes conveniently matches burned CDs (by track length signatures, one assumes), you do not have to re-key in the artists and other track info. The upshot of this is that you need only spend the cost of a blank CD-R to remove ITMS DRM.
This is such a giant loophole that I call the DRM that Apple uses DRM-LS, as in "Digital Rights Management - Lip Service." It does nothing at all to stop serious content piracy (which is impossible in any case, because if a human can hear it, a computer can copy it.) It also does nothing to stop a semi-intelligent person from making a DRM-free backup copy of their music. It seems blatantly obvious to me that Apple and the music distribution industry are just winking at each other that they did something to solve the "problem" created by napster et al. (When, in fact, the problem wasn't caused by napster, it was caused the by the lack of a legitimate, low-friction channel for buying music on line.)
I wish all such DRM systems were so open.
Posted by billo at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2006
Firefox support required. Sorry.
[This post has a number of vague references to avoid embarrassing certain people. Including possibly me.]
At work we are in the middle of buying this really big, important and expensive piece of enterprise software. It's the kind of thing that you need to have when your business grows to a certain size. In this context, "important" means that having it will improve our revenue by probably millions of dollars over a few years. And "expensive" means that it will cost more than $100,000.
This particular kind of software has a relatively large number of vendors who sell it; there were four top-tier vendors bidding on our contract. They are trying to differentiate themselves on their capabilities, each claiming something the others don't have. In some cases, they are all claiming the same feature as uniquely theirs. In reality, they are largely all the same in their capabilities. Some do seem slightly better, but none seem so broken that we couldn't make it work and live with whatever warts it has. So it's all down to price.
I was on the phone with one of the vendors the other day, confirming a face-to-face meeting where they would get more detailed requirements and then be able to make a bid. Eventually, the sales rep casually asked something like, "I see you asked about FireFox support. We don't currently support that, but are looking into it. Is that a deal-breaker?"
I thought for a second, said "ummm..." Then: "Yes. We need FireFox support. I think we should cancel the meeting. Thanks for bringing that to our attention ahead of time."
I think the rep was pretty floored. He even said that he had never had this come up as a blocking issue. He asked if we could use virtualization, or if we had Windows PCs with IE that we could use. I basically said, yes we could do that, but why would I pay $100,000 for a piece of software that I need to use every day, then use some ugly hack to access it? Especially when all the competitors offer the support I want? I explained a bit more that about 80% of the people who needed this software didn't have Windows computers; they have either Macs or Linux. And the remaining 20% really don't like to switch out of FireFox in any case.
What amuses me most about this scenario?
1. Rule #1 of being a sales rep: never ask the question "is X a deal-breaker?" if there is any chance at all of hearing "yes." Don't give the mark a way out. (Not that this would have mattered in the long run. As soon as we found out it was a Windows/IE only application, that would have been the end.)
2. It's not so freaking hard to support FireFox and IE. All you need to do is not use some stupid ActiveX control, and have at least one engineer use FireFox. They both have great DHTML, Javascript and XML-HTTP support. They both support Flash and Java fairly well.
Actually, the second reason is a really important one. If you are not smart enough as an engineering organization to avoid proprietary, lock-in technology to the extent that supporting users beyond that is too costly, then I don't want to use your stuff.
Posted by billo at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2006
Pre-installed linux hardware.
Some companies are trying to sell PCs with pre-installed Linux. Hopefully they fare better than VA Linux did. One that looks interesting is system76.com. They ship with Ubuntu, and have some interesting form factors, including one that is a dead rip-off of the Mac Mini.
My notebook PC (an Apple Powerbook) is getting a bit long in the tooth. It's soooo dog slow, that I would like something snappier. The new Mac Pros are very nice, but so expensive. A nice, light notebook without a Windows tax might be a good alternative.
Posted by billo at 09:52 PM | Comments (1)
July 05, 2006
My wishlist for the new Mac Pro
Rumors are starting to fly about what will be new, exciting and different about the upcoming Mac Pro. Here's what I'm hoping for:
Reasonable size: sorry, but even though the G5 looks cool, I really don't get why it has to be so much bigger and heavier than 95% of other desktop/tower machines. The thing weighs a ton, has two inches above and below that aren't even vented. Yet it only has two hard drive slots and one 5.25" peripheral bay. So I either use half my desk, or bang my knee into it.
Speed: I'm so tired of my super slow G5. I'm a programmer, not a movie editor, not a music producer. The 64-bit velocity engine does me zero good running MySQL, javac and emacs. I need clock cycles. Lay on the gigahertz, baby! If it's not at least 3.2 GHz, forget it. I'm switching to Ubuntu.
Drive bays: as I said, two drives in the G5 just blows. Give me at least four 3.5" SATA bays, so i can load it up with 2TB of storage.
A real desktop form factor: this relates to the size thing. The G5 is for most purposes, a server. It's too big to sit on a desk. But if it's under the desk, you have a mess of cables. It would be good to have a lower-profile layout. Something that a monitor could reasonable sit on top of, and something that would have a full complement of front ports: audio in/out/optical, USB, firewire. I'm thinking of the old Sun SPARCstation pizza box. It would have to be wider and/or deeper, but the low height and utility as a monitor stand were just right.
Some cool gadgety features: I know Apple likes cool, elegant design. And this wish wouldn't make that easy. But, this supposed to be a pro Mac. Meaning, it's in a studio, lab or office. It's not an iMac that needs to look nice in a living room. Right? So how about: a flash reader; a halfway decent speaker with a physical volume control knob; an integrated microphone and iSight.
I have a feeling I'll get nothing I want on this list. Ok just, the speed. That's all I really care about. Please.
Posted by billo at 09:54 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2006
More support for the dedicated gadget observation.
More support, here from Om Malik, for my "single purpose gadgets are always way (way way) better" position.
If I could find counter examples, I would post them. Really!
Posted by billo at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2006
Unhappy with Dell
Dell used to be my favorite computer brand, since about 1994. They had cheap stuff, without all the stupid "enhancements" (read: BIOS additions that slow down boot-up and need special drivers in the OS) that Compaq, HP and IBM loved so much.
But in the past two years, the love has turned to hate. We bought a lot of Dells for work, both for people's desks and for our servers. The desktop machines have been croaking left and right: out of a total of maybe 30 machines, we've had at least 10 catastrophic hardware failures, either motherboards, power supplies or disks in two years. To me, that's horrible.
The servers have been a little more reliable (only 3-4 failures among 80 servers), but the recent new servers we got (1850 series) are unbelievable power and heat hogs, compared to the previous generation 1750 series. In a data-center class machine, power and heat are the two most important specs you care about: it's typical of Dell these days to not understand the customer needs.
Then there's the crapware, if you buy a Dell with Windows on it. Come on guys, I want a computer not an advertising platform for stuff I will never buy.
Finally, there is the web site. Dell was a pioneer in letting customers self-configure exactly what they want. But now there are so many different entry points, it's very difficult to create the same system twice in a row. Then there is the home user, small business, large business, etc. You can get significantly different prices depending on how you identify yourself. It telegraphs to me that Dell is pretty much out to trick me into paying too much, and I have to waste a lot of time digging for a better deal. I almost hate to bring it up, but Apple manages to allow customized configs that are easy to reproduce.
So, later Dell. At work, we're probably switching to HP or generic boxes for people's desktops. We have RFPs out to server vendors for blade servers or whatever. Rackable looks pretty good to me, DC power with 88 servers per rack. Or we might just go with no-name boxes for them, too.
Posted by billo at 08:15 AM | Comments (4)
April 10, 2006
YouTube down all morning
YouTube appears to be down, and apparently has been all morning. That's the downside of outrageous success and traffic growth: when something goes wrong, everybody notices. And they all keep pounding on your site as you try to bring it back up. I hope they bring it back soon, I need to see the latest episode of ask a ninja.
Posted by billo at 11:17 AM | Comments (1)
March 23, 2006
More on single- vs. multi-purpose gadgets.
Om Malik has an post today about the iPod's hegemony in the mp3 market. I have to say I agree completely, mostly because it goes to support my theory that specialized gadgets are intrinsically better than general-purpose ones.
His article also touches on the notion that Apple will release an iPhone, because all the phones on the market today suck. Just like all MP3 players on the market sucked before the iPod came out.
My prediction is that if Apple does come out with a phone, it will not be what everyone thinks it will be. In particular, it will not be an iPod that can make phone calls. In fact, I would be surprised if it can even play music at all. I think it will focus on the mission of communication device: phone calls, text messaging, and maybe email. It will have a focused design on those problems, and will integrate first and foremost with Apple Address Book, and iCal. Imagine, a phone that is good at making phone calls! Radical!
I think if they do that, and can get a wireless provider on-board somehow, they will eat Motorola and Nokia's lunch.
Posted by billo at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2006
Digg is the new Slashdot
Digg is really becoming the new slashdot. The mission is basically the same: geeks yak about links. But the interface is so much cleaner, easier, simpler.
On the downside, it seems to be picking up slashdot's religion/mob mentality as well: linux/apple/mozilla good, microsoft bad. Which I generally tend to agree with, but only on specifics, and not as a given.
Also on the downside, the ads on digg suck. They are google adsense ads, and they appear to have the worst targeting I have ever seen. For a site that has the traffic that digg has, they must be losing money hand over fist. They should have their own ad engine. I'll bet their CPC is something like $0.15 -$0.25. They should be capturing $0.50 or more.
Posted by billo at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
February 28, 2006
Nomination for most J-cliché web page of all time.
I'm actually not sure if this is a parody or if it's real.
http://www.jcorporate.com/html/products/productsfm.html
Posted by billo at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2006
Note to self: open source alternative to F5 BigIP, Cisco LD
It's about time this started to happen. Om Malik wrote about a bunch of open source projects that can replace big-ticket telecom iron. Of particular interest to me is the open source load balancer that Affinity Networks is using. Need to find out more.
Update: ultra monkey zxtm IPVS
Posted by billo at 09:41 PM | Comments (3)
February 17, 2006
Dvorak... the guy cracks me up.
John Dvorak is a master of irony.
Bigger companies than Apple have dropped their proprietary OSs in favor of Windows
[Emphasis is mine.]
Read the article. It's hilarious.
Apple tried to parody it, but it's hard to parody something so... unhinged.
Posted by billo at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
Back in the Day
At the first internet flame out startup I worked at, we all had real IP addresses on
our machines. No firewall. Just us and the router and the big
bad Internet. No one ever bothered us. That was back when you could leave
your front door open in the summer and go away for a
week, at least on the net. We had some insane bandwidth too:
I think we had 3 or 4 DS-3 circuits.
Even our production servers where on the same subnet.
One time we were playing Duke Nukem and took down our own
site. After that we would physically disconnect the network
hub our machines were on to play.
We knew some people over at ATG on the other side of the
river (in Boston), and they were running their X servers with
xhost +. We sent them a screen shot of their screens, and
they stopped doing that.
Good times.
Yep.
Good times.
Posted by billo at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2006
GMAIL has chat history feature
I noticed today that gmail has a "chat history" feature. Basically, you can (if you want) save all your google talk chats automatically, so you can search them later. I think that's cool, but the bummer is that I don't chat with anybody on google chat. I use AIM, because everybody I know uses AIM: about 150 people on my buddy list.
The number of people on my google talk buddy list: 2. And they are also on AIM, so I never use google talk with them.
Google should pony up and buy AOL for its only valuable asset: AIM.
Posted by billo at 09:03 AM | Comments (1)
November 21, 2005
Fun With Logos
SBC is buying AT&T, and is adopting the brand name of good old Telephone. That's a smart move, because I'll bet 3/4 of Americans have no idea who or what SBC is. But they are changing the logo. Russell Beattie has a little write-up on how idiotic the new logo is. I think he might be overstating it a bit, because the old logo was met with some ridicule when it was introduced. The AT&T "death star" logo isn't quite as recognizable as the IBM logo, the Apple logo, the Dell logo... hmmm, sensing a pattern?
The pointless blue globe never added anything to the brand to begin with. How does a blue ball relate to AT&T? It's sort of like "the earth" and AT&T is a company on the earth? It never made much sense to me, but I'm certainly no designer.
Seems like it would have been a better investment to refocus the design on the letters: AT&T. I'll bet a talented person could do some nice work with just those letter.
I'm very sensitive to this, because right now the company I work for is picking its own logo. We've got a branding firm, and two final designs to choose between. It's not at all clear which is the right one. I hope we don't pick the equivalent of the pointless blue globe, but only hindsight will tell us which one that is...
Posted by billo at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)
Dreams of Greatness
LXer has a post about how OS X could crush windows.
It's a nice fantasy. I wish it would come true. But I just don't buy the idea that long-time Windows users would really switch in droves if they had an alternative OS on, for example, Dell PCs. I'm the big computer nerd in my family, and I've had a difficult time getting anybody convinced of the wisdom of ditching Windows. I finally got my mom to get a Mac Mini. But she still focuses on the few things that aren't the same as they were on Windows. And not on the thousands of things that are better.
And that's the thing: sameness is what people want. Not goodness. If it's the same, they like it. It's what keeps a lot of folks on OS 9. They would probably stay their forever, despite the awesome crappiness of OS 9, unless Apple forced them off by not supporting it on newer hardware.
The other part of the problem is that I just don't see Apple having the balls (insanity?) to instantly vaporize their hardware revenue. They still make a ton of money on PowerMacs. And while I can maybe see that they could compete against Dell with Powerbooks and iMacs (notebooks and living-rooms being places where style actually matters), I do not see how they could with workstations, servers, and even minis. Not that Dell has anything like the Mini; but there are a bazillion companies making micro-ATX and smaller machines, often custom. They are way cheaper than a mini.
Maybe it's my innate pessimism, since I grew up as a Red Sox fan. I just don't think the team I'm rooting for can possibly win.
Then again, there was 2004...
Posted by billo at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2005
Yahoo <-> Google Map Wars
Yahoo just started fighting back against google maps. They have a developer kit and a beta site for maps. I love google maps, they are so sweet and the API is totally awesome.
But the yahoo maps are flashed-based, and completely stomp google maps for interactive deliciousness, about to the same level that google maps squashed mapquest. They don't have satellite overlays, but they do have awesome driving directions, integrated local search, super fast zoom.
I'll have to give their developer kit a try to see if they have the same idiotic licensing protection as google.
Posted by billo at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2005
Apple Verdict
ROKR Motorola iTunes Phone = boring, crappy; very un-Apple like.
iPod Nano = nice. It must really piss Motorola off to have all their thunder stolen by a partner.
Posted by billo at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
Apple iTunes Phone
I know it's completely unrealistic, but I really hope the pending iTunes phone from Apple/Motorola shocks the crap out of everyone by being... a good phone. Like one that is good at making phone calls, with long battery life, a small number of big, simple buttons, sub-2-second turn on time, clear microphone and speakers and simple download of address book from various PC and Mac PIMs. Nothing else matters. In fact I hope it is not even an iTunes phone at all, but that the whole iTunes thing was a ruse to hide the fact that Apple made a mobile phone that actually works.
If it's yet another crappy camera-phone-video game-mp3 player-email device, then I could care less.
Humbug!
Posted by billo at 05:02 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2005
AOL is missing the boat
I wrote earlier about my genius plan for AOL. I was unaware at the time that they were putting the finishing touches on a web email package called... (wait for it)... AIM Mail.
I'd call it "Missing the boat email." Or "too little too late email." Maybe "me seventeen mail."
It's aggravating that AOL has a virtually unassailable IM position, and they are not leveraging the hell out of it at every turn. By "leveraging," I do not mean "showing Britney Spears-laced ads on every pixel of the screen." I mean taking the intrinsic advantages of an authenticated, closed network to applications that need them badly.
Let's review AIM mail for a second: 2GB storage; web interface; spam controls... yawn. I mean that's not a simple thing to do, for a user base the size that they have. But they did not make it different. As in, AIM Mail does something that no other email system does so I must have it.
They did integrate some of the closed-network aspects that they have available to them: for example, you can "unsend" a message if the recipient hasn't read it yet (and they are also AIM members.) Yay, protection for for hot-headed morons who don't think before they hit send.
AIM Mail would be unique and useful if they took this positioning: it's not email. It's doesn't do what email does, which is to be able to send and receive email from anyone on earth. Who needs that? That's boring; I can do that 15 million other ways. AIM Mail should be buddy mail and that's it. It should be only a tool for getting authenticated messages from buddies: people with whom you have a preexisting relationship.
Think about how you pay attention to IMs vs. email, and what is more urgent and isolated in your mind. Think how cool it would be to have email that was actually 100% for you, from people you want to hear from.
Come on, AOL. Get interesting again.
Posted by billo at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2005
yagooglehoo!
Yahoo and Google should merge. Yahoo has some great services like premium mail, web hosting, media stuff, etc. Google just crushes them, though, on application development that centers around search and organizing information. The combined entity might actually have the power to really threaten Microsoft, which I don't think either has separately.
With the spare change on the floor, they could buy apple and tivo and have a good foothold inside the home/small business as well as on the net.
If this happens I want 0.0001% of the merger value as my investment banking fee.
Posted by billo at 03:06 PM | Comments (1)
May 06, 2005
How AOL Can Win, Part 2
In my previous diatribe on this topic, I suggested that:
- Spam is a problem.
- The AOL Buddy system is widely used.
Now, I know these are radical insights, even for one who rules as much as I do, but just take them for granted for the purposes of this article. Got it? Awesome.
The big idea is to take insight number 2, and solve insight number 1. The short version of this idea is:
Turn the AIM network into a global pay-for-use email system that almost every internet user will join.
All kidding aside, I think this is probably a shocking, if not laughable idea on the surface. If you just spewed your coffee on you new LCD screen, sorry. I'll wait while you get a paper towel. Alright, let me explain how this actually could work.
As with any network, the hard part is getting it started. Nobody want to join a private email system if nobody else is on it. This is the first good feature of AIM: pretty much everybody is already on it, at least in that they have two critical pieces. First, they have a screen name with a password. Second, and more important, they have a buddy list of people they want to communicate with.
What is missing is a way to leverage that those two incredibly valuable assets into the email. If my buddy is not on line, I can't reliable send her a message through AIM. Furthermore, AIM messages are, by their very nature and intent, ephemeral. An email message is (usually) a semi-prepared "letter," while an IM is a phrase that either begins or is part of a conversation.
AOL could take the approach of building email-like semantics into the AIM client. So you cold select a buddy and say "compose email" and invoke a window that would look very much like an email, write it, and send it. This, however, would be a monumentally stupid approach. First, it would require writing and distributing more client software, including both the ability to send and read all the AIM email messages flying around. Second, it would leave users with two separate email clients: Outlook or whatever and the AIM email client. Finally, it leaves out the oddball users on Macintosh and Linux, and would require somebody writing software for those platforms.
My suggestion is to avoid writing any client software at all. AOL should create two services.
First, an SMTP service that requires user authentication to send messages: this service would take the AIM user name and password to accept messages for delivery. Email messages from any mail client (such as outlook) would be addressed to [email protected] This SMTP gateway would take the authenticated AIM screen name of the sender, check to make sure that the sender was on the the recipients buddy list, and only then deposit the email message in the inbox of the recipient. If you try to send a message to any other address, or are not on the buddy list, then you get a standard bounce message with the appropriate explanation.
This leads us to the second service, a POP/IMAP service. Just as with the SMTP gateway, it is authenticated by the AIM screen name/password. Any email client could be used. The cool thing is that for the inbox in question, the user could be assured that all messages were from pre-authorized buddies. There is no way for anybody else to send email to their AIM inbox. This is the entire value proposition to the end user. As long as this is true, the AIM inbox is a special email hotline that I can always trust has relevant messages for me. I would be willing to pay for that, and I think a lot of other people would also.
Now that we have the technical implementation described, the really tricky part is building the network of users. AIM (and other IM or social networks) generally have spread because they are free. One could take various "free for a while" or "limited use" free versions in the AIM email network. But I think those would not work so well. In the "free for a while" model, you get the user revolt and bad feeling when you start charging for something that was free. In the "limited use" model, you basically artificially fail to deliver messages based on some usage level. An important component of any email service is reliability, and the message that "hey we are reliable, but only if you pay" is not very consumer-friendly. More importantly, this service is so freaking valuable it should not have that value eroded by being free.
I suggest that the sending side of the system be free. Any AIM user should be able to send an email message to an AIM user who is email-enabled. And that's the hook: the person who is experiencing the pain, is the person who is receiving all the spam, and wants their buddies to be able to communicate with them on a separate channel. This it the pay service: an AIM inbox that only your pals can leave messages in, that you can read through any email client (or, on an AIM webmail site, of course) is only $19.95 per year. Or maybe $9.95. And, yes, per year. Remember, we're trying to build a network here, and low barrier to entry is the key. Think about it: 100 million AIM users, that's some pretty good cash. And once users have a payment method set up with their AIM account, think what else you could do: iTunes or other product purchases from the AIM client ads, etc.
Remember when I said modifying the AIM client would be monumentally stupid? That was mostly for effect. To get the network started and growing, of course the AIM clients would need to be modified. First, any AIM user who was inbox-enabled would have a special indicator (similar to video/audio chat indicators today.) That way, their buddies would know they could send them an email. Also, if you send an IM to a buddy who is inbox-enabled, even if they are offline, you should always have the option of sending the message (or whole chat transcript) to their inbox, so they can read it later on their email client. And, whenever an AIM user sends such a message, they would be sold on how to both set up their email client to send SMTP email to their buddy, and how to get their own inbox.
Another upsell method would be used for those people who set up SMTP outboxes on their email clients (which is free). When they set up the account, they would enter full settings for the SMTP and POP server, username and password. But if they aren't paying members of the network, they can't receive mail. That POP mailbox would have one canned message that would keep appearing, once a week or once a month, which basically is the marketing campaign for why they should cough up the $10/year to get the inbox. Sort of a "if you lived here you'd be home now" thing, for those of you who drive through Leverett Circle on Storrow Drive in Boston.
The other obvious upsells are on the bounce messages you get if you try to send a message to a non-inbox-enabled user. These would be standand bounced email messages, but would include a link to instructions for getting your buddy to sign up. "Sign up for AIM inbox dude, I want to send you messages!"
Finally, once the network is rolling, there are corporate sales you could make, creating meta-buddy groups that would allow delivery between departments or even companies that establish email trust relationships.
There are a few more details in this thing, but there it is, on a silver platter. Hey, AOL, feel free to send me a check for $47 million once you achieve creation of the largest private communications system in human history.
Posted by billo at 06:15 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2005
How AOL Can Win
People in the press and software industy often talk about how AOL is struggling to find new ways of making money, as their dial-up subscriber base steadily defects to broadband. I think I've figured out one way they can, and it has little to do with addressing the current target customer base of AOL.
The primary AOL customer is the non-computer-savvy average human. This is the largest percentage of the population, and if you are going to target a subset as your main market, that's a good segment to go after: the biggest one. So AOL is doing clever things like including free anti-virus software and offering system management tools. Great. But $25 per month is a lot to pay for that kind of stuff when you could buy it a la carte for much less.
What if AOL had something already in their bag of tricks that every internet user in the world needs? Something that everybody, whether they use Windows, Macs, Linux, or anything really needs. Something that they would pay money for, they need it so badly.
Guess what? They do.
Let's talk about spam. Everybody knows about spam. There's a growing industry of software and services to block spam without blocking good mail. Some solutions work quite well. Most are pretty idiotic. They all are a band-aid on the fundamental design of SMTP, which is the protocol that is used for Internet email.
The great thing, and the horrible thing, about SMTP is that it allows for free-flowing communication between computers. I can send and email to you, and it will get delivered to you, pretty much guaranteed. I can send the email from just about any computer in the world, any time I want, and it will get to your ISP or your company, and your ISP's computer will see it and say, "Oh this is for Jane. I know Jane, thank you very much, strange computer I have never seen before. You say this email is from billo? Great. I'm sure Jane will love to hear from him." This is a great way of doing things, especially in the earlier days of the Internet, when 99.9% of email was legitimately from one human to another human about something both of those humans cared about. Messages got through. People connected.
However, with the evil spammers out there, this open trusting attitude is trouble. Not only can I not figure out where a message is really from (without detective work that is beyond most people), I can not really tell if a message is from ebay, my bank, microsoft or some evil spammer or criminal just using their name.
So we build anti-spam software, and try to infer, via various trickery and forensics, that a message is legimate or junk. It's a hard problem, because the spammers learn to defeat the obvious flags. There's lots of good literature about this, and if you are interested, I recommend starting with Paul Graham's essays:
But we were talking about AOL.
I hinted that the big problem with the way email (SMTP) works is that there is weak authentication. That means that your company/ISP mail server can't really tell if a message came from your bank or some hacker pretending to be your bank. Perhaps more importantly, it's really hard to distinguish the hundreds of spam message you get in a day from the 10 or so that come from people you really want to talk to: your business colleagues that are outside your company, your family, your friends. (I assume that if you work at a company, at least the mail from within your company is generally separated and identifiable.)
What we need today, in this world of spam, is an alternate email system. One that anybody can join, but is authenticated. So you know when the mail "from" address says "coolguy@something," you are 99.9% certain it is from your brother-in-law, and it will be given a free pass by your anti-spam software. There are a number of ways of creating such a system. Most of them are way too hard for normal humans to understand. At least one of them as proven to be quite popular and easy, and, guess what? AOL has one.
It's called a buddy system. AOL Instant Messenger is the biggest buddy system in the world. Supposedly there are over 100 million AIM users out there. That's a lot. If you are reading this, chances are you have one, or, if you don't, you have a yahoo account or an MSN account.
In my next essay I will describe how AOL can take the existing AIM system and turn it into the application that takes the bite out of spam, and makes a lot of money at the same time.
Posted by billo at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)