Compare that to the 1 Million+ Android devices being activated PER DAY, as well as the recently announced 26.9M iPhones Apple sold in Q3, which is about a 300k per day run-rate. Microsoft and Nokia are going exactly nowhere, market share in Europe (which was supposed to be more Nokia-friendly than the U.S. market!)

“…Across the “big five” EU countries – the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and France – Windows Phone now show[ing] a 5% share, up one point from a year ago.”
-> Guardian (many more sales stats there)

And TechCrunch recently wrote that “Windows Phone Is Taking Share From RIM”, which incidentally is dying and has been toast for a good while now. So when can we go ahead and declare that Windows Phone 7.x at least has been an unmitigated failure?

Yes, it is possible that things will pick up a smidge over time with WP 8.x, and some supposedly super-secret advantage of getting access to Windows compliant apps on a smartphone. Which so far is belied by the fact that there are very few such apps ready for Windows RT and the Surface RT.

Every review so far, even the largely positive trending ones, are complaining about the fact that the apps situation is looking very bad for MSFT, and Robert Scoble at least thinks from his mobile developer contacts he surveys regularly that that isn’t about to change much at all.

And you may say “who cares what Scoble thinks”, but in reality wasn’t the Windows RT and Surface RT launch supposed to be what would stem the tide of MSFT #PostPC era irrelevance and make everything better? So one would think that MSFT would have pulled out all of the stops to get a lot more apps developed, it’s not like they don’t have the funds to buy/bait developer interest directly.

So I just have to ask, what is the hold-up there?! Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense, especially since MSFT have already now been through the “chicken-and-egg” problem (essentially a vicious circle of negative reinforcers) re:low amount of apps / low sales / low developer interest / low amount of apps with WP7.x for about 2 years.

For Steve Ballmer, who once snidely remarked that he didn’t get Googles #Android / #mobile strategy, maybe the “learning curve” really is infinitely steep…?

I’ve been collecting my thoughts on the Microsoft “Surface” “tablet” since it was announced yesterday, and rather than trying to gel it into a longer coherent post, here’s the key points, rapid-fire, not necessarily in any particular order:

0) Vaporware… (by the way, in this context am I the only one who found it hilariously ironic that they called the case for this thing “VaporMag”…).

Says ZDNet in “Microsoft, What the Hell is Wrong With You?”:

So let me get this straight, Microsoft. You made journalists schlep across the country, no, the planet, for a product that might not ship for months? … no ship date, no prices and… no compelling 3rd-party applications or even Office to show on it whatsoever. So we have no idea how well it performs, and how well supported it will be by 3rd-party software developers. …No demonstration or even any claims of how good the battery life on each model is.

1) Microsoft just threw a grenade into their OEMs locker-room, and they must be pretty desperate about Windows 8/RT’s chances to have done so.

From the same ZDNet post:

…And if the Pro version of the Surface is powerful enough, with Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge CPUs, why do we need Ultrabooks if we can just clamp a keyboard cover to a Surface Pro? Am I the only person who believes this thing is a total jump the shark cluster-you-know-what for Microsoft?

Right now, Microsoft’s OEMs — with the exception of whatever “lucky” company got the nod to do the contract manufacturing for this product — must be absolutely livid. To produce their own ARM and x86 Windows 8 systems, they have to pay exorbitant licensing fees. Windows RT is going to cost an estimated $85 per copy to your average OEM. A Windows 8 Professional license on x86 will be considerably more.

More on the possible intention of the Surface RT and Pro being “halo devices” at the bottom of the post.

2) Which brings me to the form-factor issue: The 10.6″ screen size makes both these tablets too large, while the “Pro” version at 2 pounds is also way too heavy, and ends up being more like a Netbook, no?

I’ve said for a long time that I find even the 9.7″ iPad with still wide bezel around the screen too large at times for truly mobile, non-tiring use. Same for the ubiquitous 10.1″ Android tablets. Which is BTW why I personally settled on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9, which also only weighs just under 1 pound, and makes for the perfect size/weight/handling combination for my tastes.

But 10.6″ weighing in at 2 pounds?! Who are they thinking will use this thing as a tablet? This truly is more in the direction of the meaning of “slate”/stone tablet…

It appears that MSFT are running headlong into the power-requirements for Win8/RT leading to non-tablet-y weight/size trap that I have pointed out repeatedly before as the Achille’s Heel of the whole Windows 8 “combined OS” enterprise (-> item #3). SeekingAlpha has a post up that goes in the same direction:

…its Surface Pro version still seems a bit half-baked. In the attempt to feed it Intel’s (INTC) Ivy Bridge i5, the device ended up being a little on the thick side and needing active cooling. It would seem Microsoft would do better to have a second go at this and use a slightly less powerful Intel processor, to get the device using passive cooling and getting a bit slimmer.

The whole point of the post-PC/iPad is low weight, low power consumption, and incredible battery life. #facepalm

3) And while Apple at least had a compelling reason not to make the iPad 3 lighter (it actually became a tiny bit heavier over the iPad 2 – interesting tidbit, Apple no longer lists the weight of the iPad 2 on the official specs sheet… you just can’t explain to the average consumer why it had to get a touch heavier…) due to the extra horsepower and battery required to run the Retina display, the screen resolution for the Surface RT (especially) and Pro versions will not even be close:

“The “Full HD display” Microsoft mentions in its spec sheet for the Windows Pro version suggests a 1,920×1,080 pixel resolution. That might also imply a 1,280×720 display (aka 720p) on the vanilla “HD” Windows RT Surface tablet.” – reviews.cnet.com/tablets/microsoft-surface-rt/4505-3126_7-35332494.html

So what we’ll likely have will be a slightly-too-large tablet built to compete with the iPad 2 specs, at the price around the iPad 3 or possibly worse ($400 – $600 range). And a Slate with near Ultrabook specs, but with a too-small-for-laptop-too-large-for-tablet 10.6″ screen. Macbook Airs/Ultrabooks in my view have a sweet-spot in the 11.5-13.5″ range.

And the 11.6″ screen Macbook Air is only 17mm thick at its thickest point, while the Surface Pro will be a 13.5mm slab throughout, not counting the covers with the keyboard and/or keyboard/trackpad options adding between 3 and 5mm, the latter putting it over the thickness of the MBA.

This same 11.6 MBA is priced at $999, right around where the Surface Pro will presumably be priced?! Oh, and another thing that no one I have read so far has addressed: How well do you think that “kickstand” thing on the Surface will work on your LAP?!

4) In summation, even in the realm of vaporware, Microsoft “magically” manages to dream up the worst of all worlds… a tablet that is too-large to be truly mobile, and out of spec (already! wait until the iPad 3S or similar refresh next spring…) with the current main contender, and so far has no 3G/4G option from all we know.

As well as a laptop that is saddled with a netbook-like too-small screen, and a tablet-like Accessories=Afterthought keyboard/kickstand “solution”.

All while managing to tick off their supposed OEM partners, highlighting the elephant in the room of too-expensive Windows 8/RT licensing costs to keep margins competitive on supposed Win8/RT tablets, and appearing generally desperate.

5) So I have to disagree with TechCrunch’s Matt Burns here:

…To me the Surface doesn’t seem like a serious iPad contender but rather a reference design or even a halo device. When released later this year ARM models will likely start around $400-$600 and x86 models will hit closer to $1,000. Even though it will likely never outsell the iPad, the Surface sets a clear standard for HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus. It shows the rest of the industry the proper way to make a Windows 8 tablet. – techcrunch.com/2012/06/18/will-the-microsoft-surface-tablet-redefine-mobile-computing/

To me, if intended as a “halo device”, they have shown the other OEMs precisely what not to do. This “Tweener” is a non-starter, like most overly Tweener devices tend to be.

—

Curated/related:

More hints at the ill-conceived Win8 “halo device” strategy -> businessinsider.com/microsoft-only-selling-the-surface-at-its-stores-2012-6

…Also: “Microsoft Really Punched HP And Dell In The Gut… This is particularly awful for HP. It gutted Palm, dumped its WebOS hardware business, and banked heavily on Windows 8 devices. Now its biggest competition could be Microsoft.” – businessinsider.com/microsoft-hp-dell-surface-partners-2012-6

[Screencap from profitboostonline.com/fb/ under "Fair Use - Parody" ;) ]

Social Ads for the most part do not work, because the click-through rates are so abysmally low. But this concept outlined in the curated excerpts below could indeed be just the thing that would make advertising in social media something useful, as opposed to this.

It is very similar to my riff on the Super Tweet concept that was first raised by Scoble end of 2009, in response to Twitter announcing their initial advertising intentions. Which I have written upon previously, as well as the Advertising Failing On The Web issue in general.

The essence is the idea that by placing advertisements UNDER a contextual link you have to click to see them (along with other related content from the service in question, asf.), the act of clicking on that link puts the user in a completely different mindset than what typically happens during the more passive state of being interrupted during social media content consumption.

(And of course the effectiveness of the interruption decreases constantly, as users train themselves to just ignore the marketing messages as much as possible.) It is a more active, solution-focused mindset more in the vein of “classic” Web search.

AND it meets the other requirement I am always hammering home, that of contextual relevance: Offer people MORE of what they were already doing. Don’t try to offer them something random that has nothing to do with the context.

The “More like this” link could provide the necessary contextual glue! Twitter would be wise to shift their efforts in this direction as well, rather than trying to do this [instream ads, which users will train themselves to ignore in short order, like they have with every other form of unwanted display ad...] and be certain to reap mostly scorn and probably failure:

[post still needs to be transfered over from the now closed Amplify: alexschleber.amplify.com/2011/02/16/my-comment-on-twitter-ads-are-coming-before-april-and-twitter-worries-you-might-hate-them/ ]

Clipped from Blindfiveyearold.com – The Future Of Facebook Search:

Facebook continues to test and improve their own search results. Yet, are we too focused on how Facebook is tackling traditional search? What if Facebook added a simple More Like This link to certain news feed items?

Clicking on the More Like This link would return a news feed with related content. In this instance, it would return Open Graph pages related to Samsung and HDTVs.

… Implementing a More Like This feature relies on a number of assumptions. The largest of these assumptions is whether Facebook can identify the content of a news feed item. My example might be difficult because it’s a simple status update without a link that has Open Graph data already attached to it.

Why is this interesting? I believe a More Like This feature would change or move user intent. Search has traditionally been about intent harvesting. Users come to Google with an intent. (“I want to find a creme brulee recipe.”) At that point it’s a bit like shooting fish-in-a-barrel.

Why did I want to find that creme brulee recipe? What created that intent?

… A More Like This feature creates an interaction – an activity. The user is raising their hand and requesting more information about that content or topic. It might not be a traditional search – it may not translate into intent harvesting – but it’s certainly much further down the spectrum.

—

UPDATE: Riffing on “A Million (free) Angry Birds Downloads Exposes Critical Android Platform Fail”, which says “There is no possibility that an ad-laden video game is better than one without ads.”

Actually, there may be ways to make it very acceptable & lucrative for the App designer at the same time. The key is as with every other form of advertising online: Offer/sell people things that make sense in the context of what they were already doing!

You just have to step away from the “ad network” model, that will never work well because the offers will be way too random. But why is it that people playing Farmville on Facebook are paying real money to buy VIRTUAL tractors? Because the offer makes sense in the context of what they were already doing…

Anyway, Angry Bird’s makers could upsell the users from free to a premium version of the game. They could build in premium implements somehow a la Farmville. If you make each offer cheap enough to be an impulse purchase, people WILL buy. That’s why they put another quarter into the pinball machine or similar.

You can sell them Angry Birds “swag” trinkets (T-shirts, cups, posters, etc.) at Impulse Purchase prices. Etc. etc.

Jeff Jarvis is pointing out several excellent recent examples of changing journalism practices in the age of the Real-Time Web, and ever more rapid Content Decay (that’s why they call it “old news”…). Is the news article becoming a luxury, and mere byproduct of other, larger reporting and #Curation efforts?

I’ve been meaning to write a longer post about what has been forming in my mind under the preliminary heading “The Content Creator’s Dilemma”, but… I haven’t found the time yet given the rapid-fire progression of topics in technology, in social media, in #dinomedia, etc. that I also wanted to at least curate here on Amplify to stay approximately “caught up”.

So shall we now add to the recent idiom “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read), its mirror, “Too Long; Didn’t Write”?!

Because that’s how I’ve been feeling in regard to an increasing array of topics over the last 12-18 months. And why I’ve been so much more active over here on Amplify curating than on my own long form blog. Why in fact I’ve been arguing consistently for Curation as a concept:

It avoids reinventing the wheel, and dispenses with the cost of, as Jeff Jarvis calls it here “adding background paragraphs…those great space-wasters that can now be rethought of as links to regularly updated background wikis…”.

Because rather than create endless rephrasings of the same basic, introductory points (that no matter how well crafted in a single piece, are still subject to the same unforgiving new “laws” of rapid Content Decay), I would rather add those in “en bloc” from my own, or other people’s writing and clippings, and keep my own writing restricted mostly to the “tip of the spear”, the most relevant, most current, most novel or insightful take or connection of dots possible.

Because that is where value, if there be any at all, can still be created. That is why I firmly believe that Curation will “win”, that it is the nearly only sane stance to take in this digital new media reality. Maybe the only thing that anyone will still pay for.

As Jeff writes: “An article can be a luxury. When a story is complex and has been growing and changing, it is a great service to tie that into a cogent and concise narrative. But is that always necessary? Is it always the best way to inform? Can we always afford the time it takes to produce articles? Is writing articles the best use of scarce reporting resources?”

That is the essence of The Content Creator’s Dilemma: Too long, didn’t write… given the pincer-like twin threat of Content Overabundance and Content Decay.

Clipped from Buzzmachine - The article as luxury or byproduct:

A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process.

… At South by Southwest, the Guardian’s folks talked about their stellar live-blogging. Ian Katz, the deputy editor, said that live-blogging — devoting someone to a story all day — was expensive. I said that writing articles is also expensive. He agreed. There’s the choice: Some news events (should we still be calling them stories?) are better told in process. Some need summing up as articles. That is an extra service to readers. A luxury, perhaps.

The bigger question all this raises is when and whether we need articles. Oh, we still do. Articles can make it easy to catch up on a complex story; they make for easier reading than a string of disjointed facts; they pull together strands of a story and add perspective. Articles are wonderful. But they are no longer necessary for every event.

I’ve been yammering on for a few years about how news is a process more than a product. These episodes help focus what that kind of journalism will look like — and what the skills of the journalist should be.

… In a do-what-you-do-best-and-link-to-the-rest ecosystem, if someone else has written a good article (or background wiki) isn’t it often more efficient to link than to write? Isn’t it more valuable to add reporting, filling in missing facts or correcting mistakes or adding perspectives, than to rewrite what someone else has already written?

1) Notice the way that the Kickstarter set-up allows for “donation” sales of $1, what I call pure Impulse Purchase territory: The amount is low enough that the vast majority of people don’t need to bring their rational/doubting/calculating brain into the equation at all.

2) More importantly, the various donation levels (=offers) all include the New Generatives principles that can still work with #Freeconomics:

Priority/exclusive access and experience/embodiment (live stream of the performance art event), plus patronage (the self-satisfied feeling from being a patron for the arts, etc.).

Next level up: Input into the creative process – experience/participation.

Next level up: A piece of the paper canvas – embodiment, uniqueness/authenticity/personalization.

Next level up: Lunch with the artist – personalization, experience/embodiment, exclusive access, etc.

And guess what? It works like a charm… almost 4 times the stated fundraising goal!

These principles apply to music and bands just as much as by the way.

[UPDATE: And Jason Calacanis is predicting that we will soon see a multi-million $ independent movie project on Kickstarter, possibly by the likes of Quentin Tarantino. Get the movie you want made by the director/artist you want! -> More here on this Google+ post. ]

Amplify’d from Mashable - Could Kickstarter Be Better Than Government Grants for Artists?

Artist Molly Crabapple has just been given $17,000 to lock herself in a paper-covered room for five days and make art until the walls are covered.

But that sum didn’t come from the National Endowment for the Arts or a wealthy patron; Crabapple, like many in her subversive art-making shoes, turned to Kickstarter to find funding for the stunt.

In her Kickstarter proposal, she outlined the basic premise of the project, dubbed “Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell.” Anyone who donated a dollar to the effort would get to watch a live stream of the whole five-day shebang. Anyone who pledged $10 or more would get to name an animal for inclusion in the artwork; donations of $20 or more would get an actual piece of the ink-filled paper sent to them. And backers who fronted $1,000 or more would get an absinthe-infused lunch with the artist.

Crabapple set a $4,500 fundraising goal; so far, the total raised is $17,000 — enough to make a short film about the project, which Crabapple says will debut online shortly after Crabapple’s Week in Hell wraps.

The only thing that they are lacking is Apple’s branding finesse, but it is pretty hard to compete with “LESS-THAN-FREE” in the long run…

Why would Google “bare [almost] any burden” (including the $12B purchase of Motorola Mobility, in large part to defend Android in the #PatentWars) to buy their way into this? Because… “The Future Of Mobile Is The Future Of Everything”.

From Abovethecrowd.com - The Freight Train That Is Android:

…the more I wonder if I too may have underestimated the unprecedented market disruption that is Android.

One of Warren Buffet’s most famous quotes is that “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats’.” An “economic castle” is a great business, and the “unbreachable moat” is the strategy or market dynamic that heightens the barriers-to-entry and makes it difficult or ideally impossible to compete with, or gain access to, the economic castle. …

For Google, the economic castle is clearly the search business, augmented by its amazing AdWords monetization framework…and Google would clearly want to put a “unbreachable moat” around it. …

So here is the kicker. Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not “products” in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own “economic castles.” Rather they are very expensive and very aggressive “moats,” funded by the height and magnitude of Google’s castle. Google’s aim is defensive not offensive. They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome.

They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free). Because these layers are basically software products with no variable costs, this is a very viable defensive strategy. In essence, they are not just building a moat; Google is also scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it…

Because they are “giving away” money to use their product, this creates a rather substantial conundrum for someone trying to extract economic rent for a competitive product in the same market.

This is the part that amazes me the most. I don’t know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to “win” in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don’t need economics. Imagine if Ford were faced with GM paying people to take Chevrolets? How many would they be able to sell?…

[First curated on Amplify.com]

Related -> This SiliconAlleyInsider Sub Headline Reveals Why You Must Move The Freeline

1) Windows Phone 7 isn’t really going anywhere, and Nokia’s new Lumia 800, etc. offerings don’t feel (price) competitive enough to make much of a dent in either that trend, or Nokia’s own downfall.

2) While Android tablets have failed to make any meaningful inroads against the iPad thus far, at least they have sold somewhere between 1-2 Million (U.S.), and shipped many more (sitting in inventories, waiting for drastic price cuts…).

But Microsoft won’t even be in the game until some time later this year (what will the actual date be? Q3? Q4?!), when tablets with Windows 8 are expected to ship in quantity. So Microsoft is starting from way behind in third place.

3) More importantly, there are no guarantees that the tablet/touch-centric bet of Windows 8 is going to pay off. In fact, it could well be that because the touch UI (User Interface) is bolted onto a relatively heavy-weight, resource-intensive Windows NT OS base, Win 8 will require too-expensive, high-end spec’d tablets, while as a standard desktop/laptop OS, few consumers and companies will see a true need to upgrade to Win 8 from 7.

It’s just a few years after 7 was introduced, and for all apparent purposes, it is running everything anyone would need on a Windows laptop/desktop just fine. So why spend money on 8 in a difficult/uncertain macro-economic environment?

4) Windows developers have been relatively unhappy about having to massively retool for writing apps for Windows 8, so there could be trouble brewing here as well.

5) While all of this still doesn’t spell immediate collapse for Microsoft’s business, legacy sales of Windows 7 upgrades, MS Office upgrades, and various enterprise software is not going to suffice in the long run.

6) It is also telling that Windows 8 was being completely overshadowed by… just about everything else thus far at CES, including Google’s Android 4.0 version “Ice Cream Sandwich”. Keep in mind that CES had until now been Microsoft’s showcase, even though it is now withdrawing from the event for the future.

(This apparently due to the timing creating a mismatch with Microsoft’s own internal launch calendar, which may explain the long history of relative vaporware coming out of Redmond at CES.)

But this has got to smart: Windows 8 is Microsoft’s major bet on a unified OS to run “on all three screens”, desktop/laptop, tablet, and smartphone. It is a bet so large, one might say Ballmer is betting the farm on Windows 8 being a hit, and that if it isn’t, Microsoft is in real trouble.

7) As Robert Scoble recently stated in the discussion on his Google+ thread here, Windows Phone might already be done:

…What matters is the PRODUCT THAT SHIPS TODAY. Microsoft is missing 450,000 apps TODAY and NOTHING you say can make that go away. Microsoft knows it’s in a deep hole. So do most consumers. …the problem is that THE MICROSOFT PRESS thinks it’s doomed. It’s not just one guy, either. It’s people who cover Microsoft for a living and live in Seattle and they think Microsoft Mobile sucks. So you’re on the wrong side of the line. It’s not getting better, it’s only getting worse. Android and iOS aren’t standing still, you know.”

So if Windows Phone (WP) isn’t catching, and Microsoft is actually indirectly telling developers with the Windows 8 unified strategy that WP (7 or higher) is going away sooner rather than later anyway, where are the Windows 8 prototype/show/reference phones at CES?

Even the CES-announced (promised for March) LG phone featuring the new Intel (!) “Medfield” CPU for smartphones will be running, wait for it… Android!?

8) The Q4 sales figures tell the tale that Microsoft is running behind on a PostPC Era that appears to be upon us (and them) a lot faster than just about anybody predicted:

From GigaOm’s Macs sales growing, but U.S. PC market stagnates:

Things were so bad, IDC has dubbed 2011 the “the second-worst year in history” for the U.S. PC market. The overall 5 percent contraction of the market since 2010 is second only to the 12 percent decline after the Y2K buildup and the dot-com bust of 2001.

Ouch!

This while Apple managed to sell about 300,000 more Macs and grow 18% to a U.S. market share of nearly 11%. But I consider that more of a Halo-Effect from the mindshare captured by the iPhone and iPad. Yes, the 2011 Macbook Airs were really sexy which is why everybody copied them since late last year and at this CES as (Wintel) “Ultrabooks”.

But that doesn’t explain how U.S. PC shipments dropped by nearly 1.4 Million in the quarter Y/Y, or even more with the Mac growth factored back out. Despite some macro-economic headwinds, the only thing that explains this is the “iPad effect”:

Apple has likely sold around 40 Million iPads in 2011 globally (just under 15M in 2010). Let’s say half of those are U.S. sales, so 5M per quarter on average. And the actual numbers for the Q4 Holiday Shopping quarter should be a good bit higher than say Q1/2011 where additionally the iPad 2 wasn’t even shipping yet, so 5M for Q4 is actually pretty conservative. [UPDATE: Apple announced 15.4M iPads sold globally in Q4 at their earnings call. So my 5M number for the U.S. sales estimate still feels conservative.]

That would mean that Apple has taken 5M of 23.5M (18.5M PCs + 5M iPads) = 21.2% share with the iPad alone! Add to that the 11% (of the 18.5M) Mac share and Apple is at about 29%. It’s not that COMPUTER sales are really dropping, it’s that a lot of iPads and other tablets are replacing a lot of new PC purchases for the mainstream user.

And this phenomenon is only expected to grow, analysts think Apple might sell 55M total iPads in 2012. One must wonder if there so much pressure on Windows 8 on tablets to be a success that it is setting it up for failure?!

(Compare: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything – NPR ).

This is the fundamental equation you have to understand about the information economy, and Attention being its only scarce resource: While supply of content of all types is going to infinity, the total amount of available Attention remains essentially static. Thus, the price for content must by necessity trend toward ZERO.

As for Curation, here is the money quote from Kevin: “Instead you will pay Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, or Google for their suggestions of what you should pay attention to next. Amazon won’t be selling books (which are marginally free); they will be selling their recommendations of what to read.”

We are beginning to see many examples of this already, e.g. here: “Not #free, but close: Amazon is selling digital downloads of Lady Gaga’s newest album for 99 cents -> j.mp/jRhhZz “.

Also, there are plenty of enterprising young artists that are bypassing the old structures entirely, and are going straight to FREE + Social Media Marketing + Monetizing the value-added back-end in the ways that are the only ones predicted to work with FREE (See: Gerd Leonhard on The Future Of Selling). E.g. here: “Stanford-educated rapper embraces fan piracy – Video – CNN Money -> bit.ly/k2B3Iv“

And Apple has been busily buying up deals with most of the major music labels, to presumably offer an Apple-branded “cloud-based” music streaming service very soon [this was unveiled as iTunes Match in the fall of 2011]. If they are smart, they will price it within what I call Impulse Purchase Territory, ideally somewhere between $1-5/month.

I’ve said previously that e.g. Sony is making a huge mistake by not going the $1/month route for complete/unlimited streaming music access with their own new offering:

Because “that would put it in the complete impulse purchase, don’t-need-to-think, will-likely-never-cancel-for-any-reason category. What if they could thereby garner 100 Million users, thus spending about $1.2 Billion, or in other words about 20% of what still is left of the global music industry?!”

If Apple doesn’t do it, then someone else eventually will. Only then will some in the #Dinomedia come to see, that the race was not about who was still going to eek out some residual “crumbs” profits from the Old System, but who was going to wholesale import the masses into their Ecosystem…

Instead of dumb ideas like the New York Times Pay Wall…I mean Fence, that only prove the deep denial that many from the Old Guard still find themselves in, because… well… the good old days, they were so very nice…

While they lasted. Looking at all of these examples I can’t help but be reminded of one of my favorite quotes by SciFi author William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Better wake up quick, because, as Seth Godin says, “Whining isn’t a scalable solution.”

The Satisfaction Paradox

…What if you lived in a world where every great movie, book, song that was ever produced was at your fingertips as if “for free”, and your filters and friends had weeded out the junk, the trash, and anything that would remotely bore you. The only choices would be the absolute cream of the cream, the things your best friend would recommend. What would you watch or read or listen to next?

In theory, you would not choose since it does not matter. Leave it to serendipity, since every option is wonderful. If your filtering/recommendation system really is working, then anything you accept from them should be satisfying.

This is the psychological problem of dealing with abundance rather than scarcity. It is not quite the same problem of abundance articulated by the Paradox of Choice, the theory that we find too many choices paralyzing.

…what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future. For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price. (An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won’t cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won’t be purchasing individual works.

Instead you will pay Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, or Google for their suggestions of what you should pay attention to next. Amazon won’t be selling books (which are marginally free); they will be selling their recommendations of what to read.

You’ll pay the subscription fee in order to get access to their recommendations to the “free” works, which are also available elsewhere. Their recommendations (assuming continual improvements by more collaboration and sharing of highlights, etc.) will be worth more than the individual books. You won’t buy movies; you’ll buy cheap access and pay for personalized recommendations.”

[ Originally curated/published here (find additional curated quotes and links in the comments), slightly updated/edited. ]

In the last 7 months most of my blogging and curating has happened on Google+ (find me here and add me to your Circles), but for various reasons that I will explain later (one of them is that the affordances for longer, more serious posts with multiple images or screencaps are still very poor there), I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to revive this blog.

As a first step, I am going to republish (and update) a number of key posts from both my Amplify and Google+ streams, those with the most evergreen value to refer back to in future posts, of which I have quite a few in the pipeline.

Here are the topics I have been writing most frequently about, designated by #hashtag for easy recognition on all services (Blog, Google+, Twitter, asf.):

#Dinomedia – issues around Old Media still trying to resist the digital age, and is still confused about the problem of

#Freeconomics – how to still charge for something when everything digital is trending toward $0.

#Content – the overall problem of Content Overabundance and the Content Creator’s Dilemma, and how they relate to #Blogging and #Curation.

#MobileWars and #TabletWars – Apple’s iOS against… well, mostly it’s just Android now, even though as I predicted, the going is much tougher for Android on tablets than on smartphones.

#PatentWars – especially in Mobile, but in general in technology and software. In the past I have also filed many items under #PatentlyAbsurd, and sometimes under #CopyWrong, where we are dealing more with the issues of Copyright in the Age of Freeconomics and Moving The #Freeline.

#GeoWars have been a subsection of Mobile topics, and while they aren’t burning as brightly as they did in 2010/2011, we’ll keep our eyes on the developments there. Basically, Foursquare has been pulling away in the space, in part due to its keen understanding of #Gamification.

Last but not least, I always collect and write about #Mindhacks (especially Business Mindhacks such as #Pricing and #Branding psychology that has reared its head in a big way for the would-be iPad competitors), #Lifehacks, and Productivity / Getting Things Done ( #GTD ).

I will very likely include a new/updated detailed “pillar post” for each of these. The Business Mindhacks blog is also going to get a visual redesign in short order, including an overhaul for better rendering/readability on Mobile devices.

By the way, today 31 / 366 = 8.5% of your year have already expired. Time to get busy. Tick tock…

Best wishes – Alex Schleber

Why? Because Gamification has not only been one of the trend words of 2010/11 in tech, but also one of the very real trends in the actual designs of user experiences/user interfaces (UX/UI).

Here are some key excerpts from a great recent post, The Gamification of Life, the Universe and Everything by Allan Patrick:

As the first “Gamification” workshop in London was held today, I thought it might be interesting to look at this rather fascinating Fortune article about Seth Priebatsch who:

…sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics… and slightly slower.”

[...] ”I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases.

So it turns out that a lot of this straight-up Behaviorist thinking is very important in the development of technology, more important than most people realized before the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, and more important than most of us would like to admit to ourselves. Because… well… we like tho think of ourselves as more evolved than simple stimulus/response “machines”.

But the fact is that whenever a game or game-like structure is presented to people, people as human beings will tend to play them. This fact is of course much older than Social Media, or than the above-mentioned computer games, though Seth may be right that the acceptance of game mechanics in all manner of contexts could have only gone up, not down, from these societal developments.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal wrote recently that “some analysts claim 50% of businesses will be gamified by 2015″!

One recent example of what I call an “indirect game mechanic” is the Twitter “follower count game”, which a lot of people were “playing” rather vigorously ca. 2009-2010. The fact that this count metric is presented front-and-center on the services main user pages, keeping score like a pinball machine, enticed users to jump through all sorts of hoops in their quest to gain more followers.

But even the micro-blogging activity itself on Twitter could be described as having game-like aspects, because 1) the activity is short and regulated (the 140 character limit on Twitter had more implications than people realized).

And 2), there are instant feedback loops such as the tweet count (“score”) going up, your tweet becoming an instantly visible “result” in your and other people’s update stream, and further intermittent/irregular-schedule feedback by other people responding to your tweets, or passing them on as Retweets.

Twitter’s @ mentions tab is the Behaviorist’s irregular reward-schedule mechanism of sorts, because we are literally pre-programmed to check for our reciprocal attention “reward” often. Behaviorists such as Skinner and Pavlov figured out long ago that such an “irregular reward schedule” was the most reinforcing of all.

So it comes as no surprise that the micro-blogging activity has become so self-reinforcing (in other words: addictive) for a lot of people, that they do things subsumed under it that they heretofore shunned. For example, doing a form of short-burst knowledge management (KM) inside of corporate organizations or more loosely-based interest groups.

Twitter clones like Yammer and SalesForce.com’s Chatter have sprung up since 2009 that propose to piggy-back on these effects, and are creating real changes to internal information flow and exchange: It turns out that with all previous iterations of corporate KM attempts, people were simply not incentivized in a way that “made them” actually do the desired activity…

Here’s a key quote I curated in 2009:

[W]hoever acquires Twitter will in essence take possession of an army of… tens of millions… of humans who are actively, accurately, and enthusiastically meta-tagging pages. In the arena of human-augmented search, Mahalo is a useful wheelbarrow, while Twitter is a fleet of 747 cargo planes.

The key word here is “enthusiastically”… why? Why is anyone enthusiastic? In large part due to the underlying gamification “rewards” as described above!

It is very important to understand all of this if you want to think yourself into the “games” of current and future social media. As Allan Patrick states:

The trend will be to build in more gamification by adding in more games for people to play:

- There are no badges and mayorships in SCVNGR [Priebatsch's own gamified geo-location-based service similar to Foursquare]. There are points, and you get these points by not just checking-in, but also by doing various crowd-generated “challenges” while you’re at the place you’re at. [...]

- He started a pilot program in Boston and Philadelphia that gives users better and better deals as people continue to come back to a restaurant. “Pure [geo] checking-in isn’t going mainstream,” he says, and is working on a Groupon-Gamification called Level-Up [...]

There is no doubt that the “white hat” attraction of Gamification is to get people more hooked on your online businesses rather than the competitor’s, and also [...] the “black hat” attraction of getting your hands on more of people’s personal data, the New New Gold.

I would have to agree. Some of it will be explicit, in the form of games that are identified as such. But much of it will be more implicit, or “invisible game mechanics” not consciously perceived as real games, but of game-like character.

And either way these will get you and hundreds of millions of other people online to do certain activities, billions of times a month. Still think you can afford to not understand Gamification?

GigaOM was quick to point out 5 Problems With Gartner’s Tablet Forecast, among them:

Apple’s iPad is poised to continue its overwhelming lead in tablet sales until 2015, holding 47.1 percent of the market according to research firm Gartner. Google’s Android tablets will slowly catch up to nab 38.6 percent of sales by then, while media slates built upon platforms such as MeeGo, QNX and webOS will barely be a blip on the radar, accounting for just a combined 14 percent of tablet sales four years from now. On the surface, these predictions may sound logical, but upon closer inspection, there’s more wrong than right here.

1) 2015 is at least two (or more) product cycles away. [...] While the iPad may not see monumental design changes each year, Apple is sure to evolve the device several times in the next four years. The same holds true for other tablet makers using different platforms. Simply put: It’s too early to predict what the tablet market will look like several device iterations from now due to powerful new processors on the way, faster mobile broadband in wider coverage areas and improvements in mobile software and apps.

While I agree that the Gartner study is making way too many assumptions overall, some of the rosier projections for Android (including Gartner’s own forecast of near 40% share by 2015) are probably having the same issue:

1) The only thing that we know with relative certainty is that Apple has put up a huge lead, and has become the uncontested category leader. If past experience is any guide (study your Ries & Trout on Positioning), that should put it on track to retain 50% share at a minimum, but quite possibly more (60-70%).

2) Especially since Apple went all out on pricing the entry-level $499 iPad so competitively, that the first few would-be competitors couldn’t even begin to catch up with Apple in that regard. Only now are e.g. Samsung rolling out an Android 2.2 tablet in a Wi-Fi model for $349 (April 10), which is priced below the $499 “price anchor” Wifi iPad/iPad 2.

But this is hardly a direct price beat, given that we are talking about a 7″ screen size tablet, not running the latest Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS optimized for tablet use (and it may not ever get the upgrade to it), and not fully up to snuff to the iPad’s build quality. So that consumers may well view this price in line with expectations for the different form factors.

3) That’s how strong Apple’s lessons learned from their iPod mass-market device manufacturing have been. Which brings up the legitimate question of whether the tablet market will turn out more like the MP3 player market than the smartphone one:

It all hinges on the question of how much Apple bungled things by staying with AT&T exclusivity for too long. What if there had been a Verizon iPhone (and Sprint and T-mobile as well) by the X-mas shopping season 2008? Would Android have even stood a chance? Would it have surpassed iPhone share as it did by now?

Since the carrier lock-in factor is almost a non-issue for tablets (the trend has been toward the Wifi-only versions anyway), Android has no such help in tablets.

4) Another thing missing: The ingenious “Droid” counter-branding to the iPhone’s own deep Archetype Branding that lifted the sale of all Android smartphones, whether intended or not, doesn’t appear to be crossing over into the Android tablet market.

Motorola created a brand with the Droid that was smartly capturing the few remaining archetypes that Apple had not employed:  Mainly “The Outlaw” (unrepentant, dangerous, bad) and “The Titan” (greatest strength, number, expanse) archetypes inherent in the allusion to the Terminator robotic eye, and to robots in general.

Symbols of “bad boy, take-no-prisoners machine”, combining within itself “the greatest strength”. To quote the original ads: “In a world that doesn’t, Droid does…”.

It appears that Motorola, Samsung, Acer, et al. are starting nearly from scratch in this regard in terms of the tablet market (which may be their biggest mistake yet, because they could have easily pushed the Droid branding into the tablet realm as well, it’s not too far of a brand extension), and so far I have not seen a break-out branding concept from any of them.

5) Much has already been written about the retail display advantage that the iPad currently has vs. the Xoom and other would-be competitors, another area that is quite different from the mobile carrier retail situation with smartphones:

Of course they are the only tablets on display at the Apple Stores, but they also visually dominate at non-exclusive retail outlets such as Best Buy, where the iPads sit on display with the rest of Apple’s shiny “tech-marvel” products, while the Xoom sits somewhere off to the side crammed in with a variety of netbooks and other cheaper fare…

All in all, those are a lot of advantages for the iPad. And any would-be competitors clearly have their work cut out for them if they are hoping to get even close to the 40% share predicted by Gartner for Android. Not to speak of the smaller challengers like HP’s TouchPad with its own WebOS (from the acquisition of Palm), or Blackberry/RIM’s Playbook, who’s only hope appears to be to make a play through entrenched enterprise computing relationships.

For more on my early predictions on iPad’s category leadership due to competitors missing the boat on getting their offerings out quickly enough, see: Is the iPad a fine young cannibal?

Is Blogging dying, or at least on the decline?

The article has sparked a good bit of debate, prompting e.g. GigaOM to retort: “Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web Is Dead .”

But rather than latch on to the specifics of some percentage gains or losses, that may well be semantically arguable as pointed out in the Times piece, I believe the key quote to be this:

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

Which is both an argument for the type of Curation-plus-commentary-plus-community activity I’ve been advocating for on my current “mini-blogging” platform of choice, Amplify.com, as well as apt to highlight what I have come to call “the Content Creator’s Plight” or Dilemma (I’ve been cooking up a longer, substantive post on this for a few months, but ironically always find myself dragged in other directions…):

It is difficult enough to keep up with our 21st century information “maelstrom” to begin with. And to arrest the flow of the real-time Web long enough in one’s mind to write much of substance on rapidly emergent, “newsy” topics, so that a post might persist in providing value for longer than a day or two. The other day I curated a post that aptly coined the term “content decay” in this regard.

In a way, it represents a massive act of will, especially in the face of what is now a fair number of professional “blogging machines” (like Techcrunch), that do nothing else.

Now add to that the fact that without already having sufficiently large, built-in audience, which very few bloggers ultimately achieve, the motivation for these “acts of will” is very quickly used up… Notice the second sentence in the above quote, which points out that many find such a built-in audience, and hence at least perceived affirmation, on their social networks of choice.

A service like Amplify, and intelligent curation tools in general, can solve at least the first issue, and while many of its curation peers are neglecting the community/conversation angle, this is where Amplify ultimately shines in solving the second problem to some extent as well.

Going back to the original question, one could say that blogging is most definitely evolving, though also certainly still alive and well:

[B]logging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

Ultimately, people are still expressing themselves online, in however long or short a form (though the trend has certainly gone toward the Twitter- or SMS-like micro-blogging), and the main differences are merely the User Interface (UI) metaphors used.

For example, Amplify has been wrestling with the issues of providing easy-to-use, elegant metaphors, while still maintaining a modicum of depth and relevance for conversation. Bigger services such as Tumblr (another mini-blogging tool) or Twitter have grown so rapidly precisely due to the extreme, push-button simplicity with which content could be created or curated, and passed along socially.

As I’ve argued before, Simplicity Wins, but there is also a fine line to walk to provide both simplicity, as well as still allow for the depth that at least some of us crave.