Why We Need Net Neutrality

Funny how one thing leads to another.

Bill and I (thanks to Netflix) are belated fans of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie"--Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's comedy series that ran in Britain in the 1990s. We just finished watching the third season, in which each episode ends with Fry concocting some sort of bizzarro cocktail while Laurie plays the piano. At the end of the piece, Fry hands Laurie the cocktail and they toast each other with the words "Soupy twist!" This may be Strom for "Cheers!"( Strom is a nonsensical language used by Fry in the series). But Bill's first guess was that it had something to do with Soupy Sales.

Which led him to meander the Web on his Nokia 810 till he came upon a reunion show by some of the TV comedians of the 50's. They chatted about what it was like to perform on TV during the medium's first few years. Few rules, everything live, massive amounts of time to fill (Wonderama, for instance, was on six hours a day) and you were successful depending on how many people bothered to tune you in.

Doesn't this remind you of something...? Like...the Internet today? Compare that description with this recent New York Times story on the life (and sometimes death) of a high-profile tech blogger.

My point is: Look at television. That which was once wild and free is tightly controlled, regulated and highly commercial today, and only a carefully chosen, vetted and made-up few are now seen on this medium. The Internet can head in that direction too, or in the direction of open, free, community-driven.

Net neutrality can seem like not that big a deal, even to those of us who live most of our lives on the Internet. But it's a first step. Let Comcast, Time Warner and Cox and their brethren take that first step to controlling what is carried on their networks and you've set them up to become the NBC, ABC and CBS of the future Internet.

A law that decrees all ISPs must broadcast everything equally would be a big step toward making sure that future doesn't happen.

Do Geeks Need Sales Training?

Yes, according to Martyn Lewis, founder of Market-Partners, and once a lowly geek himself who screwed up his fair share of sales by not understanding the process.

There's a great story in The Geek Gap, courtesy of Paul Glen, author of Leading Geeks, about an engineer on a visit to a customer, who, when asked for his opinion of the company's technology replies "You have NT installed on some of your servers. Only an idiot would do that." And didn't realize that he had blown the sale. Of course most geeks would be smart enough not to do something like this, or so you might think.

The days of keeping geeks locked in the basement are long over. In successful companies, especially technology companies, they have to interact with customers. Can sales training help them be better at it?

That's the subject of my new article in Inc. Technology on the Inc. Magazine website. It turned out to be a pretty fun piece...if you check it out, let me know your opinion.

New Geek Gap content at SAP's BPX Community

We're getting more involved in SAP's BPX community!

BPX stands for "business process expert"--what we call go-betweens, the increasingly important liaisons between the business world and the tech world.

We've begun contributing regular content to the site, as articles, blogs and wikis, and it's some of the most fun writing we've done for a while.

Here's our first entry, about how the 2010 Census field operatives will have to collect information with paper and pencils, just as they would have in the 19th Century, after the Census Bureau spent more than half a billion dollars trying to get handheld devices into the field.

Let us know what you think!

Geek Gap TV at SAP

If you've been following our Geek Gap doings, you may know that we traveled to California week before last to give a Geek Gap presentation to a live audience at SAP Corp., as well as countless watchers over the Web via Webex and Quicktime.

If you missed that event online, here's a chance to see it again. (You will need to use Internet Explorer to view the video.) It will be up on the SAP site for the next few days. Take a look, and leave a comment or drop us a line at authors@geekgap.com to let us know what you think!

Amazon Screws Print-on-Demand (POD) Publishers

You don't need road manners if you're a two-ton truck.

Amazon proved the truth of this adage this month when it issued new contracts forcing print-on-demand publishers to use its service BookSurge to print books.

For anyone who doesn't know, print-on-demand (POD) is a long-tail technology that allows publishers to print and sell books one at a time, in response to purchaser orders. You still wind up with a physical book that is shipped to you, but it didn't exist until you placed the order.

A number of mostly small or medium sized companies have popped up to serve this market, and while printing a few copies of any individual book is not an especially viable business model, in the aggregate, it makes for a workable business. Writers who want to self-publish can get their books to interested readers. Books that have gone out of print at traditional publishers find new life in the POD world, and readers can buy them without having to search for used copies. Online booksellers like Amazon take a nice cut of the purchase price, as they do with every sale. Everyone benefits.

Only Amazon has decided this isn't good enough and is now insisting these smaller POD companies are longer entitled to print their own books--at least not if those books are to be sold by Amazon. They must use Amazon's service instead.

Here's a link to an ASJA press release about this. At times like these, it's nice to remember that there's another two-ton truck on the road: Barnes & Noble, whose BN.com site is comparable to Amazon in many ways. Maybe time for a switch...?

Geek Gap Presentation Went Great!

Bill and I hade a great time doing a presentation on The Geek Gap for the SAP BPX (Business Process Expert) community. We had role-play of a real-life geek/suit conflict with Bob Mcglynn and Mark Finnern (thanks, guys!), and a couple of people afterward talked to us about doing a Geek Gap presentation at their events own events. We may be back again on the West Coast in the next few months.

For anyone who watched the webcast (you know who you are), thanks for logging on! We'd love to hear your feedback on the topic or the presentation, either here, or if you'd rather email us privately, to authors@geekgap.com.

For those of you who didn't watch it live, we hope to have at least a clip of the presentation, and/or part of the video podcast interview we did right after up online soon.

In the meantime, our next public event, for anyone in or around Ulster County, NY, is a talk at the Kingston Barnes & Noble April 16 at 7 pm.

Thanks again to SAP for having us over, and to Jeff for video recording the whole event. Hope to see you in April. And do check out the BPX community, it's a great place for geeks to learn about business, and suits to learn abou technology, and both to learn about each other.

We're off to Silicon Valley!

California, Here We Come.
On Wed. March 26, 2008, 10am to 11:30amPDT (that's 1pm to 2:30pm EDT for the timezone-challenged), we'll be in Palo Alto, CA as guest speakers for the SAP Salon series. You can join us there for the event at SAP, or join the live stream. Click here to see the invite for the event, get the address, and for the link to log onto the live stream.

Also check out the blog entry on the event by Mark Finnern, Chief Evangelist of the SDN and BPX Communities at SAP.

SAP is one of the few companies who really "get it" about the Geek Gap, and we're really looking forward to getting together with them again. We were in Las Vegas at the SAP TechEd 2007 event last October for a couple days of speaking, and met some amazing people. It was a pleasure to quickly get past the stage of "Yes, folks, the Geek Gap is a real problem!" and insteadfocus on reducing the effects and bridging the gap. The pic above is from a short video SAP has on their site about Community Day, part of the week-long event. If your company works with SAP software at all, I'd highly recommend planning to attend TechEd 2008 in either Las Vegas, Berlin, Bangalore, or Shanghai. Amazing event!

This trip, we'll be focusing on how best to get the two cultures to communicate better and get back to work. Do come or log on if you can, we plan on having a fun time.

Love My Sony Reader!

Bill's granddaughter Julia had her first birthday in early December, and after the party, Bill and I were hanging out with her parents, Bill's daughter Alyssa and son-in-law, John.

Alyssa is as much of a tech-head as Bill is and talk swiftly meandered to the latest and greatest tech devices. I mentioned my interest in Amazon's newly-released Kindle. I have stacks of books all around my office and our bedroom because, even though I have large quantities of book shelves, I have even larger quantities of books, and their ranks are growing all the time. I've always loved the idea of a digital book reader that could help tame the clutter and save the forests in the bargain.

Alyssa told me that she thought Sony's Reader Digital Book (which I had never heard of) was a better device. I came to agree with her during what I thought was only idle conversation. But, unbeknownst to me, Bill, who was noodling around on her computer, wandered over to eBay, searched for a Reader, happened upon one at a good price and grabbed it then and there as a Christmas present for me.

OK, I admit it, I love the thing. Even though, it's a god-awful example of technology that isn't "there" yet. Instead of crisp black on white, it's gray on gray, which took a little getting used to. A faint ghost of the previous image remains on the screen, which is way less annoying than I thought it would be when I first started using the thing. The interface is clunky in various ways, and you can read lots of stuff you might like, but far from everything.

But...it's great! Years ago I stopped cold turkey buying the Sunday New York Times, which can be tough to find around here if you don't rise and shine bright and early on Sunday mornings. I got sick of searching from store to store, then lugging home ten pounds of paper, only to salvage just a few sections that it would take me till the following Sunday to finish reading. I did make an exception for the Sunday New York Times in which Bill and I were interviewed; I have five copies of that huge thing taking up space in our guest room :-)

Anyhow, I signed up for the New York Times by email when that wonderful innovation came around. But I'm not going to read a 5,000 word in-depth Magazine article on the French foreign minister on my computer screen, and I really can't be bothered to print it out, either. Enter Reader: I save it as a Word file, port it over and voila!

Of course, the Reader is intended for books, and I've recently read Kate Chopin's The Awakening (loved the story, hated the ending) and Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary, both courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

You may detect a pattern in my e-reading here: it's free! If you're a cheapskate about reading, as I tend to be, the Sony is the only way to go, as even downloading a Word document of your own creation to Kindle costs ten cents. The Reader is also slim, elegant, comes with an appealing leather-like cover, and like everything Sony, excels in design.

Kindle has its advantages too. Noodling around myself, I've found titles available on Sony but not Kindle (to my delight) and vice versa (to my frustration). Ultimately, though, I imagine Amazon will win that war--and its platform will predominate--as it's in the book business, while Sony is not. Kindle has a keyboard, which lets you do things like search. There were a couple of times in that French foreign minister article when someone was quoted by last name only and I couldn't quite remember who that person was, though I knew the information had been given a few pages earlier. The only thing I could do was leaf back through the pages and hope the name would catch my eye--exactly what I'd have done if I was reading on paper--but Kindle would have let me search for it instead.

Kindle also directly accesses the Internet, so you can download books (and newspapers!) directly without having to connect to a PC. Of course, I pretty much never go anywhere for long without a PC, so this isn't much of an advantage at my end.

And then there's the question of how Kindle connects to the Internet--not via WiFi, but via Sprint's mobile network. I see the logic there: imagine you're in an airport, waiting for a flight, you want to download a book before your flight, but there's no WiFi, or you have to sign up for an account and put in your credit card number to get it. What a drag. With Kindle you can just download in moments and you're all set.

Unless you're me. I live in Woodstock, NY, a town with a single (and very controversial) cell tower that does NOT support Sprint service. I have to assume if a Sprint cellphone won't work in Woodstock, then Kindle won't either.

To download a book, I'd have to drive to a nearby large town, probably Kingston. While I was there, I would probably wind up at the Barnes & Noble...

Product recall does not illustrate Geek Gap??

Every semester, Bill and I do a presentation on the Geek Gap to a management class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y.

These are the technology leaders of tomorrow (in case you're not familiar with it, RPI is a top school for geeks. Uber-geek Ethan Zuckerman, who wrote an introduction for The Geek Gap is just one of its many prominent alumni.)

Perhaps because they are young, they are comfortable with technology, and have not been too exposed to the world of business yet, some of the students have doubts about whether there really is such a thing as a gap between business and IT people. Not that they've ever said so to our faces, but we've heard back from their instructors that this skepticism sometimes comes up in post-class discussions.

That's what happened, so we were told, after our most recent visit to the leadership class. But this time around it was kind of surprising.

Here's why: Many of the students also work as interns in large and small companies as part of their education, and during class we talk to them about their experiences. That's often a great way to illustrate the Geek Gap, and this time was better than most.

The whole class listened as one of their classmates described working at a company that had recently had a product recall. One of the components of the product, he explained, was not of dependable enough quality to be used in the product. The student explained that people in the tech department where he worked had demonstrated through statistical analysis that it wouldn't be good enough. The company went ahead and used it anyway.

As the suit representative of our duo, I responded: "Was the component lower in cost than the other alternatives?"

The student looked at me blankly. He had no idea. It clearly had not, until that moment, occurred to him that this might be the explanation.

"Obviously, when a company is forced to recall a product, that has to count as a failure," I continued. "Nobody wants that to happen. But you don't want a product that's so expensive to produce that the company loses money every time someone buys one. That would be bad too, wouldn't it? So maybe they were stuck with impossible choices, and they decided to give the weak component a try. And for whatever reason, they wouldn't, couldn't, or didn't listen to the technology people who knew it would never work."

I thought I'd gotten my point across, till I heard about their discussion later: Did the Geek Gap really exist? That description of the product recall was the best illustration of the Geek Gap I'd come across in a while. Why didn't they get it?

I guess this is why Bill dubbed the Geek Gap "the elephant in the corner"--so big that people actually can't see it.

Or, as George Orwell put it, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Sold Out at Amazon!!

So we got on a plane--actually a few planes--and went to Las Vegas for SAP's humongoid TechEd conference. What a time that was!

You can catch just a glimpse of Bill in the video highlights, but there is also some video of us talking Geek Gap in a roundtable discussion that we will post at least part of when we get it.

It was awesome to be in a crowd of people who get it about the geek/suit disconnect. Especially since a lot of them had read and knew the stories in the book. We sold a bunch more books, gave away a few copies, including one to Tim O'Reilly who was featured right after us on the first day of the conference. We were webcast out live while speaking, so we hear. And we had a whole lotta fun, not the least of which was getting Bob McGlynn of SAP and Jim Spath of Black & Decker to do our bidding as they role-played a geek and suit having it out in the Community Clubhouse.

I'm kind of an obsessive-compulsive watcher of our Amazon ranking--I figure when geeks buy books they mostly go to Amazon--so it was gratifying to watch the next few days as the figures climbed and "In stock" turned to "Only 3 left in stock--more on the way."

And then...things took an odd turn. "3 left in stock" turned to "usually ships within 1 to 3 weeks" turned to "usually ships within 4 to 6 weeks." Usually?? Since when is this usual?

After a couple of days of this we sent an inquiring note to our editor at Prometheus, who did some asking around and discovered that the book had sold out at Amazon and Amazon's distributor. They're sending more as fast as ever they can, but...apparently that adds up to 4 to 6 weeks.

Sigh.

Don't know whether to be happy that people are buying the book, or annoyed that, now that more people want the book, they can't get it at the outlet most geeks are accustomed to using.

As our editor points out, you can get it right away at the only two-letter URL I know of, BN.com. Or, better yet, send us an email. We take PayPal, we don't charge for shipping (at least not in the U.S.) and we'll sign it for you too. And--oh yeah--we'll send it anonymously if you know someone who should be alerted to the business/technology divide but you don't want to be the one to say so.

How They Make News

I've read it in half a dozen places now: A poll shows half of all employers won't let employees use Facebook on company time. The poll, conducted by the security company Sophos, bounced around from tech news outlet to tech news outlet, appearing and reappearing over at least a week.

This raises three questions:

1. Why Facebook? MySpace is out there, as are Orkut and Friendster. And then, of course, there's LinkedIn, which Bill and I actually belong to, and which employers say they like too because people use it for business purposes. Of course one of the things LinkedIn does best is help people find new jobs so they can quit their present ones, but these employers don't seem particularly troubled about that.

2. Why do tech news sites inevitably allow security companies to create news stories whenever they feel like it? If Peter Pan issued a great new study about how eating peanut butter improves people's sex lives, would they publish it? Or would they look for independent corroboration first? What if it was a Tobacco Institute study on the health benefits of smoking? And yet, every time a security company issues a supposedly unbiased study on a growing security threat, the tech media slavishly republishes it without pausing for even a nanosecond to question the motivation.

3. Does it matter? "That's what my iPhone is for," posted one responder to the CNet story. In fact, this poster rarely bothers to use a computer for Facebook anymore. So with mobile devices more and more powerful, and more and more sites like Facebook designed to work on them, does it really matter what restrictions employers place on desktops?

It's just one more example of how business leaders often are one step behind technology: telling employees what they can and can't do with their work computers, as if those employees weren't already walking around with their own computers in their pockets.

A Rare Misstep from Google?

We've always been big Google lovers. We think the way they structured their business is brilliant: create a graduate-school like atmosphere. Serve gourmet meals. Embrace open source. Make everything simple and fun.

Paul Graham, a geek much smarter than either of us, pointed out how Google's clean, simple and mostly white space look was not so much an aesthetic choice as a recognition, years ahead of its time, that mobile would become an important part of how people access the Internet, and so it would be smart to create a look that would work well on tiny mobile screens.

It's rare for us to think ill of Google. But we believe the company has made a big mistake in how it's handling its Adsense program, and how it's dealing with clickfraud.

Much of Google's revenues (which topped $1 billion in a single quarter) come from its programs to help advertisers large and small place text ads on Web sites large and small. It works like this: advertisers buy space for text ads on Web sites that relate to their product or service. Owners of Web sites sign up to run these ads on their pages. Ever time a viewer clicks one of the ads, the advertiser is charged, and a small sum is paid to the Web site owner's account. (The difference between the two, needless to say, is how Google makes its own profits.)

Simple, and brilliant--except for the phenomenon of clickfraud, in which nefarious users manipulate the system for their own ends. For instance if you want to harm one of your competitors, you can click its ad over and over, thus running up its Adsense bill without the benefit of a possible customer actually looking at the ad.

A more common, and worrisome, form of clickfraud involves web site owners using either humans or bots to repeatedly click ads on their own sites so as to generate Adsense payments. This practice has led advertisers to sue Google (and Yahoo, which has a similar program), claiming they were paying for fraudulent clicks.

Google negotiated a favorable settlement in the lawsuit, but it also cracked down--hard--on clickfraud. In the process, it has alienated many of its smaller business partners who carry the Adsense ads, by summarily closing their accounts--and keeping any owed money not yet paid to them--without explaining why it was doing so. Site owners are informed that because of the confidentiality of Google's algorithms, they can't be told exactly what they did wrong, only that it appears they've engaged in fraudulent behavior. That's that. And don't even think about coming back.

Though the web site owners are given no information, a tiny bit more can be gleaned from Google's site directed at advertisers, which explains (with a helpful graphic) that "invalid" clicks may not necessarily be fraudulent clicks, that Google is casting a wide net for these invalid clicks and doesn't mind getting false positives. Although I couldn't find anything that said so on the site, a PC World story says that something as simple as having a user click the same ad twice (which can easily happen anytime someone's computer or Internet connection is slow to respond) is considered an invalid click from Google's point of view. Given rules like these, it's easy to see how almost every innocent site might be getting its Adsense account closed.

And that seems to be what's happening, to web sites medium sized and small, including the popular British gay site pinknews.co.uk, and our friend, Rocketeers author Michael Belfiore. Supposedly, there's an appeal process, but when even a publisher with a respectable quantity of hits every month can't get anything beyond e-mail repetition that we're closing your account but won't tell you why, and you won't be able to open another one, it seems unlikely that anyone with the authority to do anything actually is reviewing the appeals. The last threat, by the way, isn't true: pinknews.co.uk had no trouble creating a new account for itself after it was told it wouldn't be able to.

It's obvious why Google is taking these draconian measures: for fear of losing its advertisers (who, are, after all, its only paying customers), not to mention running afoul of another lawsuit. The question is, how badly does it need the other element in the equation, the web site owners? Many of them have decided that, all in all, they'd rather do business with Yahoo! Especially since Yahoo! promises to provide a live human being to talk to if you run into a problem. Google has not given any indication that it minds sending these thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of content providers away in such a way that they're virtually certain never to return. And, from a short-term point of view, that strategy may be right. There are millions of fish in the Web site owner sea. Who cares if some of them are peeved; they'll be easy enough to replace.

But there's also a long-term view. Google thrives on its nice-guy image. All the way through its rise to search engine dominance, through a supposedly overpriced IPO that went nowhere but up, even through being included in the S&P 500 (!), it's retained its image of a bunch of nice Stanford kids sitting around making cool stuff. A major corporation that puts its software in the hands of the little people.

Shutting the little people out without explaining why doesn't help that nice-guy image. Keeping the money you promised them for ads that have already run on their sites doesn't seem like a nice thing to do at all. It seems like the arrogant behavior of a major corporation. The class-action lawsuit that seems like a no-brainer response to that move will probably make Google look even less like a nice guy than it already does.

So maybe there was something to lose here, after all. And maybe, for once, Google was too big and too full of its own power to recognize it.

Don't Blame Tech!

If you're a geek and you lived through the boom and bust of the dot-coms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it must be nice to know...this time no one is blaming you.

The culprit this time is the most bricks-and-mortar of industries, real estate. Real estate spent most of the last decade in a delusional state that was quite reminiscent of the dot-com boom: things were going to keep going up and up forever. Real estate prices would rise and never fall. Remember when people though that about the Nasdaq?

You could "flip" houses. You could borrow at interest only and count on rising property value to pay off your loan. It was almost impossible to lose money in real estate.

It turns out it was possible, and also highly possible to get in over your head. Especially in an environment where all it takes, pretty much, is a pulse to qualify for a home loan. Where lenders practically follow you down the street.

Countrywide, the nation's largest lender, announced the subprime meltdown would threaten its financial position, and, according to CNN, that 20 percent of its borrowers are late on their payments. This is the kind of thing that tends to make markets go nuts, and they have been, yesterday and today, probably saved from imminent disaster when the Fed, and its counterpart the European Central Bank, poured over $200 billion combined into the markets to try and build investor confidence.

OK, it seems that real estate has come home to roost as other bubbles have before it. But keep a couple of things in mind. It's easy to forget this, but just three weeks ago on July 19, the Dow actually hit its highest point ever. And, despite a bad couple of days, it actually finished this week in the black.

By the way, just in case anyone thinks the oversupply of credit is a myth, or isn't still with us, here is the text of three of the five ads accompanying the Forbes article about the meltdown:

"Refinance at 5.35 Fixed
Get $300,000 loan for $875/month. Calculate Your New Payment. Act Now!"

"Refinance Rates at 3.0%
$150,000 loan for $391/month - refinance, home equity and purchase."

"Discover Card Application
0% Intro APR & Up to 5% Cashback. Apply Online: 100% Fraud Protection."

The Ad Campaign and the Grinch

Is it me?

Nokia's new viral ad campaign for its N95 centers around Internet warnings of jealous laptops viciously attacking their owners when the computer spotted the Nokia phone and responded with unbridled rage.

The site comes with warnings as to what to do in the event of a computer attack, offers of camouflaged ringtones (so the eavesdropping computer won't know it's a Nokia) and even the facade of a coffee cup you can use to disguise your phone so the computer won't see it.

I keep reading about this on blogs whose authors find the whole thing hilarious. Somehow the hilarity is lost on me.

This may offer a lesson about people-influencing and expectations. Remember the 2000 presidential debates? Al Gore was a famously effective debater, while George W. Bush was known to bumble on his feet. Expectations for Gore's dominance over Bush rose so high in the days before the debate that all Bush had to do was avoid tripping over his shoelaces (which he did) to be perceived as the winner (which he was).

I first heard of the thing via a blog post all about how incredibly hysterical it was. So I had high expectations when I followed the link to the jealous computer Web site. Maybe the big buildup made the whole thing seem anticlimactic. Maybe if I'd come upon it some other way, with no particular expectations, I would have been ROTFL like everyone else.

The odd thing about all this is, the product being touted is the Nokia 95, a mobile phone designed, so far as I can tell, to engender jealousy in iPhones, more than in computers. If I were a laptop and feeling threatened, I'd be more likely to attack my owner if he or she came home with the Nokia 800 Internet Tablet, which, unlike any phone or other mobile device I know of, browses the real Internet, rather than the mobile 'net, and because it runs on open source, has infinite potential for new applications to be created for it as well.