Thirty million years from now, scientists may well partly decipher our society by our advertisements. Advertisements, after all, say a great deal about the sorts of things we value. It's therefore interesting to glean open-source values from the advertisements that surround and promote it.
As I drive Interstate 15 in my home state of Utah, I'm barraged by billboards with three central themes:
- Home building - Live in a planned (and canned) development project!
- Liposuction/cosmetic surgery services - Your house looks great, but you're a little shabby!
- Divorce/mediation counsel - Sure, you're thin now, but wouldn't you be happier with someone else?
No, I'm not exaggerating. But yes, these messages say a lot about the values and insecurities that I and my fellow Utahns share.
On Twitter, as I was reminded this morning, spam bots pepper users with porn and teeth-whitening services. Over e-mail, you're being asked to rescue the bank accounts of African princes (get rich quick!) or being propositioned to finally get that anatomy adjustment you've been putting off (sex is happiness!).
But what about open source?
A Google search for the term "open source" returns the ads at right. Nothing in there to improve your odds with the men/women, but a big emphasis on getting one's job done quickly and efficiently. (Ironically, a search for "Microsoft" returns somewhat different results.)
If we move to SourceForge.net, a popular open-source project hosting site, a search for "Openbravo" reveals a display ad for Oracle Accelerate (SMB solutions) and if you click to download Openbravo's ERP suite you get...SAP advertising its own SMB offerings.
Perhaps scientists will one day mark this as a turning point in proprietary vendors' inability to halt the shift to open source?
Perhaps it doesn't mean much, but I think there's something to the notion that every Google search I performed (for "Liferay," for "Apache Software," and other open-source terms), each returned roughly the same thing: advertisements on how to get the most from the software.
You can learn a lot about society from the advertisements it endures. In open source, it appears that advertisers are selling productivity. I'll buy that.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Should Microsoft buy the maker of the Palm Pre?
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)Slate's Farhad Manjoo offers an interesting suggestion for Microsoft: forget Yahoo, buy Palm.
What's most puzzling about the possibility of renewed merger talks [between Microsoft and Yahoo] is that in betting on Yahoo, Microsoft would be jumping deeper into a volatile business that is outside its area of expertise. Microsoft really has no business being in the business of advertising. It is a software company, and software remains an astonishingly lucrative market. So why does it want to sell ads?...
Buying Yahoo would solve none of Microsoft's software woes--and could likely make them worse if Ballmer spends resources fixing what's wrong with Yahoo rather than fixing what's wrong with Windows Mobile....Microsoft might pay tens of billions of dollars for Yahoo; it could pick up Palm instead for just $1 billion or $2 billion and then spend several hundred million more on transforming the Pre's user interface into a mobile OS that can run on phones made by multiple vendors. Microsoft would also gain a loyal Palm audience--and a base of developers looking to create apps for the device.
This is sage advice, and helps Microsoft compete in a massive market that it largely misses today. Wouldn't Microsoft rather own the world's next desktop, mobile? Isn't that a smarter bet for its skillsets than getting into the Web advertising business?
Ironically, Apple is pulling a Microsoft even as Microsoft fritters away its time on beating Google at the Google advertising game. The iPhone App Store is absolutely rocking, as Businessweek reports, pulling in tens of thousands of applications that make customers increasingly happy to pay for Apple's iconic iPhone mobile device. Sound familiar? This has been Microsoft's game plan on the desktop for decades.
Microsoft would be better able to withstand a potential Apple lawsuit related to the Palm Pre. Microsoft would be better able to counter Apple's increasingly deep pockets as it continues to nail its quarterly earnings.
In so many ways, Microsoft would prove an adept competitor to Apple in mobile, just as adept a competitor as it is not against Google in advertising. Why? Because Microsoft knows developer communities and platforms and operating systems. It doesn't know anything about Web advertising.
There's just one small nit in this master plan: Palm runs Linux. Yes, Microsoft would have to get over that. But given how weak Windows Mobile has been, maybe Linux looks pretty good to the Redmond giant right about now.
Microsoft just launched a new advertising campaign under the banner "It's Everybody's Business," and I have to admit that I really like the ads.
I'm not referring to the TV and online ads, which I think are a bit goofy, even though the content from CEOs at Coca-Cola and elsewhere (right) is quite good.
Rather, I'm referring to the full-page ads and fake memos distributed in such publications as The Wall Street Journal. I discovered a Microsoft "memo" on the ground of my flight to New York yesterday. It looked so real at a quick glance that I turned to the man seated behind me to give it to him. Judge for yourself:
... Read more
Microsoft's "I'm a PC" trucker hat
(Credit: Microsoft)Why must Microsoft strenuously seek to earn the "dork" label that Apple has been pinning on it? In case you missed it, Microsoft is now offering "I'm a PC" gear - like ties and skateboards and probably pearl-encrusted thongs - online for purchase.
This is stupid. It's not stupid because it's Microsoft. It's stupid because no one wants to wear an "I'm a PC" trucker hat. Or, if they do, they have problems that Windows can't solve for them.
Microsoft needs to be defining its image, not letting Apple define it. Why isn't Microsoft telling the story about much of the world's economy being written in Office? "That memo that Hank Paulson just sent to the world's finance chiefs? Written in Word." Or highlighting that the world's youth are growing up with its XBox gaming consoles? Or something that demonstrates that Microsoft is a leader, not a follower?
I'm a Microsoft critic, but it's depressing to watch the company make such a lame attempt at creating its image as trucker "I'm a PC" hats. It can and should do better.
YouTube has spent years trying to figure out how to monetize its mostly amateur-quality, user-created content.
The company has turned to pre-roll and post-roll ads, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledges that the "perfect ad product for YouTube has not been invented yet."
Perhaps Google is looking to the wrong inventors.
Traditional "Madison Avenue" advertising has failed YouTube. I agree with the sentiment expressed recently on the Marcom Professional blog:
In my opinion, one of the reasons that videos spread is the homemade quality....People are advertised to thousands of times a day. We see countless commercial messages all the time. We crave authenticity.
So why not user-generated commercials? Yes, I know there are all sorts of trademark and other concerns, but let's face it: I'd rather watch an amateur video for Heinz Ketchup than just about anything Heinz could develop. (In fact, someone just sent me this homemade video for "Ketchup Boy," pitching Heinz Ketchup.) I bet user-generated commercials would actually become a destination in and of themselves.
How about it, Google?
Tim O'Reilly recently came to Google's rescue (as if it needed him to do so), slapping out at those like ReadWriteWeb that dare to criticize Google for creating a wide array of projects...but leaving 45 percent in the land of perpetual beta, as ComputerWorld recently noted.
O'Reilly chides ReadWriteWeb for disparaging Google's win rate (i.e., one win--albeit a big one--in its company history), which is probably fair, but then makes the mistake of holding up Google's successes in maps and other "markets" that generate little cash and/or cost much cash (YouTube). He needn't have bothered. Google can be a failure in everything else it does provided it keeps feeding its advertising machine. Microsoft? It had two big hits--Windows and Office--which have covered a multitude of sins in other product areas.
I think where O'Reilly really stumbles is in implying that the Google critiques stem from sour grapes. Hardly. In fact, the reason I and others criticize Google derives from a belief that its immense brain power should be churning out more than pretty artwork on its main page. Google has a fantastic opportunity to completely change the face of computing. Its attempts thus far have been middling at best.
True, as O'Reilly notes, Google's Chrome browser and its Android mobile platform represent significant leaps at the future, and may end up significantly altering that future for the better. I agree. But this doesn't mean that Google should get a free pass on roaring into new markets (e.g., comparison shopping with Froogle, e-mail with Gmail, etc.) and then underwhelming in product features and the corporate attention necessary to gain market share.
I believe Google uses its "perpetual beta" strategy as an internal excuse for poor craftsmanship and even poorer execution. Google disagrees, trying to spin its beta story for ComputerWorld as a positive thing and somehow different from traditional software:
... Read moreWriter Nicholas Carr has done it again.
In a recent post on Google ("The Omnigoogle"), Carr explains more clearly than I've ever seen why Google does what it does (invests in satellites, free Wi-Fi, open-source software, etc.), and why failure is all part of the plan.
Indeed, it wasn't Carr's comparison of why Google is much like Microsoft (Google controls the online economy, while Microsoft controls the desktop economy) that I found most interesting, but rather his explanation of why Google can fail so routinely in its product launches...and have that failure feed into its top-line revenue:
Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts--the vast breadth of Google's complements, and the company's ability to push the price of those complements toward zero--are what really set the company apart from other firms.
... Read more
I never expected Hulu to work out, but according to ReadWriteWeb's review of a recent report from LiveRail, it may actually be doing better than YouTube in terms of online video monetization.
Why? Because Hulu is apparently able to sell ads against 100 percent of its video inventory, while YouTube is struggling to hit 3 percent. User-generated video content, it would appear, is not nearly as lucrative as selling advertising against professionally-generated video content....
Hulu has better content, and higher quality of video, even though it has far less overall content. According to LiveRail, Hulu hosts 88 million videos, compared to YouTube's 4.2 billion. When I want a Saturday Night Live sketch, however, I find it on Hulu, not YouTube (at least, not for long on YouTube).
Less content, but better, seems to pay, at least in the video world.
Even so, is it just a matter of time until higher bandwidth commoditizes video, as well, to the point that it will be as "worthless" as text? Maybe. At that point, it would make a lot of sense to bundle in pricing for video with my monthly ISP subscription. I'm happy to pay. I just don't want to have to think about it. Make online video payment as easy as paying my cable subscription.
I was scratching my head in wonder at the news that Yahoo! and Google are now making it easy for their users to opt out of advertisement targeting. I can't remember the last time I've seen an ad. I installed Adblock Plus a year or so ago and haven't seen an ad since.
No, I haven't figured out how Google and others can make money in the absence of ad. For that matter, who knows how CNET will?
All I know is that ads are a thing of the past for me, on the TV and on the web. It's nice that Yahoo! and Google are kind of, sort of recognizing this. But for the crowd that will be savvy enough to know how to turn off ads (and will read the press that reports on such things), they're already using Adblock Plus.
In other words, Yahoo! and Google, thank you but no thank you. We've already taken care of our ads.
What's a fairly dull service yet manages to pull in $20,000 each day by serving up ads? No, it's not Google, but it's one of those services that make me say, "Dang! I wish I would have thought of that!"
It's OpenDNS. It's a service that speeds up browsing while protecting its users from phishing and other malware sites.
Despite the name, no, OpenDNS is not open source. It's the kind of service, however, that doesn't rely on proprietary source. OpenDNS makes money by serving up ads. More pertinently to open source, it leverages community to improve the service:
OpenDNS also uses their community to drive new features and tag new malware sites. Users submit ideas and vote on them in a Digg-like interface. And when a user blacklists a site and tags it with a category, other users are asked to verify. If they do, the site is added to the general category blacklist as well.
It's not open source, as I said, and, frankly, I'm not sure how open source would help drive this particular business. OpenDNS is a sign of our "open" times: The code is not always open, but the process increasingly is. Everyone seems to be experimenting with the principles that have made open source so successful.
OpenDNS' experiment? It's currently worth $7.3 million in revenue.
