Apple’s Dazzle?

Over the last six years, especially, AAPL has branded much better mouse traps, in the larger scheme of things, and designed a line-up of communications brands that carry the same panache as designer handbags on Fifth Avenue.  Jobs et al simply paid attention to the interfaces and made them and the products appealing.  Hard as some tried, they bent badly in the frenzy.   HP nearly folded, Dell is awash in a sea of living fossils, soon to be replaced by open source enterprise utilities, if they can define a pleasant enough experience.  Microsoft simply bowed out a long time ago.  Steve Jobs will be missed mainly for being able to locate the next generation of interfaces.  Apparently, he may have been the only one in our business who recognized where the user was going.

While Steve Ballmer has been sitting around, pondering his pile, the folks at Apple saw what was obvious –  global markets for easy-to-use, reliable, entertainment-friendly, music-friendly gadgets for the generations.  AAPL earns over $41 dollars for every share ( now selling around $600 per share) of stock they issue.  They claim to be paying back some of it to investors, but that hasn’t actually happened since 1995.  They have about $100 billion in savings alone, and they have built an entirely separate division to beat the residents of many states out of some taxes they could really use.

		DataStax Enterprise – Big Data Management for the Enterprise

Yet defenders, of the tax shelter industry, would say, ‘hey, they’re not breaking any laws?’  And, according to our representatives, and some “loyal” Apple shareholders, this is an acceptable arrangement, regardless of the campaign money politicians spend and take from the companies they regulate.  The legislatures and Congress are corrupt, but how do the folks who own shares abide by the dudes who won’t share the riches with them?  The last dividend Apple paid was back in ’95 though the stock has soared since then.

I’d love for someone to tell me how it is worth Apple’s time and money to support someone just to ride the bloody line of the law, rather than just give the money back, or buy your own shares.  What is the need for this separate industry designed to simply pluck off all the loopholes our corrupt politicians, the lawmakers, write into legislation?

Should Apple be involved in such controversial policies; should they ask shareholders to vote on whether or not to continue such practices; should they be forced, financially, to give the money back to shareholders, spend it, or buy back their own shares?  Love to hear your opinions.

The report points to the acquisitions of content providers like Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Reuters, respectively, by the big hot tech giants, like Facebook and Google, and the attempts by such laggards like AOL to try to pin their future on the likes of Huffington Post. The newspaper industry alone has shrunk 43% since 2000 and with classified ads moving online, almost exclusively, the hope for any change to the contrary is wishful thinking by a dinosaur industry. The advent of the smart phone, which now is found in more than 40% of most American’s pockets, and which threatens print models further, may be the final nail in the coffin. Even the U.S. Postal System looks doomed as snail mail is evaporated by online communications and transactions.

The report claims that while most “traditional” news operations have launched some form of online news presence, some way to collect fees for the content they produce, none are successful. Those who know, see the forest for the trees and understand that folks who are online aren’t enticed to pay for content that is available, in some form, elsewhere. The problem is that they waited too long, and they never understood what was happening. Try to engage ina NYTimes discussion and it can take three days to get your opinion posted; try to engage with the Wall Street Journal, and you may find yourself getting hacked.

Here in the Bay Area we have seen how local news rags have simply imploded and the reasons people once supported them are gone. No more great columns or writers, no more unique content and no hope for change. The NYTimes is bleeding money big time and I can’t think of a single reason it will stop. Here is perhaps the biggest tell: “Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising. So far, news organizations are mainly using the popular networking platform, Twitter, to push out their own content rather than to engage with audiences, solicit information or share information they themselves did not produce.”
However, on the other side, which Pew covers rather obtusely, are the independents and bloggers- social media. Writers haven’t disappeared. They simply are learning they can live without the newspapers and their inability to engage with the new media and the New Economy. According to Pew, while news organizations are being swallowed up by the big techs, and while they are reconciled to Twitter to promote their articles, “Social media are important but not overwhelming drivers of news, at least not yet.” Apparently, they missed the fact that Facebook and Twitter may be the two most important IPO’s to come down the pike since Google. Also, they apparently missed the Arab Spring and the importance of social media in driving change around the world. Here is their rendering of their findings: “Some 133 million Americans, or 54% of the online U.S. population, are now active users on Facebook (out of 850 million monthly active users globally).2 They also spend an average of seven hours there a month, 14 times the amount of time people spend on average on the most popular news sites.3 And the number of Twitter users grew 32% last year to around 24 million active users in the U.S. (500 million total accounts worldwide), the company reports. But the notion that large percentages of Americans now get their news mainly from recommendations from friends does not hold up, according to survey data released here. No more than 10% of digital news consumers follow news recommendations from Facebook or Twitter “very often,” the new survey finds.”

That makes no sense unless you are measuring the results based on a wish list. Just because the folks they asked said they don’t follow news recommended from friends, doesn’t make any sense. Why would the social media be growing and their discussion multiplying if they don’t follow the stories offered there? Why would news organizations that this report claims uses Twitter, if it didn’t work?
Pew misses the mark by not following obvious conclusions like the death of the major networks. Does anyone think that NBC, CBS and ABC along with Fox aren’t baffled about how they plan to sell TV time in the coming years? Does anyone think that radio is eager to contemplate their future based on satellite radio along with autos with Internet standard?

Finally, their “findings” issued further contradicted their article. “The year 2011 was a mixed one economically for the news media. Ad dollars followed the audiences to the web, and a stable business model helped cable television. But much of the legacy media suffered revenue declines.” I’m not sure who superimposed their senseless rendition of these facts we have all contemplated and predicted years ago, but it is clear that Pew is not playing with the whole deck and clarity is not a part of their analysis. Let us know where you see news and media moving in the next year and let’s get some predictions so we can see how smart our audience is over that time. I’d bet we can come up with more accurate predictions than Pew has done.

“The coming transformation journey—changing IT from roadblock to driver—won’t be easy. It will call for a comprehensive strategy that leads to new architectures, new services, and new platforms. And it will demand prompt, disciplined execution to bring those new approaches to life.”

We have been saying the same thing for years, and we have been waiting for the train to reach the station, so that IT workers can get on board and face the third coming of the Internet. If social networking was the second coming, then the march to BYOD inside businesses, and the transformation of the enterprise, along with the folks driving it, will force the equilibrium to be punctuated by the workers. Accenture correctly names the Cloud, mobility and Big Data as the drivers, and they warn CIO’s that now is not the time to shy away from the realities of the market place.

We listened to various technology executives posit that the enterprise has decided to allow the smartphone into their sphere, to allow devices to pierce the veil of the corporate sanctuary and to recognize that big data is not only here, but it is a most lazy asset left to its own devices. Few would go on record to say that they had little choice, and that they had no idea what it would mean down the road.

The Accenture report focuses on specific aspects that they say will drive innovation, and will “change IT from roadblock to driver.” The first of these is “Context-based services,” and they distinguish between the parts of the social media that are focused on the consumer versus the way businesses relate the unstructured data of that landscape, to the dialog that now exists for business. The examples they suggest are “support for a pharmaceutical sales rep tailored to the context of the doctors she will be meeting and the drugs she’s selling,” or, “it could be data made available to a technician at an oil refinery, customized to the equipment he’s servicing and what its downtime history looks like.” Let’s be clear, these are not new ideas, but the explicit message from Accenture that, if you don’t start using this data, and the technologies that provide it, you will be out of business, is a new tack for the consultant firm.

Is this mandate for real, or can the business community afford to continue to procrastinate and lag in the IT realm? If you saw the activity in the Cloud Connect show and RSA recently, you’d know that competition is fierce for change and companies are lining up to get educated and start testing the waters. Having said that, the IT worker is not ready to innovate the use of data and is not ready to jump in and suggest strategic planning that will differentiate their business from laggards. There seems to be almost a missing piece in fact. We have people who can build databases, we have search functions that can farm the data for keywords and ideas. We don’t have a position in either the IT or marketing realm that can merge the two assets and therein lies the rub.

Accenture’s folks say that “old approaches to data survive because they make IT leaders feel they are in control” and they seem to think a pilot team of the old guard if IT and management are needed to design the system that will turn this into a profit for the companies that invest in them. This part is where the rubber will meet the road. They state that, “Successfully rebalancing the data architecture portfolio and blending the structured with the unstructured are key to turning data into new streams of value.” This will take time and education of traditionally cross cultural initiatives to deliver the goods. There is no mention I could find of marketing’s role in the process. The convergence of marketing and IT may be the biggest challenge of all since neither have had the experience of sharing resources and working together on goals with unstructured data. At least they haven’t had that in the industrial realm.

The report states that the, “ability to share data will make it more valuable—but only if it is managed differently.” Sharing is always a meta-idea when it comes to IT departments and marketing management, and, as far as I know, IT has never viewed data as a strategic asset. In their report they mention the red hot Open Source database framework, Apache Hadoop, which has knocked folks like Oracle and Microsoft for a loop because it provides the Big Data requirements without the big ticket price tag. What these changes spell for Oracle and SQL are yet to be sketched, but companies are driving prices down and market share is shifting rapidly. The big question, which has not been answered, is, will companies that were built around these new technologies, and new ideologies, have the advantage over companies that are stuck in the glacier-like movements in rebalancing the work load and the applications used in change?

The migration from only relational databases to the merging of unstructured database data platforms alongside to develop a strategy requires a “rebalancing” of the data scene and demands more than simple titular changes.

Klint Finley, from Servicesangle.com, offers some insights in a recent blog on companies that offer an alternative and work in concert with Hadoop:

ReportGrid – WE TURN DATA INTO INSIGHT – We provide an API that ingests data, analyzes it, and produces insightful analytics and beautiful reports you can embed in your product.

RainStor is a database designed to manage Big Data for large enterprises at the lowest total cost.

RainStor delivers two editions of its database product, Big Data Retention and Big Data Analytics on Hadoop to efficiently manage multi-structured data sets, fully accessible for ongoing query and analysis helping meet both regulatory compliance in addition to the fastest query and analysis on Hadoop. RainStor’s innovative database stores and manages multi-structured big data in the most efficient and cost-effective way compared to traditional relational or data warehouse approaches.

Hortonworks is focused on accelerating the development and adoption of Apache Hadoop. Together with the Apache community, we are making Hadoop more robust and easier to use for enterprises and more open and extensible for solution providers. We also provide expert support and training.

Once again, it remains to be seen how these so-called technologies are bridges to the future, or if they will stand alone to displace the war horses of the past. One thing is for sure, there are no shortages of innovative opportunities to jump aboard and these companies inspire training and new thinking which is really what we think will drive change and help business recognize the many opportunities unfolding from the new data.

Accenture notes in this section that the struggle to “uncouple” data from its roots may not be the purview of the IT manager or department. It is unlikely that the guys building the applications and supporting the strategic security model will have the time, or the inclination, to ponder how sales or marketing or finance might use the data being stored to their advantage. This new category of thinker versus IT manager is a challenge that may just be avoided completely. If data can be stored and moved to the cloud, and if transitional models can pull what they need to shape innovation, where does that leave the IT guys?

This is the crux of the problem for our audience and for the IT model at large. Clearly, retraining and rethinking the model from the worker’s perspective is essential or you may be next dinosaurs to run out of breathing room. CRM systems have demonstrated this and the advent of SCRM users and Superusers have reinforced the concept. Those who thought it would stop there weren’t seriously thinking through the possibilities. If you can manage to understand the needs of sales and understand how to pull meaningful data from your CRM system, you will have a job and you will be highly rewarded.

I can just imagine what the folks over at www.tektips.com are thinking when they read the caption on this section. They are the oldest social network on the planet, yet, I doubt many are interested in being thrown in under that heading. I doubt they see legacy systems as dead in the water or that their jobs are threatened by the idea that they may have to learn how to answer to marketers when they look at the data they are housing. I doubt they fancy considering how it might be evaluated for growing the customer base or retaining customers. That dialog has been avoided or shunned more likely. The underlying caption from Accenture is, “Social isn’t just a bolt-on marketing channel—it will transform interactions in the business world.”

Over at the SCRM discussion, often found on Twitter, you can still hear the sound made by companies that learned how to capitalize on the Superuser perspective – that idea that you already have customers who are more than willing, in fact eager, to help other users on how to use your technology and how to find solutions to their problems. Even though this Superuser concept has been around forever in the form of the beta test, which Microsoft and pals used to grow their businesses, the SCRM crowd has made it all look like a stroke of genius.

Now that the cloud has spread its wings beyond the CRM application, now that applications that allow big data machines to forge all sorts of advantages for corporations, how will it affect the guys in the trenches, the guys who thought they’d always work for those kinds of companies? Instead, call centers, data centers and content farms are the new substrate for the IT worker and the role of contractor will superimpose itself on the idea of a career for many of the IT workers now living the dream. Being the master of the data domain will provide legs for workers, and knowing how to shape a strategic security plan are golden. Thinking that the dynamics aren’t changing and upgrading your skillset are a big mistake. Many of the new companies listed above are offering all sorts of training in middleware and transitional applications. Get used to change and get in front of the works that make you an asset. The world has already adopted this stuff, and now they are in the process of adapting the worker model to it.

Accenture correctly states that while “Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social tools are new communication channels, most organizations have yet to catch up to that reality.” I’m glad they wrote that but it is almost an understatement today. Most organizations are not even aware of those realities; most IT workers haven’t a clue how to add social to their toolkit.

The report lists what needs to be done:

• Revisit business processes and the systems that implement them.
• Look across channels to define interactions
• Look at new forms of data generated by those interactions and evaluate the potential insights
• Revisit the organizational structures that perpetuate the separation of channels.
• Think in terms of industrializing social platforms
• Update the metrics that define success for customer interactions

Well that sounds all fine and good, but the fact is, this requires a special combination of left, and right-brain, thinking. You can’t be a linear thinker and expect to get this stuff and contribute to the new IT worker. You can change the titles, maybe bring back that ol’ cliché about evangelist that was popular a decade or so ago. You can offer some retraining and all sorts of incentives, but, you cannot change the equation. IT guys, for the most part, don’t have it in them. They will spurn any attempts to get them to adopt any collaborative techniques with marketers because they, for the most part, disdain them. We will watch this but I’d love to hear from IT guys on how much you look forward to becoming marketers. Good luck with that.

Here is the link to the page with their 100 day plan, http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture-Technology-Vision-2012.pdf

The only thing that is missing is the idea that many companies will be better off re-training their marketers in IT needs, than attempting to re-tool those old time dudes who loathe marketing. I believe this will significantly shift the entire spectrum of IT and put the burden on the C-suite to come up with a better plan to get the folks they will need to do the job.

There has been lots of discussion by vendors, like Ironkey saying how cost savings will drive the engine for the new look in IT innovation. I agree, though as I told Kevin Bocek in this interview, I’m always amused when an IT company tells me I will save money by investing in the newest platform. The abstract under this heading in the Accenture Report offers this:

IT leaders must look beyond cloud debates to pinpoint the business processes and applications that will matter most to their organizations—and that are best suited to a platform-as-a-service model. PaaS is not just a tool for squeezing cost out of IT; it will provide an environment that can support rapid evolution for key business processes that need continuous change.

Yadda, yadda, and you betcha. Way beyond the cloud is my best guess. Somewhere just outside the cosmos maybe. Problem is, evolution demands, once again, a punctuated equilibrium, not a slow steady glacial crawl. All the assessing that is going on isn’t worth a bag of beans if you don’t have the thinkers, the left-brainers, who can make sense of the dialog.

In Daniel Pink’s piece de resistance, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future,” he states, “To survive in this age, individuals and orgnaizations must examine what they’re doing to earn a living and ask themselves three questions:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

Even if your guys can look beyond the cosmos, can they assimilate the abundance that they must understand and put it back together? Can they get all the tooth powder back in the can?

Knowledge leadership starts at the top, and if your leaders haven’t invested their souls in the social sphere by now, do you really think they will be eager to update their creative muse to step up to the plate?

The Platform-as-a-service is a phenomenal concept and tool but without the thinkers, and their ability to deliver high concept and high touch, the concepts that involve the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty to detect patterns and opportunities and craft a satisfying narrative, the platform will lie fallow. These are sophisticated systems that make suggestions, offer initiative and determine execution models. But they cannot re-shape thinking unless the thinking has embraced change and is willing to collaborate. Sure they can provide cost savings versus manual configurations and transitional applications. But they aren’t going to beat Big Blue in chess, and they aren’t going to create thought leadership for your crew. The other idea that Accenture must follow, but we shun, is that companies like Ellison’s and Beniof’s are players in the platform space and that companies will jump back aboard the big player syndrome. Not going to happen unless they merge and acquire the world, and, even then, the resistance is strong at the thought leadership levels.

Accenture wants folks to think that PaaS is somehow going to provide agility, that old saw about technology leading more technology. That doesn’t work and never has. Sure it can provide the pathways and it can create a plan to move towards the intended goal. But they rely on innovative thinkers, those who understand the particular business and the psyche of the company. You can’t simply apply a FAQ to those requirements. The special sauce and DNA of every company needs thought leadership and it demands a buy in by the leadership. No technology can provide that.

There are no more risks attached to Web 3.0 than there was in 2.0. Accenture notes the risks of smartphones and the data centric model but there has never been more effective security for all your applications and never been more government interest in making enterprises less vulnerable. Now, having said that, there is a huge void in strategic security planning today, and there doesn’t seem to be much interest in laying out the terms. We’ve invited security companies to provide us with their three step plan in security hardware, software and devices across the enterprise but, apparently, they haven’t heard the demand yet from the market.

Accenture loves clichés like, “Organizations will have to accept that their gates will be breached,” “Increasingly connected means increasingly exposed,” and “Leveraging new data platforms to better detect incidents,” and other meaningless fill. They do offer a list of items we like for building that strategic plan we crave:

• Identify organization’s most critical business systems and data sets and assess their vulnerability to cyberattack
• Identify nontraditional IT systems that are being connected to the IT backbone to assess their vulnerability to cyberattack
• Audit basic security operations—from patch management processes to how user access is managed and tracked
• Sketch out the elements of a strategy to partner with select security providers
• Meet with business peers to gauge alignment of security strategy with business strategy and to articulate a shared sense of risk tolerance

The fact is, corporate enterprises have been hit by all sorts of issues and some have left data unattended and lost market credibility because of human error. Where rudimentary security has been performed and managed correctly, there haven’t been any high risk issues. The biggest problems we face as people is from our neighbors and friends who seem to think they can cause problems, disrupt our homes and families and get away with it. If we go after the creeps who target children and bilk the honest businesses and people, we will stop most of our problems. This isn’t something new and it isn’t beyond management. We are safer online than ever before. Rattling the drums for the purpose of headlines is a fool’s game. We won’t play in that sandbox.

Check out the Accenture Report for sure and let us know how we may better serve you. Remember, our goal is to make the life of the IT and online knowledge workers better. How are we doing?

Dave has always had a polite way with words, but the conversation came about when he, and, the more outspoken, Matt Ingram, launched an angry post about how the WSJ article (which we are not linking to here, in deference to MG Siegler), covered an article by an even less subtle, MG Siegler, general partner at CrunchFund and columnist for TechCrunch, without proper citation. Ingram also zipped off this feelings on the topic, “The only possible reason — apart from simply forgetting to do so — is that the paper would rather try to pretend that it was the first to know this information (and it also apparently has a policy of not linking if a WSJ reporter can independently confirm the news).”

Siegler wasted no time in posting a much angrier, and rightfully so, and much needed, rant against the jewel-in-the-crown of the Murdoch media group:  “But if you read The Wall Street Journal, you’d never know. Why’s that? Because they’re fuckheads who don’t credit actual sources of information.”  Ingram’s still pushing tweets that continue to decimate the mogul empire of the failed Australian’s desperate attempt to gain the monopolistic control he feels he needs.

I’m guessing that is what Dave Weinberger referred to when he used “self-esteem” as a cause for Murdoch’s archaic world view.  Ingram and others bring up the issue of trust and Matt also claims that WSJ sees itself perhaps as the scoop leader, but Matt doesn’t see scoops as important as they may have been in the past.  I may be wrong, but I infer that he feels the community of new journalists that follow the new conventions of proper citation, elevates the news, and the medium, and I couldn’t agree more with that.  We all have adapted to a consensus approach and look for it in almost every volatile topic.  The question I want to raise is this, is Twitter the only vehicle and weapon we have to correct the situation?

Yet I can’t help but think that there is another step, perhaps a taboo, on this subject.  That is, what do we about it, as the folks who want to change the old guard world view?  In another old-guard, living fossil, Newsweek, writer Daniel Lyons,  in an essay, provocatively titled, “A Decade of Destruction.  The first decade of the new millennium saw the rise of a supremely disruptive technological force: the Internet” that provides a more accurate appraisal of the situation and expands the need to fix bigger issues:  “You wouldn’t think that in an information age the biggest victim would be purveyors of information. But there you go. Newspapers are getting wiped out in part because they didn’t realize they were in the information business—they thought their business was about putting ink onto paper and then physically distributing those stacks of paper with fleets of trucks and delivery people.”

In the piece, Lyons recites what many of us have documented, that the news industry tried to ignore the internet, hoping it “would just go away,” and then lists a few of the industries who succumbed to the power of critical mass when everyone moved online and brands piled up on the heap of yesterday’s news.  He lists the music, and entertainment, groups who followed the same path as Murdoch and notes that Microsoft too, it should be reiterated, failed to understand the new platform and continues today to fail, in spite of their resources. “Microsoft’s business model was based around waiting for others to innovate, then making cheap knockoffs of what others were selling. Microsoft copied Apple to make Windows.”

And he notes, which has been well documented, that their approach to bullying and intimidation is no longer winning them any prizes.  They continue to spend on innovations that are no longer innovations, and they continue to sit on a pile of acquisitions they haven’t a clue how to grow.  Today we see the exact same thinking and problem coming from companies like Oracle who though finally recognizing the Cloud as the newest threat to their business, not having a clue how to adapt.

But the main question is, what do we do about the officious path many old media companies use, and the same for titans of industry, which will eventually lose, but hang on by destroying the landscape the Internet has leveled?  As readers, do you see the difference and does the new path build trust for you, or do you even care about where news comes from and if it is properly cited?  Should the new guard ostracize the old and refrain from thinking about new ways to compete?
The Cloud represents a sea change for Web 2.0 and it’s time it was recognized as such by the audience and user as much as the companies that adapt to it.  If authors and companies who want to play fair don’t get their audience on board and educated about the choices they are making, we are squandering the chance to leap into the new era and may lose our traction.

The “low-hanging fruit,” those who wanted to get the latest information on securing their networks locking down business secrets and building solid firewalls around their data, promised a rapid expansion and secure future for the Internet. For the most part, you could trust what showed up on your desktop. But, to quote Gordon Gecko, “greed is not only good, it’s now legal.” Today you don’t see many folks inhibited by complaints of spamming, and data is sold for dimes on the dollar. The game is on, and what you do with the data you’ve accumulated, or bought, all goes into a huge mixing bowl which blends it all together with your Facebook profile, your twitter smarm and your “secret” anonymous email accounts. Today, there are no secrets; and there are no constraints. As an old friend said, the only test for spam is, if it doesn’t work. In other words, 11% of all spam gets a response; 75% of all email is spam.
According to the Wiki , tracking what has come to be called, “’You-Can-Spam’ Act because while the bill does not explicitly legitimize e-mail spam, it preempts laws that allowed for (among other things) easier prosecution and rights to private action. In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages.” They show the path we’ve watched the last ten years or so as the government has failed to understand the implications or the opportunities for enhancing our brand of free market enterprise while respecting the audience it serves. They list handfuls of arrests and more smacks on the wrists of the con-men who have manipulated the law and the people willing to risk their reputations for a buck.
Our Swiss friends started an organization some years back called, “The Spamhaus Project is an international nonprofit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations and sources, to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, to work with Law Enforcement Agencies to identify and pursue spam gangs worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.”

They offer a technical definition of spam:
“An electronic message is “spam” if (A) the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (B) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.”
Unlike the guys selling the nifty email marketing applications, who ostensibly decree that if it works, it’s not spam, the Spamhaus group offers, “Spam is an issue about consent, not content. Whether the Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”) message is an advert, a scam, porn, a begging letter or an offer of a free lunch, the content is irrelevant – if the message was sent unsolicited and in bulk then the message is spam.”
They provide a simple, honest and intelligent guideline for anyone considering a risk to his or her freedom: “The Golden Rule is: Never buy email addresses from anyone. No legitimate company will ever sell you a list of ‘opt-in’ email addresses. Anyone selling you lists of ‘opt-in’ email addresses is very simply a spam outfit. If you have been sold a list of email addresses which the seller promises are “opt-in”, you have been conned.”
Here are some important definitions from their web site:

Listwashing
Listwashing is the systematic removal of complainants from an illicitly gathered address list with no other action taken to stop spamming the remainder of the list. Listwashing removes spam symptoms without curing the underlying problem. ISPs which simply pass abuse reports on to their spamming customers without investigation or further consequences are aiding in listwashing and spamming.

Listwashing is often done in conjunction with snowshoe spamming and waterfalling to attempt to clean bad lists and improve deliverability, rather than simply using OPT IN address acquisition in the first place. Listwashers nearly always include per-recipient codes in the headers and payload URLs. Together with careful list segmentation, dirty lists can be washed to a clean enough state that some ESPs are willing to risk sending spam by importing those lists.

Waterfalling
A list owner is “waterfalling” when they run the same illicitly obtained address list through a series of ESPs, each time cleaning bounces, complainants and maybe non-respondants, and then hoping to move up to a cleaner ESP with better deliverability. The result still includes spammed addresses but fewer spam complaints to the ESP.
Spamtrap
A spamtrap is an address that is used to capture spam sent to it in order to provide information on what spam is being sent and from where. Spamtraps do not belong to real users, they are decoys set up to catch spammers, monitor and collect spam.

When using spamtraps in automated systems, in order to prevent legitimate email from being invited, a spamtrap e-mail address is never published where a human can find it. As the address is never visible to humans, no sender would be encouraged to send messages to the email address for any legitimate purpose.
IP Address
An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique address that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard. The format of an IP address is a 32-bit numeric address written as four numbers separated by periods. Each number can be zero to 255. For example, 1.160.10.240 could be an IP address.
DNSBL
Domain Name System Block List – a list of IP address ranges or other information compiled as a DNS zone. Information in DNS format is easy to query and transport, and its small answers are very “light” on bandwidth overhead (UDP vs. TCP). A DNSBL of domain names is often called a URIBL, Uniform Resource Indicator, although there are numerous such lists written under other names.

Understanding DNSBL filtering

Block, Blocking
noun: A range of IP addresses is a “block” or subnet, often expressed in CIDR notation.
verb: An action taken by an ISP or network to prevent unwanted traffic from entering its private servers, including mail servers.

Tagging
Some spam-filtering systems add a “tag” to the headers of messages which have a high spam-score, such as “X-Filter: yes” or “[spam]” in the Subject. The user can then have their mail client filter those to a quarantine, or delete them sight-unseen. Many of those filtering systems include Spamhaus lists as part of their scoring.

Bouncing, Rejecting
“Bouncing” or “rejecting” refer to the two courses of action a server may take when it detects undeliverable or unwanted mail. In the case of spam, bouncing is very undesirable because most spam has forged headers, and the bounce is sent on to an innocent third party who is often the target of a malicious “bounce bomb” attack.

Visit their community to learn more at: http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Glossary

Yet the idea of building a business around a credible brand, that respects customer choices, has always been an idea that not to be ignored. After all, how many customers can you afford to risk losing in the fight for market share?

It’s important to understand that much of the spam you see in your inbox is in the form of consumer offers, often submitted by third parties with little risk on the table. You won’t find big IT using spam tactics because they would be punished harshly and they understand the risk. This is why it is up to bit IT to confront the situation and demand enforcement.

Yet, talk to any of the multitude of email marketing application peddlers and, while they may not put it into an email, they’ll casually explain that as long as the message is “interesting” you won’t have a problem. Or, as long as you include an opt-out option, it’s Kosher. Naturally, like almost everything these days, politics have destroyed any hope that a rational discussion can work to everyone’s benefit. And with the spread of intrusions by groups like Anonymous, which have sorely embarrassed U.S. law enforcement, to the point of going after the wrong people because they have no clue how to prevent it, there seems to be little leadership to revive the once flowering promise of a junk free channel to the information we want, versus the mountains of garbage that we all have to filter from our lives.

IT leaders remain the wild card in the fight against unwanted junk email and intrusions that serve to inhibit growth, destroy the work of honest folks, and risk the loss of Internet freedom. We’d like to propose an alternative to the failed policies of government, at the risk of them throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We’d like to see IT leaders provide the path to stopping junk email and foster a better system of correcting the problems we face in the future. We invite your ideas and complaints about those you feel abuse the system and increase risk for no one’s benefit. We’ll post whatever you think can help restore the idea that if you mess with the elegance of permission communications, you will suffer the wrath of those who cherish it. Let me know what you think, and we’ll do what we can to make the Internet a channel for free open communications without the threats we now face.

Apple Marketing chief Phil Schiller at a news conference introducing a digital textbook service which will change the way the world works

Apple, with a war chest over $100 billion in cash, has demonstrated that while the past may have found them shying away from taking on the enterprise markets, their plans have developed brand new amazing ecosystems that consumers have adopted and they are piercing the corporate veil from every direction. The idea of forcing those consumers, who also work in the enterprise, to ignore their new playing fields and lose the productivity that comes with Apple’s innovations, strikes this writer as hokum. Productivity rules investment, and, if you think you can rest on your laurels, just ask “Research-In- Motion” how they’re plans are working out.
Steve Jobs evolved from a perfectionist with proprietary propensities, to a “New Economy” entrepreneur and collaborator with a vision for not only the next generation of computing, but with an eye on what the next generation of users will decide to do with his ecosystems. If only Apple would buy out the Department of Education and take charge of educators, we might even compete in global activities in the future.
Yet over at Infoworld they are calling the perceived threats from the piercing of the corporate veil coming out of the IT market “fearmongering” referring to it as “scareware.” Steve Jobs would have gotten a chuckle out of that but the tack at Apple isn’t focused so much on competing, especially, since they prefer to watch the evolution of the user and now understand that the user will decide how information technology evolves, not those holding on for dear life to their past achievements.
Surveys abound saying that fears of security issues caused by mobile devices are unfounded, and that IT concerns are not based on actual issues, but perceived dangers. As phones are being used more and more for identification and password tools, the question remains, will the IT landscape adapt or continue to cringe?
Yet those same surveys claim that “60 percent of companies are now adapting their IT infrastructure to accommodate employees’ personal devices,” “73 percent of C-level executives reported that the growing use of employee-owned technology is a top priority in their organization, and 88 percent said employees are already using personal technology in the business,” and “91 percent of C-level execs and 75 percent of IT leaders said their IT department today has the staff and resources needed to manage the use of consumer technologies.” Most executives, according to these surveys, now say it is simple to integrate consumer devices, and many have actually figured out that instead of punishing employees from interacting with the outside world during business hours, productivity improves from embracing these employee benefits and, if they are really honest, they will admit they have little choice but to hire folks who are savvy about the new relationships they must foster.
Apple continues to open up its ecology and expand its carrying capacity and developers are madly in love with the new approach. The iPad now has released more than 100,000 new apps for the tablet and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight or anything but an eager audience to be part of the New Economy thinking.

WHAT STEVE JOBS CAN STILL TEACH US
Over at Fast Company, they credit Apple’s success with the fact that Jobs was the “greatest user” of technology who actually got the UX and lived with technology, rather than using it. His enthusiasm for his ecosystems was authentic because he was the number one fan. No one will ever accuse Steve Ballmer or the open source community of embracing the products or applications they produce with that sort of reality.

Attitudes are changing for many reasons but don’t think for a second it isn’t related to a changing of the guard at the helm of many corporations who have grown up in the new world of ecological thinking. While Microsoft seems destined for extinction and Google cringes behind a monoculture that pits itself against allies, are there any other players out there to be taken seriously? By the same token, Apple’s eye is on the future as they are laser-focused on what the kids in grade school are saying and doing and when they officially take over the text book business, look for a sea change in the way the world works.

On the surface, we note those who favor the legislation and those who don’t. We would like to invite those who see flaws in the argument or have something to share about practical considerations. I’m no fan of recording industry, after a peripheral share of how it was handled for decades. Trademarks and publishing rights have also been routinely abused and now the whining from those who abused it is trying to pay off politicians to back their abusive pasts.

Let’s try to be objective but have your say and you’ll be rewarded.

In the First Session of the 112^th Congress, The Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, (SOPA) was introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and was initially co-sponsored by Howard Berman (D-CA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), John Conyers (D-MI), Ted Deutch (D-FL), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Timothy Griffin (R-AR), Dennis A. Ross (R-FL), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Lee Terry [R-NE]. As of November 15, 2011, there were 24 sponsors.

The legislation has broad support from organizations that rely on copyright, including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Macmillan Publishers, Viacom, and various other companies and unions in the cable, movie, and music industries. Supporters also include trademark-dependent companies such as Nike, L’Oréal, and Acushnet Company.

Both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce support H.R. 3261, and many industries have also publicly praised the legislation. On September 22, 2011, a letter signed by over 350 businesses and organizations—including NBCUniversal, Pfizer, Ford Motor Company, Revlon, NBA, and Macmillan—was sent to Congress encouraging the passage of the legislation this year. This was taken directly from the Wiki and I sure hope anyone doing business on the Internet takes an opportunity to support this amazing resource before the end of the year.

Now, having said all of that, let’s look at those opposed. Besides the Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Internet groups, which have various points-of-view on the topic, we find, a reluctant participate, Microsoft, who apparently has a bit of skin in the game.

According to Declan McCullagh, over at CNET, Google, Twitter and Facebook also oppose SOPA. The Business Software Alliance, the lobbyist for Mr. Softy and many software companies has client list, apparently, pulled a switch on the bill after hearing from the folks in Redmond, and, undoubtedly, some others here in Silicon Valley.

Here is what Declan thinks: “While the wording of SOPA hasn’t changed over the last four weeks, the politics have. A person familiar with the situation told CNET that BSA’s volte-face came after Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, other members of the trade association had reviewed the bill and informed Holleyman of their displeasure.”

Declan also suggests that because Lamar Smith is the influential chairman of the House Judiciary committee, which oversees copyright law, they may have hedged their displeasure with the bill. In the CNET piece, Declan thinks, “SOPA is broader. Protect IP, which is awaiting a Senate floor vote, would allow courts to order AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs to pretend that the domain names for targeted Web sites didn’t exist. (The Domain Name System, or DNS, translates alphanumeric domain names like CNET.com into the numeric IP addresses actually used by computers, in this case 64.30.224.118.)

“SOPA goes further by permitting the Justice Department and courts to order ISPs to block customers from visiting the numeric IP addresses of off-limits Web sites. It also appears to authorize deep packet inspection, which raises privacy concerns.”

The distinction is huge for privacy advocates because it gives power to the government, who many in the Internet world see as the kiss of death. Politicizing access in anyway, puts the power in the hands of people who have been dragging us backward with legislation that is half baked and counter intuitive.

Over at Ars Technica, Nate Anderson, senior editor, offers a different spin. “Whatever you think of the legislation, it unquestionably represents a sea change in the US approach to the Internet, one which explicitly contemplates widespread website blocking and search engine de-listing.”

Nate is privy to some new angles on this: “a draft seen by Ars Technica: online piracy from overseas sites will be taken away from the Attorney General and moved out of the courts. Instead, power will be vested in the International Trade Commission, which already handles IP disputes relating to imports (the ITC is heavily involved in the recent patent wars around smartphones, for instance).”

Here are politicians who favor this approach: Senators Wyden (D-OR), Cantwell (D-WA), Moran (R-KS), and Warner (D-VA); Reps. Chaffetz (R-UT), Campbell (R-CA), Doggett (D-TX), Eshoo (D-CA), Issa (R-CA), and Lofgren (D-CA).

We certainly favor any approach that provides a level playing field with copyright protection on a plain where artists’ interests favor those of lobbyists and hack politicians who will say or anything for a buck.

Here is a pretty hefty set of accusations from the boys at Mozilla whom we think understand the situation: http://youtu.be/UaauUSSepBs

Nowhere, however, is the message clearer than the message by Steve Colbert whose ironical interpretation of the politics demonstrates that even the FBI has zero data to back up its baseless predictions.

Here is a surprising video by Joe Biden telling it exactly as we see it. It remains to be seen how this plays out: http://youtu.be/Px_d6Kuel50

Here is what Anonymous posted on Youtube: http://youtu.be/9rbyk0h3yeg

In reality, many businesses like Microsoft simply can’t get past the notion of giving away stuff for free, so that their advertising model works. Ballmer, like Gates before him, never understood the true value of audience or community. They simply recoil at the fact that they believe Google is doing something wrong, but what it comes back as is jealousy and ineptness at the highest levels. The big traffic hunters like Facebook, Twitter and the downstream lot that is replicating audiences anew daily will most likely determine how copyright and sharing is achieved. Don’t think for a minute that legislation will change much.

In an article over at Mashable, Jonathan Goldford, who  is a partner at JG Visual, an Internet strategy company, shares the two main questions organizations  face when developing an online presence:

1.  How do we get the right people to our website?

2.  Once they are on our website, how do we engage them in a meaningful way?

I challenged my design partner, Ali, to a little compare and contrast on how we look at the points Jonathan makes to see what is new and what we think may have been left out of the comparison.  Maybe we can get some of our audience to share their views on the comparison, but, I warn you, Ali is the fellow who knows this stuff, and my view is based on ideas I’ve retained after nearly twenty years designing sites and marketing to IT audiences.  In other words, have some sympathy with the oldtimer.

The first point Jonathan makes, “Forgetting about Conventions,” Jonathan points out that some web sites forget to follow long, and occasionally tired, conventions:

1.  Make the logo at the top of the page a link to your home page.
2. Make the cursor reflect live links when you hover over one
3. Make all blue highlighted text linkable, or ask yourself what you’re doing in this business

Sorry if I inject my own comments but I’m a recovering Facebook addict, and it’s my sand box.  So here is what Ali had to say in response to Jonathan’s #1 point:

“His 3 points are actually very valid. The first point simply suggests that clickable links should change the cursor from the arrow to the pointing hand, which is actually a very common mistake designers make. The second suggests that, if text is colored blue, and is underlined, it better be a hyperlink, which in just about every scenario it absolutely should. The third is actually a personal pet peeve on mine, where the logo of the site is not linked to the home-page or worst yet, not linked at all. To add to this, I actually believe using the logo as a homepage link should replace the traditional ”Home” link that so many sites still use.

We are usually veritable ships passing in the night, where I get up early and read his work and reports on our development team, he usually works late and then a day job so I yearn for our weekend chats just to look for ways to disagree with him.  It’s tough, but if you can’t argue both sides of a web site controversy, you can very bored in this business.  My reaction to all of this is that people who have conventional web sites who don’t follow these conventions ought to be occupying an unemployment line.  These are not only conventions, they are on the brink of becoming standards, the second worst “four-letter” word, after “proprietary,” to touch the Internet cognoscenti.

Standards reign up there with anarchy, and worse, to so many of the folks who build platforms.  But I guess, I really do think these are things you should be punished for not using.  Sort of under the term, “anti-marketing.”  You pay a lot to some surly developer, and he forgets to check the basics?  Not a good look. I would attach the usual rudiments to this list, privacy policy, contact information and security symbol as you never know how people scrutinize your business.  If you’re serious about eCommerce, you ought to look at what the old crusty folks like us carry as a minimum.  A simple cost/benefit analysis of what the basics cost, usually nothing, and a comparison of how leadership addresses these conventions, should save you tons in wasted marketing.

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Okay, Jonathan’s point #2 says, slow web sites suck, and will not maximize your efforts, essentially.  This goes back to my favorite web site of the nineties, that I tried to buy from AOL, but they decided to throw in the waste bin instead, and didn’t even move our offer to the right people.  Web site garage was the coolest animation UI I’ve seen, and it was an old fashioned cartoon gas station where you “drove” your web site, represented by a cool car graphic, and gave them your URL, and they actually spidered it quickly and gave you back proper file formats so if your surly web developer didn’t pay attention to your editor, when resizing or formatting images for your site,  all hell would break loose for your marketers.  Jonathan give us some basics on when to resize and how different editors express input.  He also provides links to good CSS practices that should be a good review for anyone as a check list.  A good thing to keep handy and a good checklist for yourself as this continues to be a big problem for many sites.

Here is what else Ali had to say about #2, “It discusses some basic scripting do’s-and don’t’s, and, I for one, agree with just about all of them. For example, all the sites which I have been involved in (including NH.net, NH.tv, and the new TT/ET) actually resize images on the CMS side of the site, creating smaller versions for the blog list view, medium-sized ones for the blog post’s body, and keep the original for the lightbox, what you get when you click on an image to expand it to full size. Usually it dims the background when it pops up hence the name “lightbox”. (let’s add this definition to the glossary).”

Jonathan also addresses Java, and refers to other “OpenSource,” development applications, and if I’m still allowed to use that term, web site tools like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.  These amazing programs have truly leveled the playing field for those able to exploit them, but, these guys are right, we can all be “guilty” if we don’t bother to take care of some regular housekeeping issues.

From Ali, “Loading JS in the header is something I’m actually guilty of doing sometimes (sure), but that’s because JS these days is often very light and loads within milliseconds. But for heavier JS sites, such as my employer’s site (www.gwos.com), I follow his suggestions and selectively load JS as needed, usually in the footer. Lastly, CSS in the body is just plain wrong in 2011 and any web programmer that does this needs to go back to school or start looking for a new line of work.” Ali is getting pretty stern in his demands.  He’s been trained well.

If you are the CEO or owner of your site, the biggest thing to keep in mind, and, if you’re the guy paying the developer, and, if you’re assuming that these nifty little “Open” environments don’t need tending, gather some basic check lists to test for yourself, and, if you’re interested in re-developing Web Site Garage, let me know right away.  If you aren’t doing your own self-tests and going over basics with your development team, your marketing budget will suffer, and your sales costs will increase steadily.  These ideas are all costly to marketing, though I doubt they’re ever processed that way.  The risk/reward test is something we’re sharing if you want to see how your web presence actually affects your bottom line.

The #3 point of Jonathan’s is that while these tools, like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, often are programmed initially, but sites are dynamic, and, again, if you expand your site, as you surely will, things like CSS styles must be upgraded.  Or you end up with default choices and not the really latest capabilities.  Jonathan suggests keeping the Wiki’s close by, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG  and checking to make sure that you get what you want.

Here is what Ali shared, “This is actually directly related with the state of our current TT/ET sites and is one of the primary reasons I’ve re-developed the sites from scratch. In a nutshell, developers often take shortcuts when tasked to do things/make changes to things. This results in many elements of sites being hardcoded into the actual framework, which makes modifying stuff extremely counter-productive. Sadly, 4 of 5 web programmers won’t think twice about these points, which is why a good one is so hard to find.”

A good web programmer is hard to find, like a good cowboy, but it seems the next generation of web sites will be sorted out by the mobil world, since they are far more interactive than the static world of business web sites.  I can’t help but wonder why web sites are missing the basics, maybe they need to incorporate a governor to make sure you don’t publish if the basics aren’t check every time.  After all, the Web Site Garage in my mind says there is a spider out there that can check this stuff quickly and we need to re-build that community.

Let us know what points you want to share, and what you think the next UI will look like and how the basics will be incorporated into them.  I see a video screemcast of how each site works and how products represented on it work, to be the next big marketing bonanza.  Video and screencasting are the future and they save a bundle in anti-marketing.

At about the same time, Steve Jobs and his pesky version of the personal computer was engineering a different approach to computing and he built his own operating system which was designed for less than 1% of the world market. Did Jobs et al know they were sacrificing the mass market rather than compete with Gates and IBM for the business world? Of course he knew, and so it goes.

I doubt, back then, Jobs dreamed of his iPhone or iPad or the notion of piercing the enterprise veil with his nifty little devices. And I’m sure IBM had no clue how they might leverage their resources to marshal their forces and compete against clones, not to mention the Internet as some strategic thing for which to plan. No telling how much they drained by trying to create drives and widgets that cost three times what clones cost and were destined for the trash heap. Yet were no lessons learned on any of this?

When our own blog went public, we tried to write the definitive explanation of the cloud and the terms associated with it: Defining Cloud Computing’s Key Characteristics, Deployment and Delivery Types It remains a staple on our site and gets more Google hits then anything we’ve published: http://tek-blogs.com/a/rt9bx . There is not much folks haven’t heard there before, but the hits we still get reinforces the idea that the very concept is still so abstract in many people’s minds. In the nineties, when folks wanted to symbolize the Internet, a cloud was often the metaphor used. It replaced words like the “ether” to describe how when you went online, you were out there in space somewhere.

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But more recently, we see how the word proprietary has wedged its way back into our lives, and businesses, and, once again, we seem to be willing to ignore the warnings that come with it. The difference today is, the proprietary nature of computing is more aligned with a different piece of the network, the community.

Here is what our good friend and social networking Guru, Mark Tamis, has to say on the subject,

“It’s kind of like the web “standards” of yesteryear, where everyone has their own version – like how HTML was rendered differently based on the Browser you’re using. Each company is trying to retain their competitive advantage by making barriers to exit higher, and with regards to the various “Clouds” their differences make the promise on-demand self-service only a reality within the realm of each vendor.

“On that note, in spite of Enterprise Software Vendors who claim that the Cloud is a Revolution, it is actually only just an evolution which has helped to reclassify the associated IT Expenditure as OpEx rather than CapEx – allowing companies to use these financial resources to concentrate delivering on their business value proposition.”

Mark Tamis’ enterprise comment points to some of the more formidable application provider’s like Oracle, who recently hopped aboard the cloud train to claim its place in the realm, despite the fact they haven’t a clue how to make money without selling the servers to go along with it. Naturally, Larry Ellison’s grand standing is not without detractors and who but Salesforce.com’s Mark Beniof just last month (http://tek-blogs.com/a/8n7dv ) took the yachtsman to task for his glib tack: “”You can see this is a different message than Oracle OpenWorld. It is not a message of proprietary mainframes. This is not a message of closed systems. This is a message of open systems, of a cloud-based world that is social, that is mobile.”

The only problem with that is that Salesforce.com has resisted open source and open communications for the last decade so pot/kettle. If you’re a member of the SF.com community, they will write the rules on who you can play with in their sand box and they get to decide on whom is trusted. All if the name of security issues naturally.

I doubt we’ll ever see an end to the ranting and raving between billionaires, just as I doubt we’ll ever see the end of the big boys using proprietary locks on their competition. As long as the user is willing to go along with being hamstrung by his providers, we expect this to re-evolve in one fashion or another.