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So few businesses and businesspeople understand the value of design that I'm not surprised business books are designed merely to throw information at you, rather than to captivate with aesthetic.
Tag Archives: Off-Topic
Once Again, It Comes Down to Value
Electronic Cottage reports that there’s a small-scale user revolt boycotting Kindle titles that are priced higher than the new release and/or bestseller $9.99 price point:
Now, Amazon has many books over the $9.99 price it promised for new releases when Kindle was first launched. That price was a major selling point to convince buyers that the large investment in a Kindle would pay off over time. The price also acknowledged the obvious: a Kindle edition is less valuable than a hardcover; although you cannot pass along your Kindle edition to friends, you are at least paying a significant amount less than the hardcover price. Unfortunately, short-sighted publishers feel they are losing dollars instead of realizing that a $9.99 Kindle sale doesn’t usurp a hardcover sale. It is a brand new entity. A plus. Pure gravy.
Kindle owners have organized a boycott of Kindle editions over $9.99. The uprising is ably helped by Amazon’s own online tools: the 9.99boycott community and a boycott discussion forum. Cleverly, the boycotters are using the Amazon tags feature to tag books over $9.99 with the 9.99boycott tag. Boy, if I were a publisher or author, I sure wouldn’t want to see my books listed at the top of the tag’s “Popular Products” under the boycott tag.
Interesting that part of the article here is that Amazon has provided customers with all the tools they need to create an uprising within their own service. Pay attention to the number of books the author says he purchased at the lower $9.99 price point. Like iPhone applications, there appears to already be a price ceiling forming with the Kindle.
I don’t think this is what Amazon was going for, nor do I think they promised everyone $9.99 books, but (again) like the App Store, the customer base is showing what they’re willing to pay.
Twitter, Like Google, Is All About the Search
Well, actually, Google is all about the advertising, but that’s another article.
From the Twitter blog:
We went back to the original sketch and made everything far more awesome. Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don’t go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you’d expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.
Take a look at the whole article. It’s awesome to see the design process boiled down to a simple sketch on a legal pad. Sometimes, the best ideas have very simple beginnings.
It's Not About Cost; It's About Value
The Macalope says it’s go time with Microsoft:
[…] This is not about price. This is about making “safe” choices. For years enterprises have chosen—and let themselves get locked into—Windows because, yes, no one got fired for buying Microsoft.
But these companies also bought Microsoft because, like AIG, Microsoft simply seemed “too big to fail” and Apple did not. Well, that’s as may be, but there’s “fail as a company” and then there’s “fail to deliver”—and Microsoft has certainly failed to deliver.
So, congratulations, enterprises! You’re left holding the bag for an outdated desktop operating system bundled with a costly and uncertain path forward!
Seriously, if it were solely about price and choice, every company in the world would be running Linux.
You May Take This As Encouragement
Michael Hyatt on why people in traditional publishing need to be blogging (transcribed from the embedded video):
…People get stuck right here. Because they think: ‘Okay; Do I want to start a corporate blog or do I want to start a personal blog?’ And we’ve all seen those personal blogs where it’s just—you know—somebody’s diary, and it’s boring, and it’s not that interesting, and we’ve all seen the corporate sites, where it’s nothing but a stream of PR announcements. You know, I don’t think either one of those will garner a lot of traffic, and I think fundamentally it’s a false dichotomy. I think the best corporate blogs are blogs that are personalized—that are about the individuals in the company that are writing the blog.
We are a nation—maybe a world—of voyeurs. Reality TV is still very popular. People want an inside look at how you think, what you have to say, how your company operates. And the great thing about publishing is it’s very mysterious. I get emails all the time from people who—they can’t fathom how a book makes its way to the market […] but they just don’t know what the process is. They’re mystified by it. And for you to peel back the curtain a little bit in a blog and give people an inside look at your company connects them to your company. And an inside look at your own life connects them to you.
He goes on to list twelve reasons why publishers should be blogging. I think you should watch the video to receive the context and to hear the rest of the talk, because it’s really good. I’ll place a summary of the twelve reasons behind the cut below.
In his post linked above, he entreats other publishers to attend the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference next year (where this talk was taped):
I also one of two traditional publishers who participated in the “CEO Panel.” (The other one was Tim O’Reilly himself.) Surprisingly, I did not see any other CEOs from traditional publishers in attendance. Perhaps I just missed them. Perhaps they sent people to attend. Frankly, I think they need to attend themselves. This is not something you can afford to delegate.
If you are a traditional publisher, you need to be there next year. The world is changing fast. This is the only conference I know of that is totally dedicated to exploring the future of publishing.
I hope this conference gains steam over time. The list of presentations was staggeringly interesting. I plan on watching a handful of the other presentations over the weekend. You can find them at toccon.blip.tv.
Ryan Markel 