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Why Apple pulling out of MacWorld is the best thing they could have done.

I know it’s sad and shocking to the throngs of people who paid thousands of dollars in hotel and airfare to make sure they we’re all set for this January’s SteveNote at MacWorld, to find out that he’s not even going to be there.   It was also shocking to a community accustomed to meeting up every year at MacWorld, to find out that the company the trade show was MADE for, has decided to no longer participate in it.

But to be honest,  it’s the best thing Apple could have done.

First of all,  we’re in what is likely to become an economic crisis only slightly smaller in scope than the great depression.   Apple has a lot of cash in the bank, and I have a feeling they want to keep it that way.   Spending millions of dollars on a booth, and a keynote at a tradeshow every January,  when you have reporters at your beck and call to come to your headquarters any day of the week is simply economically irresponsible.   Over the years Apple has proven that product reveal press conferences on their own terms work just as well as the ones at MacWorld.   Sure you won’t be able to get into one anymore if you aren’t in the inner circle of Apple Favored Press,  but who cares?   There are so many live blogs of the event, and an HD quality stream of it available afterward.   Does it really matter?

Secondly,   HAVING to deliver an important keynote every January has likely driven the development teams at Apple insane.  Every year I imagine December at Apple headquarters being quite an un-happy place to work.  Instead of being able to enjoy the holiday season,  everyone is likely in crunch mode working on finishing whatever is to be debuted at MacWorld in the beginning of January.   And as we know from the recent iPhone and MacBook releases,  Apple is no good when it comes to it’s quality control on it’s first gen products.

Not being required to give a keynote every January will likely give Apple dev teams the ability to get a product more polished before its release,   and Steve and Co.  will be able to schedule a keynote for whenever the cool new product is actually DONE.

So what’s up with Steve not being in the keynote this year?   Simple.   He wants a clean break from MacWorld.   I wouldn’t expect any groundbreaking announcements,  that’s for sure.  If Steve is trusting the show entirely to Shiller,  they haven’t got anything cool up their sleeve for January.     So what will they show?  Maybe a couple of speedbumps on existing products,  perhaps a 32 gig iPhone?   Maybe a $99 iPhone nano.     Show off the improvements of Snow Leopard.   But nothing that the world is gonna “ooh” and “ahh” over.   Apple’s goal here is to make MacWorld irrelevant to their business.    So they will damned well make sure that this keynote is as irrelevant as possible.   Heck I wouldn’t put it past them to have an event with Steve at the helm a couple weeks after MacWorld just to screw them.

If there is one thing I really respect Apple for,  it’s the uncanny ability they have of being able to throw the baby out with the bathwater, without any regard for what might happen.  If something doesn’t work for them, they change it, whether you like it or not.   OS X is a perfect example of this.     They tossed out the old OS entirely and started from scratch.   They knew it would be painful in the short term, but it put them on the stellar track they are on today.   Same goes for MacWorld.   They used it to their advantage when they were a smaller company, and this was the best place for them to get publicity.   Now that it’s more money than it’s worth, and they can simply call the bloggers in on any old day of the week,   why spend the money?   It’s not worth it.   Out with the bathwater Macworld!

So all in all,  I don’t think for a second that Apple leaving MacWorld is a bad thing for Apple.   They’ll still be able to bring us all the cool stuff we expect, and now it’ll be on their own terms,  instead of the yearly CES style keynote that they have had to do in the past.   Seems more like their style anyway.

Is it bad for MacWorld?   Of course it is!   Without support from Apple, or at least Adobe,  the show is doomed.  But with these days of Twitter, and blogs,  is a trade show really necissary anymore?   Not as much as you’d think I’d imagine.

Yahoo hits $10.34 a share. It’s over. Here’s what to do.

Isn’t it funny how Yahoo was too good for Microsoft when they were being offered, and subsequently turned down $33 a share?  Isn’t it even funnier that they have now come back begging for ANY offer from Microsoft just so they can stay afloat?

The way this has been going, it’s starting to look more and more like a bad romantic comedy.  So how long before Yahoo shacks up with AOL in some trailer home?  Seriously though, this is really starting to get sad.  Basically with the economy the way it is, no one wants anything to do with the sinking ship that is Yahoo.  And with no real direction or plan,  Yahoo is going to find it extremely difficult to survive on their own.

Personally, though I don’t use much in the way of Yahoo services besides Flickr,  I’d hate to see them go.  They were one of the first Web companies to really hit it big back in the Web 1.0 days, and one of the first web companies to really gather any sort of real brand awareness.  Also, there isn’t anything all that terrible about ANYTHING that they are doing.  That’s what makes this whole situation so sad for them.  Yahoo mail is good, Yahoo search is okay, Flickr is fantastic, Yahoo Buzz is a great site, and the new redesign of the Yahoo homepage that is currently in beta testing is nothing short of fantastic, and when released will likely become my browser homepage.

So what can Yahoo do to save themselves from the Tech Bust 2.0?  Simple.  Find out after the jump:

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Circuit City files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Well it’s official.  After the announcement of store closings in the range of 150 stores, and corporate job losses in the range of 17% of its total workforce,  Circuit City has taken the next step and filed for bankruptcy.

From the Cnet Business Tech Blog:

Struggling electronics chain Circuit City announced Monday that it has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Chapter 11 allows a company to hold off creditors while it attempts to restructure its finances. Circuit City said Monday that it has has negotiated a commitment for a $1.1 billion debtor-in-possession revolving credit facility to supplement its working capital.

Circuit City announced earlier this month that it would shutter 155 stores and lay off 17 percent of its workforce. The retailer said Monday that it will eliminate an additional 700 positions in addition to the reductions resulting from the store closings, bringing the total layoff projection to around 20 percent of its employees. According to the company’s FAQ, in February it had approximately 45,900 employees, not including workers taken on during peak selling periods.

“We appreciate the support we have received from our lenders in the midst of such a tight credit market,” acting CEO and vice chairman James A. Marcum said. “With this support, we believe we have the opportunity to leverage our market position and the strength of our brand to restore Circuit City to solid financial footing.”

I only have one thing to say.   Good riddance.

Circuit City has had nothing but terrible customer service in every one of it’s stores for years, at least in my opinion anyway.  It’s possible that the customer service situation in my area was a symptom of bad district management, but any time I took the chance on shopping at a Circuit City I was left disappointed.

The staff there was even less knowledgeable than their Best Buy counterparts regarding the products that were being sold, and pricing on the shelves very rarely corresponded to how much I was charged at the time of checkout.

Even the process of checking out itself was painful.  All but one or two times I walked into the store to buy something was anyone even STAFFING the checkout lines.  Instead I was directed to stand in a 25-odd person line at customer service to check out, which NEVER got me out of the store in less than 30 minutes.

To ask WHY Circuit City is filing for Chapter 11 is almost hilarious to me.  It’s simply because regardless of the nominally better prices in the circular,  shopping there was nothing but painful.  While Best Buy has it’s own customer service nightmares, if I’m being forced into a brick and mortar store, I’d rather shop there any day of the week.

That being said, I’d rather shop at Amazon.  Good riddance.

Get over it. The blogosphere isn’t dead, just different.

There has been much kvetching and flapping of lips to the fact that Blogging has become a dead art.  I’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again.  It’s not dead, and it’s not going anywhere.

What has died is the intimate level of conversation that used to be so prevalent in the blogosphere between a writer and a reader.  With millions of blogs on millions of sites, many of the bigger ones run by large corporate entities,  it’s only natural that the intimacy has faded.  There’s simply too much noise.  But blogging as a whole has gotten stronger.

Blogs are democratizing in a way that few things in the past have.  Anyone with a good idea and serviceable writing skills can go out and make an impact on people.  This blog by itself has proven that.  I started writing simply because I wanted a place to jot down cool ideas I’ve had, and comment on the goings on of the tech industry.  Now this has grown into a site with well over 10,000 unique visitors per month and has shown no sign of slowing.

I’m not corporate backed, and the ads only pay for my hosting and domain, but I still write anyway, simply because I can.  If you’re in this for the money and you aren’t bought out by a large corporation,  you’re in for a big shock.   Blogging on it’s own isn’t a terribly good money making endeavour.

That doesn’t mean that your ideas and writings won’t affect other people, or cause you to grow a small but loyal base of fans.  If you’re good, those will come with the territory.   Not to mention the fact that consistent quality writing will likely lead to other opportunities that you could have never seen coming.

Indeed, most bloggers simply can’t cut it in this rough and tumble medium and simply give up.  A great article on Nicholas Carr’s blog shows that very clearly:

It’s no surprise, then, that the vast majority of blogs have been abandoned. Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent “state of the blogosphere” study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. Now, as longtime blogger Tim Bray notes, 7.4 million and 1.5 million are still sizable numbers, but they’re a whole lot lower than we’ve been led to believe. “I find those numbers shockingly low,” writes Bray; “clearly, blogging isn’t as widespread as we thought.” Call it the Long Curtail: For the lion’s share of bloggers, the rewards just aren’t worth the effort.

I’d say those numbers aren’t as bad as one would believe.  What percentage of Myspace pages are abandoned?  Facebook pages?  Twitter accounts?  Flickr accounts?  Photobucket accounts?  E-mail accounts?  AIM screennames?  My point is, that like most things online,   people try them for the hell of it,  and a lot of the time,  give up.  Failure is the natural selection of the Internet.  It weeds out the bad and useless,  leaving more room for the good ideas of those who persevere to float to the top.

Nicholas Carr compares Blogging to Amateur Radio, which I think is a fair, if incomplete comparison:

Back in 2005, I argued that the closest historical precedent for blogging was amateur radio. The example has become, if anything, more salient since then. When “the wireless” was introduced to America around 1900, it set off a surge in amateur broadcasting, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the airwaves. “On every night after dinner,” wrote Francis Collins in the 1912 book Wireless Man, “the entire country becomes a vast whispering gallery.” As amateur broadcasting boomed, utopian rhetoric soared. Popular Science wrote, “The nerves of the whole world are, so to speak, being bound together, so that a touch in one country is transmitted instantly to a far-distant one.” The amateur broadcasters, the historian Susan J. Douglas has written, “claimed to be surrogates for ‘the people.’” The democratic “radiosphere,” as we might have called it today, “held a special place in the American imagination precisely because it married idealism and adventure with science.”

But it didn’t last. Radio soon came to be dominated by a relatively small number of media companies, with the most popular amateur operators being hired on as radio personalities. Social production was absorbed into corporate production. By the 1920s, radio had become “firmly embedded in a corporate grid,” writes Douglas. A lot of amateurs continued to pursue their hobby, quite happily, but they found themselves pushed to the periphery. “In the 1920s there was little mention of world peace or of anyone’s ability to track down a long-lost friend or relative halfway around the world. In fact, there were not many thousands of message senders, only a few … Thus, through radio, Americans would not transcend the present or circumvent corporate networks. In fact they would be more closely tied to both.”

It’s a fairly good statement to say that blogging in general will likely be more and more absorbed into the main-stream media, leaving independant bloggers a bit fewer and farther between.  But unlike amateur radio, which has all but died today due to licensing and equipment costs,  independant blogging will always be around.   All one needs is a modicum of technical and writing knowledge and a website like Blogger or Wordpress.com to host a blog for free.

Even if in these tough economic times, sites like Wordpress.com and Blogger start paid models,  it’s easy enough for one to pay $10 for a domain, and $3 a month for enough webhosting to host all but the biggest of blogs.  This is simply not a medium that will die as easily.

The concept of blogging in one form or another has been around far longer than it’s own name.  Even back in the days of Web 0.5 BBS systems, and Web 1.0 static homepages, people have been using the internet to get out their opinions, and thankfully the open and uncontrollable nature of the internet will allow that to happen for a very long time in the forseeable future.

Like anything else,  the mediums evolve but the message remains.

Don’t let the election be stolen. Report voting problems with Twitter Vote Report

In the face of an election featuring voting machines that have serious tampering issues, and political parties trying to disenfranchise voters that don’t fit their demographics,  it’s really important that we have a single location to post our problems with voting in real time, to hopefully combat the problems.

Thankfully it looks like there is a grass-roots non-partisan group who is using the near-ubiquitous microblogging service Twitter to monitor voting problems.   It’s a fantastic idea since voters can very easily twitter from a mobile phone, and report problems with voting in near real-time.   They are tracking anyone using the hashtag #votereport on twitter, and collecting all of those tweets on a single page at TwitterVoteReport.com .  If you are a twitter user, please join in the effort to log your voting experience.  With the problems looming with this year’s election,  it’s extremely important that we have a way of logging and tracking the legitimacy of our Democracy.   If you are not yet a twitter user,  I urge you to create an account at Twitter.com and report your voting experience as well.

From the website, here are some more detailed directions about what you should do:

Yep, I Twitter. Now What Do I Do?

It’s simple. We voters are using Twitter and other texting tools to report on how the vote is really going during this election, and we’re urging everyone to use the common word (or “hashtag” in Twitter lingo) of  #votereport as they do so. If that happens, we’ll all be able watch on maps and graphs how the election is going across the country.

Including “#votereport” in your tweet is enough to get your report tracked by Twitter Vote Report. But the more details you can stuff in, the better. So, for example, include in your Twitter post:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
• #early if you’re voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

I Don’t Twitter, But I’m Willing to Try.

Don’t worry, Twitter is really easy to use. That’s one reason so many people love it. Just jump over to Twitter.com to sign up for a free account. You might want to watch “Twitter in Plain English”, the short video to the right, to learn how it works. Then follow the steps above for sending in a report.

I Don’t Twitter and I Don’t Want To. Can I Still Participate?

Sure thing. Our team of crack developers have come up with all sorts of ways for you to make your vote report known:

• Send a text message to 66937 and start your message with “#votereport”
• Download and use the iPhone app
• Find the “votereport” app in the Google Android marketplace
• Key in a report by calling (567) 258-VOTE/8683 (coming soon)

Okay, I Sent in Reports. Now What?

#votereport reports will, in real-time, be made available to anyone who wants them. Visit TwitterVoteReport.com to see the reports flow in. Voters can read these messages and help one another solve problems, liking letting someone know when a polling place has been moved. Advocacy groups can use them to spot problems. Citizens can figure out how to lend fellow voters a hand. And the press can zero in on local voting stories worth telling. Just sending in short reports can help your fellow citizens to vote.

I appreciate any help you guys can give.  I think it’s really important.

Is the Blackberry Storm an iPhone killer?

I woke up this morning to an interesting article on GigaOm, that talked about the possibility of the new touchscreen Blackberry,  the Blackberry Storm, being an iPhone killer.  Jim Courtney raised a few good points in the article, no doubt, but an iPhone killer?  I think not.

Let’s go through his article point by point shall we? … After the jump.

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