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Showing posts from 2012

This Week in Instagram

  I've done a couple of posts this week on Instagram, and one TV appearance, on CNBC's "Closing Bell" (clip above). In my weekly Reuters column I argue that Instagram has to reverse course, and quickly. In a blog post on LinkedIn , I describe the controversy as big messaging blunder who's best (and least likely) explanation is that it was rookie mistake.

What We Can't Learn from The Daily's Demise

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I come to neither praise nor bury The Daily , News Corp's iPad-only news app experiment that will end with a whimper in two weeks . But let's be clear on what went wrong — and what didn't.  As Wired's business editor at the time The Daily was announced I decided to cover it as a big event — the coming out party literally was a big event for News Corp, which threw a press conference that seemed to try too hard anoint it as a golden child from inception. When you use phrases like "digital renaissance” and assert that "We believe The Daily will be the model for the way stories are told and consumed,” you are setting yourself up for quite a fall. My own initial impression, for a formal Wired review , was that The Daily was "very good" — 7/10. I admired the "cover flow" approach to displaying content and likened the publication to a "re-imagined digital magazine that is updated every day." I praised the co

Surface 'Pro' Sheds The Tablet Pretense

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Back in June, when Microsoft's Surface was announced, I wrote a Reuters MediaFile column  arguing that it really wasn't a tablet at all. It was a hybrid at best, I said, really going after a piece of the the ultralight market. The target wasn't Apple's iPad — but its MacBook Air. An ARM-based version of the Surface has been out for about a month . It goes for $500 — same as an entry-level iPad. It's really more like $630 because you do want that cover/keyboard, and the cheaper "touch" one looks cheap compared to the "type" version, and it's only $10 less. While Apple shows people touching the iPad screen Surface's print and TV ads for all tout the cover and the kickstand — terrestrial, not mobile features. Five weeks after launch Surface hasn't made a dent in iPad sales. CEO Ballmer said earlier this month that sales were modest, and that was on purpose . But the big shoe drop was always going to be how much Microsoft

Who 'Owns' Facebook?

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One of the oldest tropes in marketing is that the consumer owns the brand. It's nice shorthand for customer passion: It's why New Coke had to go, why the Gap had to reverse course on their logo change and why the Twinkie may actually last forever after all. Companies own their brands, of course, in every literal and legal sense. But most of them know that if they act imperiously with their property they risk losing customers, and worse — their best customers can turn into motivated, evangelical enemies overnight. But what if the product is a service that treats you like a product? Where are your alliances — and what are your rights — in that mind-exploding scenario? ( Full Post )

Vote On Facebook! (It Could Be Your Last Chance)

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Facebook's decision to eliminate member voting on policy changes is coming down to what could be the last member vote ever on the world's largest social network. The good news is that it could still be reversed. The bad news? The only thing that can stop disenfranchisement is if the number of votes cast are equal to nearly the entire population of the United States.  Facebook's pesky democracy problem? Members can vote to reverse a policy change if a) 7,000 people comment on it, and b) one-third of the total membership casts a ballot in an election Facebook is required to schedule.  Facebook is addressing a legitimate problem with the voting protocol — the infinitesimal percentage of its one billion members that can make a vote happen. But rather than fix that, Facebook has decided to scrap the entire member-empowering initiative. By ending it entirely it has set off a nuclear bomb when a grenade would have done. Talk about voter suppression. ( Full Post )

Hewlett-Packard, Autonomy and 'Rules of the Garage'

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It remains to be seen if Hewlett-Packard's investors (or the SEC and  the FBI ) will accept a "shift the blame" defense for an  $8.8 billion charge  it is taking for the $10 billion purchase of Autonomy, a Big Data firm with a big accounting problem that was the landmine in an otherwise unimpressive Q4 earnings report. For those who missed the news from Palo Alto, here’s a brief rundown:  According to CEO Meg Whitman , Autonomy had been billing low margin hardware sales as high-margin software sales and booked some deals with partners as revenue even though no money changed hands. Making matters worse, the Autonomy charge was the second acquisition-related, $8 billion+ write down in two consecutive quarters. Shareholders quickly drove H-P down 12% to a nearly 52-week low. Now starts the finger-pointing. For his part, former CEO (for 10 months)  Leo Apotheker  is shocked, shocked that the deal he put together may have been massively flawed: "The due diligence

Why Facebook Didn't Tank (Again)

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A funny thing happened on the way to Facebook's second lockup expiration Wednesday — it sent the bears running for cover, unlike lockup expiration version 1.0 back in August. This is good news — but it's not all good. The good news is obvious enough: Facebook shares not only held their own but rallied — more than on  any other day  of the company's brief, rocky existence as a public company. Shares  shot up about 13% , to close at $23.23. And to emphasize that wasn't some kind of irrationally exuberant fluke, $FB was essentially flat and in line with a slightly down NASDAQ in early Thursday trading. The bad news is not as obvious: Insider holders of Facebook stock saw the prospect of dumping as many as  800 million shares  on the market all at once as a holding opportunity — not a chance to cash in on a windfall that is a significant part of their compensation package. The "maybe good, maybe bad" news? Strong, counterintuitive performances like this

'Black' Day at the Gray Lady

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Oh, to have been a fly in the room when Research in Motion Chief Executive Thorsten Heins briefed the New York Times on the face (and potentially company) saving Blackberry 10, due out Jan. 30 and not a moment too soon for the company which rivals Nokia for top prize in the mobile phone "How Far The Mighty Have Fallen" honors. I flatter myself but also Bits writer Ian Austin by saying confidently that I infer from his report the mood of the room was ... cautiously pessimistic. How else could these seasoned journalists have processed this Money Quote from Heins: "I don't expect things to get much worse." It's right up there with "What could possibly go wrong?" and " This might just do nobody any good " and "The check is in the mail." ( Continued ... )

Breaking Bad: Available Evidence

It's been killing me: How can Walt be free at 52 (albeit miserable, evidently alone and more in fear of his life than ever) since Hank now knows (or soon will realize) that Walt is Heisenberg. Here's a possibility: Walt comes clean (how can he not?) but blackmails Hank. What story would Hank's superiors be more likely to believe? That  Walt eluded Hank's scrutiny, or that Hank was in on it? Hank has even accepted money from Walt for medical bills. But the fact that neither family is living beyond their visible means supports the conspiracy theory. It's all in the family. The settling up will come someday, but needn't now. Walt has already decided to quit the meth business; this is another pressure point to Hank since he wouldn't be asking the DEA ASAC to turn a future blind eye, only the lies that were necessary in the past.  Clearly, even if this is the scenario for season 5, part II, it won't hold forever. Hank wouldn't take this

Get Over It: It Was a Fair Fight, And Obama Blew It Himself

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I can't help but think that many of my liked-minded friends have completely missed the point of last night's debates. It doesn't matter how much dissembling Romney might have done, or how preposterous the internal logic of his statements may add up to. The moderator's role is a sideshow — moderators are a stupid modern convention that clever politicians know how to play. Debates are not about policy discovery. They are theater. That is all. It's all about heart. The day before, and the day after — that's the time to score the head. On stage it's all about your media training. What makes so many Obama supporters angry is that the distance between head and heart were so wide. But there is nobody to blame for that, and for the appearance — the performance — that conveyed. I saw Felix Salmon today (thanks again for RT'ing, even if, as you explained, it must have been a mistake / the result or boredom or all you have left to do when your own Twitter

How The Blog Ethic Will Cripple Debater Romney

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One of the most important modern advances in journalism — courtesy, mind you, of the ethics of blogging -- is the opportunity for writers and publisher to own up to mistakes in the same place, time and fashion where the mistakes were made. Journalists have always had an obligation to correct their errors, of course. Not all have, of course. And the truth can be elusive, even a matter of opinion sometimes. But what isn't up for debate is requirement to tell the same audience you deluded that a) you were wrong and b) here's the truth. Not to pile on, but newspapers haven't always been too good at this. Even when they have grudgingly acknowledged error, they did so in an error section that only the curious few bothered to check, often exposing themselves to the story in question for the first time. Once the paper was out it was out, and gone. Fish wrap. No sane publisher was going to spend valuable paper and ink to re-print old news, just so an error could be acknow

The NY Times & HTML5: "This Is A First Step."

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I felt a tiny burst of joy on my morning commute today when I read that the New York Times was going to launch an HTML5 version of its digital edition. Then I had a cow when I discovered that it was iPad only. I Tweeted disapproval with my usual reserve: I also wrote to the Times , which quickly responded: "We wanted to test the Web App among a highly engaged audience of NYT subscribers, which made the iPad a natural choice," spokeswoman Linda Zebian wrote back. "This is the first step, but the HTML5 format does allow us to explore the idea of launching Web-based apps other platforms in the future." Indeed it does. The question is, why wait and do even a tiny bit of damage to your street cred as a leader in the digital arena? And invite unfavorable comparison (as I did) to the Financial Times, whose HTML5 app works great on both the iPad/Safari and Nexus 7/Chrome/Jelly Bean? @OttoBerks had a thought: This makes sense, and hews to the Times'

Where Angels Fear To Tread: Bernd Debusmann

Five years ago I wrote about the start of an era at Reuters . Now it's time to write about the end of two. Bernd Debusmann is leaving The Baron after one of the most storied careers not only at that news agency but but surely in journalism. He reported from more than 100 countries since joining the company in 1964 and, five years ago, was the marquee name when Reuters began an opinion service with three writers. They don't make them like this anymore. If ever there was a living Le Carré character, it is Bernd, from his lifelong passion of jumping out of airplanes (most of the time, I think, with a parachute) to the 7.65 mm round, delivered with a silenced pistol on behalf of someone who didn't care for his reporting. Bernd leaves with that bullet still lodged near his spine, and with the admiration of generations of reporters who got to watch how it was done, day-in-and-day-out, even on those rare occasions when he wasn't being shot, threatened or throw

Virtual schmirtual — the virtual wallet wars are a bust so far

The Wall Street Journal today reports what those of us who care about these things already know: There isn't a huge, pent-up demand for virtual wallet technology among consumers. Retailers are fired up and ready to go (in some cases, only half-heartedly), but customers aren't taking advantage of this new tech much yet. Or at all. Consumer use of Near field Communication -- NFC, which beams payment information to a credit-card terminal — still looks very much like a novelty in the wild. Every one of the handful of times I've paid with a virtual wallet it has been then first time the cashier has seen it used. I am talking Home Depot, Radio Shack, Duane Reade. It's not scientific, of course, but it is still extraordinary. These are places that do a lot of transactions. Starbucks is a big exception; they pioneered a rudimentary method which involves scanning barcodes stored on your smartphone. This is the same method Apple has now introduced with its foray into the virtua

Master and Commander

The problem with "The Master," The Paul Thomas Anderson film I really disliked, for those who have asked: The protagonist really should be "The Master," the Paul Seymour Hoffman character. But it's not -- the character at the center of this self-indulgent maelstrom is the Joachin Phoenix character, Freddie Quill. This needed some serious script doctoring.

TaxiCab Confessions

It's too easy, of course, to make too much of those pearls you hear from the mouths of babes (the small child variety, please), the mailman or a cab driver. But I think I heard the rationale that older, blue collar white guys will find to vote for Obama, in sufficient numbers. "I just don't believe him," the driver said today, referring to Romney in a rambling discussion about politics and his charges (black-car drivers LOVE to drop names of the people who've been in the back seat). "I don't like Obama either, but we have him ... so you know ..." And there you have it. +John C Abell

TurboTax Romney

Two things I don't get about Romney's self-defense of his tax situation: 1) A rate of 14% is "fair" because the funds being taxed — capital gains — have already been taxed on the corporate level. Huh? Capital gains are on realized profits from the sale of real property. If I buy a share of stock for $10, and I sell it for $15, my capital gain is $5. And if I held that share for more than a year, I am taxed at a rate of 15% on that $5, not an whatever rate my earned income is subject to. But, who paid a tax on the any of this before I did? Or, looked at in reverse: Every dollar is taxed by the person or entity which owned it at one time. My employer pays taxes on the money his company earns, then pays me from what's left over. I pay tax on that, and spend some at the supermarket. The supermarket pays tax, and its employees ... and so on. The fact that someone pays tax on that dollar upstream is as irrelevant as the fact that someone will pay tax on that dol

Marathon Man

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In this age of moral equivalence, your inner bad guy is relentlessly held against you — until I do the same thing. And then I get to say a) I am no worse than you, and b) You did it first. It's a push. So it is that GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan's fact-challenged convention speech is judged on one set of criteria, and his malapropisms on another. On the former, well, he's Romney's running mate, these are the campaign's talking points, and he's just doing his job — reinforcing the message sanctioned by the top half of the ticket. On the latter, well, those are just "Bidenisms." But then in what seemed like a relaxed moment Ryan inexplicably exaggerated his performance in a marathon some 20 years ago. Yes, one's memory does play tricks, but as these things go (especially for a P90X boot camp guy) claiming you ran a sub three-hour marathon when in fact it took you more than four hours (worse than Sarah Palin's PB, but I digress) takes a little

Romney, The Hispanic Vote and the Capital-ocracy

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Bernd Debusmann raises an interesting point in his latest Reuters column : Does the VP selection of Paul Ryan mean that GOP presidential candidate Romney has conceded the so-called Latino vote? Put aside the usual caveats — that voting blocs are usually more complicated than we assume, that they are motivated by single interests and swayed by personality and tribalism — and Debusmann makes a convincing case Ryan is perhaps the least likely to help with Latinos "Of all the potential running mates Romney could have picked from." There has been plenty said about the importance of the Hispanic vote independent of the veepstakes during this endless campaign, but very little analysis about Ryan in this context since his VP candidacy was announced Saturday morning. The "Hispanic vote" looms large in electoral analysis. Bush garnered  more than 40%  of the Hispanic vote in his 2004 win, but John  McCain only 31%  in his 2008 loss. Both showings were considered stron

Mitt Romney, Class Warfare, and The Rosetta Stone of Taxes

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It isn't true that Romney "owes it" to voters to release more tax returns than he has and has said he would. In politics only two things rule: the law (a very forgiving standard) and your image. If Romney doesn't release more than two years of federal tax returns and he wins, ergo, he didn't owe anybody anything. And if he loses it will be difficult to impossible to assess the extent to which opaqueness contributed to defeat. But Romney has a bigger problem. Emphasis on the word "Big." Clearly, Romney has calculated that — at this moment in time, anyway — it is better to hold his ground than to give way. This may change, of course, which would present new challenges (is Romney, yet again, cowering to pressure in a very unpresidential way? Is this just another head-spinning flip-flop?). A host of conservative commentators and at least one  two elected officials have urged Romney to just do it. The most recent is the National Review, whose editorial

Romney & Uniform-Gate: He Can't Win For Losing

Lost in the Shocked Shocked outrage over the outsourced order for US Olympic opening ceremonies uniforms (Really? THIS is what animates bi-partisanship in Congress?) is the fact that these garments were made in China even though an American company got the order. Nobody thought to ask Calvin Klein where the clothing would be made, probably because it occurred to nobody that "Made in the USA" was more important than price. Or because virtually none of the clothing Americans wear is made in America, or has been for a long, long time. And this is why the attack on capitalism, as the Romney folks put it, will redound to Obama's benefit. Capitalism is not patriotism. Capitalism is not social engineering. Capitalism is not about national boundaries. Capitalism is about making money by providing goods and services for which there is a demand. If you are good at it, lots of people get jobs. If you are bad at it, lots of people lose their jobs and you (and perhaps lots of

The World That Could Have Been According To Andy Taylor

I used to live in Mayberry. For the dozen years we were there our Virginia hometown epitomized the feel of that fictional TV hamlet, a place where people stopped to talk, treated each other right and everything always just seemed to be okay. It was actually Reston, but we joked about the similarities. Like lots of kids in the 1960s, I also grew up in Mayberry, at the knee of a quiet hero. Andy Griffith 's sleepy southern town was an island in the storm. There was little strife or crime. There was a mayor (his boss) and successful businessmen who controlled commerce. But Griffith's Sheriff Andy Taylor was the glue which held it all together, the one person everyone relied upon and turned to. And they were correct to defer to him: Taylor invariably prevented idiocy and excess while promoting common sense, all the while speaking softly and carrying no stick. Taylor was a lawman who never carried a gun or raised his voice. He was a single father whose son's upbringing mea

SCOTUS Sings. Who's The Leaker (And Does It Matter)?

Felix Salmon makes a great observation about the deterioration of the Supreme Court: if they start leaking self-serving secrets under the cover of anonymity, aren't they lowering themselves to worst levels of the political branches? Isn't SCOTUS supposed to be above it all, oblivious to criticism or how the citizenry regards how they do what they do? Isn't that the point of lifetime appointments? It's interesting that some Justice (at least) is singing , so soon after the event. Both the ruling and the makeup of the majority in Sebelius was surprising, the latter far more so than the former since conservative Chief Justice Roberts looked for and found a way to uphold the Affordable Care Act. I don't think it's unprecedented, though I may be confusing retired Justices who've been source material for books about the Court. Either way, I'm struggling to figure out the motive since I take the reporting of CBS's Jan Crawford as accurate. Salmon wa

John Edwards, Worst Person in the World (Part II)

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When his corruption trial ended yesterday without a conviction on any of six counts John Edwards was all about John Edwards again, looking for love in all the wrong places ... again. Redemption comes to those who wait, not those who ask. OJ had it right: After he was acquitted of double murder he let his lawyers announce a fund to find the real killers and lived in the shade for as long as ego would allow . Edwards thought instead that  the Anthony Weiner gambit was the way to go. This is neither colossal misjudgment nor uncharacteristic hubris from a guy who thought that going to Haiti after that country's devastating earthquake was a good idea. Like many others I thought the prosecution was a bad thing, probably political — but that's about process and the next prosecution and the rule of law, not about the " awful, awful " things that this once rising star did while he was on the ascent. There isn't much more to say, so, from the archives, here'

There Is No GOP War On Women. It's Much Worse

You declare war on people you despise. To despise, you have to feel. The GOP has declared a Jihad to restore what they might call traditional values: right-wingers have never come to grips with Roe v. Wade (which, by the way, was meant to protect doctors from criminal prosecution, not especially to identify a woman's right to choose). Apparently some in the Republican Party also haven't quite come to terms with the notion of contraception, either. But the common thread isn't a hatred of women. The hate is directed elsewhere. Women don't matter. And that's much worse. What's the proof? When the Obama Administration stepped in it by in-artfully engaging the Catholic Church over contraception coverage in the health care plans for the employees of their secular enterprises, the GOP had a winning hand. You can't just treat a protected class like anyone else -- heck, religious institutions don't even pay property taxes. Whenever you have more than one

Rush, The Entertainer

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It's worse that Rush Limbaugh's feckless defenders in the political elite kiss him off not as a serious, fearsome political force, but rather a mere entertainer, not worth undue attention, to say nothing of condemnation. As dumb as Rush's political analysis might be, and as unpolitic his technique of expressing himself, his pool is politics, mostly invective against non-conservatives of his particular stripe (whatever that may be). Entertainers are supposed to, well, entertain. They are supposed to be, well, entertaining. This is, as they say, by definition. Rush isn't funny, except to the dittoheads he calls his fans, and these fans don't seem to realize how uncharacteristically accurate and demeaning that description from their spiritual leader is. Go to any comedy club, in any city, on any night and there will be at least one person about whom your table will look at each other and wonder, worlessly at first, in unison: How is this person not famous? An