EightBlack.

Oh God. I think I’ve turned into a Mac Snob.

I was sitting in a meeting this morning and a guy came in to present to us. He had set up his PC on the boardroom table and I couldn’t help feel sorry for him. He had wires and crap going everywhere. I think it was a Benq machine. Whoever the hell they are.

Worst of all - his screen saver was an ad for Benq machines, about how well designed they were, the inherent quality and form and function and all that other marketing pish. The screen saver even bragged about the fact that this machine was blessed to come pre-loaded with Windows Vista. Cursed more like it.

Anyway.

He laboured through his presentation. I didn’t listen to a word.

Man, was the machine ugly. It was enormous. And it probably weighed a ton.

Now, I only recently moved to a Mac environment about a year ago. I am a total convert. But I am worried that I’ve turned into this Mac snob who is close to accepting the fact that membership to the Mac cult is not far away.

What is it about the Apple brand that affects most users?

All I know is that I can’t go back. It’s too late. They work too well. And too easily.

The first article I read which got me thinking about this post was by John Battelle - here. I loved the words in italics…

If you have a ton of engaged inventory (ie, people using the web in ways that they value), then you can and should figure out a way to provide marketers access to those people for a premium price that will make network TV look like a blip in the history of marketing.

Then there was this article in todays Australian newspaper, with an article on the front page of the business section titled “TV permits no longer a licence to print money”. The article talks about the “the value of commercial TV licences being slashed by $2 billion since 2003-2004.

And then as I was thinking about what to actually write and how to pull it together, I received an email from AdNews - with the lead story “TV revenue on downward slide”.

All the articles point to one thing. The ultimate death of TV.

I know a lot of traditional ad guys who don’t think this will ever happen. I like the fact that they are still clinging to hope. They desperately want to believe that the medium which has helped pay the lease on their BMW, paid for their skiing holiday in Aspen and filled their wife’s lips full of botox will continue to deliver fat profits for eternity.

Except for one thing. The internet has already signed TV’s death warrant. And the sooner the networks figure this out, the better we all will be.

I know one thing. I want to consume and watch the content I want. And so do you. I don’t want to watch the content some 28 year old media programmer and media buyer wants me to watch.

Why has iTunes been so popular? Content on demand thats why. Started with Music. But I bet video content will outstrip it (eventually). I’m happy to pay 99 cents for a song I know I already have on a CD - which is somewhere in the house. Or if my kids have had anything to do with it - probably buried 3 feet in sand somewhere in the back garden.

I’m also happy to pay $40 bucks for a series of NCIS or Boston Legal - which iTunes downloads for me automatically and for which I receive an email notification. Its so simple. And convenient.

I think our lives have shifted to a point where we’ve had a taste of what’s possible via the web - this “on demand” and “eat what you want when you want” thinking. TV doesnt give you that. Never has. Sure, it helped entertain us for years. And because we haven’t worked out a better way - we’ll still be forced to watch major sporting events via TV because of the money involved and the myopic thinking of both advertisers and TV executives alike.

The only TV network who has the web figured out in this country at least is the one you least expect. And the one that amazingly sits in the public domain.

You guessed right. Aunty.

A colleague put an article on my desk this morning with the title “BlackBerry Backlash Building…”. It was printed in today’s Australian Financial Review.

It was written by Fiona Smith and made reference to research conducted by Judi MacCormick and Kristine Dery from the University of Sydney. The essence of their findings was the riveting fact that smart PDA’s take up every waking moment in our lives. Safe to say, the article wasn’t overly positive about the effect of Research In Motion’s killer device.

My disclaimer here is that I am an avid fan of the BlackBerry. I’ve used one for years and use one today when all our team use iPhones.

Smith reports in her article that…

“users tend to be unnecessarily distracted by inconsequential emails, delegate less, put too little thought in their email responses, and are sometimes there only in the physical sense when other people really need their full attention”.

Hogwash.

You could argue that nearly 99.9% of all emails we receive are inconsequential. I mean, when was the last time you received an email that you thought, “holy hell, this one’s a cracker. I need to print it off, save it and have one copy framed for my grandchildren”.

That’s why a BlackBerry is so useful. Because most emails can be handled with a simple “yes”, “no” or “maybe later” response, all of which can be sent in an instant. The “delete” key also works wonders too.

And as far as only “being at meetings in the physical sense”. Same argument. When was the last time you had a meeting that as soon it was over, you went up to everyone and personally thanked them for their contribution, wrote a hand written card to HR saying that this company was a real gem and later that night, you reminisced about the actual event with your better half, with a tear in your eye?

You see, total frog shit.

Most meetings are a complete waste of time. I can only concentrate for about 5 minutes in any meeting. And forget my BlackBerry distracting me. If my laptop is with me - all bets are off. As an aside, Seth Godin provides his thoughts on meetings here.

Actually, common sense dictates that if you’re at something important like the football, a divorce settlement, a Britney Spears concert or the purchase of major power tool, you’ll at least turn your phone or PDA to silent. I can actually go for a full hour without looking at it, but only if I am well and truly distracted.

Look, what Ms. Smith, Ms. MacCormack and Ms. Dery all forget is that wireless devices are now an intrinsic part of our DNA. We can’t switch off - even if we wanted to. And anyway, I have no desire to be disconnected to the outside world. Ok, I’ll admit it - I’ve spoken on my phone or looked at an email when I’ve been on a chairlift on the family skiing holiday. I check email on my laptop at home every night. Hell, I’ve even gone to bed with the damn thing.

It’s called living in 2008. Period.

But I do know one thing. I do still control the device rather than it controlling me. I might only have a marginal advantage over it - but it’s what I’m comfortable with.

I’ve set it at night to switch off at midnight and come on again at 6am. I don’t have it in the bedroom - although I know currency traders who sleep with their devices. And so they should. It’s their business.

I’m a relatively young parent and I’ve got much bigger issues with small humans creeping into our bed at night, rather than my BlackBerry vibrating quietly in the corner. At least I know when it makes a noise, it’s only for a set time. My 5-year old daughter on the other hand, can scream for an indefinite period.

Smith goes on to cite,

“research commissioned by Hewlett-Packard in the UK three years ago found that a person’s IQ falls by 10 points when they are trying to multi-task with their BlackBerry. The device would then have the same impact on their performance as the smoking of a joint or insomnia”

Most of my friends, who after smoking a doobie (and who admit to inhaling), are far more charming, far more literate and just plain old funny as shit as opposed to when they are boringly sober. Or something like this.

First of all, the whole statement is dubious because you have to question the impartiality of the research when someone like HP (who incidentally don’t make a killer device like RIM do) is involved. What was their real motive? It was hardly good corporate citizenship.

Actually, I bet the entire research project was overseen by a bunch of angry lesbians who really have an issue with BlackBerry’s because they represent all the evil that is contained within the male species. What they wanted the research to really say is “that all men are dumb”. Or something like that. I’ve probably overstepped the mark here. Screw it.

Lets move on.

The article then starts to get knee deep in it as Smith and co. pontificate…

“BlackBerry’s were introduced into organisations without any clear strategic type of thinking”.

Tell me, do you think the internet was introduced to society with any clear strategic thinking? Was radio, TV, were 90% plus of all corporate Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM)?

Nope. Nope. And Nope again (twice).

You don’t need an army of McKinsey consultants to tell you that smart PDA’s would be beneficial.

Back to the research in the UK 3 years ago. Well, in this day and age of technology, 3 years is an eternity. Actually, 3 years ago, YouTube didn’t exist. Google hadn’t gone public. Facebook hadn’t even been born. I’d actually like to know what age group these smart researchers interviewed? Generation X or Y or did they talk with a bunch of baby boomers who had to get up to go pee 3 times during the one hour focus group.

Ask a teenager to give up their mobile phone and see what happens. Actually, I bet if you told any kid today that the new rule of the house is their phones would be restricted to voice calls only (and that the text or SMS function would be disabled), there would be a global revolt. Parents would be locked in cars and basements and all manner of threats would be shouted from every rooftop.

Kids don’t talk on phones anymore. They grunt. But the little f@#ckers can text. Man, can they text.

You may as well try and hold back the tide. You won’t change this - doesn’t matter what you do. We’ve started to see this rabid behaviour with our 7-year old son. He has a Nintendo DS. The child is addicted to the thing. He could spend all weekend on it if you let him. We could move house and he wouldn’t know it. Especially if he was engrossed in his favourite game where the whole object is to remove the dragons head with a chainsaw. You get my point.

Nope, to me, the whole article by Smith is a croc. Nothing more but a desperate attempt to cling to the past.

As the article starts to round the final bend, she states,

“People who feel they are only needed for 10 minutes in an one-hour meeting might feel justified in fiddling with their phone under the table, but they are missing out on the other things that are said - or are unspoken - at the meeting”.

Like what? Most people would be arrested for saying out loud what they really think at meetings. I know I would and I cross the line more than most. It’s the benefit of being a benevolent dictator.

My suggestion for CrackBerry addicts is simple. Get all your email going to your device. Embrace it. Drive your friends mad. I just figured out today how to get my GMail, and other work email going to my 8100. And its a cracker. The thing is literally going beserk.

This is 2008. The internet and wireless devices are here to stay. Soon, we’ll be at the mercy of our kids, who embraced this shit long ago. We may as well work out how to talk with them, on their level if we want to be fed, bathed and generally looked after in our old age.

This notion of “People filling up all the empty moments of their lives - which the researchers call ‘micro-boredoms’”, is poppycock. All the empty moments of my life are consumed by my kids yelling at me and my wife telling me what to do. And in a funny, masochistic kind of way, I’m actually ok with it.

And I wouldn’t go anywhere without my BlackBerry. And they’re ok with that.

What on earth for?

Something is clearly up - and according to the official BlueFreeway Press Release, the management want up to 2 weeks because their initial investigation into the shambles is not yet complete.

So, on Monday this week, Blu asked for a trading halt. Then 24 hours later, they asked for an immediate suspension.

Whatever way you cut it, the future is not bright. More at the ASX site here.

I honestly didn’t think this would happen. Maybe Ballmer is getting far less impatient in his old age. This from the Microsoft website. I still don’t think this is over by a long shot. Because one thing all the pundits have forgotten in the coverage of this news story, is there’s still the issue of a little search company in Mountain View to deal with.

How Yahoo! and Microsoft intend to deal with “search” in the bigger context is still a massive undertaking.

Be interesting to see what happens when the market opens on Monday in the US and what value it places on Yahoo! then. My guess is that after a week of “blood on their hands”, the Yahoo! directors will want to do a deal with just about anyone.

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

•	First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
•	Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
•	In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
•	This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
•	It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Ben, our Technical Director, reckons the way to get traffic to any blog is simply to write something negative about Apple - and within minutes, hoards of ravenous Apple Zealots will show up and beat you into a virtual pulp.

Or something like that.

I’m happy to admit that I’m a Mac convert. Wouldn’t admit to joining the cult just yet. But close.

I received my Mac Air about 6 weeks ago.

As far as travelling goes, the Air is unbeatable. It’s obviously light, the wireless is great and the same Mac features like simply closing the lid when you’re done and the auto detect of any wireless network, are just so user friendly. I don’t think the thing has crashed yet.

But I do have some gripes.

For one, the battery life sucks. The charge times are all over the place. Sometimes it literally takes 5-6 hours to charge the thing. It will last for maybe 2 hours tops. Run video and your toast.

I always buy 2 power supplies with every laptop I own. That way, you can leave one at home and one at the office. The power supply for the Air is actually the same as it is for MacBook Pro’s - but it does have a slightly different end plug. I don’t know why they couldn’t have just standardised the thing - probably because some design nazi at Apple wanted the plug for the Air to be “at one” with the overall look and feel.

Or something like that.

Also, the lack of USB ports. Couldn’t the designers have fitted just ONE more? For example, when I’m at work, the Air looks like it’s connected to life support as I have a USB router connected to it with the printer, the back up drive, the wireless mouse, the keyboard and whatever else there is.

As it is, I have now bought an external CD/DVD drive and an external hard drive for when I travel - so it starts to negate the purpose of a laptop that can fit into a large envelope when you take into consideration all the ancillary crap you have to lug around.

The full size keyboard is nice, although I preferred the “feel” of my MacBook Pro’s keyboard. Screen is exceptional. And the in-built camera works perfectly fine with iChat.

No doubt, the next version will be faster, have a bigger capacity hard drive and maybe Apple will have addressed the power issue. The Apple website reckons you’ll get 5 hours wireless use out of your new MacBook Air. Pigs arse you will.

Maybe they could design one to run off plutonium. I wouldn’t care. Already had kids.

Also, if you work with iMovie a lot (like I do), then the Air will start to hyper-ventilate. Just doesn’t have enough grunt.

My summary. The machine is cool. Would I buy another one? Maybe not. I’d be happy to go back to a Pro for performance and horsepower reasons.

And as far as helping me pick up women or improving my overall image, the Air has done bugger all. C’est la vie.

* Specs for my machine: (1.6 GHz, 80 Gig standard hard drive, 2GB ram)

* Image courtesy SMH

Not that any serious website owner should take note of it anymore, but PageRank is one of those “vanity” things. Reassurance to your own self that all your hard work has paid off (if you’re a blogger) or a webmaster.

That little green indicator at the top of your browser (which by the way you have to install) causes more arguments and blog posts in the blogosphere and forums than you’d care to count.

A high PageRank number alone has little to do with traffic, engagement and total content.

It’s also no indication, if you’re an advertiser, that you should pay more on a site with high PageRank.

Having said all that, I smiled just a little this morning when I discovered this humble blog growing by one more peg on Google’s radar.

Means nothing to you. And will mean nothing to me once I’ve had lunch and something alcoholic to drink.

The only numbers we should be looking at are the numbers that our web analytics interface shows us. Period.

Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL and in this presentation, he talks about the scale behind AOL’s instant messaging platform (AIM).

Didn’t think a messaging platform could detect patterns on broadcast television? Then think again.

AIM is one of those underestimated technologies that keeps on growing and with over 14 million users, now commands the number 3 position in the global messaging market.

This is clearly one of the best observations on the potential Microsoft/Yahoo! tie-up. And much, much clearer now. For me at least.

If I was Yahoo!, I’d engage Marc Andreessen pronto.

Although, the feeling on the West Coast is that the deal will get done regardless.

This session was presented by Steve Pearman, one of Tom Anderson’s top deputies (he’s currently SVP of Product Strategy).

Anderson is one of the co-founders of the social networking juggernaut, along with Chris DeWolfe.

Pearman rattles off some amazing numbers. Like 117 million unique users in March 08, 100 billion rows of data which can be mined anyway they like (not a typo, it reads “billions”), 85 gigs of bandwith, 50 million messages a day and so on.

Son of a bitch, that’s big.

If ever you needed a real live example of what scale means on the internet, then MySpace is it.