Hank Williams Archive

FYI – There is a press event setup for 2pm Eastern today – we will live blog this along with CNET’s Webware. You can watch the press event here.

At my company, Kloudshare, a big part of what we are developing involves pushing boundaries of what browsers are expected to do. Generally speaking this is the case industry wide as the web browser is becoming more and more a real application delivery system.

Google understands this issue and has apparently been focused on some of the more glaring weaknesses of the current crop of browsers. As such, they have decided to launch a new browser called Chrome, to try to bring browsers into the 21st century.

This has the blogosphere all excited. Everyone is writing about the features of the new browser, and its strategic significance. The product sounds great, but I can only get but so excited.

Why?

Because as a developer, Chrome seems to me to be little more than pissing in the wind.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controls around 75% of the browser market, and that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that Internet Explorer version 6 has 25% of the market.

IE 6 launched in August of 2001.When IE 6 Launched the attacks of 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We were in the middle of the 1.0 tech bubble. In fact, if I had had kids when IE 6 was introduced they would be in second grade this year.

And yet 25% of the market is still using it. I’m not sure, but I believe it still comes on XP installation disks. In any case the fact that Microsoft has nothing in place to induce a higher upgrade rate is damn near criminal.

And so I must contrast all of the breathless excitement over chrome with the fact that the browser with #2 market share is so bad in 2008 terms it is just barely capable of delivering modern experiences. And even to do that, *lots* of engineering goes into supporting this trailing edge of the browser market.

I’d love to see a study of how much time is wasted developing special case crap for IE 6. I suspect if you added it all up we could solve world hunger or something.

All I know is that for me, as a writer, Chrome is a fun story — as a developer, not so much. As a developer, Chrome is very much a story for the next decade and has nothing to do with my 2008 or even 2009 challenges. In fact it will be a cause for celebration if I care at all even in 2010.

The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily. So Chrome, from a business perspective, for the forseeable future, is totally irrelevant.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

This morning Mike Arrington wrote a great advice piece to Amazon on the Kindle.

The gist of Mike’s argument is that Amazon should offer Kindle up as an operating system and reference design. This would allow third parties to create Kindle compatible devices in the same way that Dell, for example, makes PCs compatible with Windows. This would create an ecosystem around the product which would be incredibly powerful. And at the same time, Amazon would still be doing what it really wants to do, which is to sell books. By offering their own product which they should continue to sell, they get to work out all the kinks without any meddling third party companies telling it what to do. But by opening up the platform, they really get to have their control cake and to eat their large marketplace cake too.

Interestingly, this is really what Google should be doing with Android. Google is indeed licensing the Android OS to third party phone manufacturers, but by not creating and controling an initial reference design they are leaving important pieces of the design to third parties, in a field (mobile phones) where important design elements can be critical.

Anyway, getting back to Kindle, I have been a fan of the product concept but I do believe it will be very hard for Amazon to build up the kind of market that they really need and should have with such a device without getting some help. I hope they take Mike’s advice.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

There is a rumor that has been circulating that Apple is going to be introducing a music subscription service like Rhapsody. I don’t know if it is true, but hope that it is. I love music subscription services, and am a current subscriber to Rhapsody, but I would switch to Apple in a minute so I could use my neat iPod with it.

But what triggered me wanting to write about this was not the rumor, but the reaction to the rumor by certain quarters. Specifically, whenever you read about subscription services, you always read vehement and angry comments from people that don’t like the idea of subscriptions. It is certainly fine to not want it for yourself. But what is odd to me is the anger that said people have at the idea that I might want something different.

It’s fascinating that this response always comes from the "free" music crowd, and yet I am confident, if they had a magic wand, they would make such services illegal, or so socially or politically unacceptable that they would not be offered.

This vehemence strikes me as strange because clearly I should have the right to buy something the way I want and a vendor should have the right to sell it to me in the way that s/he wants.

In short, it strikes me that the free music crowd is really more a religious movement than one based in logic and reason. It is very similar to the way that certain fundamentalist religious groups demonize people for different beliefs. Here the free music community demonizes subscription services because, by definition, subscriptions must use DRM, which is "evil". And the irrational zealous passion brought to bear is exactly analogous to the behavior of every out of control religious group in human history. Ok, they haven’t gotten to burning people at the stake, but you know what I mean.

The point is, even if you have the wacky view that all music or intellectual property should be free, the idea that you should consider business and interaction models, and technologies like DRM that don’t match your world view to be "evil", is, to me, bizarre. This is particularly true when the DRM *enables* a, compelling, at least for some, business model such as subscriptions.

As I see it, this movement would be more appropriately lead by a religious figure like Pat Robertson, or John Hagee, or Richard Stallman, or… oh wait, it is!

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

For those of you who have been following along, my mom was seduced by Steve Jobs’ iPhone. This was and is an astonishing thing, since my mom is very far away from being a techie.

On the day of the iPhone launch, she waited in line at an AT&T store (and I waited with her) to get her new phone.

My mom loves her phone, but one issue came up which triggered an interesting thought.  She had a hard time using the phone initially because of her fingernails.

My mom does not have big garish fingernails, but they were longer than any man’s fingernails, extending perhaps a quarter or a half inch beyond her fingertips. The problem is that the iPhone screen requires touch by skin. the tip of a fingernail will not work. This is a problem because it means that the angle that your finger touches the screen at is such that the you end up making contact with the screen with a very large imprecise area of your finger. In short, my mom kept missing the intended screen  buttons.

Now in reality, my mom clipped her nails and everything was fine. But I guess my question is whether that is a reasonable expectation in the product design. Were there any women on the product team? We’re there any *girly* women on the product team — women that like the idea of painted fingernails that extend a bit beyond the fingertip?

I am sure many of you will say that is the price of technology. But I myself wonder if there were some equivalent male focused impediment if it would have been considered acceptable.

I am not sure that this is the perfect example, but this whole episode just got me thinking about design issues for men vs women. How many other, perhaps more subtle issues like this are there that I and other product designers/developers don’t think about? It is indeed striking that such a basic issue for the iPhone, as far as I can tell, really has not been discussed at all. Will most of my male readers, or readers in general, argue that such issues are irrelevant?

Editor’s note: In addition to Hank’s findings, last winter we wrote about the inability to use the iPhone with gloves on.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

No secret here, the music business is in trouble. One of the biggest reasons is that its product, being digital, is easy to steal, and for many it appears that there is no good reason not to.

I think I have the solution. But to be honest, though I did think of it independently, with a little bit of research I was able to establish that none other than Bill Gates himself proposed a similar concept in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead.

That said, this is 2008, and based on my discussions with folks in the record business, the idea is really not one being looked at, but there don’t appear to be any good reasons why. And so I am proposing it here to try to get the conversation going.

The idea is fairly straightforward. We should not be buying bits when we buy songs, or for that matter, digital content in general. We should be buying lifetime rights to access. So when you buy a song, or album, you can freely re-download it from the cloud, you may stream it to yourself, you can load it on any device you have with full privileges, for the rest of your life.

In this scenario, the cloud manages your ownership. So if you lose your iPod, the cloud knows what songs you own and is ready to re-download them to you. If you don’t have your iPod with you, you can still go to any PC and stream music from your library to yourself.

The point of this is to give long-term value to the purchase of a song. Right now, if you steal a song, once you have stolen it there is not much value difference between having stolen it and having purchased the real thing, other than, perhaps, a clear conscience, which it appears is not enough.

As I see it, a set of managed relationships between artists and labels on the one side, and fans on the other, has great value, to both sides of the equation. As a consumer, this would allow you to opt-in to relationships with artists, fan clubs, discount tickets, notification of concerts you might like in your area etc. It is a way for fans, without going out of their way, to establish a deeper relationship with their favorite artists.

The interesting aspect of this is the politics of it. Who controls what? And there, I think I have a solution that works both technologically and politically.

There would need to be one, or several rights societies, kind of like ASCAP and BMI. They would be non-profit organizations that do one thing. They manage the database that stores the relationships between users and songs. But they would not be responsible for selling anything.

The idea is that all the types of businesses that exist today would service customers including traditional digital music stores, as well as streaming on demand vendors, and online music lockers. So, for example, Rhapsody would still offer an on-demand streaming service as well as the right to play purchased music with the additional privileges that would afford. When you log in, it would ask the central database what songs you have played recently. Essentially, your streamed play history is in the cloud, just the way it is  with Rhapsody today.

But what is interesting with this new model is that you can switch from Rhapsody to Napster, and retain all of your purchases and play history. Or you could go to iTunes and re-download a purchased song you lost. In each case there is probably a service fee of some sort for allowing you to re-download music, perhaps on an annual basis, but those fees would be up to the service provider, and would presumably be driven by competition.

To touch on the details for a bit, the database would be exceedingly simple. It would store two tables. I have outlined them below, and I am sure there are other fields that I have missed. But it does, at least, suggest the framework.

User Table
user ID
last access date/time

Transaction Table
The Song ID or Album ID
user ID
Password or OpenID
the seller ID
transaction date/Time
Unit Type (e.g. single stream or full purchase)

Both the service providers and the record labels would have access to the database. The service providers would have write access, and would only have read access to a given customers history if the customer gave permission for that, which might allow the service provider to use collaborative filtering to make listening suggestions, as well as allowing the user to see what they have played or purchased and when.

The record labels would have access to the database for tallying purchases in order to bill service providers. The labels would not have permission to access individual purchase records, but could pay service providers to send messages to fans of a given artist, presuming the fans have opted in to receiving such messages.

With regard to identity, the central database would have no knowledge of who anyone actually is. Credit card information is held by the service provider, but that information, and actual identity information such as name or address is only kept as needed by the service provider for facilitating transactions, and not in the central database.

Finally, the idea of this is that accounts are not transferable and become inactive after death. But since we don’t know who people really are, we have to guess, and to make it unattractive to use someone else’s account. For this, we employ several tactics.

First, we set time limits. An account may not exist longer than the average human life. This would discourage someone from using an account since it will cut off after a certain time and then all of your personal songs go away.

Second, we say if an account is not used for several years – I am not yet suggesting a particular time frame – it becomes invalid. But most importantly, service providers create such personalized experiences and suggestions that you don’t want to use someone else’s account any more than anyone wants to share a Last.fm account.

From an economic perspective, the rights society would operate based on membership fees from labels and service providers, and it probably would make sense to have several competing rights societies for the consumer to choose from. It probably also makes sense for there to be some nominal annual fee to the consumer, but since I haven’t done any modeling around this I am not sure. The main point is that the organization needs to make enough money to operate successfully given demand.

And so, the reason I am writing this is because I want to see it happen. I have no economic incentive to do so, and am pretty busy doing my own business. But I have begun exploring this as an idea with interested parties to see what people thought.

From what I hear on the label side, they would likely be receptive to such an idea, given the state of things, but the impetus from this must come from the tech side first. This is because the labels are not capable of creating the infrastructure, and without the service providers it won’t work.

For this reason, the labels really need buy-in from Microsoft, Amazon, or some other big player or players. I don’t even suggest Apple here, though they would be the obvious choice, since the concept is a direct threat to iTunes hegemony. This threat, however, is a great reason for every other tech business in consumer facing content delivery to love this idea. It radically changes the status quo.

And so really, at the end of the day, this is a request to the big tech guys to reach out to talk about this idea. Though it may be a bit presumptuous, if I can serve as a midwife in this situation, it would be my pleasure. Because of the competitive interests involved here I do think some kind of neutral third party will be required to grease the wheels.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

Over the weekend, The web was abuzz with discussion about Microsoft considering the acquisition of natural language search company Powerset. Some time ago I had heard a rumor that someone was looking at Powerset, but was relatively uninterested. Hearing that the potential acquirer is Microsoft certainly makes it more interesting, but I have to say the concept leaves me more than a bit incredulous.

From skeptic to user

I became familiar with Powerset’s only competitor, Hakia initially because they are a New York company. I became intrigued with Hakia because several months ago I tried their search engine, and it worked – really well. This was a surprising result for me since I have always been a skeptic regarding all things relating to artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, and other such fuzzy technologies.

At least in the area of natural language processing Hakia that has changed my mind. In fact, it has become common for me to use the Hakia search engine when Google does not deliver sufficient results.

Hakia and Powerset are part of the same general area of natural language search. The idea with both services is that you can actually ask specific questions and get answers. But there are critical differences between Hakia and Powerset. And those differences bring me back to my incredulity at the idea that Microsoft is taking a serious look at Powerset.

Powerset indexes 750 times slower than Hakia!

I have no expertise in natural language processing or semantic search, or any type of full text search for that matter. But as far as I can tell, Hakia’s technology is *far* superior to that of Powerset’s. Why would I say that?

Well first, as I have already said, it works. It is a real live search engine. I use it. I can’t say the same for Powerset. Powerset has yet to show anything but a search engine for Wikipedia. A big part of the reason Powerset doesn’t seem able to offer a real search engine is the fact that according to their own reports, it takes them about 25 seconds to index a page, based on an average of 25 sentences per page. According to Hakia it takes them 1/30th of a second to index a page. Essentially this means that Powerset cannot scale. It is seven hundred fifty times slower than Hakia!

Now you might assume that Powerset is slower because it’s applying some serious, and superior indexing mojo, and therefore what it is doing is much more valuable than what Hakia is doing. But alas that is also not true.

Hakia really knows how to read

Hakia is doing something called “ontological semantics”. What this means is that over the last four years, Hakia has developed an “ontology” for human expression. In layman terms, what this means is that what Hakia does when it indexes a page is to look at each sentence and figure out what the *questions* are that each sentence answers. Any given sentence usually answers 3 or 4 questions. These questions are coded and go into what Hakia calls their Qdex, or question index.

In order to be able to figure out what the relevant questions are for a given sentence, Hakia’s indexer has to literally read the sentence. By “read” I mean it has to understand the actual meaning of the sentence semantically. This is a big deal.

Powerset uses statistics + syntax but can’t actually read

So, while Hakia is actually reading, Powerset, does not actually attempt to understand what sentences mean. It uses a system that parses the syntax of the sentence and guesses matches based on statistics. But this approach means that for questions that do not match previously encountered syntactical patterns, the system will not be able to find answers, even if there are in fact answers in the database.

Powerset benefits from the Silicon Valley echo chamber

Now, if, for a moment, you presume that it is true, or even *possibly* true that Hakia is the superior service and technology, or if you even assume that Hakia is just equivalent to Powerset, why would Powerset be so continuously celebrated while Hakia is overshadowed?

The only answer I can come up with is that the west coast is such an echo chamber that very little sound gets in or out. And so it must be shocking when a New York company develops a technology that seems to beat the pants off something that should be pure Silicon Valley. Just a thought.

In any case, it seems, for the record, worth noting that we have the clear leader in natural language processing and search technology right here. And, as an admitted New York partisan, after a while it does get a little annoying to hear such continued fawning over a west coast company that is very likely, at the end of the day, just another Silicon Valley also-ran.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

Jakob Nielsen recently published two interesting research statistics that help explain why display ads don’t work.

First, Jakob says we read a very small amount of the text on most pages. Apparently we only, on average, read at best 28% of the words on the page and most likely around 20% of the words.

Second, in an older article from late last year, Jakob also says users avoid anything that looks like a banner. This may seem obvious, but the interesting thing to consider is that all web pages on a given site (and even across the web on different sites) are likely to have the same pattern for what looks like an ad vs what looks like content. Your eyes quickly learn that anything that is on the sides, or anything with a border around it, or anything that looks photographic is an ad.

Newspapers and magazines generally do not have any such easily to discern pattern. Pages are generally laid out manually by a designer on an issue by issue basis. Smaller ads are blended in with the content, breaking columns and such so that advertising will have unavoidable and unpredictable proximity to content. Moreover, many ads take up the full page which requires at least some minimal scanning before turning the page. And because the ads are often so big, you almost can’t avoid at least seeing a bit of it before turning the page.

The bottom line is that users see too much stuff on the web and so they focus on very little. On top of that they have learned effective patterns for avoiding ads. And while we try to avoid ads in print, the physical size of the advertising, the unpredictable patterns, and the high degree of mixing advertising and content make pattern based ad avoidance much harder in print.

In my view, the model for how we organize information on the web is fundamentally broken as it relates to siphoning off attention for advertisers. We need to inject more randomness into our designs. Indeed, the kinds of thing that Jakob Nielsen promotes as improving usability do in fact promote usability while *reducing* monetizability.

Magazines and newspapers are *not at all useable*. I am often frustrated that it is very difficult to find a table of contents in a magazine, or that some pages are missing page numbers that would help me find an article. This is all on purpose!

Print publications are very effective advertising platforms in large part specifically because they place "attention speedbumps" in your way. If print publications were as streamlined as websites, with ads neatly presented off to the side, ads wouldn’t work there either.

And so we have a decade of smart folks like Jakob teaching us exactly the right stuff to make our sites easy, but exactly the wrong strategies for making money. Amusingly, at least a part of the message is that a little disorganization is absolutely critical.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.