Charles Miller makes a great point about Chrome:

Firstly: if you introduce a beta that is largely interesting to nerds, releasing it only for Windows is a mistake. I know I subscribe to a preponderance of blogs by Mac or Linux users, but even I was surprised by the number of Chrome reviews that mentioned having to run it in a virtual machine, or on the old discarded Windows box in the corner.

That was exactly what I had to do - I first tried it under Parallels (with inexplicable results), and then on an older Windows box "in the corner". Given the early adopter mix that Google wants to reach for, I have no idea why they didn't go for Linux and Mac early. Windows? For early adopters? Astonishing.

Technorati Tags: chrome, google

I like this post about the long tail and niche artists - and the same principle applies to any niche product. Swap in a niche product for music, and this is very true:

The Long Tail is... an economic principle that reveals a strategy that can be used by creative businesses: sell less of more. That is to say, release a large amount of things that sell in small quantities. To date (and much to everyone's surprise) the major record labels have grasped this far more quickly than the independents.

The reason this is so true? "Hits" don't disappear just because we live in a long tail world:

The Long Tail is not... the death of the hit. While the niche market expands because the availability of products is greater and greater - to the extent that the sum economic value of all non-hits combined is greater than the sum economic value of all hits combined - that doesn't mean that the number of hits decreases, or that Britney Spears goes away.

The same thing applies in the market for any product. Take development tools. Just because it's easier to get the message out about Smalltalk doesn't mean that there won't be hits (Ruby) - what's different about the current era, compared to, say, 15 years ago is this: a hit doesn't suck all of the oxygen out of the space. It was hard to get a word in edgewise; now it's much more possible, which makes it much more possible to make a living down at the long tail end of things.

The key things are increasing exposure and decreasing the "friction" involved in making sales.

I feel some empathy for the folks behind SiteMeter. As has been widely reported, they did an update to their service, and said update broke fairly catastrophically in IE. The reason I have some empathy is that I've executed similarly botched updates to this blog site - the day I first used "future posting" I was on a plane when my update crashed the app server :)

Still, their problem sounds a lot like the one I had: a failure to test adequately. The big question is, how did something like this slip through? Having a Javascript flaw that breaks in IE seems like the sort of thing that should have been caught.

This story points out the dangers of not doing that testing, too - lots and lots of sites yanked SiteMeter, because the flaw made them inaccessible to a large body of readers. I expect that a not insignificant number of those sites won't get around to putting it back up, either due to irritation or inertia (there's almost always something better to do than go back and check some third party software).

Updates are very easy to roll out on a web app - but with that ease comes the ability to make an absolutely horrid impression.

Technorati Tags: PR, management

Periodically I get asked about mandatory forms - people are often surprised that we don't use them in front of things like our videos, podcasts, and other downloads. Which is ok, because I'm surprised that anyone thinks they would help :)

Here's the thing - there's a nearly infinite amount of information available on the net, about lots and lots of products and services. let's say someone comes to our site looking for information on Seaside or Web Velocity - and they are immediately confronted with a form before they can see anything.

The standard marketing answer is that a form guarantees that interested parties will leave valuable contact information that can be followed up on. To which I respond: "Oh, really? What do you do when you are confronted with a required form?"

That usually leads to an awkward silence. So the question is, if you won't fill in a form, what makes you think other people will? Let me return to my hypothetical person interested in Seaside. After finding out that he's got to fill in a form to get information, what is he more likely to do?

• Fill in the form
• Bail out to a Squeak site on Seaside
• Bail out to some other language (like Ruby)
• Bail out to parts unknown

Here's a clue: it's not the first option :)

Technorati Tags: PR

David Meerman Scott makes a great point on tech polls and social media:

When asked "do you read blogs?" or "do you use social media?" many people answer "no". However, practically everyone uses Google and other search engines regularly and the search results frequently include blog posts or YouTube videos or other social media content high in the search results. So even though people may report "no" when asked if they use social media, nearly everyone has been to a blog or other social media content through search.

The problem with asking a general audience poll questions on tech is that they make too many assumptions. Take Boing-Boing - is that a blog, or a technology reporting site? Ask 10 different people and I suspect you'll get a variety of answers.

It goes beyond the search results and into trusting respondents to know what they are looking at and categorize it - and in many cases, things are harder to categorize than you might think.

Technorati Tags: PR

I suspect that the overall uptime numbers for Amazon's S3 service are still very high, but outages like yesterday's really hit people - this is from the FaceStats service, which relies on S3:

It wasn't just us -- dozens or hundreds of useful websites were down today. SmugMug, the photosharing site, was broken. Avatars didn't show up in Twitter. Drop.io, the excellent service we use to send and receive data from clients, was completely down. Scribd had no document data, rendering the site basically worthless. We decided to make the best of it and replace the homepage with an embedded flash game -- since every feature of our site is broken, why not give our users something else to do?

A seven hour outage is bound to get comments - Amazon is going to have to be very open about these problems going forward.

Mathew Ingram notes that MS is making a good play to have the XBox become the media server of the future:

Netflix and Microsoft announced a deal earlier today that allows Xbox 360 owners to download movies through their game consoles, which appears to be another step in the software company’s Trojan Horse approach to winning the living room/media-server wars. Will this give it an edge over Apple TV? MG Siegler seems to think so -- he’s dropped his earlier championing of Roku’s media server box and is now calling Microsoft the winner. I’m not so sure just yet, however.

We've given that path some thought - my wife has an (XP based) Media Center PC she's mostly hapy with, and combining it with an XBox might make some sense. The downside? The upgrade path runs through Vista and its DRM from hell. Still, most people aren't going to decide on that basis (as much as I wish they would).

Personally, I plan to buy a new Office Mac and move the mini into the living room to be the media server - but that's way more work than most people will want. Apple has an edeg with ApleTV and iTunes, but MS is plodding along diligently here.

Technorati Tags: media server

Phil Windley quotes Ross Mayfield on the retail experience at Apple, and compares it to other places:

What Best Buy is missing is the fact that they provide no after market value add with their retail -- in comparison to buying and servicing with an e-commerce vendor. If I buy something in person I expect a person to be able to help me when things go wrong. At least during the manufactures warranty, and I might pay to extend that period with the retailer.

That's very true, and I think it explains why stores like CompUSA died, and why BestBUY is probably going to end up in trouble. If I can get the same lack of interest and knowledge for less at a website, why should I bother driving? At the Apple store, on the other hand, there's a ton going on, a lot of smart people who actually know something, and they encourage you to try the sample merchandise. Huge difference.