Vault Radio: It's Quite a Trip

I've wanted to write about Vault Radio since I began this crazy blog adventure.

If you love live music...If you love classic rock, blues and soul music from the late 1960's and early 1970's...If you never got a chance to see Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, John Mayall, Led Zeppelin, Albert Collins, Jefferson Airplane and other rock and blues legends play live...If you always wanted to hear a concert at the Fillmore (West and East) or the Berkely Community Theater or Webster Hall or Madison Square Garden....If you love bootlegs but want to support the artists...then, go visit Vault Radio right now.

Vault Radio is the digital re-incarnation of Bill Graham. Graham, whose given name was Wolfgang Granjonca, produced more than 35,000 concerts through the late 1960's and mid 1970's. Graham recorded most of these concerts on tape, including seminal live performances by the Doors, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Traffic, BB King, Paul Butterfield, Janis Joplin and others. This treasure trove of live music lay dormant in Graham's attic until 2003 when his music archive was acquired by Wolfgang's Vault, the owners of Vault Radio.

Today, Vault Radio is playing selected tracks from Graham's recorded concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. While Vault doesn't provide listeners with the option to fast forward through the playlist or select a specific artist or track -- how very lo-fi -- there is no denying the unique experience of listening to Aretha Franklin sing "Love the One You're With" from her 1971 concert at The Fillmore West. It is truly spine tingling.

So, dust off your old LPs, put on your bandana and bell bottoms and head off to Vault Radio. It's quite a trip.

Hooters Air Goes Tits Up

Too often brand and marketing gurus get so caught up believing their own hype that they convince themselves that consumers will lap up new product variations or brand extensions regardless of how insane these may seem to the detached observer. Cases in point include New Coke, the McRib and the Phaeton.

The latest example of this "brands gone wild" syndrome is Hooters Air. Believe it or not, Hooters, the (in)famous chain of restaraunts best known for its scantily clad and buxom young "Hooters Girls", launched its own airline in 2003. Why fly Hooters Air? Well, safety first and foremost. Hooters Air is the only airline which can legitimately claim that, in the unlikely event of a water landing you can use the attendants as floatation devices!

Well, you can imagine how shocked I was this morning to read that Hooters Air is going out of business. What a bust! Who was the boob who dreamed up this idea? Apparently, the company was getting too top heavy. Management was trying to milk it for all it was worth. They tried to get their hands around the situation but business started to sag. Frankly, they needed additional support.

Ok, enough of that. The real point here is that Hooters, like New Coke and Phaeton before it, broke three of the cardinal rules of marketing and branding:

1. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Coke is great. Leave it alone.

2. Know where your brand can go and where it cannot. A VW logo on a luxury sedan? Please.

3. Innovation is only real innovation when there is a customer need. Does anybody really need another tacky discount airline?

So, farewell Hooters Air. We salute you.

Time-In Parenting, Time-In Management

Let me begin by saying that I am blessed to have two beautiful, kind, smart, fun, resourceful and loving children. Ninety-six percent of the time (I have detailed daily logs to support this figure), my children are a joy to be around. But, let's face it, there are those occasions when my children, like all children, become irritable, rude, upset and angry. Not surprisingly, it is on these same occasions that their Dad also becomes irritable, rude, upset and angry. The result is a vicious cycle that ends up with all of us throwing tantrums and being "timed out".

Last year, my wife brought home a book called Time-In Parenting by Dr. Otto Weininger that dramatically changed the way in which our family deals with emotional outbursts and misbehaviour. At its core, Time-In Parenting takes issue with the common advice given to parents to send their children for a "time out" when emotions build up and lead to misbehaviour. The prevalent practice of “timing out” children, argues Dr. Weininger, sends them the absolutely wrong message; namely, that they are unacceptable to their parents when they are experiencing strong emotions and that they need to cope with their anger and emotions on their own.

Instead, Time-In Parenting calls for parents to "time-in" with their kids during these emotional moments and say, "I am here for you". While this may seem obvious and trite it is, in fact, quite profound. Offering children support and empathy when they are troubled let’s them know that their parents believe in them and their ability to manage through their troubles. It also, from my own personal experience, creates an extremely strong emotional attachment between parent and child. Holding your child’s hand or squeezing them close when they are experiencing strong negative emotions let’s your child know that you will be there for them in times of crisis. And isn’t that what parenting is all about?

I was having lunch yesterday in Des Moines, Iowa (don’t ask) with a key prospect who also has two children. We were discussing Time-In Parenting when it dawned on us that the fundamental principle of “timing-in” applies equally as well to business management. Too often business managers “time out” their staff by sending them away to “fix the problem” or “deal with the issue” on their own. However, what if these same managers would “time-in” with their employees? What if they would communicate to their staff that “I am here for you” and let them know that their boss will always support them in times of crisis? How powerful and motivating would that be? And, after all, isn’t that what good management is all about?

Are You Unbundled?

On the most recent podcast of All Songs Considered, Bob Boilen noted that the Red Hot Chili Peppers have finally agreed to sell their music on iTunes. Why is this news? Because the Chili Peppers have until now objected to allowing consumers to "unbundle" the band's music by purchasing individual songs rather than the entire album.

While it's not clear yet how much of an impact the availability of individual tracks is having on album sales -- though music sales from online digital stores like iTunes now exceed those made in traditional bricks and mortar stores -- what is clear is that the unbundling of the music track is just the latest example of how technology is fragmenting and atomizing the production, distribution and consumption of media. Some other examples of the unbundling of media include blogs (unbundled news), vlogs (unbundled television) and podcasts (unbundled radio).

While it is natural to bemoan the impact of unbundling on traditional media, the flip side is that unbundled media or, micromedia, is generally more personal, more portable, more shareable and more consumable than macro-media. What's more, as Ricky Gervais, Saturday Night Live and Rocketboom have proven, micromedia is inherently viral. This is all great news if you are a creator, producer or distributor of content.

So, let's all pause and pay our respects to the album, the newsaper and the traditional television and radio show. They have served us well. But, if you are interested in having your content shared, distributed and consumed, start today by unbundling it into its simplest discrete form -- or, as Fred Wilson says, "microchunk" it -- and allow your consumers to easily access it, mix it, tag it, customize it, search it, store it and share it.

Oh yeah, and then blog it!

David Bowie Uncovered

Ok, I admit it. I have never been a huge fan of David Bowie's. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Bowie's music and Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust are clealry classic albums. But, I just haven't connected with his music like I have with other 70's art rock groups like Roxy Music, Pink Floyd or The Talking Heads (my wife would add Brian Eno here if she had any editorial rights).

By the way, I know that I am in the minority here. In 1999, David Bowie was voted the most influential artist of the 20th century by his fellow musicians and Pitchfork named his 1977 album Low the best album of the 70's beating out The Clash's London Calling, Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Led Zeppelin's IV.

So how is it that some of the most haunting and beguiling music I've been listenting to lately is Bowie's? The answer, interestingly enough, is that I've finally found my way into David Bowie's music by not listening to Bowie himself. Instead, I've been listening to mesmerizing cover versions of some of Bowie's classic songs by two very talented and very different contemporary artists: Seu Jorge and M. Ward.

Let me stop here for a second and say that I am generally not a fan of cover versions. Rare is the cover that is better than the original or that adds a new dimension to the music or the lyrics to warrant listening to the song being interpreted by another artist.

So, back to Seu Jorge and M. Ward. Seu Jorge is a Brazilian actor and musician. He has appeared in the movies City of God and The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou. For the movie The Life Acquatic, Jorge also recorded acoustic Portugese language cover versions of fifteen Bowie classic songs, including Changes, Ziggy Stardust and Suffragette City. But my personal favourite is his version of Rebel, Rebel. Listening to these songs sung in a different language, in Jorge's throaty and romantic voice and totally stripped down to their bare elements reveals the narrative brilliance of Bowie's songs as well as the beautiful rhythm and tension within his music. I urge you to buy this album right away as well as Jorge's two original albums, Carolina and Cru (all are available on iTunes).

M. Ward is quite simply one of the best singer-songwriters and folk-blues acoustic guitar players on the face of the planet right now. As his record company says, "his voice sounds like it should come out of a 75-year-old Mississippi Delta bluesman." On his second album, The Transfiguration of Vincent, Ward takes on Bowie's 1980's song "Let's Dance". Listen to his stark, slowed down version of the song here and I am sure you will find it to be a revelation. Almost unrecognizable from the original, Ward manages to explore and highlight the deep sadness, fragility and heartbreak of this song, which is totally lacking in the Bowie original. Listening to Ward's version of this song will haunt you for weeks. Again, if you don't have this album, run as fast as you can to iTunes and purchase everything by M. Ward, including his most recent album Transistor Radio. You can also listen to both M. Ward and Seu Jorge on the Z-Axis radio station.

So, thank you Seu Jorge and M. Ward for uncovering David Bowie's music by stripping it bare, singing it in a different language and ultimately revealing the genius of The Thin White Duke.

Microsoft Vista and the Future of Software

This has been a very bad week for Microsoft. Earlier in the week, Redmond announced what everyone was already expecting; that the much anticipated release of Vista, Microsoft's new Windows software platform, will be delayed until 2007. This is a big deal since Microsoft will now miss the critical holiday selling season. Reeling from yet another delay, Microsoft named Steve Sinofsky, the former Office chief, to head the Windows unit.

But, that's small potatoes. The bigger news here is that Microsoft is crumbling under its own weight and is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant as a force in the consumer software industry. As Business Week noted, "the delay raises larger questions about Microsoft's ability to innovate at today's pace." Indeed, the whole business model and process of releasing monolithic packaged software in three or five year cycles is an archaic notion in today's Web services world.

Update: Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's Co-President of the Windows division, sent an email yesterday to his entire group laying out the challenges facing Mircrosoft today. Specifically, he stressed the need for greater agility, explaining that MSFT needs to: "Lay the foundation for accelerating our pace of innovation, including focusing on ways to improve clarity of decision making, drive greater accountability, and reduce layers in the organization so we can move faster. It also means utilizing existing expertise within the division to embrace services -- and rapid release cycles that services can enable -- to all aspects of our business."

While Microsoft continues to futz around with Vista's 50 million lines of code [Update: According to a report this morning, up to 60% of the Vista code will have to be rewritten before launch], its competitors are re-inventing the way in which consumers will access and purchase software. Take Google for example. It is quickly putting together the pieces to challenge Microsoft's dominant Office product suite . Two week ago, Google acquired a small Web-based word processor company called Writely. Writely is a free collaborative web application that offers many of the features of Microsoft Word. However, unlike Word, Writely doesn't require an install, is updated regularly (not every five years) and can be accessed on any computer or browser. More significantly, Writely provides Google with a natural springboard for introducing other Web-based productivity applications (can you say GOffice) as an alternative to Microsoft's desktop software.

As if that's not enough to send Bill Gates to the medicine cabinet, today Michael Robertson announced the release of AjaxWrite, another browser-based word processing application. I've tried AjaxWrite and it's simply awesome. It looks and feels like Word, reads and writes Microsoft Word formatted documents, has tabbed browsing for easy access to multiple files and documents, is quick and responsive and it all lives in a browser. Oh yeah, and it's free.

What we are witnessing is a revolution in the delivery and economic model for computing software applications. As Michael Robertson explains:

The impact of this shift in how software is delivered to users cannot be understated. First and foremost, we're blowing up the economic model that companies like Microsoft and Adobe have built their empires around selling packaged software for big dollar amounts. Software is transforming into a service more akin to web mail, news, IM and VoIP where the basic offering is free. That doesn't mean that the companies behind these services don't make money, but that the way they make money will change.

Can Microsoft adapt and thrive in this new Web 2.0 world? The recent launch of Windows Live suggests that they are on the right track. But, as someone once said, supertankers are more likely to sink than to sprint.

Phaeton Phiasco

Last month, German auto maker Volkswagen announced that it would be withdrawing its once heralded ultra luxury sedan, The Phaeton, from the US market. This comes on the heels of a Wall Street Journal report that only 38 Phaetons were sold in the US in February. To put that in perspective, Ferrari sells about three times as many cars per month in the States.

The Phaeton fiasco didn't come as a surprise to anyone following this story. The Phaeton was a marketing and branding disaster from the day it was launched. In the US, the Phaeton was positioned directly against the Mercedes S-Class and the BMW 7 Series. The problem is that S-Class and 7-Series buyers are not going to plop down $90,000 to drive a car that's emblazened with the big VW logo. After all, Volkswagen means "people's car" not "rich SOB's" car.

But, aside from the lethal branding blunder, VW violated rule #1 in product marketing: never tempt the Gods. As many of you will remember from your Greek mythology class -- apparently this is not a prerequisite course in German high schools -- Phaeton was the son of the sun god Helios. One day, Phaeton asked his dad to take the family car (ok, it was a sun chariot) out for a spin. Dad reluctantly agreed but told Jr. to drive safely. Well, Phaeton being an exuberant youth without a driver's permit, got a little reckless and soon found himself hurtling out of the sky on a collision course with Earth. To save Earth and the universe from utter destruction, Zeus threw a thunderbolt at the chariot destroying Dad's wheels and instantly killing Phaeton.

And so with this as background, the VW braintrust gathered one day and, seemingly unware of the irony of it all, decided to name their new luxury sedan after the victim of a fiery car crash. Frankly, they had this one coming to them!

Get in the Loop

The most recent addition to the Z-Axis is the scrolling FilmLoop of my family (I've named this loop The X and Y of the Z) just below the "Links" section on the right hand sidebar and copied here below. You can click to view.



This is a great Web 2.0 application. It's interactive, dynamic, collaborative, social, viral, simple and embeddable. My only complaint, and it's a major one, is that the application is not easily searchable or taggable. That is, I can't easily search through the FilmLoop photcasting network to find and tag loops that I'd like to subscribe to. That is a major shortcoming right now, though I did manage to find and subscribe to Hugh MacLeod's amazing cartoon FilmLoop as shown below.



Enjoy the Loops and keep checking back as we will be adding new features regularly, including an audio blog segment soon.

Wallace Roney: Just My Imagination

Jazz trumpeter Wallace Roney is one of those musicians that has never received the recognition he deserves. This is partly due to his rather humourless personality and the fact that he played -- and continues to play -- deep in the shadow of his mentor Miles Davis.

This is truly unfortunate as Roney is not only a great musician, but he has put out some stellar recordings over the past five or six years, including No Room for Argument (2000) and Prototype (2004). He is also playing with a great band these days that includes Gerri Allen on piano.

Earlier this week, I heard Roney being interviewed on NPR. He has just released a new album (ok, it's a CD) called Mystikal on High Note records. I haven't heard the entire album yet, but the one track that was featured on NPR simply blew me away. Roney has orchestrated a cover version of The Temptations hit song, "Just My Imagination" that stays true to the melody but hides it within layers of beautifully improvised and gently swinging jazz. It's a real gem. Take a listen to a sample of it here.

Value Innovation and Blue Oceans

As the founder of an Internet software company, I spend a lot of time considering how to create, maintain and extend competitive advantage through innovation. Of course, innovation can take many forms, including technological innovation, process innovation and value innovation. In North America and Europe, the first two types of innovation are quickly becoming commoditized due to the proliferation of open source software and free or very cheap Web collaboration, tracking and reporting tools. While technology and process improvements remain necessary building blocks for most any business, they are no longer the key drivers of competitive advantage. Rather, and as detailed in the brilliant book Blue Ocean Strategy, the pendulum of competitive advantage has now swung decisively towards value innovation.

At its core, value innovation is a customer oriented strategy that does not use competitors as benchmarks and largely ignores existing industry conditions. Instead, value innovators create competitive advantage by focusing on differentiation, customer needs and by creating uncontested market space ("blue oceans"). Consider how Starbucks, Cirque de Soleil and Ikea have come to dominate their industries by fundamentally redefining the coffee shop, circus and funiture store.

So, as you consider your own company or business think about how you are going about creating competitive advantage. Is it through a conventional strategy of focusing on technological, process and cost improvements -- which are unlikely to be sustainable over the long term -- or, is it through a commitment to value innovation and blue ocean strategy? As for me, I am hoping that in a few years I will be writing this blog on the sandy beach of a very blue ocean.

Aloha.

Keeping it in Perspective

Love. Family. Children. Joy.

Z-Axis Radio and The Channel of Me

Uncork the champagne. Z-Axis took to the airwaves today with the official launch of Z-Axis Radio. Powered by Pandora, Z-Axis Radio (located on the righthand side bar) is a compilation of personalized Web radio stations that stream a continuous playlist of music that share similar musical attributes or "genes" (e.g., harmony, melody, instrumentation, vocal structure, lyrics, etc.). You can learn more about the process behind Pandora's musical discovery engine by reading up on the Music Genome Project.

Beyond the immediate cool factor of being able to easily and quickly (less than three minutes) create your own Internet radio stations and embed them on your blog or website, this is yet another example of how the Web is fundamentally altering social interactions and the creation and distribution of digital content.

Consider the impact and implications of a technology (actually a suite of technologies and tools such as Flash, JSP, Ajax, DHTML, etc.) that allows individuals to create, publish and share their own content and rich media experiences at a click of a mouse and generally for free. This is the foundation of and driving force behind "The Channel of Me"; a self-produced narrowcast channel that broadcasts each individual's unique digitalDNA. As Business Week declared in their Best of 2005 article, "The Channel of Me makes consumers the ultimate producers."

By providing consumers with their own digital soap box, The Channel of Me fundamentally alters consumer-to-consumer interactions as well as business-to-consumer interactions. For businesses, The Channel of Me requires a new mindset and approach that offers empowered consumers personalization tools and customization options -- not uniform products -- and social networking and collaboration tools to allow consumers to express and share their digitalDNA across the bitstream universe.

So, tune in to Z-Axis Radio and enjoy The Channel of Me.

The Democrats: Stuck in the Spin Cycle

There is a great editorial cartoon in today's NYT entitled "Spin the Democrat", which perfectly captures the dilemma facing the Democatic party today. The cartoon shows a Democratic candidate pinned to a spin wheel that includes the following words and phrases: soft on terror, out of touch, aiding the enemy, elitist, weak, flip flopper, loony left, pre-911 mind-set, retreat and defeat and girlie man. The punchline of the cartoon has this neutered, anxious Democrat asking, "Why bother defining myself...when the Republicans have done such a thorough job already?"

In a similar vein, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the man behind the liberal blog Daily Kos, argues in today's NYT Magazine that the Democrats are in desperate need of savvier consultants, noting that:

To get their message out, the Republicans created this entire conservative noise machine. They have Fox News and The Washington Times and the 700 Club and just about the entire talk-radio dial. They have this incredible ability to promote whatever the big issue of the day is. There is no partisan liberal media that is working in concert with the Democratic Party in order to sell whatever the party is selling.

Finally, on the most recent episode of Real Time, Bill Maher's fantastic new show on HBO, Maher grilled Russ Feingold, the Senator from Wisconsin and a leading Democratic presidential candidate, on why the Democrats can't get their key policy messages across to the American public. Feingold's response was that the Democrats must first demonstrate to the electorate that they can stand up to the Republicans on Iraq and the "war on terror" and make it clear that they won't be intimidated by the White House.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the current state of the Democratic party: weak, defensive, neurotic, headless, self-pitying and ultimately futile. And the most shocking part of all is that this comes at a time when the President's approval rating is at its lowest level since taking office, Rove et al are under investigation or indictment for criminal activity, Cheney is shooting old men in the face and Bush continues to trumpet the liberation of Iraq as his crowning achievement while the country disintegrates into civil war and is the prime breeding ground for global terrorists today. Wow, imagine what the Dems would do if things were more or less on even keel down there in D.C.

So, what of the Democrats? My suggestion is that they take a page from the playbook of Inter Milan, the great Italian football team. The key to winning is to appear to be playing defence while, in fact, playing offence. But, the first course of action, requires a substitution. Let's get Nancy Pelosi off the field and bring in some fresh legs. How about bringing back Carville from South America and feeding the ball up the wings to Obama and Warner. At least, let's try to play for a tie.

Ali Farka Toure: 1939-2006

The global music community lost one of its very best this month. Ali Farka Toure, the Malian bluesman, died in his home in Bamako, Mali last week. Best known in this hemisphere for the album Talking Timbuktu, his 1994 collaboration with Ry Cooder, Toure was a world music pioneer who laid the foundation for other Cooder produced trans-global successes like the Buena Vista Social Club and Manuel Galban.

Often referred to as the African John Lee Hooker, Toure was an original in every sense of the word. He created a unique musical landscape by marrying the rhythms and traditional sounds (foot tramping and hand clapping) of acoustic African music with the melody and mood of electrified American blues music.



Toure's latest and last album, In the Heart of the Moon, is perhaps his best and certainly his most haunting recording. An improvised collaboration with fellow Malian musician and kora master Toumani Diabate, In the Heart of the Moon leaves us, as Toure leaves us, with an overwhelming feeling of peace, love and spiritual fulfillment.

The Long Tail or The End of Cocktail Parties As We Know Them

There is a lot of talk these days about the impact of the "Long Tail" on the future of the media industry. The long tail, for those who don't watch Rocketboom, represents the extended fall off or "tail" on a typical consumption graph. As Wired magazine recently put it, the long tail includes "the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." Put another way, think about the long tail as the back catalog of the world; all those albums, books, movies, journals, clubs, blogs, etc. that aren't popular enough to even find their way into the discount bins of life.

While the long tail includes, by necessity, a lot of crap (e.g., underwater basketweaving blogs) it is also an extremely powerful entity. In fact, the long tail cumulatively outnumbers and outweighs the bulging hulk that is mainstream demand and consumption (ie., the top 1000 movies, books, songs, etc.). What's more, long tail consumers are passionate, knowledgeable and extremely loyal customers that represent high value, high margin business to media companies.

While the long tail has always existed, the limitations of the physical world have limited the size of this tail. Enter the digital age, where virtual storefronts like Amazon can house the entire world's inventory of books and music and where digital publishing media like blogs allow anyone to create and easily syndicate a micro channel of personalized content.

There are a lot of smart people considering the impact of the long tail on the future of the technology and media industries. However, I don't think there is sufficient thought or dialog going on about the impact of the long tail on society at large. For example, what are the social implications as more and more consumers micro-cast themselves and delve deeper into the dark recesses of the long tail?

My belief is that the long tail will fragment our social structure as we start to lose our common cultural language and frame of reference. Imagine a cocktail party seven years from now where no one has seen the same movie, no one reads the same newspaper, no one listens to the same music, no one watches the same television channel. What will we have to say to one another? Pass the cheese plate please. Frightening image isn't it? Remember, you read it here first. By the way, is anybody out there?

Flaming Lips: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

I was listening to the podcast of NPR's All Songs Considered progam on my drive in to work this morning. This week's show features the new Flaming Lips single, "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Song" from their soon to be released album, At War with the Mystics. BTW, are there two better online music programs than All Songs and KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic?

I have never been a fan of the Flaming Lips. As Bob Boilen says, their music is often too cute and annoying. For artsy, sardonic and noisily melodic music, I've always gravitated towards bands like Yo La Tengo. Anyways, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the new single. Yes, the sound is still a bit annoying. But the single is fun, fresh and very catchy. Here are some sample lyrics:

If you could make everybody poor just so that you could be rich would you do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back would you do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want. Because you cannot know yourself, or what you'd really do...with all your power?

Ok, there is no mistaking these lyrics for Dylan, but what a great pop song. What am I going to do with all my power? I'm going to start by buying the new Flaming Lips album on iTunes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Paradox of Choice or When Good Enough is Good Enough

Barry Schwartz's book The Paradox of Choice explores the downside of having too much choice.

The core of Schwartz's argument is that consumers are so overwhelmed by choice that it has two significant negative effects. First, instead of liberating people it tends to paralyze them (e.g., Orange Juice with pulp, without pulp, with some pulp, with pulp and calcium, with pulp, calcium and added vitamins, etc). Second, consumers actually feel worse when purchasing a product that has too many choices or options. For example, a consumer that has purchased a digital camera after reviewing hundreds of similar products may have made an informed choice, but is still likely to feel worse for it because of the overwhelming sense of having made an imperfect purchasing decision (ie., there must be a better camera out there). Too much choice therefore tends to defer decisions and extend the purchasing cycle as consumers grapple with a matrix of possibilities.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Tipping Point and Blink, shares Schwartz's view and explains how offering consumers too much choice impairs their ability to make snap judgements and purchasing decisions. As Gladwell says, "the only way to get people to buy quickly is to radically simplify".



The lesson for product managers is that less is more. By streamlinling or restricting choice and focusing more on product quality and design, sellers can significantly reduce the complexity and anxiety facing buyers today and drive overall sales. Case in point: until very recently, the two most popular consumer devices of our time -- the iPod and the Razr -- came in only one color. As Barry Schwartz explains: know when "good enough is good enough". Amen, Barry.

Now, I'm off to the drug store to decide among 25 choices of toothpaste. Help me!

Google Buys SketchUp: What's Next?

Hot off the press: Google has acquired @LastSoftware the folks behind SketchUp. Great news for the guys at @Last and for the 3D world at large (though I'm sure the folks at Linden Labs are probably wishing for a Second Life right about now).

While SketchUp is great for users that are technically inclined and can create their own 3D content and virtual worlds (and export it to Google Earth), what about mainstream America? How can Google use the Web and interactive 3D technology to drive mass consumer adoption of Web 3D technology for search, commerce, advertising and collaboration? Here's how.

The ABC of the Z

Welcome to the Z-Axis. The only blog coming to you straight from the third dimension. So, before we begin, please check your coordinate system and strap yourself in as we explore the complexities, ambiguities and insights that are the Z-Axis.

Rhetorical Question #1: Is this deja vu all over again? Wall Street firms are reporting record profits, M&A activity is peaking, media and Web companies are spending mad money on anything that seems new and cool (Flickr, Delicious, MySpace, iVillage, Writely) and Steve Jobs is still getting paid only $1 in salary. Is this Web 2.0 or Web anything goes?

Don't get me wrong. I'm a believer, proponent and practitioner of social networking, rich internet applications and Web services. What I'm questioning is how definitive it all seems to be. If you listen to or read what's coming out from the A-listers (Scoble, Wilson, Searls, Godin) or the e-media (Malik, Pogue, Evans) you would have to believe that it is all pre-destined; that we will all blog, vlog, tag, feed, chat, podcast, Skype, Sling, Tivo, etc. No doubts, no worries.

Well, excuse me for throwing some cold water on this Web 2.0 party, but not only does user behavior take a long time to change (yes, even the iPod) but it keeps on changing. What we tag today we may shmag tomorrow. Hey, I used to work at Forrester Research. Let me clue you in on a dirty little secret: nobody has an inkling of what's going to happen. At one point in the late 90's, Forrester predicted that AOL would rule the Web. Ooops. Goodbye, Steve Case; Hello, Larry and Sergey!

So, let's end this inaugural blog entry by all taking a deep breath, sticking our heads out our office windows (or moving cars) and shouting out loud: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take any more Web 2.0 cheerleading anymore."

That's it. That's all.