I love hackers, especially code hackers, but I hate crackers.

My servers are being bombarded by break-in attempts – none successful so far as far as I can tell – but it’s putting an unnecessary burden on my network right now. I’ve taken some preventive measures, but if this persists, I might have to take my server offline for some time. I apologize in advance if that happens.

Otherwise everything is good, and I’m loving my new job at my new employer. And as you can tell by my blogging frequency, it’s pretty busy at the moment :)

- Gummi

I just bought a body scale from Withings. For those of you who have never heard of it, it’s a wi-fi connected scale, meaning that whenever I (or someone in my house for that matter) step on the scale, it automatically transmits my weight and body fat mass. My wife thinks it’s a total waste of time and money, I think it’s pretty neat :)

This got me thinking about personal analytics, and what else I could measure and track, and it’s amazing that despite all the technology we surround us with, most tools and gadgets don’t report or track stats. My car doesn’t automatically report gas mileage and other stats. There’s no tool to automatically track calorie consumption (perhaps based on blood sugar level readings?) All exercise tracking tools that I’ve seen are fairly involved with respect to setup and operations, but why doesn’t your phone just automatically report how much you walked and ran for any given day, and where exactly?

I think there’s a whole world of opportunities for making connected gadgets that communicate to the cloud and will allow us to improve our lives significantly. We’ve just started scratching the surface.

And it’s already helping me: I now know I should bring my body fat down a little ;)

- Gummi

Last week a friend of mine told me that you could buy stuff (i.e. in my mind: coffee) from Starbucks with their new mobile application. I was initially skeptical since I had already downloaded a Starbucks app on my iPhone which didn’t seem to allow that. But I was also curious, so I went to a local Starbucks to check this out.

After some inquiring and online investigation, I found out that you were indeed supposed to be able to buy stuff using your mobile phone, if you had a Starbucks reward card (prepaid card you can only use at Starbucks, but you get some rewards in return including free wi-fi at Starbucks locations – nice, but it used to be free with no strings so I guess this is a step backwards). I signed up and did some more digging around only to discover that I needed another app on my phone called “Mobile Card” (or at least that’s the name on the phone’s menu, it might have been called something different in the App Store), so I downloaded that app. So far so-so, but I was still pretty excited to try out ordering from my phone and having everything ready when I walked into my local Starbucks.

I launched the app, and entered my card information – all a breeze – and quickly found out that the app only works with select locations that are participating in the trial. That’s fair enough, and there are a few near my home so that’s ok. I then started looking at the ordering piece, which, well, wasn’t there!

When my friend had told me you could buy stuff with your phone at Starbucks, he was telling the truth, I just assumed it wasn’t this lame: the app turns your phone into a giant barcode which can be used instead of swiping your card. Say what? Are you kidding me? This isn’t useful at all and seems just a big waste of time!

Here’s what’s wrong with Starbucks’ mobile approach:

• First of all, there are two apps, both equally pointless. One for putting together your favorite drinks and food, and then you can share that with your Facebook friends. Wtf? The other app, as I described above, turns your phone into a giant barcode so you can pay for your coffee, but nothing else. It’s confusing enough to have two separate apps, even worse to have two pointless apps.
• Paying with your phone, through an app, that you have to launch, and unlock your phone first to get to, and possibly swipe the menu a few times, is just plain and simple not better than using the card in the first place. That’s product management 101 – make a product that’s better than what’s out there already (for those of you who are advanced and have attended PM 201, it actually has to be 10x better to get any meaningful adoption, unless you have some other unfair advantages to boost your adoption, which is rare – Starbucks could probably get away with 2-3x better in this case).
• The folks at non-participating Starbucks have no idea what’s going on. I asked them about this, and they got all confused, had heard some rumors and mentioning but nothing beyond that. Even as a trial, if you are serious about it, give the other places at least some material to hand out or some information. Even a simple “yes, there is a trial going on for mobile payments, but we’re not participating yet, please check out starbucks.com/trial for more information – I’m sorry that I can’t be of more assistance at this point” would work.

Here’s what I think Starbucks should do (and should have done from the start):

• Build one mobile application. Just this alone solves a host of problems. No confusion about what app to download. Higher chances of people actually using the app. And so on and so forth.
• Allow people to order through the phone. Oh my god – this is what I want! And I can promise you that this is what everyone else is waiting for. You have the pieces to pull the order together in the “My Starbucks” app, and you have a payments mechanism through the rewards card, so what’s the problem? This is the trial you should be doing, and nothing else. If there are conflicting teams on the inside causing this mess, merge them or deal with it somehow – customers don’t care about the org structure of companies.
• Focus, focus, focus. Don’t waste time on features like share with Facebook friends., those come later. Get the order-pay process set up first. Once that’s figured out, it’s great to add things like share with Facebook friends that you just bought a Grande Latte at the Blossom Hill Starbucks in Los Gatos (hint, hint, that’s the place you should start this trial :) )

This whole thing was just a let down. I was excited to try ordering coffee through my mobile phone, but then found out that you can’t, and that it’s in fact just annoyingly lame after all. Sigh, perhaps I should go to Peet’s instead, at least they’re not pretending.

- Gummi

I just discovered a very good blog by Naval Ravikant (how did I miss that one for so long?!?) and his latest post on meetings is, oh, so on target!

When I worked at Google (yup, news break, I left), I got lots of these requests from potential partners, startups, and entrepreneurs, and not because I’m important but because I worked for a company that was perceived as an important one to work with.

Naval hits a home run with his points about a) asking to be introduced without being included in the introduction (spending time finagling yourself out of an introduction like that is just as time and energy consuming as having the meeting) and b) not asking for a meeting immediately but sending more info for the other person to evaluate you first.

I would add more thing to this list: know why you want to talk to this person or company! Too often I would get requests to talk, immediately ask for more information, and get back some stock brochure marketing material. Sigh. I’m perfectly capable of checking out your website, I want to know why you want to talk to me, and more importantly, what’s in it for me and the company I work for to be having that conversation. In concrete terms, no marketing fluffy fluff crap.

I’m always amazed at how many entrepreneurs don’t seem to think this through, it seems to be “ooh, I got a meeting with [insert the name of your favorite big company], how exciting!” and that’s it. And even worse, when I end up having meetings like that (and feel stupid having wasted time on it) I won’t say anything nice about the company, so the net result might be worse than no meeting at all.

Know what you want before you ask.

- Gummi

I love reading books. All sorts of books; biographies, fiction, historical, informative, non-informative, etc, etc. But the problem has always been that I just can’t find time to read all those books. And that’s why I bought the Kindle device… or so I thought.

At first, I was really amazed by the Kindle device, and loved going to bed an hour earlier than usual and read. But that didn’t last, mostly because I wasn’t ready to shift everything else in my life by an hour to get the private reading time, no matter how much I wanted to. So the Kindle device started gathering dust, much to my frustration.

And that’s when I discovered Kindle for iPhone. What a wonderful and surprising innovation by Amazon: create Kindle for each and every platform they can get their hands on and make it super easy to read books electronically anywhere! (well, it’s not that surprising once you realize that they make their money from selling books, not the Kindle device) Now I can read books in small slivers of time. Waiting in line to pay for my groceries? Open “Outliers” and read 6 more pages. At the doctor’s office, waiting for my turn? 18 more pages. Waiting for my 2 month daughter to fall asleep? 10 more pages.

After this little discovery, I’ve averaged about 1 book per week, which compared to my previous rate (0 books/week) is infinitely better, and I’m very happy :)

The funny thing about the Kindle is that it’s not the most technically advanced or most capable e-reader around. Specifically, it lacks:

• Color or any fancy presentation, tables are often hard to navigate and books that rely on lots of visuals are hard or impossible to read.
• Backlighting (for the device); e-ink just isn’t advanced enough yet to support this at a reasonable monetary and energy cost, but it makes reading books after dark harder.
• Easy and fast browsing and orientation mode. Kindle just shows you that you’re at position 129 of 2749 which is pretty meaningless (except that it tells you that you have a lot left to read!) A stronger connection to physical books in the form of page count (even though that concept doesn’t universally make sense for re-flowing e-books) and some presentation mode allowing users to flip through books like a lot of people do for physical books would be nice.
• A good web browser, camera, FM radio, [insert your favorite gadget addition here]…

It’s that laser focus on building a good reading experience, a credible alternative to physical paper books, that makes Kindle stand out. So what exactly did Amazon do that made Kindle so successful?

• Browse, shop, download, read. Amazon sells books, we all know that. With Kindle, however, they started to offer something much more than that. It’s a complete shopping and reading experience. Compare this to going to the nearest book store. Amazon used to excel at offering reviews, comparative shopping and perhaps better prices. But they always suffered because of the lag between finding something and being able to read it (and this lag is called physical shipping). Not anymore with Kindle, where I can buy a book, and read it within 60 seconds (as the ads so cleverly state).
• Read anywhere, anytime. This is my favorite part. There’s Kindle the device. And then there’s Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Windows, and now even Kindle for iPad (gosh, I need to buy me an iPad!) It doesn’t matter what device I have with me, I can continue reading my books anywhere, anytime. No e-reader before has offered this seemingly simple but powerful breadth in offering.
• Fully integrated experience. I believe this is the true magic. Everyone has an Amazon account, and now you can use it to buy books for your Kindle. And when you buy a book on your PC, it magically shows up on your Kindle device. And when you open Kindle on your iPhone, it magically synchronizes to your current location of the book you were reading on the Kindle device. I call this “cloud state” and even though most companies are embracing the cloud these days, too many fail to take advantage of this key advantage you get when everything is stored in a single place, but accessible from any place.

A lot of this wouldn’t have been possible 8-10 years ago, so I think Amazon’s timing was also great. But regardless of the specific reasons why Kindle works, I’m just glad it does :)

Thank you Jeff.

- Gummi

Newspapers struggle to get revenues these days, especially online. I empathize with their situation, and know that there are real jobs at stake and lifestyles to preserve. But it seems that some online publications confuse that situation with a license to screw over the user experience, and don’t understand that it hurts them and it hurts their advertisers (who probably don’t even know how their message is being delivered, since it’s obscured through mass purchases and deals with agencies who might be mis-guided in their attempts to get attention for their clients).

This morning I was reading about the “Lessons from eastern Euprope’s flat tax“, a fascinating topic that I’m very interested in generally (i.e. flat tax, and overall simplification of tax systems to increase fairness, reduce work and friction and minimize fraud) – however, as I open the website, the whole window suddenly grays out – I wonder if my computer is going to sleep – and then, after some pause, a slow animation opens a black box in the middle of the screen – what the hell is going on? – and then, after some more waiting, a video starts playing. It’s a Siemens ad. Fortunately I am given the option of closing the window (otherwise I would have just closed the browser tab immediately), but it’s already wasted more of my time than I had budgeted to actually read the article! And to make matters even worse, the publication has split the article into two webpages, and the ad shows again (with all the slow motion animation) on the second page!

I know all you die hard capitalists are now shouting: but this is free content, and it’s their website, and they can do whatever they want to generate some income. Absolutely right! But I don’t think globalpost (I’m writing their name is it appears on their homepage) realizes that they’re not increasing their revenue.

Let’s look at how I (and a lot of people I know) read news today. I find content by subscribing to various feeds from sources that I trust. One of this source is Hacker News which is basically an aggregation of various news from the web, probably a bit geekier than the average CNN or NYT feeds, but still great stuff. I skim the headlines of the feed in Google Reader and when something interesting grabs my attention, I click to read it. Sometimes the stories are interesting, sometimes not, and sometimes the experience of the website is good and sometimes (like with globalpost) it’s poor.

And here’s the challenge for new organizations. If I like what I read, I will share it with my friends. And occasionally, I like an article so much, or I see the news site bring interesting content often enough, that I actually add their feed directly to my subscriptions, but there’s a certain bar to be met in order to get there. A website which throws unnecessary obstacles in my way is not going on that list. News publications have to understand this (just like the rest of the media industry): if you screw your customers, they won’t stay as your customers – it’s that simple.

Back to the original problem, how can news organizations survive today. I think there are a few ways, all hard to master, but that’s life:

• Get people to pay for your content. Very few news organizations have this luxury, the most notable one being Wall Street Journal. They have great content, are a prestigious company with a long history of quality reporting, but their revenue is also driven by unusual factors, such as the fact that companies often pay the premium for their employees. There’s only room for very few in this category, so don’t expect to copy this model easily.
• Bring businesses and an audience together, and charge the business. The old golden goose for newspapers. Just get circulation up and then tell companies that you have an audience willing to listen and charge for delivering a message. Simple? Not any more. It’s not just newspapers being delivered by paper to people’s houses anymore, or even people going to your website. I might see the headline in my feed reader and decide not to look at your content at all if I don’t find it interesting. There’s also advertising fatigue (like I described above) where consumers are fed up with non-contextual ads being thrown at them all the time – people learn to ignore or skip ads through any means necessary (how many of you have a Tivo for that purpose alone?). Advertising can work, but for every dollar in revenue you need more readers by every day that goes by. And the more blend your news content, or the more aggressively you push advertising, the less likely you are to succeed.
  There’s room for a few very large, high quality publications (think New York Times-like quality and size), and probably a whole slew of niche or niche-local publications (think valleywag, TechCrunch or similarly obscure or specialized publications).
• Innovate. If you can’t succeed in either of the above two categories (and this applies to the vast majority of old publications imho), there’s only one solution: innovate. Unfortunately most publications today are not trying that, but instead they whine about how technology is killing them and how they desperately need to be in either of those two categories and should get help or protection from the government to make sure that’s possible. It’s time to put your thinking cap on (and keep in mind that this is a tremendous opportunity for new entrants, since there is disruption going on) and look for new ways to connect interesting stuff (call it news, blogs, tweets, whatever) with interested people (call it subscribers, customers, friends, readers, whatever). With all the new technology and new ways of communicating, there’s probably room for several new models that can be successful in delivering people what they’re looking for, and still generate good revenue.

News publications, embrace things like social sharing, crowd sourcing, machine learning to improve personal relevancy and the fact that information overflow is just getting worse, and news organizations should be about that. If a company could deliver me the front page every morning of stuff that matters to me, I’d be ecstatic and use if every morning. Until then, I’ll stick to my ritual of scanning hundreds of headlines in Reader and try to do this manually.

Oh, and also continue to avoid publications like globalpost who don’t seem to get their customers.

- Gummi

PS. unfortunately I’ve probably increased the impression rate of that Siemens ad, but it’s hopefully short term gains at the cost of long term gains for globalpost and their advertisers.

[image source]

If you ask anyone here in the Silicon Valley whether age matters when it comes to starting a company, a lot of people will tell you that young people have a better chance at getting something off the ground. In fact, at the start of this year I went to an MIT event where Doug Leone said that people over 30 simply can’t innovate and therefore he doesn’t want to invest in their ideas. Really? Guess I’m doomed in my job, which depends on innovation and nothing else.

Let’s think about this for a second. It makes a lot of sense to bet on young people for innovation. They’re not biased by old ideas or attempts, they have lots of energy and can do “all nighters” (or “ollara” like we used to call them when I was at the University) if needed, they usually don’t have huge financial commitments dragging them down, less likely to be distracted by kids and spouses and more likely to stick through things even if they look tough. Wow, this is looking really bleak for the old guy in the room.

But younger people have their own biases. Why do you think there are 5 gezillion social networks around? Because young people like to socialize with other young people, and find the tools to help them sucking at it (or at least did, the landscape seems to be settling). Why are there another 5 gezillion tools to help you get organized in an über controlled manner? Because young entrepreneurs are obsessed about their productivity and want to squeeze as much as possible out of their 24 hours as possible (damn you, sleep, for taking a third of that!)

And here’s the bias: there are very few good tools for parents to help them manage their lives; there are no tools afaik, aside from email or just the regular social networks, to help families communicate during the daily grind. And the tools that try to help this group suck so badly. Why? Because they’re created by 20-somethings who pretend they understand their demographic! And the people who belong to this demographic have moved on to become executives or something worse and are not involved in any real work anymore.

This is where my UX friends would shout at me, but for innovators, there is value in being part of (or very close to) the demographic you’re designing for. And that’s what I think older entrepreneurs should use to their advantage. Don’t try to create the hottest dating site for young singles, focus on stuff that you understand and deeply care about. And if you have the energy and time, you’re at an advantage compared to the young entrepreneur because you’re the wrong person in the wrong place when compared to the herd.

- Gummi

Yesterday I was the super man of productivity. No, I didn’t leave the house to isolate myself from the rest of the world. No, I didn’t feel particularly energetic. I simply had planned the day with some concrete things to work on, and spent about half the day trying to get these things done. Many of the items on my list were things that I’ve been dragging my feet about for a couple of weeks, which probably explains part of why I feel good about doing them, but still.

I’ve talked about 3 tasks before and reiterated the value of daily task items, but I’m just so profoundly amazed by the power of this simple method that I feel compelled to talk about it one more time, this time with a few tips on how you could possibly make this part of your daily habit (hopefully the stuff about how I do it makes it more concrete, don’t mean to imply that I’m doing it the best way :) ):

• Have a daily list. Probably obvious, but just the simple act of deciding what to do tomorrow will make you much more likely to actually do these things. And don’t cram everything into your daily list, it needs to be comfortably doable in a single day.Here’s how I do it: I use OmniFocus for all my task management, and I create the daily list the night before by setting tasks as due that day. I don’t keep a lot of tasks due (only stuff that’s truly, really, something-bad-will-happen-if-I-don’t-do-it-by-this-day due) so the list isn’t crowded by other stuff. The “Due” perspective will then show me my daily list so I can chop away.
• Have an “all” list. Keep a pile, and understand that the pile will never go away. Whenever something comes to your mind, add it to the pile. Whenever something isn’t relevant anymore, remove it from the pile. But by all means, don’t try to remember everything, and don’t keep 27 piles. Try to have one pile. Here’s how I do it: With OmniFocus, this is natural – all my tasks are in there.
• Make the list mobile. If you put the list into a Word document, it’s probably going to be useful for you about half the time. The other half (or even more for some people) you’re going to be away from your computer, and you’ll forget what you had planned to do. Figure out a way to make the daily list go with you no matter where you go, even writing it down on paper is better than a computer-only based solution. Here’s how I do it: OmniFocus has a mobile version for iPhone, which I check all the time when I’m on the go. I just wish they had an Android version…
• Make the list actionable. “Learn how to read faster” is not a daily action item, but “Set up a schedule for learning how to read faster” or “measure baseline reading performance” are. Make sure you distinguish between projects (or dreams!) and actual tasks. It takes lots of tasks to finish a project (or make a dream come true).Here’s how I do it: I ask myself every time I put down an action, “can I do this at a given time and location tomorrow?” – if not, I need to either figure out prerequisites (e.g. before I file taxes, I need to gather all documents for the filing) or break it up (e.g. learning Spanish takes a series of steps which I need to be more concrete about).
• Keep your routine stuff, well, routine and time boxed. There’s always stuff you do every day, or several times a day, and although usually important, they are potentially your biggest barriers to getting anything else done (email is the prime example, with Facebook probably a strong second). The key is to be deliberate about this, know what routine stuff you care about, when you do it and for how long. Here’s how I do it: My routine is email (personal and work), Google Reader (for news and interesting bits from people I like reading from), Facebook, Twitter, Mint.com (reconciling transactions is much easier if you it every day, believe me!) and Wikipedia’s front page (I know that’s a weird one, but there’s usually something interesting there that’s not news or based on current events). First thing I do after breakfast and dropping the girls off at school, is to open a browser window with one tab per before-mentioned site, and then give myself 30 minutes to jam through all of them. After that, the routine is out of my system for the day (doesn’t mean I won’t come back briefly during the day, but I never let any of these services distract me from more important work).
• Tasks vs projects. I briefly touched on this above, but it’s so important to know the distinction: a task is something you can do, and a project is a collection of tasks that get you to a meaningful destination or milestone. It’s also important to track both. If you only track tasks, your life will just be a random collection of stuff that you do without any context. If you only track projects, you’ll never actually do anything. Here’s how I do it: since OmniFocus has this exact same distinction, this is very easy for me. I create, delete, and check off projects and tasks in one place, which is pretty convenient.
• Keep your long term stuff aligned. It’s important that you periodically look up from the trenches and figure out if you’re on the path you want to be on. Are the tasks you’ve noted down aligned with your bigger ambitions? Remember, neither can live without the other: you need to know where you’re heading, and you need to figure out the steps to get there. Here’s how I do it: I use projects (and sub-projects if needed) to set my longer term direction. If I have ambitions to remodel my home, I will create a project for that, even if there are no immediate tasks in there for the foreseeable future (although for anything you care about, you will start seeing ways to chip away at the project, even if it’s small bits at a time). Just like the pile of tasks that you shouldn’t be afraid of or expect to go away, keep a pile of projects, even if some of them are completely dormant and you know will take a long time to finish. It’s having these things in front of you that will help you take slow, but deliberate, steps towards finishing them at some point in the future.
• Just do it. Nike was right. in order to get things done, it’s often just a matter of having an attitude of doing stuff. Don’t get distracted by things that you haven’t decided to do, go ahead and finish that daily list, and then go get distracted by all the fun stuff. You’ll thank yourself later.

Procrastination, in my opinion, is often just because we haven’t figure out exactly what steps we need to take to achieve a given outcome. Setting up a daily task list is a very powerful tool to fight that behavior.

Do you have other tips on how to get more stuff done? Please do share in the comments, as usual :)

- Gummi

It’s true, I still use an iPhone (although the Nexus One is my primary phone, and I love it!). When it come to discussing apps on mobile, my natural inclination is to focus on how many crap apps there are out there (and most of them are crap, even if the idea might be good, the execution is usually horribly poor) but this time I’m going to talk about apps that I like and use very frequently (~daily is my criteria).

1. Amazon Kindle. This is my all-time favorite mobile app! I have an actual Kindle, and love it too, but the convenience of being able to read a few pages while in line at the grocery store, or waiting for my daughter to finish her ballet lesson has allowed to actually start reading books again. This is my new “email” app for mobile (think about it, when you see someone standing and checking their phone, you probably assume they’re checking email – for me, it would be reading 5 more pages of Swimming Across – which I just finished by the way, and highly recommend)
   I can’t think of anything I’d like to change in this app, it’s got shared reading progress synchronized with my real Kindle, synchronized bookmarks, the Amazon e-book convenience (buy through your computer, read instantly on your device), just pure magic, although still waiting for the Android version Mr. Bezos! :)
2. OmniFocus. I paid through the nose for this one (something like $15?) and for a long time I hated how long it took to start up, but it’s gotten better over time, and since my life is in OmniFocus, it’s pretty important that I can bring it along when I leave the house.
   There’s lots I’d like to improve though. The perspectives I create on my desktop version don’t get synchronized, the whole synchronizing process is slow and cumbersome (I have to manually synchronize while on the same wi-fi network as my computer, while it’s on? That’s so 1999), but it’s still better than nothing and I use it a LOT.
3. Facebook. I don’t think I use FB quite daily on my mobile phone, but it’s still a pretty darn well designed app, and if I was a FB addict (I’m not, really, it’s not true, or it is… now I’m confused) I’d probably keep it open all the time. Has most of the features one would need on the go, and the photo sharing is nice (although too slow imho).
4. Google Maps. Ok, I’m biased since I used to be the product manager for Google Maps for mobile, but still, I use it all the time to get phone numbers, see exact locations of businesses, get directions (even trivial ones) etc etc.
5. Google Search. Be that voice search in Google Mobile App, or just plain typed search through google.com, I use Google all the time on my mobile phone. Life just throws so many surprises at you every day, and search is always there to help figure out answers to these little puzzles.

So that’s the list as it stands today, but I’m constantly trying new apps and I’m pretty confident the list will have changed 6 months from now (although I’m having a hard time seeing anything topple Kindle from the list at the moment). There are some interesting ones like Foursquare, Gowalla, Siri, and even Amazon (the shopping app), but none of them has yet made it into my daily usage patterns, which I think is the greatest challenge of any mobile application.

Also, you’ll notice that there are no games on the list – somehow I haven’t gotten addicted to any game (yet :) ), although I’ve tried quite a few.

Do you have any mobile app favorites? Please share in the comments.

- Gummi

With the birth of my daughter Emma Kara about a month ago (now you know why I haven’t been blogging :) ), my wife and I decided to sign up again for NetFlix. Since we used to subscribe, we knew the convenience of getting our favorite new releases every Wednesday morning by mail, and now we had more time to watch these movies together since I’m on paternity leave. Great!

The way we manage the queue is pretty simple: on the weekend, we check out what new releases are coming out that week, and add the 2 movies we would like to watch to the queue. So for the first week, we did just that and waited eagerly for the postman to deliver on Wednesday morning. But alas, he didn’t bring any movies! We raced back to our computers to check the queue, and the movies were still there, for sure. We were puzzled for a few minutes and then noticed that the movies were going to be released on this very day… in March! (since this was in February, remember that all the weekdays in March have the same “numbers” as in February) Confused, we double checked the new release lists, and they still showed the movies coming out on that day in February. Seemed like NetFlix had a bug in their system.

We called NetFlix customer service, hoping to correct this little mistake and have our movies delivered to us promptly, but as I overheard my wife on the phone with their customer rep, it became clear to me that nothing seemed wrong, and the customer rep had rapid explanations for everything. Turns out that NetFlix is “experimenting” with a new program with some of the studios to deliver new releases 4 weeks after the release dates. Seems weird? I agree, but it’s ok, we got some explanations.

So the studios are apparently all miserable because DVD sales aren’t doing as well as their Excel spreadsheets indicated, and they’ve pointed their fingers at rentals, especially the new-age boutiques like NetFlix and Redbox. I’m sure they brainstormed all sorts of approaches to this problem, like blocking rentals for some companies or even suing them to make sure customers can’t get their hands on new movie releases. But the solution they’ve stumbled upon is just pure genius: new-age movie rental outlets should delay offering new releases by 4 weeks, in order to boost DVD sales!

Just think about it. I try to add the new movie to my NetFlix queue, and then no movie shows up in my mailbox so what do I do? I run to the nearest Target and buy the movie, of course! Wrong!!! Are they kidding? This is not good for customers (I don’t get my new release), not good for the studios (probably doesn’t increase sales, and could potentially  increase pirating, leading to even lower DVD sales and rentals) and most important of all, damages the long term brand value and customer loyalty of the movie studios (the studios involved so far, afaik, are Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros.)

As if the actions of the studios didn’t piss me off enough, I’m also very annoyed with NetFlix for pretending that they’re doing an experiment with the studios, and that it somehow is good for everyone. Why didn’t the customer rep just tell me that the studios are arm-wrestling them into doing this, and that they would love to send me the movie right away if they only could. That’s one point off for not being up front and honest with me (and already lots of points off for not delivering the movie to me!)

The broader point here is that this is the typical ice harvesters vs refrigerator makers story: the movie studios can’t adapt to a new world, where people get media delivered on a rental basis to their homes, be that via snail mail or the Internet, so they fight change. During time of turbulence, the newcomers usually have to fight some skirmishes like this, and the customers will suffer through the uncertainty, but the long term losers are always those who can’t adapt since change is always inevitable (and good!)

Btw, it seems that this is not just about rentals reducing sales, since Blockbuster and Hollywood Video can still rent out new releases – this just does not make sense at all, and things have to change so that we can move into the 21st century and get proper on-demand, personalized media delivery. The technology to support that has already been around for awhile, so why wait?

- Gummi