But can we learn anything from paid content attempts in the past? After all, this has been tried at varying levels before. Until The New York Times opens the books on its mothballed Times Select service, which kept certain content — mainly columnists and archives — behind the pay wall, these two examples, from 2003-2005, will have to serve as examples

via Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004 » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism.

Here’s one more. A long, long time ago in a Galaxy far away, one of my first jobs in Silicon Valley was with a startup (see footnote 1) doing interactive services for cable TV. We’re talking almost 30 freaking years ago, folks, and teletext-type technology, which was state of the art then. And the goal of all of this was — ta da — value added services. Online banking, news tickers, weather, etc etc. And of course cable companies wanted customers to pay for them.

But every pilot test failed miserably. 100,000 people in Ohio were given the services free for six months, and surveys showed very positive responses to it. They liked what they saw. And when they were asked to pay even a nominal fee for it (a couple of bucks a month), about 2% signed up for it.

Nothing new under the sun.

This long predates the “consumers have gotten used to things being free on the net” problem. Hell, for the most part, it predates the net (at the time, I think it’d just been renamed the Internet from Arpanet, but USENET was still modem-based.

Thinking about it, the reasons for this problem go deeper than “we expect it for free”.

One is that both television and radio have made people think this stuff is free. Yes, there are commercials — advertising subsidizing the cost so the consumer doesn’t have to pay anything. That’s likely one of the strongest reasons there’s resistance to paying for things, a multi-decade history of things being “free”.

And with cable? well, consumers are already paying for cable. Any surprise people resist paying for things that come on the thing they’re already paying for?

Advertising long subsidized the true cost of that newspaper or magazine, making them artificially cheaper to the end consumer.

Circle those ideas back to to the internet today — and people pay for their internet connection, so are we surprised they resist paying for stuff they get off of what they already pay for? Those of us on the distribution side of the equation understand the details of how this all works, but should we be surprised that the consumer only sees it as a double-dip? And we’ve seen this resistance to this pay-again mentality going back decades. Look at the resistance we see today to the airline’s tacking on fees for things like checking bags. Consumers see this stuff as bait and switch (and in some cases, I’m not sure they’re wrong). Perhaps one problem we’ve had here is we’ve done a bad job of teacing the general consumer how all this works and why the ISP charges don’t pay for things.

But the bigger issue is that issue of “free”; and that goes back to the early days of commercial radio. 80 years, mulitple generations of “this is free”. It’s really not — the cost is watching/listening_to commercials as part of the programming. And now advertising isn’t paying the freight, we’re trying to shift the burden on the consumer after decades of subsidizing content (long before the internet!) — and the consumer resists it.

Surprise.

Just a thought: I’ll bet, and I have no data to back this up — that if you do a study of people who primarily watch network television and compare that to people who contribute to PBS or NPR, that the PBS/NPR crowd is a lot less resistant to paying for content online, because they’ve already made the decision to pay for content rather than sit back and take what the advertisers are willing to pay for and have them watch “for free”. And amybe down that road lies some answers, not in technology or micropayments or nag walls or whatever, but in working to educate users why what they (and their parents, and grandparents) were used to: free content, with commercials they used to go to the bathroom during…

(footnote 1: the startup was founded by Paul Baran, one of the people who invented packet switching networks. Which is the underpinning allowing you to read what I’m typing. It didn’t make it — but in the back room was another startup called Telebit, which invented the first modems that did data compression and error correction, and which ended up playing a key part in the growth and success of USENET and Email back in the days before everyone was hooked up to the net, and basically allowed for the growth to critical mass that eventually made the internet mainstream. This just reinforces my view that Silicon Valley is really just six people, but they all moonlight….)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Will paid content work?. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

First — the eBook reality. the first Kindle intrigued me, but I’ve seen the “future of electronic books” before, and so I decided to wait and see. the Kindle actually surpassed my expectations, and now Amazon has introduced Kindle 2, and it’s much better. My primary interest here is to have a good, easy to use/read electronic library, especially of technical stuff, that I can carry around. Reading for recreation on an eReader is less insteresting to me, but couldn’t hurt.

Unfortunately, even thought the new Kindle comes closer, at its current price point, it doesn’t make the cut. I’ll keep waiting. Maybe the rumored Kindle software on mobile phones? We’ll see. but we’re nearing a tipping point where electronic books will make sense, which three years ago, I wasn’t sure we’d ever see. Kindle at half the price? I’d buy it. Today? I am staying on the sidelines.

Second — the convergence of electronics in the living room. I keep waiting for Apple to upgrade the Apple TV to be a real living room dominator. And I guess I’ll keep waiting a while. They’re doing a survey on possible features to a limited audience right now, which indicates to me that they’re now trying to figure that device out and get serious about a “non hobby” product — and I honestly expected to see that product at the last Macworld. So Apple’s product timelines and my expectatons are still in sync. The big limiter here is availability of content, still; for netflix streaming to my Xbox, only about 10% of the items in my queue are avaialble for online delivery. A quick look at iTunes shows that’s not any better. That makes this convenient — but not an option. Yet. And whatever Apple does needs to have 5.1 built in so I don’t need a separate home theater box to drive the speakers…

Something tells me this year is the year companies dive in and seriously try to own the living room. My short list: Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo. One of them will get it right in the next couple of years. If someone else wants to come in and distrupt the market, the window is closing.

Third — For the last few years, we’ve had internet in the house via DSL. This is our third generation of network in the house, going back to 1998 or so when that means leased lines and expensive routers, so it’s amazing how far it’s come. But now, I’m starting to look at what comes next. And what I want is a home network based on EVDO or 3G, a dongle I can carry iwth me when I travel and plug into a device at home to drive the wireless network, with real broadband speeds and reliability. This would allow me to finally dump the landline/DSL (and their monthly payments), and carry my network with me, since when we’re not home, do we really need the netowrk there? Not really. Unfortunately, I’m just not convinced this is ready for prime time — the dongles are there, but the home network interfaces aren’t yet. Unless you know something I don’t know, of course.. I mean, seriously. We use (and are really happy with) DirecTV. The idea of installing cable just to get a modem and fast cable modem speeds instead of DSL irritates me — but that my mom’s home network is faster than mine annoys me. Even though, in reality, I rarely notice my network’s speed, which implies it really isn’t “slow” as much as I’m realizing it’s been a few years since I upgraded….But isn’t that part of being a geek? Oh, and I’d love to do the portable dongle, but I just don’t want to add one more monthly charge to my budget. Unless I can remove one I don’t need, and the logical one seems to be the DSL line, no?

Honestly, I’ve been waiting for Wimax for a while, but the rollout is — problematic, painful and slow. So maybe I’ll stop waiting.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Three technologies I’m hoping mature this year.. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Sony, the Japanese electronics company, said Thursday that it expected to post a record annual operating loss of nearly $3 billion because of the rapid deterioration of the global economy.

via Sony Expects $3 Billion Loss for the Year – NYTimes.com.

That’s an awful lot of zeros

– Gil Amelio, when Apple had it’s first billion dollar loss quarter

It should be noted that way back when, Apple was expected to be (and close to being) sold to both Sun and Sony. And today, the Mac is celebrating it’s 25th birthday and Apple is doing quite well, while Sony is, well, not. Neither is Microsoft, who back in the day was the evil nemesis Mike Spindler tried to take on head to head and almost killed the company doing so — and if you look at the numbers, Apple could buy Sun outright from the profit from this last quarter.

If nothing else, this is a good reminder that EVERYTHING is cyclical. Apple, too, will some day slip or someone else will sneak around them and take the lead in the race for a while. Companies we now think of as dead or fading will — some of them — revitalize themselves and move forward again.

None of this is forever. And that’s a good thing. Apple is one of those rare companies that has really put it all together and continued to push an innovate, but other companies innovate, too, so it’ll be fascinating to see what we’re saying about all of this in another five years, no?

(via daringfireball)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Sony Expects $3 Billion Loss for the Year. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Open source projects should be judged as much by their community as by their technological achievements. The code tells you what it’s good for, but the community tells you what its future is.

Communities need to be active to continue improving the project, deal with bugs and changes to their ecosystem. If no one is interested enough to talk about the project, none of that will happen. Newcomers need to meet experienced users to be sold on why to use the software, to get help as they learn their way around, to maybe be drawn into contributing to the project itself.

via Open Source Communities – Push cx.

I nice view of the dynamics of communities by Peter Harkins. One of the aspects of this, I think, is that from the communities I’ve been involved in over the years, the smaller the set of people actively involved in the decision process, design and implementation, the more sensitive that project is to fading or falling apart if the life or motivation of a key member changes. For that reason alone, communities really need to foster new members into the project and ways to recognize and enable the most effective and capable into the “inner circle” where they’re ready and able to step up and move a project forward. If you don’t do this kind of “succesion planning” from the start, when you need it, it won’t be there.

Geeks tend to think you don’t need marketing, but they’re wrong. Marketing, even of an open source project, is key to enable adoption and convince people to evaluate it and join the project. projects really should consider community growth as a key metric in he success of a community, and communities really need to look at outreach, evangelism, and recruitment to be tasked out the same way bugs, features and documentation are, and those members should be part of the “core team” whether or not they actually code.

One reason it looks to me that Rails has taken off faster than django is simple: the rails guys did a lot of talking and promoting and evangelizing of rails, where the django folks have been quieter and less self-promoting of themselves and the technology.

A technology nobody knowss about may be great, but it won’t change the world.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Open Source Communities – Push cx. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.