Is Apple The Worst Company Ever At Public Relations?

Apple, by most accounts, is great at public relations. But as I see it it really depends how you define public relations. Apple is great at having product launches, and at getting people speculating about what they are going to do. Apple is great at getting people excited about their products. Apple is great at making itself the center of attention.

But as I see it, Apple is horrible at actually *relating* to the public. They are horrible at creating the image of a company that actually seem like, well, humans. And the most recent, though by far not the only example of this is Apple's MobileMe launch.

David Pogue in the New York Times today writes that the MobileMe launch is a mess. Essentially, for many people the email part of MobileMe doesn't work at all and is actually *eating* emails. This is bad, but the reality is that stuff happens. Software doesn't work sometimes. Worse yet, sometimes products lose data.

But the thing about Apple is they never seem to really own up to *anything*, and this tends to make things worse. There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance and Apple doesn't seem to know where it is.

This is Pogue's take on the MobileMe situation:

I called Apple. Would the P.R. team be willing to say what the problem is? What is being done to solve it? When might it be fixed? What kind of resources or time is being spent on a resolution?

No. Apple declined to comment on any of that.

A P.R. manager did, however, offer me this official statement: "The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped, and we are still having some growing pains. Some users have been having problems with their e-mail in particular, and we are trying to restore the service as soon as possible. We're very thankful for our loyal customers' patience as we work out the kinks."

Shortly thereafter, that stale, static status message on the MobileMe site was expanded to include this: "We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption. We are working hard to restore your service."

That's about as far as Apple will go in expressing an understanding of the emotional toll the outage is causing those 20,000 people.

It's amazing that Apple doesn't recognize this situation. This is an airplane that's stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn't come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what's being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: "We apologize for the inconvenience."

And indeed the situation is horrible. But the larger point is Apple seems to have a tin ear when it comes to reasonable public behavior.

One very recent example is that Apple requires that all developers who download an iPhone software development kit must digitally sign an NDA. The repercussion of this is there can be no user groups, discussion forums, consultants, or even books in the Apple iPhone eco-system because no one is allowed to talk about developing for the iPhone. How dumb. And arrogant. And heavy-handed.

Another famous example was Apple's aggressive effort to sue a writer to reveal a source about an upcoming product launch. And yet another was the horrific iPhone price cut shortly after its product launch making the initial purchasers really feel like dupes.

All these things reflect a sense that Apple just has no concern for how its actions will play with the public. When things bubble up, Apple seems to take just enough corrective action to appease the natives. It feels like they are dancing in a circle that is unreasonably small for no apparent purpose. Why dance so close to the edge of trouble. And yet, in truth, up until now it would be accurate to say they have always done just enough to keep things under control. But I keep wondering how long Apple's hyper-arrogance can continue without some fall from grace.

Indeed, the MobileMe situation can still be fixed. But the seriousness of the technical issues here combined with the typical Apple attitude really feels like a potentially serious demarcation line. And whether it is or not, I think Apple needs to work on this part of its consumer facing behavior. Because eventually this kind or hubris always gets you in trouble.

The Nightmare Twitter Scenario May Be Upon Us

It looks like we may have a nightmare Twitter scenario. Ok, well, when I say nightmare scenario, everything is relative, because it is just Twitter. But for those who suffer from Twitterdiction this could be a big deal.

The problem: It looks like when Twitter went down today, when it came back up it lost a bunch of follower/following connections.

Liquidsunshine said:

Aaagh! Twitter knocked off 50 of my followers and about 30 of my "following". Wtf!

And Alex Iskold said:

My followers and following are down. First is understandable, second has to be exact. Lets revisit tomorrow.

Of course I should be able to say something about my own numbers, but while I *think* my numbers are down, I did not have my following/follower counts committed to memory so I can't be sure. But no matter, it appears something is up.

I suspect Twitter has backups, and that they will fix this, but for people who really rely on Twitter (for either emotional or serious business purposes) if so much connection data really is lost, it would be a nightmare. A sufficient amount has been written about the problems keeping Twitter up and running, and so I will not revisit them here. But it does highlight the issue of how important this kind of data is for so many people. And without a reasonable way to back up such data, it does call into question the reasonableness of relying on web based services for critical business purposes. The idea of losing contact with people and not having any reasonable way of reconstructing those relationships is certainly frightening.

If this is not solved some time later today, I think there are going to be some very unhappy campers in Twitterville. Hopefully this is only temporary.

update: it appears they are already working on fixing this as they indicated on the corporate blog, though at this hour (1am est) they are clearly not totally back to normal. Thanks to Morriss Partee for the latest info.

update 2: at 6:46am the problems still have not been fixed. This suggests that the message from yesterday saying they had fixed the problem and were propagating the data is now either inaccurate, or they rolled back to an old data set. If so, this really may indeed be Twitter Armageddon.

Memo To VCs: Every Great Idea Doesn't Fit In An Elevator Pitch

I have been thinking a lot recently about the elevator pitch.

The common accepted wisdom is that every great idea, or every fundable idea has to have a good elevator pitch. In order for an idea to be great it needs to fit neatly into a one minute description that at best knocks people's socks off, and at worst makes them extremely curious.

I have come to a conclusion about this. It's Bull.

The truth is that for some ideas an elevator pitch works great. For others, not so much. And there is no direct correlation between ease of explanation and appeal or value in the marketplace. The reason for this is simple. Some things are better seen and experienced than explained. In fact I suspect many of the best ideas fit this description.

As an example, I am a pretty big critic of Facebook, and in particular their likely ability to generate really significant revenue. But that doesn't mean it is not a great idea. And the truth is I don't think anyone could understand Facebook without seeing it. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg could have sat a VC down and said, this is my idea, (or this is the idea I stole from the Winkelvoss brothers or whatever) please invest in me. I don't think it would fly.

The reasons for this are fairly straight forward. With consumer facing products, whether we want to use something is tied to such things as utility, ease of understanding, and social context. And so much of the first two can only come from actually experiencing the product. The Nintendo Wii is a great example of this. You needed to experience the Wii to really get why it was a big deal and how fun it is. Even the iPhone fits this description. Most of the features of the iPhone existed in other phones. It is the design that makes it work.

Another area where seeing is believing is around data driven products. Visualizing data in one's head is very hard if you have never visualized it before. People have varying degrees of capacity for spatial visualization, but few of us are good enough to take an abstract description of a data model and to actually imagine exploring that data. For most people the significance of the organization of that data will be unclear when the explanation is purely verbal.

But when people are allowed to explore real data in real time, things become much more clear. FriendFeed is a good example of this. The product is almost impossible to explain because it is, in essence, a new data model.  You need to experience FriendFeed to get it. And once people do get it, they tend to love it, but they have to get over the experience hump.

And so the challenge here is that many of the great ideas will not have great elevator pitches, because they can't. This means investors must either trust the entrepreneur based on reputation or blind faith, or they must take the time to really try to understand more complicated sounding product concepts. Or worse, they can just avoid any new ideas until they have been developed and tested enough to prove the demand. This is the most common strategy right now in the venture community, but it leaves lots of the best ideas undeveloped because there is not enough early stage money to help these ideas that really need to be seen to be fully appreciated. Paradoxically, I think these are some of the best ideas.

This leads me to an idea that Paul Graham from the YCombinator incubator put forth:

I've tried to explain this to VC firms. Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. Would that mean sitting on too many boards? Don't sit on their boards. Would that mean too much due diligence? Do less. If you're investing at a tenth the valuation, you only have to be a tenth as sure.

It seems obvious. But I've proposed to several VC firms that they set aside some money and designate one partner to make more, smaller bets, and they react as if I'd proposed the partners all get nose rings. It's remarkable how wedded they are to their standard m.o.

We need more money going into more abstract and less obvious ideas, and Paul's idea is the right way to do it. It doesn't take that much money to prove a good idea is a good idea. But often it takes more than an entrepreneur has or can raise. This is particularly true for those ideas that take more insight and time to explain than an elevator pitch affords. Only a relative, or someone who knew the FriendFeed guys were from Google would have been willing to put money into that. Thankfully they didn't need any money because FriendFeed just sounds horrible on paper. That is a case where you would have to have bet the people. But every great idea doesn't come from someone that is already a brand name. In fact some might say the opposite is true.

In any case, the point of all this is simple. Good potentially profitable ideas sometimes take time to really understand and they may take resources to prove. The venture community should spend less time and resources on the obvious and more time and resources nurturing ideas that may take more than an elevator pitch to really appreciate.

The Real Reason IPOs And Mergers Are Down

I don't want to over simplify this, but it really is instructive to look at the big picture sometimes, and so I will.

The real problem with the tech market, and dare I say the overall market, is the quest for the gimmick. The quest for the quick flip. The serendipitous, disproportionate money maker. In the last 15 years the market has *fled* from the fundamentals, leading to a psychology out of step with the concept of creating real long term value.

Lets take a look at some of the bigger economic events in the last 10 years.

Real Estate: In America, the real estate market has tanked because it far outpaced any real underlying increases in property value. It was propped up by cheap loans for people that couldn't really afford them -- particularly after an ARM rate adjustment -- and a sense that prices, totally unrelated to the fundamentals, would keep going up. In short buy a house and make money for nothing.

Energy: The big story here -- we could have been doing stuff to use far, far less fossil fuel. We, and particularly the auto makers didn't because it was not immediately urgent. Gas prices were OK and people bought the old cars. Why bother doing anything better. It will not improve next quarters earnings. That short term corporate and Wall Street focus is a killer. And while the Japanese car companies have focused on the real and obvious fundamentals of the market, the American car companies are all heading towards bankruptcy.

Bubble 1.0: Companies went public by selling ads to other companies that were selling ads back to them. Can you say shell game? There weren't enough brick and mortar dollars in the eco-system so when people began to realize that these ads didn't perhaps work as well as imagined, the whole thing fell apart. Again with the money for nothing theme.

Bubble 2.0: Amazingly, bubble 2.0 is a redux of bubble 1.0 but without the public companies, so only the VCs will be hurt. As with Bubble 1.0, no real revenue -- companies like Facebook have almost no monetization capacity relative to the size of their audience. Web 2.0 has not been able to capture enough viewer attention to make ads truly effective outside of search. And selling services for hard dollars has become much more difficult, and in some quarters down right gauche. And so the public market wised up. And acquirers are much less interested in M&A transactions that are not accretive to earnings (i.e. who wants to buy companies that are not making money... we've got plenty of unmonetizable eyeballs without your help).

The point in all of this is that we have been trained to believe that there *is* a free lunch. We have learned the false lesson that we can, or should be able to make money without making any money. We have abandoned the concept of fundamentals. And so, the tech world is frustrated that all the VC turds that used to be flippable can no longer be sold. But as with the larger economy, this is just the chickens coming home to roost.

My view on this is relatively simple. You must make money if you want people to buy you.

The money you make must not be a gimmick. It must be money you are making because you are adding real long term value to customers. If you make a lot of money, you can sell your company to a larger company, or you can take it public. The concept of IPO is not dead forever. But the idea of IPOing crap probably is.

Of course if you do actually make a lot of money, the urgency to sell or IPO your company decreases, which will of course make you more appealing when you do actually sell out or IPO. Google only IPOed because they had too many shareholders and were therefore required by law to do so begin reporting as a public company. I am not saying any of us is likely to achieve the same result as Google, but the dynamic of building a company that doesn't need to sell is the same.

The point is that we should all be less focused on exits and more focused on excellence. If that means the VC industry needs to restructure to accommodate that new reality then so be it.

S3 Failure Raises Questions About Cloud Design

I watched with interest this weekend as Amazon S3 went down yet again, and I thought to myself, "there but for the grace of God go I."

My company is currently developing a cloud based data service called KloudShare. And though KloudShare is basically unrelated to what S3 does, and probably has more similarity to Google's Big Table or Amazon Simple DB,  they are all still data services, and so it got me thinking about how one might architect systems to avoid such messes. Because while people might forgive Amazon, I don't think a tiny startup like mine is going to have the same latitude Amazon does.

First, looking at Amazon's computing service called the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is probably instructive as we have been using Amazon EC2 and have had an instance running for well more than six months (probably approaching a year) without a failure. And so what is clear is that there are ways to design really massive systems that do not have a single choke point. Amazon gets it right with EC2 and less so with S3.

The big question is why S3 is structured in such a way that so many problems they have seem to bring the entire system down. Invariably, things fail. You cannot avoid it no matter how smart you think you are. But what you can often do is limit the collateral damage of failure by compartmentalizing your design. Clearly EC2 instances are quite compartmentalized.

While the data in S3 is clearly stored across separate distinct systems, I would imagine that security and access rules, and perhaps other elements are centralized, though I really have no idea for sure what their internal architecture is like. What is clear though is that as all of us in the cloud computing business think about our designs, sharding or federation of all services within the cloud into separate operational silos is critical. As best we can, we must avoid allowing one failure somewhere to bring down the whole system. Strategies to keep failure localized are critical.

One of the keys in our design has been replication, and eschewing what is known in the database world as normalization. In a normalized database design you are very careful not to store data in more than one place. You want to reference data in its existing place rather than replicate it everywhere. We avoid the principles of normalization because it is impossible to provide massively scalable systems that are normalized. But what we had never considered is that our "anti-normalization" design principle also relates to stability of design.

I think what the S3 issue is demonstrating is that distributed design is critical not just for performance but for reducing the impact of failure. Of course I am not saying that we have figured all of this out yet, and without more thought I suspect we too still have vulnerabilities in our design of the type that brought Amazon down. And so this is not an attack on Amazon but as I see it a teachable moment for all of us working on how to bring the real vision of the cloud to the world. And while it is, of course, impossible to avoid all centralized services in a cloud architecture, clearly Amazon is demonstrating the critical importance of limiting your dependence on them.

Microsoft Mesh Is A Metaphor For A Run On Sentence

On the day of the Microsoft Mesh announcement I wrote skeptically about the product, but given that they have just opened it up to the public, its time to broach the subject again.

What the heck is Mesh for? People are still talking breathlessly about its potential, but I can never get a clear explanation of how that potential is going to be realized.

Ok, yeah, I understand the file syncing thing. And code syncing. And versioning. Yada yada yada.

But the question is, what is it *really* for. The real world scenario seems to be based on the idea that we are going to want to run code and access data locally on multiple devices. The presumption is that we are going, in the future, to have a phone, and a laptop, and desktop, and perhaps set top box. They will each have their own storage and will want/need to access code and data that is remote, and at times will not have access to the net. And we need a *platform* for this.

The problem is I can only see one really compelling end user relevant usage scenario, and that is moving media around. It makes sense to me that I might want to easily keep my music or video collection in sync across portable devices, or on my TiVo. Beyond that, I can't come up with a single end user scenario that regular folks are going to care about. I keep looking, and every explanation is just too complicated. The descriptions are too long, the words too big, and the concepts too abstract. The master of this discussion by obfuscation is Steve Gillmor:

Does Silverlight intersect with Mesh to produce the Net OS? Answer: Yes. Treadwell calls it orthogonal and complementary. MicroBig language. Can Mesh support Twitter streams orchestrated by identity mapping via affinities and abstracted to devices across OS, mobile, and corporate divides via Silverlight? Yes, but it can do so much more.

I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I will admit. But if this is what it takes to describe why Mesh is important...

Fail.

Here's the problem. How many devices is your average person going to have. A phone. A desktop or a laptop, and in rare cases, both. So first, Mesh has to be available on the phone you have. Good luck making that happen with Nokia or Apple, or Google.

I just don't see device or service providing developers (like Apple with iTunes) adopting this in a wide enough fashion to make it useful. Apple won't do it at all, and to the extent anyone else does it will it matter?

The other enemy Microsoft has is time. The target time frame for this has got to be like five to ten years. And regarding things like synchronizing word processing documents between devices, in that time I just think that bandwidth will be reliable enough that people will access stuff just the way they are starting to right now, through a browser. And there will be so many competing ways to do this, like Apple's mobile.me and iTunes and Google Apps with Google Gears that will get right to the point. And people are using or starting to use these kinds of solutions *right now*. No fancy platforms, no run on sentences, just direct easy to understand meat and potatoes.

Honestly, Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie has been thinking about synchronization for a really long time. This is what Groove, the company Microsoft purchased to get Ozzie, was doing for the preceding five or so years before the acquisition. This singular focus has carried forward to his new job. Unfortunately, sometimes when you have a hammer, and you are intent on using it, everything looks like a nail. The problem is sometimes there just isn’t a nail there so all you get is a bloody thumb. And so for their sakes, I hope Microsoft has a first aid kit at hand and a more compelling plan B.

In Case You Didnt Know, I Am A Nobody

Last week, there was a discussion inside the racism discussion that I found, err... interesting.

Jordan Golson from the Industry Standard was busy defending Loren Feldman, and calling the anti-Feldman protesters "self-righteous". And in building his case he argued that the Feldman might have actually *helped* the cause of the protesters by allowing people to notice how there are no prominent black bloggers. Jordan's argument goes as follows:

I really doubt that one video from one sort-of well-known video blogger is going to change anyone's mind towards black people in a bad way. In fact, for me, it did the opposite. I did wonder where the black minds in tech are. Sure, there are a few, but they aren't very prominent. From my (very white) point-of-view, there are more blacks in Conservative politics (Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, etc) than there are in high-profile tech-circles.

What follows then is what got interesting. One commenter offered me up as an example of a prominent blogger. While I am thankful for the recognition, I will totally cop to the arguable nature of the proposition. Nevertheless, Golson's response is interesting. He checks out my blog and then follows up with this fascinating retort.

Like I said, not very prominent. I'm sorry, I have trouble taking someone seriously who uses a standard blogspot template.

Interestingly, a discussion ensues on friendfeed where the first commenter there says:

Who's keeping track of the dumbest comments of 2008? This one needs to get on the list.

After it is pointed out that Golson himself uses a standard blog template, he then digs himself a bigger hole with this comment:

Sure, I use that template on a blog... that I haven't updated in 2 years. My point still stands -- he isn't a "prominent" person in tech. He isn't Scoble, he isn't Calacanis. Blacks are underrepresented in tech. I didn't say I WAS prominent -- just that he wasn't. Blogging for AlleyInsider doesn't exactly make you prominent. Neither does writing for Valleywag or Industry Standard. But having 40,000 followers on Twitter? I'd say that gives you prominence. But, you know -- attack away if it makes ya feel good -

And so apparently he has fallen back on some bizarre attempt to be "supportive" by arguing that his intent wasn't dismissive and disrespectful. He was just trying to tell the world that there are no Scobles, Calcanises, or Arringtons that are black, and what a pity it is. Fascinatingly though, his argument was totally unrelated to the size of my audience. Apparently prominence has nothing to do with audience size or visibility. Prominence is based on having a pretty blog template.

When you think about his words, the real subtext becomes clear. The truth is, once he came to my site, the argument ceased to be about "prominence". He actually made a judgment about me as a person, and not my prominence. To say he couldn't "take me seriously", based purely on the color of my, excuse me, nature of my blog template is really a very different matter than discussing my visibility in the marketplace. In truth the discussion really wasn't about prominence or audience size but about who he feels is "significant" based on his own oddly subjective criteria. And for Golson, that assessment was disturbingly superficial.