Archives for February 2007

Comcast Speed Boost…Smokin’

February 17, 2007 Leave a Comment

Last night I saw a Comcast commercials on TV advertising “Comcast Speedboost”. This was the first time that I saw or heard of this addition to the Comcast internet service. Just now I remember the commercial and decided to run a broadband speed test to see if my download speeds had increased at all.

Wow! How does a 6x download speed increase sound? That is exactly what I saw!

Let me back up a bit. Around the holidays, I decided that I had enough of the slow speed and line problems I was seeing with my AT&T DSL service. So I switched to the Comcast triple play (bye bye AT&T…). My biggest concern with the triple play was the need to do anything special with the phone service. I couldn’t change the physical phones in the house due to the elderly members of our household…it would be a tad to difficult for them to adapt to a change in how something as basic as how the phone works. Luckily, the latest generation of cable modems provides the dial tone for the IP Phone Service. You run a phone line from the cable modem to your closest phone jack and your done. So I didn’t have to change anything with the phones inside the house (except remove the line filters that are required when you have DSL). Even better, the cable modem has a built in battery that can provide you 12 hours of phone access should you loose power (or more if you buy and install the second battery option).

More importantly (for me at least) was the increased bandwidth for internet access. My downloads went from 600K/sec on my old AT&T DSL line (my speed kept degrading since AT&T bought SBC) to about 3000K/sec (3mb/sec). The last time I ran a speed test I had about 3.2mb/sec. Just now when I ran another speed test using the same service and test site, I saw 20mb/sec! A 6x increase in download speed!

Now my upload speed hasn’t increased at all. Which, for most people isn’t much of a problem since most of what they do online is download (reading web pages, downloading email, etc.). It would be nice if I could get a bit faster speed, but only due to my photography and needing to upload large images to my website.

All in all, I’m very happy with the this new increase in service. If you have Comcast, you might want to run a speed test yourself (or just watch how fast web pages load now).

(Oh, and the HD television broadcasts that we now get on our expanded Cable…Wow! Now I can see the true quality behind my HDTV.)

Steve Jobs’ DRM Genius…But Not Why You Think

February 9, 2007 Leave a Comment

(Photo Courtesy of Jesse Wu)

This week Steve Jobs’ web site posting Thoughts on Music has created quite a bit of hype. Commentary on this news item is spread across multiple blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines (when they finally get their printed versions out). I first heard of this on Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection and then later read an article in the USA Today (it was a travel week and the USA Today gets 10 minutes of my attention during breakfast when I get it delivered to my room..).

What I find so interesting and quite shocking, is how most of the media attention given to this story totally misses the point of why Steve and company wrote that piece. There are a lot of smart people out there who like to point out how it’s a bit of marketing genius (and it is), but they think that it was done to free the music from the restricting shackles of DRM and the music industry.

Come on. It’s about Apple’s revenue stream. It’s about selling more iPods!

Last quarter Apple posted an 18% increase in net sales of iPods over the same period last year (and a 29% increase in “Other music related products and services”). At the same time, Norway declared that iPod and iTunes DRM is illegal (and a slew of other European countries are about to follow their lead). It doesn’t take an MBA to realize that the continued backlash across Europe of Apple’s DRM means that these double digit increases in sales can’t (and won’t) continue.

So, what is a responsible CEO to do? Same thing that all responsible CEO’s do, protect their revenue streams. (no mater what a CEO says, a companies first duty is to itself). One of Steve Jobs’ greatest achievements was to convince the record labels to bless Apple’s iPod and iTunes by providing content for them. All Apple needed to do was provide DRM protection for that content. This is what allowed Apple to market both products without a backlash of bad publicity from the recording industry. Now, in order to continue to sell these same products, Steve needed to strike out at the recording industry against DRM.

Poetic in a Ouroboros kind of way…

Community Networks: Build it and Tread Lightly

February 3, 2007 Leave a Comment

Within the last few days, there has been a huge uproar within the Flickr user community regarding some limits that Yahoo was going to start imposing on Flickr accounts. For those that don’t know Flickr, it’s the original photo sharing community. Sign-up for a free account, upload your photos, share them with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Over time the system evolved to allow comments to be left about photos, building lists of friends and favorites, etc. Now that Yahoo has been the owner of Flickr for a while, they are starting to change a few things. In this case, they wanted to limit the number of friends that you could have (limit it to 3000) and the number of tags that are associated with a photo to describe it.

Thomas Hawk has done an excellent job of reporting of the announcement then description of the user reactions followed by his coverage of the slight modification of the new limits. This gave me flashbacks to one of the recent user backlash against eBay. I would have thought that Yahoo/Flickr would have remembered that little incident and taken a different approach to their limit changes.

What this just continues to exemplify is the need for community networks to think and act differently with regards to product management (actually any software company with the continuing movement toward online and community based products). Having spent over 10 years in the software industry working with customers and product managers (including some time as a Product Manager), I’m still amazed at how many crucial decisions are made without clear understanding of the customers or without doing something as simple as asking the customers.

I’ve seen product features be designed with no idea of how a customer uses the product. Products built based upon huge assumptions made from the ivory tower of the corporate office. Even a product manager sit in front of a large fortune 100 customer listening to them state their specific needs only to later say “I think what the customer really meant was…”. As someone who sells technology for a living, my job would be so much easier if at least 60% of what was built was what customers ask for. (I know there is a huge discussion that can be had about innovation here…but that’s for another time.)

Getting feedback from users has only gotten easier and easier over the past 10 years with new internet based technologies. You have internet based user forums, online surveys, user groups, etc. Mostly it’s the time to market pressures that the technology industry creates itself that prevents this from happening.

In the world of community network type services and products a totally different approach is needed. It’s the community that makes the product successful, so why isn’t the community used to drive the development of the product? Flickr, and most community networks, succeeded because of the evangelizing that is done by early members. These same members should be given the option of continuing to drive the success of the business. In the case of the latest Flickr changes, it was a Flickr early user who suggested the change to one of the limits that eased a lot of ruffled feathers.

All the advances and changes in the technology landscape, and yet some attitudes are so slow to adjust.