The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Monday, August 12, 2002

BlogBack: Treo I thought I'd tie up a bunch of loose ends on my Treo story since I'm fighting an attack of insomnia anyway .... I heard from Marc Bernstein of Eastgate Systems, author of the very, very, very cool Tinderbox blogging tool (it's worth looking at if you are on a Mac platform regularly; I'm not, more's the pity).  Hey! It's now shipping for OS X too.  Cool.  Marc's a Treo user and very, very happy.  Apparently the form factor works well for him.  Interesting...  Marc's Highly Literate and Most Excellent Blog (Drat wish I had the link to it; I know i have it somewhere ...).  (and if you detect a plug here, yup.  Marc's great people and a die hard Mac supporter who has always made great products) I heard from Adam? Kalsey of who IM'd me a bunch of detailed Treo comments that he let me post me verbaitem:   KalseyGroup: Palm shouldn't make a phone. They should make the software that drives the phone. KalseyGroup: When the Palm debuted, there were two things that made it a success. One was the sync. The other was the extreme ease of use. KalseyGroup: Those are two things missing in handsets today. KalseyGroup: But handset sales are on the decline, even in Europe where mobile phones are most popular. KalseyGroup: So even though a new phone (or the software to run it) may fill a consumer need, it's not likely to be a big seller for them. ... fuzzygroup: Interesting.  Mind if I quote you on some of this? KalseyGroup: Sure. fuzzygroup: Cool.  I'll get it up later tonight or tomorrow.  Your point on the phone vs. the software is interesting.  KalseyGroup: It makes even more sense since Palm is now two companies. There's one company that builds the devices and PalmSource makes the software. fuzzygroup: Yup.  I neglected to mention that. KalseyGroup: Most phones are nearly impossible to use. My wife hands me her phone when she needs to do something like set the correct time. fuzzygroup: Yup.  its getting better but not quickly. KalseyGroup: Any user should be able to do that, but you have to go through 4 levels of poorly labeled menus to get to it. fuzzygroup: Yup fuzzygroup: Of coz that's also why our women keep us around, don't forget that. KalseyGroup: :-) Adam (sorry in advance if I got the first name wrong) has a great point here -- focus on the IP not the hardware.  I'm not sure if I'm 100% convinced: This puts them back in Microsoft's gunsights for a second time since MS has their Stinger Windows CE cell phone project (sure... a cell phone with 100K + RAM and a full GUI ... That'll work). I suspect being in the actual phone business lets them get part of the recurring revenue for the phone fees.  Now I don't know all that much here so I could be way off. At least at one point people really, really trusted Palm as a vendor.  I know I did.  My guess is that their brand is still appealing and a direct cross sell from Palm itself would be more successful then Palm => Nokia/Samsung/Nextel/Etc => Customer. It would get a product to market faster since it wouldn't rely on the missionary selling process of "Build it in and you'll get sales" KalseyGroup: KalseyGroup: bye Note: BlogBack inspired by Slashdot's Slashback of course. 10:52:34 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Attention OS X Users: Sign the Petition! Interesting: To:  Steve Jobs and Apple Computer, Inc. On Wednesday, July 17, 2002, you spoke about Mac OS v10.2 in your keynote address at Macworld New York. The public and technology media was informed shortly thereafter that Apple would not be offering an upgrade price for existing users of the Mac OS X operating system. By our signatures below, we express our anger and outrage at this decision. Many of us agree that some form of upgrade fee is warranted for to recompense Apple for time and money spent developing of the many new technologies packaged into 10.2. Few here believe it should be free. But we feel that by charging full price, you are doing great damage not only to your customers but to your own company. We point out the following problems: * People feel the price differential is unfair. Upgrading from 9.x directly to Jaguar will cost a user $130. Someone who upgraded from 9.x to 10.0.x to 10.1.x, and now wants to upgrade to Jaguar, could end up spending well over $280. Existing OS X users, by their use of the OS, helped Apple work out bugs and discover which features had the highest demand. Why should you penalize them for their loyalty and "early adoption" mindset, which was a clear asset to you? * Many of us wonder why you were not advised this could be a very unprofitable move. The psychological impact of asking former users to pay full price for an operating system they have already bought will be enough to hurt Jaguar sales a great deal. We respectfully suggest Apple would see greater economic profit by offering an upgrade fee, because resulting sales in that area will no doubt be more brisk than those from selling 10.2 at full price alone. In other words, a moderate discount for existing users could vastly increase the number of sales. http://www.petitiononline.com/nopay129/petition.html In case you are wondering, yes I did sign it and I did give a valid email address (but they will protect it for you).  Worth signing if you are even thinking about OSX.  $129 for a .2 upgrade is lunacy.  If you are going to charge that much then at least have the audacity to bump the version number to 11.0. 5:15:44 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Marketing that Doesn't Lie to You: Covalent! How many times have we all filled out a form or a post card or a web form that promised us a T-Shirt, a chochtka or even just information.  10?  100?  1000?  And how my times did the vendor deliver?  Not all that many I bet.  It's all too easy to make a promise with a form and then never deliver on it.  Now Covalent, www.covalent.com, actually delivered on it.  I just arrived home to find my brand spanking new Covalent T-Shirt waiting for me.  Here's the sequence of events: At OSCON at the end of July, I stopped by the Covalent stand and talked to them about their Apache management products.  Very cool. If you have a lot of Apache servers, this is neat, neat software.  It gives a very powerful web based GUI for batch control of your servers. At OSCON I gave them a card for the obligatory information. When I got back I either got an email or a physical mail stating "return this for a free T-Shirt, specify size here ___".  I did. Lo and behold a T-Shirt arrives Elapsed time from OSCON to TShirt in my sweaty little hands (it's hot today!!!) 11 business days.  Pretty damn good.  Pretty damn good. Marketing that Doesn't Lie to You.  An Idea Whose Time Has Come. 4:54:45 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

phpMyAdmin 2.3.0 is Available!  Thank You Keith Devens Somehow or another I wandered over to Keith Devens' weblog and I see that phpMyAdmin 2.3.0 is available.  Keith did a great job summarizing the changes in this highly usable Open Source application: http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/?id2630 I also learned a bunch of things from his blog.  Nicely done.  Recommended.  Thanks Keith. 10:31:09 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Translucent Databases Very interesting article on how to make secure databases: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08/02/simson.html I need to think about this for FuzzyOffice and personal information shared within a larger organization wide space.  This idea has definitely has legs ... 3:30:09 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This