Planning, Startups, Stories

Why Would Guy Kawasaki Sell Truemors?

(Note: I posted this on Huffington Post over the weekend. I'm reproducing it here for subscribers of this blog. Tim)

The classic formula for success in investment is "buy low, sell high."  That could also be known as one of those "yeah right, but easier said than done" cliches. Related to that, Guy Kawasaki announced last week that he has sold Truemors.com to Canadian nowpublic.com. 

Here's a formal announcement from marketwatch.com. Nobody's talking about the amount of sale, which hasn't been made public. What was announced was Guy's taking a seat on the advisors board.

You may remember Truemors.com because you're a happy browser there, or because you've seen and followed Guy's frequent tweets to Truemors on Twitter, or because he caused a bit of a stir last year when he publicized his relatively low startup costs (about $12,000) and his plan-as-you-go (and that's my phrase, not his, but it fits) business planning approach for that.

What I gather, from between the lines of several posts, is that he's very happy with the outcome and Truemors might be a good example of a business started pragmatically, without a lot of startup fanfare, managed carefully, promoted by personality and persistence, and sold happily after a while to compatible, like-minded people.

Truemors wasn't a big hit when it first came out, according to the buzzkill commentaries on Guy's and other blogs, but it also got a lot better over time. And while it does represent a remarkable success for a few thousand dollars, when Guy Kawasaki talks about the low costs of Truemors.com, he skips one very important factor: it was promoted tirelessly for more than a year by Guy himself, one of the most successful and well liked personal brands on the Web. You can't talk about low costs without adding in the value of Guy's own effort.

I'm quietly suspecting -- Guy's not saying this either, but I am -- that what might also be relevant is Guy's success with Alltop.com. If it were me, I'd be tempted to clear my plate a bit to concentrate on Alltop, which is taking off quite nicely.

Why? Take a look at the Google trends chart comparing Truemors traffic to Alltop traffic.

So Do I Trust Windows Vista?

This is a copy of an email I just sent to our internal tech support person at our company. I thought it might make an interesting short post, because what should be a no-brainer, upgrading my system, isn't really. Here's the email:

My Vista system is urging me to allow it to upgrade to SP1, but when I click through the details it wants me to back everything up, and warns me that if it screws me up it doesn't give a damn, it wasn't its fault. Do I trust it? Should I let it do SP1 on a perfectly good system? What should I back up first?

I might be too sensitive because last month an overnight nobody-asked-me upgrade of the Windows XP system on my tablet computer killed my system. We had to reformat it, losing all the data (it was pretty backed up, so no big deal ... but still!). On the other hand, I think it's remarkable that I have what I'm calling "a reasonable doubt" about upgrading the operating system.

Disappearing Competitive Advantage. Is This Productivity?

Technology and competitive advantage. Sometimes it's like one of those shell games. Does technology make our work better? Does it make it easier.

I have a theory. A lot of technology we work with (as in personal computers, etc.) gives us competitive advantage over a short term, until expectations catch up.

For example, hard as this will be to believe today, in the late 1970s and early 1980s working with word processing was an easy way to get competitive advantage. Some of the very big companies had it, and it was available in the university basements, but clients and professors didn't take it for granted. So knowledge of, and access to, word processing was a huge competitive advantage. I was early on that curve, and it helped me a lot.

Soon that competitive advantage disappeared. The world got it. You can cut and paste, and move paragraphs. Fine. So write more. Write better. Has productivity increased?

And spreadsheets? Does anybody here remember financial modeling languages, such as Empire? Before spreadsheets boomed in the early-to-middle 1980s, I personally gained a lot of consulting mileage on pouring financial analyses out of a DEC TOPS-20 computer running the Empire financial modeling. The rest of the world assumed a whole lot of work was necessary to produce a whole lot of outcome, even when varying just a few of the input factors. It was easy to produce quantity output without much effort. And people were impressed. I had a real early adopter advantage.

But soon after that people in business recognized the power and utility of VisiCalc, SuperCalc, and then, in 1983, Lotus 1-2-3. Then came Microsoft Excel in 1984 (amazing fact: Excel was not always the market leader in spreadsheets; it was originally the upstart, dwarfed by Lotus 1-2-3).

So that competitive advantage disappeared. In a few years everybody in business assumed spreadsheets. Where the spreadsheet was a competitive advantage early on, it became an expectation. Now we want budgets. Lots of budgets.

In 1975, most of the business world did budgets on yellow pads with calculators. By 1985, we were all working with spreadsheets. Has productivity increased?

I was also an early adopter of desktop publishing. I had one of the first Macs. In 1985 McGraw-Hill took one of my early books straight to press from LaserWriter output, which we thought at the time was a first. I used desktop publishing for consulting reports, early documentation of software, marketing literature; and it, too, was clear competitive advantage.

But that too got old. It became second nature. Everybody took it for granted, so the bar went up, expectations were raised, and soon we all expected documents to look better. Has productivity increased?

And yes, slides. During my brief stint at McKinsey Management Consulting, in 1981, there was a whole department full of artists who did nothing but create the slides to go along with the consulting. The early Persuasion software on the Mac was a huge competitive advantage for me when it came out, about 1986, when I was on my own in consulting. Is PowerPoint (or Keynote) a competitive advantage anymore?

I was on CompuServe and the Source and AppleLink by 1984, and email was a competitive advantage. And it was faster, easier, and better.

I did Palo Alto Software's first website at pasware.com in 1985, and that was competitive advantage.

I could go on with this theme.

Did the work get easier? Yes, for sure; but expectations got higher too.

Did we end up spending the same amount of time, just doing more of it?

Did productivity increase?

And, with that in mind, let me ask you: what about cell phones? What about my iPhone or your Blackberry, giving us both instant access to email at all times? What about instant messaging? Blogging? Facebook? Are we working today with equivalent new things that give us competitive advantage, but that will eventually raise the bar and become commonplace?

Is Facebook The Most Powerful Thing Ever Invented?

Fast Company titled the interview Why Facebook is Even Bigger than You Think. It starts with this subtitle:

Stanford University professor BJ Fogg explains why the social networking site is the most powerful thing ever invented.

Strong words. In the actual text, Fogg is only slightly less majestic:

Facebook is the precursor of something I'm calling mass interpersonal persuasion. That is a new phenomenon and the most important thing to happen in the world of persuasion since the advent of the radio over 100 years ago. Radio changed the game for persuasion because it allowed a message to be broadcast to thousands and millions of people, which was previously not possible. TV was an extension of that, but I don't think it was the big leap that radio was. 

Facebook takes very strong interpersonal influence dynamics -- the way people persuade each other face-to-face in small groups with peer pressure, reciprocity, flattery -- and allows those to be used on a mass scale because your social networks are built in. Friends influence friends, who influence friends, and that keeps rippling out. They can reach people very quickly for very little cost and ordinary people can set these in motion. It doesn't require a big broadcasting company or a big PR campaign. If you get the right message in the right way, you'll effect millions of people. Facebook has been the best platform for that, but I think in the future it will be commonplace.

Writing about the same interview, Steve King at Small Biz Labs holds back only a bit --

While I think things like the wheel, printing press, steam engine, antibiotics and few other inventions might place just slightly ahead of Facebook on the all time list, online social networking is clearly important.

Steve adds:

The Society for New Communications Research recently released a study showing that consumers are increasingly using social media as described by Fogg.  And while I believe online social media usage is not yet fully mainstream, the era of mass interpersonal persuasion has clearly begun.

Sure, all of this may be a bit exaggerated. But as Bob Dylan said in Ballad of a Thin Man: "Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

Alltop's New Green Page

Even if it weren't an Earth Day tie-in, I'd still be adding Alltop Green to my regular visits. I like browsing the Alltop small business section, which is usually my first view in the morning. It reminds me of the early Yahoo!, streamlined, quick, and easy. Most days I get lost in there and I end up pulling out to jump to Windows Live Writer to post related to something I've seen there.  This new green version, a joint effort with Flock timed for Earth Day, gives me the same streamlined view of Flock's favorites from treehugger on down a pretty substantial list.

I think Green is going to be steadily more important from now on, so it's definitely part of my agenda. And I do mean green as in environmentally and socially sensitive, and, in my case, with special emphasis on implications for startups, business planning, and small business.

Guy Kawasaki and Steve Balmer

This is a fun interview. Guy Kawasaki interviewing Steve Balmer at Mix 2008. These are two extremely smart people with a lot to talk about. It might not have any new news -- Steve has to be very careful what he says, the SEC has a lot of rules and it's really easy to get sued in his position -- but Guy doesn't pull any punches and Steve is up to it.

I'm amused by the fact that to see this video I had to download Microsoft's new Silverlight on my Mac. And it worked perfectly.

Watch Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki Keynote | News | MIX Online

Watch Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki Keynote

Making it With the Mac

So I posted Back to the Mac here in January when I put a gorgeous new 24" iMac on my main desk top at home, replacing my Windows XP Media machine that got sent upstairs to serve the television (which we haven't used much since). The initial view was exciting, but I was missing a couple key items. 

I mean missing the things I'm used to, like Windows Live Writer, SnagIt screen capture, Roboform.

Six weeks later, I'm really happy with the switch. I don't know how much of the screen capture you can see in the low blog resolution of 450 pixels, but the illustration here is my Mac working happily in Windows Live Writer composing this post. Live Writer is completely integrated through Parallels, in what they call coherence mode, so it's just like another Mac application. I can copy easily from Firefox to Live Writer and back. Thanks to Noah Parsons for that. Noah also helped me get an additional two gigabytes of RAM and plug them into the bottom of the monitor (which is actually the computer) and that helped too. More memory made a big difference.

Business Plan Pro works beautifully in Parallels, just another window in Coherence mode. So does Microsoft Office. I've got Word, Excel, and PowerPoint installed in the Windows setup, and any of them are just another window. I could also use the new Mac Microsoft Office, but then I already had a license to the Windows Office 2007, and this was just as good.

Thanks to Brian Williams' comment on that previous post, I've figured out passwords like Roboform, using the add-on he suggested (thanks Brian).

And then I did a quick google to discover that screen capture is built into the Mac. I know, it's in Windows too, but this is a more powerful screen capture. I added Acorn to edit and manage them a bit, and solved that problem too.

Now my only problem is I'm starting to think about how nice it would be to have something like this on my main desk top at work. And I don't really, strictly speaking, need it ... but it is very tempting.

How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?

David Pogue has a very good and (I think) realistic assessment in last Thursday's New York Times, in which he asks (and answers) the important question: How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?

He starts the piece with the story of an editor who asked him to do a story about the dangers of the Internet for children and was not pleased with what he submitted. Not scary enough. And then:

So the editor sent me the contact information for several parents of young children with Internet horror stories, and suggested that I interview them. One woman, for example, told me that she became hysterical when her eight-year-old stumbled onto a pornographic photo. She told me that she literally dove for the computer, crashing over a chair, yanking out the power cord and then rushing her daughter outside. 

You know what? I think that far more damage was done to that child by her mother’s reaction than by the dirty picture. 

See, almost the same thing happened at our house. When my son was 7 years old, he was Googling “The Incredibles” on the computer that we keep in the kitchen. At some point, he pulled up a doctored picture of the Incredibles family, showing them naked. 

“What…on… earth?” he said in surprise. 

I walked over, saw what was going on, and closed the window. “Yeah, I know,” I told him. “Some people like pictures of naked people. The Internet is full of all kinds of things.” And life went on. 

My thinking was this: a seven-year-old is so far from puberty, naked pictures don’t yet have any of the baggage that we adults associate with them. Sex has no meaning yet; the concept produces no emotional charge one way or another. 

Today, not only is my son utterly unscarred by the event, I’m quite sure he has no memory of it whatsoever.

This is an interesting point of view about an important issue. He also recommends a PBS show now available online, called Growing Up Online. Looks like another good treatment on this subject. He concludes: 

In any case, watch the show. You’ll learn that some fears are overplayed, others are underplayed, and above all, that the Internet plays a huge part in adolescence now. Pining for simpler times is a waste of time; like it or not, this particular genie is out of the bottle.

Facebook About-face: Group Protest Gets Quick Response.

So having the youngest leadership ever for an $11 billion company, Facebook does respond quickly to problems. Maybe that's just coincidence, but today is the second time I've seen them switch things very quickly in response to complaints.

Earlier this week Maria Aspan of the New York Times wrote a column on how Facebook keeps personal data forever. I posted it here as Digital Immortality. Today she reports Quitting Facebook Gets Easier.

On Monday, Facebook modified its help pages to tell people that if they wanted to remove their accounts entirely, they can direct the company by e-mail to have it done. But on Tuesday, representatives of Facebook stopped short of saying the company would introduce a one-step delete account option.

This is the second time I've noticed Facebook responding to complaints. A couple of years ago they changed the way they made some comments public, which "creeped out" a bunch of young users who suddenly saw things they thought were private being visible to others. I heard it first from my youngest daughter, who was then a freshman in college. It was front page on our local newspaper the next day. Facebook changed it back almost on the following day.

In this second case, it seemed like a ground swell:

As The New York Times reported on Monday, some Facebook users who wished to close their accounts had been unable to do so, even after contacting Facebook’s customer service representatives. Many departing users, who could spend weeks or months trying to erase their accounts without success, turned to unofficial guides like the Facebook users group “How to permanently delete your Facebook account.”

Since Monday, almost 3,000 people have joined the group, which counted more than 7,000 members on Tuesday evening and had been growing by the hour.

Digital Virtual Immortality, or Maybe Not

There is a very nice "other Tim Berry" somewhere on the Web -- he and I communicate by email so I know only his email address -- who graciously gave me timberry.wordpress.com last month for free. Except WordPress wouldn't let him. I asked. He wasn't using it. So he deleted it. Now neither one of us can use it. In fact, nobody can use it. Ever.

Oh the loss. Both of us locked out. And all those other Tim Berrys, also locked out (there are a lot of Tim Berrys, several of us on the Web, one who is also an MD and operates in entrepreneurship. One's a state official in Indiana, one was the producer of Cheers). None of us will ever have timberry.wordpress.com.

I asked why. WordPress says it never deletes a URL. This is from the email they sent me:

Unfortunately once a blog is deleted we can't recover it or reuse it.
http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/05/07/recycling-blog-names/

And this too, by the way, apparently just so my namesake and I both feel worse:

If the blog hadn't been deleted, you could have transferred it.
http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/07/22/how-do-i-transfer-a-blog-to-someone-else-another-name/

So I think there's an irony here, like how can anything as virtual as the Web be so permanent? The great god of backup, I suppose.

Meanwhile, also today, here's an interesting quote about how hard it is to remove yourself from Facebook:

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

That's from today's New York Times, a column by Maria Aspan called How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free.

It turns out that Facebook wants to keep your data just in case you change your mind and decide to rejoin.

The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.” 

But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”

You might think that personal stuff like what you put in Facebook ought to be yours, right? Deal with it. It isn't.

You might also think that one Tim Berry could delete a URL and another Tim Berry could pick it up. Nope. Deal with that too.