EclecticLip

Briliant minds at the UK charts website decided to:

• use Twitter
• to advertise an iPhone app
• for Facebook
• which does the same thing as RSS

This is an advertising analogue of a Rube Goldberg machine — a ridiculously complicated way of getting iPhone users to download an app.
As an encore campaign, I suggest:

• a Twitter tweet
• asking people to use Remember The Milk
• in their Google Calendar
• so they don’t forget to Digg
• a LiveJournal blog entry
• whose video, hosted on YouTube,
• describes how to use a Facebook app
• for the iPhone

The possibilities are dizzying…!
(hat tip Popjustice)
How much more

It might seem strange to talk of Web Classical Studies (net Antiquity?) but it’s been, what, ten Moore’s Law doublings since 1995?

But sticking to the topic of web Classical Studies, this Web 1.0 retrospective made me chuckle.  Especially the part about 36 k modems.  We use Journyx for our timesheets at work, and it sure feels like a 36 k connection…  or maybe even a 14.4…

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Yes, that’s an attempt at a pun.

In the past twenty-odd years, Microsoft has proven exceedingly good at dispatching business rivals.  They’ve been unstoppable spider-killers.

Even Google’s search dominance is a limited direct threat — Google has captured a new market, they aren’t “eating Microsoft’s lunch”. And open-source alternatives (Linux, OpenOffice) have been the business equivalent of blackflies, as opposed to, say, Viking raiders.
Until now.

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We leave a page trail in our browsers — a cyberspace equivalent of the wandering snail’s mucous trail.

Here’s a fiendishly clever application that establishes which of the top 10,000 US websites (according to Quantcast) you’ve visited.  It takes the male/female ratio of (known) users for each of those sites, then multiplies all the numbers together to develop a probability of your being male or female, based on browsing habits.

According to this measure, I’ve got a 100% likelihood of being male…

More information here.

This story stunned me.

I previously figured Macs would have the same market share across all price points. Of course, on further reflection Apple doesn’t make “budget” computers. (And that’s a good strategy for keeping margins healthy.) All of its market share is probably in the >$1000 category.

I think this is a turning point in the personal computer market. (And I’m probably one of the slower ones on the uptake here…) It suggests that prices and performance have reached the point where design is starting to matter.

To draw an automotive analogy: in the 1920’s, Ford kept making the Model T cheaper and cheaper. But GM started refreshing their models each year, and positioned their cars at all price points (hence Sloan’s expression “a car for every purse and purpose”.)

As a result, GM cars became the ones people wanted to buy; that’s probably one of the many reasons GM wound up replacing Ford as the world’s #1 automaker.

PC manufacturers have competed largely on price in the past couple decades — whether price for a basic model, or price for the premium model. Perhaps the product is mature enough now, that design becomes a big differentiator. To draw again from the automotive sector, design is probably the main reason that the Nissan of the 2000’s has been healthily profitable while the Nissan of the 1990’s tumbled towards bankruptcy.

The interminable problems Microsoft seems to be having with Vista made me think of the argument Joseph Tainter made in The Collapse of Complex Societies.

I should probably disclose that I’m a relatively contented XP user who plans to soon take cyber-refuge in OS X.* And that I haven’t actually read Tainter’s book! I’ve read a fair bit on it though. That is, if Wikipedia counts as “a fair bit”.

OK, enough joking around… after all, this blog is “chatter from a fallen monkey” not “dissertations from a risen paramecium”.

Tainter argued that the ultimate cause for societal collapse is diminishing returns on investments in social complexity. In the “house of cards” model, eventually, adding complexity to a society makes it only little more productive — but a lot less resilient.

Using a biological context, single-cultivar agricultural monoculture might be a good example: crop yields might be a little higher (diminished return)…
…but if there’s a blight or pest, you could lose the entire crop (less resilient).

See here for a current example.

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In the context of Windows Vista, I wonder if the OS has become so huge and so complex (so bloated?) that there are meagre returns on its increasing complexity, relative to the alternative (say, Windows XP).

If that’s what happens to a society before it collapses, I wonder what Microsoft will do for post-Vista Windows OS’s, such as Vienna. Will there be a point where Microsoft says “there’s no business case in building the Windows OS further” and instead try to ‘reboot’ by launching a simpler, stripped-down Windows — e.g. building everything around Windows CE? More trivially, will Apple still be running those Mac-vs-PC ads?

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* given that all the OS X names seem to come from big cats (cheetah, leopard, jaguar…) I assume the person in charge isn’t a “dog person”. Wonder what’s next — Leo? (”Lion” sounds too much like “lying” so it probably isn’t appropriate.) Lynx would be cool, if only for the consumer confusion caused by having Linux, Lynx and Unix OS’s in the marketplace…