2009 January

Oops…Google is Broken

January 31, 2009 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

This is troubling. Using multiple browsers (to ensure it wasn't my issue) has turned up an error this morning with Google. It seems that *every* search result is a "…site may harm your computer." The outcome is I'm unable to use Google.

I know no one is perfect — and that Google is still probably in "beta" — but all of our newfound dependencies on the cloud make any hiccups like this a big problem. Especially, when like I am right now, have a deadline in 7 minutes (we're starting a podcast and four of us will be on it so I cannot delay).

Google's Marissa Mayer publishes their mea culpa (and no, clicking that link will not take you to malware!).

Filed Under: Internet

Who Needs Big Brother Technology…

January 27, 2009 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

…when you have innovation like this that we could simply modernize?

Filed Under: Current Affairs

Why Empowered Customer Service Reps Matter

January 23, 2009 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

Just had an experience that could have gone awry if not for an empowered customer service rep who took action and turned a negative into something positive by listening to me and having the authority to do the right thing.

For a couple of years I've been enjoying Parallels, the virtual machine to run Windows on Mac. Though I didn't immediately upgrade to 4.0 — since booting into Windows via Boot Camp was meeting my needs at the time — recent client requirements compelled me to leverage my Mac tools and Windows simultaneously making rebooting not a viable option.

Parallels continued emailing finally met my need and it was pretty painless to upgrade rather than move to their competitor VMWare Fusion (and climb a new learning curve to boot) even though I've got some buddies who swear by it and tried to convince me to buy it instead.

Over lunch today I went to the Parallels site, purchased and downloaded the upgrade. Installing it I was asked for my previous version key which I cut-n-pasted from an email. OH NO! It turned out that my previous key was the 3.0 upgrade from 2.0 key…and I needed the original 2.0 key!

After spending a half hour digging through my office closet in search of my original box with the key on the CD jacket, I confirmed my nagging suspicion that I'd tossed it out since I'd written the new key down in my archive as well as emailing it to myself (my way of ensuring it's at my fingertips and safe).

Getting on the phone with customer service licensing, the young woman Amy let me know that I'd need to contact their distribution partner, Nova Development, in order to obtain my original key! Having been through this key dependency problem with Adobe — until they figured out that a successful upgrade requiring a previous key was sufficient anti-piracy measure — I knew I faced nearly an hour of "key chasing" in order to use the product I'd purchased, downloaded and was in the midst of installing.

I asked Amy, "Before we get off the phone, may I rant just a bit?" in my nicest voice, concealing my agitation. Pointing out how Adobe had made a policy change to cease pissing off their customers through this key dependency problem, our conversation eventually got around to her emailing me an original 2.0 key so I could upgrade! Problem solved, customer delighted, and so much so he does a blog post about this atypical-but-very-important service empowerment.

Smart move by Parallels management to not so tightly restrict a licensing rep so s/he can't make a judgement call.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing

An Administration That “Gets It”

January 20, 2009 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

Did you hear we have a new president? (As my kids would say with astonishment, "Dad…that's not even funny! What's wrong with you!?!"). Yeah, I'm feeling optimistic and happy which, while it's my usual mental state anyway, hasn't been the case much lately with our economic situation, wars and such.

Why the optimism? Here's the deal: I've lived through enough presidential elections to be as jaded by the rhetoric as I am by most commercials, ads and PR scrubbed messages. Lots of promise…little delivery. High noise…low signal.

When I wrote, "Lessons from Our First Social Media President," it was clear then that this incoming Administration would possibly fulfill their campaign pledges of transparency, continuing to engage the American people, and bring change to government.

So I was delighted that — moments after becoming president officially — WhiteHouse.gov website came online filled with "Yes…we get it" elements:

A blog with an RSS feed
A Director of New Media, Macon Phillips, who has a Twitter account and is on Facebook (the former is protected and the latter is offline now) (via my buddy, @timelliott)
Use of a Creative Commons license (Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License)
A very clean and user-friendly interface with access to all relevant areas.

I'm dying to know though, will President Obama use the Resolute desk in the oval office or one President Lincoln used? (Though I don't think anything like it remains as I've found nothing online).

Filed Under: Current Affairs

It’s the Value, Stupid

January 14, 2009 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

As social media continues to accelerate, many are discussing the "death of blogging" and the "rise of lifestreaming". Marc Canter has a proposal for a DiSO (Distributed Social Networking) which is well explained here at Read/Write Web.

There is NO question that aggregating all we do online is a worthwhile effort, but I've got a position that is sort of a stunner for a guy like me who supposedly is embracing social media:

I don't care about all of your digital breadcrumbs, even if they're scooped up and put on a plate (i.e., a blog container, a dashboard, whatever)
I don't want to follow your little lifestream with blow-by-blow thoughts, feelings and opinions
No, I really don't want to watch hours upon hours of your real-time video streaming
PLEEZ don't deliver links to awesome lectures, which you've happened to record holding a frickin' Flip Mino like a drunken sailor with palsy
I'm not interested in all of the photos you constantly upload of doorknobs, railings and peeling paint
Your tweets about the weather, the chili you had for lunch, or the "Hey look at me!" self-aggrandizing links to articles about you or the cool names you're dropping, is booorrrrring!

See the two photos above? The late William F. Buckley was a disorganized slob with an office that looked like a hurricane blew through before breakfast. Did he throw every piece of content he possibly could into his TV show Firing Line? Or his magazine the National Review?

No. He edited the enormous tsunami of content that was his life, his genius and that of his thought leading writers into encapsulated chunks of value.

Canadian journalist Josh Freed is so disorganized and has such a chaotic office, that he wrote and produced a documentary film entitled, "My Messy Life". Though he offices in a place that would make an obsessive compulsive hoarder feel like they had hourly maid service, this guy understands that he needs to deliver value in his newspaper stories, and that his film had to have a beginning, middle and an end and probably run for a conventional time for a movie (90 minutes or so) rather than throwing every single thought in there.

As the continued explosion of social media technologies, device types that are getting cheaper and easier to throw up content (get the pun?) online, just remember that it's the value you're delivering that matters. Don't make your friends, family, future employers (or any people you hope will "follow" you) dig through your stacks of crap for hours in order to possibly uncover some nuggets of value.

Put forth some effort to collate, organize, edit and publish value from your crap and we increasingly time-and-attention-poor online participants might be willing to invest our energy in what you're delivering.

Filed Under: Social Media

November 1983 Macintosh Intro

January 5, 2009 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

My 83 year old Dad often tells stories about a mason from Europe, George Dohmeyer, who worked on the house my late grandparents built in 1950. My Dad tells one story about him walking up to the front of the being-built house and asking Mr. Dohmeyer, “Why are you placing that foundation for the steps down so deep?“ He replied, “We’re in Minnesota, Bill, and the freeze-thaw cycles will move and crack these steps some day if I don’t do that, and you could come back here 50 years from now and these steps will not have moved an inch.“

You guessed it probably. Stopping by recently, it was amazing to see that those steps had NOT MOVED AN INCH IN OVER 50 YEARS. I’m telling those stories to my son now so HE understands that “doing it right” and with quality — even if people don’t see the care you’re putting into it — matters.

As a Mac user since I saw Steve Jobs intro the Mac to company personnel in Hawaii in 1983, the essence he’s brought to Apple is the subtlety and nuance of an approach, of design and of quality that means what he has brought to Apple, to PIXAR and undoubtedly to his family and friends, will endure forever.

The Mac, OS X, the tools, and everything else he has wrought have empowered people like me to create businesses (our core company publication is 21 years old thanks to my Mac SE/Laserwriter and Pagemaker) and continue to be able to deliver high value content and communications.

In honor of Steve Job’s letter today (explaining why he won’t be at Macworld) and in honor of tomorrow’s Macworld keynote by Phil Schiller, I bring you two videos from Steve’s intro of the Macintosh to the company in November of 1983….and I was there!

This man’s vision has brought us so much and, I suspect, will bring us much more, starting tomorrow morning.

This was the faux “Dating Game” with Fred Gibbons, Mitch Kapor and Bill Gates. Many don’t remember Fred, CEO of Software Publishing, but the other two were an important duo supporting this new computer.

Filed Under: Computing