I didn’t intend to write consecutive blogs about Apple, but with all the rethinking going on over there, it’s hard to resist.  This time I am focused on “how” they ensure application safety on their mobile devices and why that’s very high on the list of what customers like me value.

Worth noting at this point is that I bought an iPad for my son and we both love it.  It makes my iPhone seem so tiny and much less useful.

But despite the early huge success of the iPad, Apple is now in a very dangerous dance, no matter what their real motivations are.

Last week Apple announced that they are tightening their already firm grip on the applications that run on the iPhone and the other mobile devices.  Apple is requiring people to develop the applications using their programming tools, appearing to be a competitive  move against Adobe Systems who just announced a new set of developer tools on April 12 (yesterday).  Beyond this, developers can no longer use outside services to measure how their applications are performing.

There is a long list of companies that have failed by keeping a product in a proprietary environment, Sony’s BetaMax being sort of the poster child example of that, ceding almost overnight the home video market at the time to a lesser format, VHS.

But I can’t help but think that Apple’s tight-fisted control isn’t just about market share.  Many of us have had bad experiences on the social networking site, Facebook, for the very reason that Facebook had no controls to speak of over what kind of apps were accessible on Facebook and as a result a lot of us got viruses downloading apps, and I for one will never again download an application on Facebook.   On the internet, trust is king.

Whether Apple is too restrictive right now is something I can’t judge, but I do think they have to have enough controls in place so that people don’t have the same experience with their products.  Right now I totally trust Apple, I buy books and applications from their online store often.  But the first time my credit card data is compromised via an Apple-related application, it will be the last, and I expect I am not the only one who feels that way.

I have blogged before about trust and security and how some companies strike the wrong balance between trust and security and what their customers value  (like Qwest foolishly preventing me from paying my phone bill online because I couldn’t remember my password), but this is different and for me at least, I think the controls do have to be pretty tight.  The other side of the coin is that if Apple didn’t do this, given the thousands of applications being developed, think of how many quality control people they would have to hire to verify the apps that get done?  Controlling the tools, testing, and reporting platform may seem onerous, but I would like to hear a better alternative that works for Apple and doesn’t risk losing customer trust.

So bravo to Apple for keeping things safe for us (and keeping our trust intact), but don’t choke the development community to death.  Please.

-Ric

It’s common for me to read an article and think there is a huge question needs to be asked that is the biggest part of the story, and that question goes unasked.

It was no exception when I read Brad Stone’s article Apple Edges Into Selling Of App Ads today in The New York Times.  The article explained that Apple is now making it easy for application developers to serve up ads through the applications they develop.  The message is that this is a way to keep the price of applications low while giving a new source of revenue to the developers.  OK, I get that.

The big question that wasn’t asked was who owns the data?

It’s no secret that the holy grail of marketing is to know more about your customer and what will cause them to buy your products and services.  That’s the entire business model of Alice.com, that’s why MasterCard has set up the MasterCard Marketplace.  At breakneck speed we are getting to the world depicted in the movie We Live In Public, where our data about who we are and what we buy and don’t buy is information we don’t own, but someone does – and it’s worth a lot of money.

The organization that can be the most effective at sitting between the marketer and the consumer, is able to collect all of that information and then sell it back to the marketers – which is HUGE.  There isn’t just going to be one company that does this, but given their current position, Apple is in a really good place to be an 800 pound gorilla in this space.  But it’s not clear to me that Apple owns the data.  AT&T is the only carrier (at the moment) for the iPhone – do they own the data?  Do they share it with Apple?  Does Apple’s licensing agreement with the end users allow them to sell the data?

To be clear, marketers in most case don’t care about your name, they just want age, gender and ZIP code.  People who are getting lathered up about privacy issues here need to switch to decaf and relax.

This data is not only the holy grail of marketing, but it’s going to transform “how” business is done because it’s, for all practical purposes, a net new asset in the world of commerce, and it will change prices which will make things more accessible to people and it will ripple through lots and lots of industries in ways we can’t (or I can’t) yet imagine. It’s the same reason I have said Amazon should buy Netflix – because overnight they get an engine that is great about soliciting customer feedback about what customers like and don’t like, which then makes them much smarter about recommending things (which Amazon is currently cartoonishly bad at – they could be making so much more money and building so much more customer loyalty it’s numbing).  My sense is that is what MasterCard is trying to do, my hope is that as they get “smarter” about what we want to buy, they will ask for our input as well.  The big thing about Amazon and Marketplace that is different from Netflix is that I will often buy things like gifts for other people, and those kinds of things should be mapped into my preferences profile differently from the things I buy for myself and unless I say it’s a gift they have no way of knowing that.

Anyway – this is a HUGE change in business and I continue to watch it with great interest – still mostly cheering for alice.com.

-Ric

I have written before about how Facebook has changed the definition of the word “friend”, I think the word “local” has also changed, but somewhat surprisingly not because of the internet.

The article In Florida, Seafood Becomes Less Local, by Damien Cave covers a lot of interesting ground about the Florida fisheries industry.  One of the most basic points Cave makes is that when restaurants describe the fish as “local” they just mean that it came from a local fish distributor, while it may have come from half way around the world, and that some people think it’s misleading to call it local.

I think that may have been a valid objection ten or twenty years ago, but with the ability to ship something using a service like FedEx (which is how most fish travels these days), it’s entirely possible that the tilapia that has been flown in from Madagascar is fresher than the Atlantic salmon on the Florida menu.  In that sense, it really doesn’t matter how “local” the fish is if your goal is freshness.  In many ways the internet has made the word local less meaningful, but in the case of food, transportation has significantly reduced the meaning.  Obviously some things, like a cup of coffee and a car wash will always have a local element, but the list of things that don’t matter, or matter less, continues to grow, from banking to movie rental, to food.  That’s the reality.

Having said that, as irrelevant as “local” has become in the traditional sense, it is starting to take on more meaning in a different sense.  A lot has been written about what some people call “food miles” – that is how many miles the food has traveled to get on your plate, but they are talking about it not because of anything to do with freshness, the focus is on the environmental impact of transporting goods long distances.  The carbon footprint of the tilapia, if you will, compared with that of the Atlantic salmon mentioned above.

The assumption is that the fewer “food miles” the food has, the more “local” it is, the better it is for the environment.    There are well documented arguments that dismantle the the validity of that point, so I am going to leave that one alone today.  I just find it interesting to see such simple words like “friend” and “local” meaning such different things from when I was a little kid.  I can’t help but wonder what’s next?

-Ric

When a company does something silly, I sometimes try to avoid naming names, but not this time.  Qwest, the phone company. Friday I was paying my bill online and it took a really long time because I had forgotten the password for my online Qwest account, and they don’t have the option many organizations have where they will just email you your password or reset it and send you a new one.  When you don’t know your password, Qwest needs more information to verify you are who you say you are.  At first, I was thinking Qwest was really looking out for me in terms of security and privacy and going to great lengths to protect me.

Then it hit me.

All I wanted to do was give them my credit card number to pay my bill.

If someone else wants to pay my bill for me, I don’t want anything to stop them – leave the door open and unlocked, as it were.

It struck me that there is so much noise about internet security and privacy, that it seems some people assume that the more secure something is ,the better, no matter what the situation.  Not so.

Somewhat along the lines of the notion that the punishment should fit the crime, people need to take a step back and look at what is going on and then assess the level of security or authentication that is required for the action the person wants to perform.  An example I often use (that has nothing to do with the internet in this case) is restaurant reservations.  The goal of the restaurant reservation is to secure a table for you at the time you want.  In reality, the restaurant doesn’t care what your name is, but that turns out to be a decent placeholder for attaching reservations to different people.  In my case, my last name is Merrifield, and 100% of the time when I reserve by phone, I have to spell my name even though I realize the restaurant doesn’t really care who I am. It’s not like they are going to check for ID when I arrive.  So I started to make reservations under a simpler name, one that everyone knows how to spell – French.  That’s right, I make my reservations under the name Ric French It works for everyone and saves time, and if they put a “k” on Ric, I don’t know or care.

In the case of Qwest, I love that they protect some of my information, but if all I want to do is pay for something, there shouldn’t be any resistance.  Accessing any information about my account is a very different story.  Companies really need to look at “what” they are doing before they throw the kitchen sink at “how” they authenticate people and enforce security.

-Ric

In the past several weeks I have seen ads on TV, and gotten a lot of mail telling me that the US census is happening and that it’s against the law to not participate.  My first reaction was to wonder how massive the budget is for this in a recession, then I wondered why they can’t use data from sources like the Internal Revenue Service (it’s also illegal not to file tax returns and people know that).  But the bigger issue in the year 2010 is that for at least the last five years, and maybe ten now, we have been inundated with information about the importance of maintaining privacy about our information, and that we need to “get” something in return for “giving” information.   So asking us to give information to the not-so-trusted government?  Back in the 20th century people had a very different sense of privacy (and duty to country), and I am not surprised people willingly, trustingly, provided this information.

Like it or not, that is the current culture and I really don’t see the US census people liking the results they are going to get.  It’s not really very different from the manufacturers that have been trying to get information about us since the beginning of mass market retail, and until very recently they had next to nothing.

Over two years ago, Louise Story wrote this super piece in The New York Times explaining that the people who sell us the things that we buy have really crummy information about exactly who is buying it, and which of their advertising efforts cause us to buy.  All they really need is basic demographic data, age, gender, geography, means, that sort of thing.  They don’t care what my name is, which is what alice.com has figured out (I blogged about alice.com recently) and alice.com has a brilliant model for collecting (and selling) that prized information.

Today there was this interesting article in the paper by Stephanie Rosenbloom talking about how stores are using various methods to film customers in their stores to watch behaviors and make adjustments where appropriate – so if for example, they see several people having a hard time reaching a specific product, they figure out how to make it easier to reach.   My bet is that if you speed up the film a bit, you could watch the flow of traffic like a river and see where the jams are, not really having to pay much attention to any one person (for that objective). They mention a company called Envirosell that is apparently the real trailblazer in helping organizations do this.  There was some reference to this being an invasion of privacy and that in the not-too-distant future they will have face recognition software to know who we are, but the stores don’t care what our names are in mass market selling – they just want the same demographic data that alice.com is collecting online.

The US government needs to treat us like a customer if they want information from us, and they should take a look at “how” smart companies collect information about their mass market customers.  Welcome to the 21st century and welcome to the “how” trap that I talk about in the pages of the book Rethink.

-Ric

One of the most interesting things that has happened with the internet is some of the most basic assumptions about businesses and customers have been turned on their ear.  Black becomes white.  An example I have blogged about before is that Netflix used to be seen as one of the biggest competitors of film festivals like the Seattle International Film Festival, and today they can be one of their most powerful partners.  It’s not always easy to know when these “flips” happen, but they are happening with increasing frequency and I think it’s really important for organizations to frequently test there core assumptions.  I was reminded of this phenomenon earlier today.

There was an interesting article in The New York Times this morning that talked about a drug called Xiaflex, “A Drug’s Delayed Triumph” by Andrew Pollack.  Xiaflex is one of those drugs that had been around for decades but never got a foothold until now.  Why? For the simple reason that people didn’t know that it cured Dupuytren’s contracture, which I learned this morning is a surprisingly common condition where a person cannot straighten one or more of their fingers – Ronald Reagan was a famous victim of this.  It’s not such an unusual situation that a drug is invented for one purpose but it ends up solving a very different problem.  The drug that solved “Involuntary Leg Syndrome” was designed for a very different purpose, and it was only in clinical trials that they noticed that it did wonders for what is also a surprisingly common affliction.  Essentially the drug makers learn “what” the drug does in trials and in the case of Xiaflex, it took decades to figure it out.

But that’s not what really got my attention.

What I found fascinating is that Xiaflex is based on something that most of us would want to run away from – gangrene.

Yes, that gangrene.

As the article describes, gangrene is really effective at breaking down human tissue which is usually a bad thing, but in the case of Dupuytren’s contracture, that’s exactly what is needed to cure this disease (in small doses).  A clear understanding of “what” was needed to cure Dupuytren’s contracture made it painfully obvious that Xiaflex is the right solution.  It’s not the first time a “disease” that we fear has become something we (or some) intentionally put in their bodies – botox is based on none other than botulism, another deadly disease in the wrong dosage.

My message is pretty simple, which when you have a “what” that you need to solve, don’t be surprised to find the solution from something that might have seemed like a “disease” yesterday.  That’s the world we live in today.

-Ric