T-Mobile & AT&T! Oops…just kidding around about the network thing, honest!
Apple has certainly inspired a lot of imitators. Among them a series of ads in the "I'm a Mac / You're a PC" vein basically insulting AT&T's network coverage. Oops. And worst of all, they can't even pull the ads - once its out there on the Net it never goes away. Hey, was that Verizon smirking in the background...?
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- Posted Rita McGrath on March 20, 2011
The paradox of stability admidst change
In a thought-provoking blog post, John Hagel observes that stability is not getting its fair share of press, as well all run around talking about how rapidly things are changing in the age of the Internet. I think he makes a good point - in life, many things that are true and good require stability and time to nourish and focus. Becoming expert at anything, as Malcolm Gladwell famously found, requires 10,000 hours of stable practice time. Buiding trusting relationships requires repeated interactions. Mastering a profession requires reference to the core body of work that represents collective learning. And so on.
People, while being remarkably adaptable, also crave some certainty. That's one of the reasons that I always encourage leaders in a rapidly evolving situation to take some of the burden of uncertainty off people's backs by helping them create a set of operating assumptions that everyone can agree to. "Assume it won't need attention for a week" liberates people to take "it" off their do list and get on with something else.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 19, 2011
When life hands you lemons…AOL Style
What can you say about a 25-year-old web portal that has lost its grip on the public imagination? I refer of course to AOL, which for many of us was our first introduction to the joys of the Internet. It's iconic "you've got mail" tag line even became a well known movie!
I still log on to my aol account every now and then, and had to smile, darkly, at one of their latest promotions. They have "freed up" millions of usernames. That is marketing speak for millions of people dropping their service. The good news for you, oh prospective customer, is that the dream username you always wanted but that was taken by someone else may actually now be available!
Oh well, I guess if you have reversals you might as well try to make the most of it.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on December 21, 2010
The corruption of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
By now, most people are familiar with Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk business. Here's how it works: if you have a job that needs to be done that really requires a person to do it, you can post the task and the price you're willing to pay to have it done on Amazon's marketplace. The jobs are called HIT's or Human Intelligence Task. For example, one posted right now asks workers to find the names and email addresses of PTA Board members for a number of different school boards. They pay is nothing to write home about, but for folks who have limited time or mobility or who are in between other gigs, it's a way to earn a little cash. For those sponsoring HIT's, it's a way to get little jobs done without taking on a fixed cost burden or burning through a full-time employee's time.
But all is not well in this marketplace, according to research conducted by Panos Ipeirotis and his students at the Stern School of Business in New York. Ipeirotis has conducted a systematic analysis of the Mechanical Turk system and came to a pretty shocking conclusion: at least 40.92% (he's a computer scientist, of course we have double-digits!) are spam! Among the things he had his own cadre of HIT workers do was classify as spam tasks that fell into the following categories:
In other words, what the workers are being asked to do is "fake" social interactions, social media or interest in whatever the poster is flogging. I found that pretty shocking. It is also a cautionary warning for those who depend on Internet statistics to do things like price ads, assess the interest of web readers, determine site attractiveness and so on. And the insidious thing is that these are real people doing these things, so a lot of the automated spam-preventers (such as captchas) won't pick up the spammy nature of their activities.
Very creative, if a tad creepy.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on December 21, 2010
Ghost cities of China - some amazing pictures
Next to the Federal Reserve, China holds most of America's debt. A recent National Public Radio broadcast said that China was acting like "the big man on campus" (a more polite radio-friendly term than I imagine the correspondent would use in person!). China manufactures an enormous number of products for American companies - all that is well known. Somewhat less well known, but not entirely unfamiliar is the risk of a real estate bubble in China as apartments in places like Shanghai are going for New York City style prices.
What I didn't know and what blew me away is that there are purportedly dozens of ghost cities that have been built by the government, but in which nobody actually lives. If you click on the link, it will take you to actual photographs of these places - the scale of it is quite amazing and alarming!
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- Posted Rita McGrath on December 21, 2010
