The problem is …

The problem is that Microsoft isn’t Apple, and Microsoft’s customers aren’t Apple’s customers. They tried selling a more Apple-like attitude to their customers, most of whom don’t want and won’t tolerate an Apple-like attitude. That’s why they’re not Apple customers.

Microsoft customers defeat Microsoft – Marco Arment

For software co…

For software companies, one of the perils of success is becoming shackled to your customers; the more users you have, the harder it is to innovate, because most will be averse to any change. (Microsoft has suffered a version of this.) By filtering its innovations into new apps that lack an established user base, engineers and designers can take creative leaps that may not have worked if they’d simply been adding features to Facebook’s primary app.

The future of Facebook may not say “Facebook” – Farhad Manjoo

The Mega Trends

Headlines with questions?

Betteridge’s law of headlines (Davis’ law or the journalistic principle)

If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no.’ Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’. 

Marr, Andrew (2004). My Trade: a short history of British journalism.

Source – Wikipedia

Theory of Diffusion of Innovation

The 1-9-90 rule of online participation

“As many of you may already know, there is this thing called a 1-9-90 rule of online participation. In any given online community, about 1% of the participants produce most of the content, another 9% participate regularly by editing (e.g., on a wiki), commenting (on blogs and articles), occasionally producing new content (in forums, etc), and the remaining 90% are ‘lurkers’ who do not publicly participate but only read (though these days, many of them participate a little more publicly, if not creatively, by “Liking”, tweeting, and otherwise sharing the content in ways that are visible to others, but without adding any thoughts of their own).”

“Some of those 9% of readers, instead of commenting on the post (at least a brief “Nice post, thank you”) are now sharing the link elsewhere and perhaps discussing it elsewhere, without the author of the original article ever being able to see that discussion. […] most of the good, nice, constructive commenters may have gone silent and taken their discussions of your blog elsewhere, but the remaining few commenters are essentially trolls.”

Source – Commenting threads: good, bad, or not at all, Bora Zivkovic

From a Mission to a Mantra

Into a Mobile World

Making money will now depend on how deftly tech companies can track their users from their desktop computers to the phones in their palms and ultimately to the stores, cinemas and pizzerias where they spend their money. It will also depend on how consumers — and government regulators — will react to having every move monitored.
The amount of time people spend on their phones surfing the Web, using apps, playing games and listening to music has more than doubled in the last two years, to 82 minutes a day, according to eMarketer; the time spent online on computers will grow just 3.6 percent this year.
Sources

‘Dark Social’

The sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the ‘social’ iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it’s easy to measure. But most sharing is done via dark social means like email and IM that are difficult to measure.

According to new data on many media sites, 69% of social referrals came from dark social. 20% came from Facebook.

Facebook and Twitter do shift the paradigm from private sharing to public publishing. They structure, archive, and monetize your publications.

SourceDark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong, Alexis C. Madrigal

What we really want