Funny how some companies apply the proverb “under promise, over deliver” completely backward.

Sales people make dubious promises to clients about some wonderfull technology that doesn’t exist. R&D has to step up, but under impossible constraints and schedule. The clients are not happy with what they see.

And everyone ends up really bummed.

Quick! Let’s start the cycle again!

Wow, long time without a post! I need to get more serious about posting frequency.

So here I am, back from a road trip across California, with yet another example of dusty business models that make you want to shake your head. In a little more than two weeks, I’ve seen more than a dozen hotels, hostels and motels. In each and everyone of them, my friend Steven tried to access the Internet through WiFi, and,  finding myself without anything better to do at those times, I started noticing the following trend: Full fledged hotels want to make you pay for WiFi access, while youth hostels and model don’t. Without any kind of insider information, I can only guess how this came:

When the new and expensive wireless technology became available, large hotels were the only/first ones able to afford it. Smelling the possibility of adding value to their customers’ experience, they proposed a service that clients liked and were glad to pay for.

Fast forward for couple of years to a world were wireless Internet technology is much more affordable. Smaller businesses (motels, youth hostels), in an effort to stand out, decided to offer the very same service, except for free. Now that it cost almost nothing, it wouldn’t impede their margin much, and would make for a nice gesture for their clients; after all, nobody likes to stay away from news and mail, nowadays. And sitting all the way across the ring are the hotels, used to take that money from their customers, who still don’t see why it would ever change.

Too bad for them of course, as they are now comparatively under-serving their customers. All of this just because they were busy looking the other way (voluntarily or otherwise) while free internet access became the norm.

Of course not. But that’s what lobbyists and lawmakers around the world are trying to shove down our throats with blind propaganda and obsolete moves.

Question: at a time when music was only performed by live bands, what kind of reception do you think phonographs received? “People are going to play the same music over and over! We live musician always improvise a little bit and will be out of business! It’s going to kill music!” It didn’t.

Fast forward to the invention of the radio. I’m sure the advent of a box that could broadcast music all over the world for no additional cost and without the intervention of an artist generated an outcry. And when audio cassettes came up, the industry whined that it helped hordes of shameless pirates record music, killing it as a result. It didn’t.

It’s time people learned not to listen to those alarmist cry babies. Of course they aren’t going to cheer the arrival of this (r)evolution: during a transition, only the smartest from the “before” will manage to make a buck in the “after”. Just remember that it doesn’t matter: by using their reasoning (change = bad), we wouldn’t have what we have – and love.

Music will always be alive and well; so will be the musicians. The people in the middle, peddling the stuff at a steep price, will have to adapt or disappear – it’s the golden rule of both evolution and business.

I thought I’d take a minute out of my sitting and watching the recording industry drown itself to talk about a band doing the right thing to stand out. As music is a pretty subjective topic, I’ll do so in the perspective of marketing only, even though you gotta love what they’re doing.

TRV$ DJ-AM is a duo with Travis Barker, drummer, and DJ-AM, well, DJ. Travis Barker is a world-renowned drummer who happens to be at the center of a polemic on whether he f*cking s*cks at drums or if he is the Drum God. I keep explaining naysayers that nobody outside the relatively small cast of drummers really cares whether he can beat faster or better than others (whatever that means), and that he’s appreciated for his style and musical choices, but this has so far fallen on deaf hears. Anyway.

Because both of them are pretty famous, they probably could have sold this music, but chose instead to put their whole mixtape for download on their website. Since I heard it from the first time, I’ve been addicted. To support them further, I decided a week ago to buy a T-Shirt from them. But the box I received yesterday just so happened to be filled with stickers and a CD of their mixtape.

“Under-promise and over-deliver” is a golden rule of business. Here, by sending me substantially more than what I asked (and payed) for, the band exceeded my expectations. Before that, I had gone around and mention this band quite a lot, but only to those I usually talk music with. But now the band’s given me another reason to tell friends about them: “Did you know that when you order a just a T-shirt, they send you their mixtape AND 12 stickers in various sizes?”

Additionally, what comes on top of my order are not products that are just for me to enjoy. Both the stickers and the CD help me advertise the band: stickers I’m going to stick all around, and as I already have the music, I’m going pass the CD to people who might not be able to download it from Net. Seth Godin did something similar with his latest book, Tribes: I pre-ordered the book but received two copies. This kind of initiative delivers a powerful message: “You bought a T-Shirt from us / preordered my book,  so I’ve identified you as a fan. Now here’s your mission: spread the word”.

And spread the word I will.

Money corrupts everything.

Even though I don’t consider myself an idealist, it’s not often you’ll hear me bitch about corporate greed and corrupt politics. In the past few months, however, my faith in the governing institutions has taken a toll. In a previous post, I mentioned how my country’s institutions were pissed away; I realize my point might not have been very clear for the people outside of France. Here is some explaining about that bill that passed on May 12, 2009.

Hadopi is a french three strike copyright law bill that will make ISP responsible for spying on their clients to pick out downloaders of copyrighted media. After 2 warnings, their internet connection will be discontinued. Similar bills have been abandoned (at least in the near future) in New Zealand, Germany and the UK . Even in the US, homeland of the all-powerful and vindictive RIAA and MPAA, it seems no-one dares to promote such an idea.

Opposition parties across the world have done their job, pointing out the absurdity of such an overkill law. Detractors will be quick to highlight consequences such as the violation of privacy, the violation of the presumption of innocence (interestingly coupled with the enormous probability of false positives) and finally the privilege of being penalized twice (your Internet access is discontinued AND you keep on paying your subscription); packing so much anti-constitutional elements in a single law certainly commands respect. But  the how is not as striking as the why.

The why is the shrinking of the middlemen’s territories in the media industry. Retailers and music majors used to be necessary middlemen: one was the only production and marketing channel artists had, the other their only distribution channel. Times were good. They liked it. But the feathers of their business models got ruffled by the advent of the Internet. Indeed, when a product can be duplicated ad infinitum at no cost, it doesn’t sit well with the usual Scarcity Law of Economics. Same with the fact that anybody (individuals) can put up websites,  blogs,  videos and whatnot. The only people to refuse to acknowledge this change (because I can’t bring myself to think they’re not seeing it) are of course the people who get wealthier by maintaining the status quo: if things change, they’ll have to adapt. Adaptation costs money and efforts, and large corporations don’t like spending either.

Let’s just have a look at the defenders of the current state of affair:

• retailers and majors who designed the system to be their Cornucopia,
• artists that don’t want to look for alternate ways of making profit,
• politicians that don’t understand what they have on their hands, but want control anyway.

These people are standing in the way of evolution in the name of greed, fear and lust for control. The only thing I wish for is for them to get crushed by it.

I hate to use such black-and-white phrasing, but are these motives pure and good? Are governments supposed to get us down this road? And who’s going to prevail in the long run? I ‘m not worried, I know who will, but what makes me nauseous is to see an entire government hell bent on working against its own people, and collaborating on a masquerade that turns artists against their own fans.

Even worse, this bill has disastrous consequences outside the entertainment business. By criminalizing an entire segment of the population, the government is pushing everyone toward systematic anonymisation and encryption of their data, which benefits regular criminals all around.

Money impairs judgment.

As a side-note to my previous post on Seth Goding’s Tribes, here are two stories:

The first one occurred when a colleague of mine went to his manager to pitch an idea for iPhone development. As the conversation went on, the manager tried to convince him that the AppStore wasn’t such an original concept and that software hadn’t really changed in the last 30 years he’d been in the business.

If you’re not exited about new developments, how do you expect to thrive on them?

And even if you’re self-assured enough to think there’s nothing tangible where everyone else does, it doesn’t matter, go with the flow! If thinking there’s change in the air is enough for people to modify their behavior, then there’s business to be made! Don’t just stand in the corner and sulk!

The other story is actually nothing but a quote:

I prefer to do something ugly with our own tools rather than do something beautiful with third party software.

If that’s the kind of commitment to quality you have, what are you doing in the business? The answer? He’s acting like a virus, trying to spread around just for the sake of spreading.

TED really is an invaluable resource. Any given day, there’s something interesting to discover. Of course, I can’t post here every time this occurs, but I’ll have to make an exception this time: Seth Godin talks to us about Tribes and why they matter. I suggest you read his book to find out much more, but if you want to have an idea of what it is first, go check the TED video.

You know when you sort of understand what’s around you, but that it all gets clearer with a simple nudge? That’s how this book works. The way Seth talks about managers (vs Leaders), it’s like he’s been working for my company: managers are here to handle processes that are already in place, and not to innovate. Most of them will tell you how things are still the same they were before. They’ll actively fight change to justify their paycheck.

But Seth hasn’t been working for my company. He just picked up on an universal trend that needs to go away, and he has a plan to make it go away. How not to take everything he says for granted when his views are so dead on?

Come on, do youself a favor and visit Seth’s blog and TED on a regular basis.

While witnessing in horror my country’s institutions being pissed away for the benefit of middlemen that are no longer useful in their current form, I’ve been actively looking for alternate business models they could be using. My research led me to a blog I’ve been following on and off for some time. Guess I was off at the wrong time: Mike Masnick of techdirt wrote a very interesting series of posts on the Economics of  Free (in 2006!). While it takes some time to get around all the related posts, it’s definitely worth it: putting into motion concepts such as the Long Tail or the Economics of Abundance (both of which originated from Chris Anderson), he makes a great case for changing the old ways of the entertainment industry.

When looking at the movie industry, Mike mentions in his post The Answer To The $200 Million Movie Question that blockbusters may very well be a thing of the past. While they’ll probably be around for quite some time,  it’s pretty clear fewer people will be likely to invest big bucks in them: this will result in more optimized costs (how many millions does an actor need to do his job?) and a lot less blockbusters. One could hope for an increase in quality. What could also happen, though, is that studios will get even more risk-averse and will push for the most average, blandest movie experience ever. Which would eventually spiral down to the disappearance of said blockbusters. Well, can’t say I’ll miss them much.

By going further on the tangential topic of super-stardom, I came to realize how un-democratic this status really is. After all, like in any election, you only get to pick amongst the list of candidates that was put together by somebody else. With everyone and their dog having the tools to put their names and faces out there, the number of “stars” will naturally increase. This explosion of distribution channels, however, will fragment people’s attention: if they only keep tabs on the channels that are of interest to them, the spread of everyone’s output is reduced, and with it the likeliness of the old, global stardom status. Just food for thoughts.

Anyway, enough said, go read everything he’s written, you won’t regret it!

How often do you hear someone say “it only takes an idea”?

It doesn’t. Everybody has good ideas, and it’s not everybody that’s successful and rich and famous.

What it takes is two things:

• The balls to get it started,
• The stomach to keep it going.

Whether it’s about starting a company, giving legs to a project or any kind of other endeavor, the idea is only the beginning.