Accidentally in Code

Author: Cate

  • Why Not Fix Your Broken Business Model?

    Been reading a lot about how the music industry and the TV and movie industry are falling down, and they all blame “pirates” (great article on how stupid and offensive a label that is given the Somali pirates here). I also recently finished reading Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World and one of the things he talks about is that people of my generation (the “Net Generation”) don’t see “piracy” as stealing.

    I used Napster, back in the day, but since it shut down I stopped and I don’t “pirate” music anymore. I also buy far fewer CDs. Connected? I think so, I don’t hear as much random music as I used to, when if I downloaded a song and loved it I’d go out and buy the CD. So I wasn’t at all surprised to read this – pirates buy more music, what a shocker.  As my friend Dig pointed out, when I linked him to this article (got to love Twitter) “Yes, more importantly though they go to more gigs, buy more merchandise and tell more friends – and the labels are bypassed.”

    And now the TV and Film industry are appealing for government help. And I find it frustrating to read this stuff because it’s like – get with the program. Finally, I’m reading in the news the things that my friends and I have said for years.

    Suing your customers is not a business model – it’s at best a short term fix and invariably a PR disaster.

    In Grown Up Digital he talks about the way “our” generation consumes media, and whilst I don’t agree with everything he says on this – I think he’s right on.
    1. We want to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it: i.e. we don’t want our schedule dictated by the TV listings. I remember people saying stuff like, “Oh I can’t go out on Thursdays <insert TV show here> is on”. But why do we need to live like that now?
    2. We ignore adverts: This has two parts. Firstly, we don’t trust advertising and tend to buy things on the basis of recommendations from friends. And, what’s more, because we tend to multitask whilst watching TV, when the ads are on we’re probably on Facebook.
    So obviously this is driving us to the internet. If you’ve tried to watch TV in the US it’s something like 50% adverts. Which is kinda nuts. But the internet is lower quality. I was streaming Sex and the City online, and I liked it enough and got fed up enough not being able to find episodes and the fuzzy quality I bought the box set. Because here’s the thing, and I think the “pirates buy more music” thing illustrates this, it’s not that we want to watch TV shows and movies illegally, or download music illegally – most of us at least would sooner watch or listen to the proper, higher quality, properly labelled versions. There’s just some questions that need to be answered first.
    1. Why is it harder to watch movies legally? If I’m under 18 and don’t have a credit card… what are my options exactly?
    2. Why do I have to pay for the song before I listen to it. What if I don’t like it? No, a 30 second clip is not enough to make that decision.
    3. Why is it just as expensive to rent a movie, or buy a song, on iTunes as it is to buy it on physical media? Storage and distribution costs have been dramatically reduced, but why is none of that passed on to me the customer?
    4. And having paid for a movie or a TV show or an mp3… why is it packed full of DRM?

    There’s this graph in economics. For most things (normal goods), as price goes down demand goes up. If the cost is zero, of course demand goes sky high. But the cost of illegal downloading isn’t quite zero because of other “costs” – it’s a hassle, legally questionable, and you don’t always know what you’re getting. Streaming a movie only for it to cut out near the end ‘cos you don’t have a subscription to the site hosting it or whatever is annoying.

    However because the monetary cost of downloading is zero, it’s not realistic to say that because 90% of downloads are illegal if people were paying for that you’d be making 10x as much money. If there was no illegal downloading, some of those downloads would be paid for but some would just never happen, no matter how cheap the download was because of the transaction overhead (the act of deciding whether something is worth paying anything for, period. Clay Shirky has some good articles about that regarding micropayments).

    In fact I don’t know why I’ve written this because I have very little to add to the argument. What it comes down to is pretty much what Shirky said when Napster was taken down and sadly it doesn’t seem like anything much has changed since then.

    It’s very hard to explain to businesses that have for years been able to charge high margins for distributing intellectual property in a physical format that the digital world is different, but that doesn’t make it any less true. If the record labels really want to keep their customers from going completely AWOL, they will use this ruling to negotiate a deal with Napster on their own terms.

    In all likelihood, though, the record executives will believe what so many others used to believe: The Internet may have disrupted other business models, but we are uniquely capable of holding back the tide. As Rocky the Flying Squirrel put it so eloquently, “That trick never works.”

  • If You Can’t Find It, You Can’t Buy It

    Recently, I tried to pay my Rogers (Canada) bill online. Considering that you’re trying to give them money they really make it very difficult for you. Eventually I managed to set up an e-billing account for my banking. Linking this to Rogers for some reason necessitated downloading Firefox, as it does not support Safari (this makes me hopping mad; I have Flock on my mini, but don’t see the need to have two browsers on my Air). Anyway, having set all this up I discovered it’s only helpful from next month. I could scream. The problem of what to do this month is on-going.

    My modem (provided by Rogers), when properly secured, is also incompatible with my iTouch and Wii. I would call them, but I’ve already lost the will to live. Maybe tomorrow.

    In classes on Usability and E-commerce, we learn about this principle that if people can’t find something they can’t buy it. Usability is not just good practise for E-commerce – it’s essential to support the business model.

    However apparently it’s not essential for banks or bill payment. When they cut off your phone I doubt “but I couldn’t find my bill” will be considered a legitimate excuse. By this point, you’ve committed to the service and you can bank at a branch or an ATM, and pay your bill at the post office or by credit card (admittedly both these options are harder when the busses are on strike and your credit card is British). So it seems the usability of the site doesn’t matter so much.

    I really disagree. I’ve banked online using 2 British banks, 1 Canadian, and 1 US. They are, with the exception of HSBC UK, some of the worst company sites I’ve had the misfortune to come across. HSBC is no paragon, mind. They have a slightly bizarre security system where attempting to log-on twice in the same browser (so without “quitting” Safari – closing the window and then, later opening another one is inadequate) locks you out. Fair enough, perhaps, but to discover this you have to phone them – which is just a pain.

    And all this is so stupid. Encouraging your customers to pay their bills online and transfer money directly has got to be cheaper. Every time they have to call if costs the customer in time (and possibly money), the company, in money and also the intangible costs associated with annoying the hell out of your customer. We’re in the midst of a recession, if there was ever a time to try and reduce overhead it’s now. Ironically that might just be by shelling out the cash to conduct a thorough usability evaluation and redesign of these websites.

    Will it happen though? I’m sceptical. It’s hard to switch banks, and I would be with an alternative phone company, only they had the even bigger drawback – despite two attempts and numerous phone calls they never got as far as connecting my phone.

  • Average Users

    Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “average user”. Who are they? What do they use their computer for? What do they know? And – I think this is the most interesting question: How much do they care about the things we [programmers] spend all our time on?

    I recently wrote a paper about Microsoft’s latest Vista operating system. Why did people hate it so much? Why was take-up so low? How much of this was due to usability? I found there were usability issues, but there were also improvements in usability. By the end of the three months I spent intermittently reading and writing about this, I’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t so much a usability issue; more of an absence of a great leap forward.

    When I presented this paper in class, we talked a lot about the average user. Do they know what the operating system does? Crucially – do they care? We think of the operating system as many things, but the most important thing to us is probably the kernel. Our average user is probably more concerned with the graphical user interface and file organization. Our perception is so dramatically different… it will take a lot of work to bridge the gap.

    During my undergraduate degree, a guy in my class once held up MySpace as a reason why regular people shouldn’t be allowed to design webpages. I disagree with this. No doubt there are horrendous looking web pages out there, but the internet is a meritocracy. Badly designed pages with poor content will get few hits. The most popular designed web pages are well designed and functional. Even Facebook. Isn’t this the power of web 2.0? The computer is now not just a communication tool but an interaction tool. Maybe that’s why our average user loves it.

    I don’t think the computer revolution is over, but it will take progressively more to impress users. Their expectations are higher, but they are not programmers; they do not have any understanding of what goes into the applications they now spend an ever-increasing amount of their time using. If we are artists, they do not understand our artistic process. If we are engineers, we may need to accept that people expect a working system as a minimum, and are not tolerant of failure. Whatever, we need to know who our average user is. Perhaps that is where Microsoft went wrong with Vista.

  • Greetings, World 2.0

    So, I was talking to my supervisor the other day about what I’m reading for my research, and he told me that I should be focusing on academic papers, because blogs, newspapers, and books aren’t as reliable a source. And he’s right, I can’t just cite The Economist, and The Guardian and the Bloggers Blog and have that be my thesis.

    However… as a Computer Scientist I have to say – it’s really cool to read about the kind of things I’m working on in these places. If I told you what I did for my undergraduate thesis, even if you’re in CS too… your eyes would likely glaze over. And that’s OK – mine did too at times. But to be working on something current, something now… working on the things that everyone I know interacts with every day? That’s really pretty exciting to me.

    I’m looking at Web 2.0, Usability and other fun things. At the moment, my focus is on Twitter. More soon!