Facebook is bad for you.  It just is. You know it is.   I’m not saying you shouldn’t use it.  We all do things that are bad for us and in moderation that’s ok.  But don’t kid yourself.  It’s bad for you. 

Despite what this study says…

Among the findings of a phone survey of 2,255 American adults conducted by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project last fall:  Facebook users are more trusting of other people, they have larger numbers of close friends, they exhibit a higher level of civic engagement and they get more social support from their friends.

The survey's findings challenge the common perception that social networking sites isolate people or undercut their real-world friendships and interactions, said University of Pennsylvania professor Keith Hampton, the lead author of the report.

To my eyes there are two questions raised by this study…

1.  Is the metric they use a good measure of social well being?

2.  If not why would they use it?

On the first question let me address the individual points. 

Someone who logs into Facebook multiple times a day is 43% more likely than other Internet users and more than three times as likely as someone who does not use the Internet to feel that most people can be trusted.

Social Well Being shouldn’t be measured by how much you trust total strangers since that is a function of life experience and not of one’s social interactions.   Social interactions rely on how much you trust your friends and neighbors (a.k.a. the people you’re actually social with).  In fact an over abundance of trust in strangers can indicate a lack of social well being.  People who are desperately seeking friends because they don’t have any will be more inclined to trust total strangers.

Someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other Internet users.

How exactly do you measure that?  Because it seems that’s an easy metric to get wrong.  For example, would knowing more about someone’s schedule make my “ties” to them closer?  There are several people whose schedule I know because they posted it on Facebook yet I haven’t spoken to them in years.  While there are people I speak to on a daily basis whose schedule I don’t know.  So that’s just one way I could appear to have closer ties to someone I don’t actually interact with.

Someone who visits the site multiple times a day was two and a half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone to vote for a candidate and 43% more likely to have said they would vote.

I’m sorry but if your scale of “social well being” includes becoming deeply involved in political movements I think you need a new scale.  For better or worse politics has become the worst side of many people’s personalities.  It’s the place where people feel they can be hateful towards their fellow man.   I’m not against being civic minded or knowing the issues.  But that’s a function of research and spirited debate with people you disagree with.  Political movements are about feeling so confident in your correctness that you surround yourself with like minded people and go around trying to bully others into joining you. 

“they get more social support from their friends.”

Again this is a metric that’s easy to fake.  Whenever someone posts about something bad happening to them there’s an outcry of “support”.  But does a comment on your Facebook wall really mean you’re being supported by friends?  Ask yourself this: Would you rather have 20 friends post “I’m so sorry for your loss” or one friend sit with you through the night and give you a shoulder to cry on?  Who in those two scenarios is really being supported by their friends? 

So, if I’m right and this study is flawed why is that relevant? 

Part of being human is doing things that are bad for us.  The trick is to only do those bad things in moderation.  Drinking, Watching TV, even eating Pastry is bad in excess but enjoyable and relatively harmless if we control ourselves. 

The largest barrier to self control is and always will be our ability to justify.  Telling ourselves what we’re doing “isn’t that bad” is how we give ourselves permission to do more of it.  That’s what this study is. 

It’s an attempt by people who are obsessive about social media to justify that obsession with a bogus metric.  The “lead author” of the report is someone who has currently dedicated his career to social media to give just one example.  Given that do you really think he was going to design a survey that would discredit social media?

Again I’m not saying you shouldn’t use Facebook.  If it makes you happy than more power to you.  But don’t ignore the facts.  Every second you spend on Facebook is a second not spent actually interacting with your friends and nothing anyone can say will change that. 

Addendum: After I wrote this a link was published to the full report which can be found here: http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2011/PIP%20-%20Social%20networking%20sites%20and%20our%20lives.pdf.  I don't have time to read it now but I did want to post this in regards to the "core ties" question above...

The average American has just over two discussion confidants (2.16) – that is, people with  whom they discuss important matters. This is a modest, but significantly larger number than  the average of 1.93 core ties reported when we asked this same question in 2008. Controlling  for other factors we found that someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9%  more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users.

 

I warn you right now my tone might be harsher than I’d prefer here.  I tried to tone it down (even waiting several hours after writing this to post it) but the whole thing really annoyed me.  So I apologize in advance for the incivility. 

That said this Forbes article is misleading or just plain wrong in just about every paragraph.  Here are a few examples of what I mean…

Chromebooks are built to run nothing but a browser–unless they’re jailbroken, no executable files can be installed, neither antivirus software, nor the malicious software it’s meant to protect against. And if that web-only strategy catches on–still a big if, admittedly–it could spell real trouble for the antivirus companies like McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky and Trend Micro.

This really isn’t true.  There’s a whole SDK dedicated to writing native applications.  I think Google has done everything they can to secure those apps with their double sandbox design.  But to say “no executable files can be installed” is inaccurate. 

Charlie Miller, a researcher for Independent Security Evaluators who has made a career out of disproving Apple’s security claims, has owned a Chromebook since February, when the machines were sent as freebies to winners of the Pwn2Own hacking competition in Vancouver. He hasn’t dug deeply into the device’s security, but he says the Web-only security model works in theory. While a hacker might exploit bugs in the Chrome browser to run code on a user’s machine, that exploit would only allow the attacker for a single session, and would disappear the moment the browser closed. “The way you stay persistent [as a hacker] is by installing software,” says Miller. “This is designed not to allow any persistence. You turn it off and on and you’re good to go.”

This is Stage One thinking at its worst.  Yes, a hacker could only gain access to the Chromebook for one session.   But the whole point of “hacking” (as defined in this context) is to access or cause damage to the user’s data.  So gaining access to the Chromebook for more than one session is irrelevant.  A virus targeting a Chromebook would be looking to harvest credentials from the user and then access their files off Google’s cloud. 

So, in theory, all a malignant program would have to do is redirect the browser to a page that makes it appear the user has been logged out.  The user enters their credentials and the harvesting program can do whatever damage it wants to the files in the cloud.   In that way it actually presents more of a security threat because you can’t stop it by turning off your own computer (as you could with a traditional virus).

The Chromebook contributes to that larger post-PC problem McAfee and its ilk, [Perimeter E-Security’s Andrew Jaquith] argues.  Jaquith points to data from Gartner Research that predicts sales of 1.4 billion post-PC devices (a category that he construes as including the Chromebook) by 2015 compared with 540 million traditional PCs. “Very few of these will need AV. That’s terrible news for security vendors because three-quarters of the market for their traditional products is about to go away,” says Jaquith. “That’s what happens when you build security in, instead of relying on the market to bolt it on. It’s great for customers, and terrible for the security aftermarket.”

Two things here.  First the article quotes a security person whose company is shifting their focus to these post PC Devices (see here).  That’s smart of his company but it gives him a bias.  Because his company directly competes with McAfee and their focus on post-PC devices is a strategic advantage.   So drawing focus to them makes his company look better over their competitors.

(I’ve already posted on how Analysts are almost always wrong with these types of numbers so I’ll just direct you to that post in regards to the Gartner claim)

The second thing is the claim that post-PC devices won’t require any security software.  That really isn’t provable.  Apple has had few to no security breaches because they lock down things so extensively.  But we don’t know how many Android breaches are out there because people can side-load applications.  Meaning there might be programs compromising Android phones right now that Google isn’t aware of.   Google has had security breaches in its own Marketplace so I think it’s safe to assume there are malignant side-loaded apps out there. 

In the end we really don’t know what the need for Anti Virus software will be in a post-PC era (not that we are anywhere close to being in a post-PC era).  Which is why this article annoyed me so much.  It is far too early to be writing off security for these post-PC devices.  Telling people they “shouldn’t worry about it” is downright irresponsible and could be disastrous in the future. 

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has decided to start angel investing again…

In 2009 the accusations of conflicts of interest by our competitors became somewhat distracting, and for a couple of years I discontinued investing in startups completely.

That policy has now changed. Over the last several months I have begun investing actively again. We’ve noted these investments in Shawn Fanning’s new startup and in Kevin Rose’snew startup.

I have also become a limited partner in two venture funds, Benchmark Capital and SoftTech VC. I am considering investments in a few other venture funds and a couple of startups as well, but have nothing further to announce yet.

and people are making a big deal out of it…

Arrington says "I think that this will all be fine," because he plans to disclose everything. But his conflicts have already illustrated how reporting financial tech news tends to be in fundamental opposition to participating in tech finance: Rather than reporting on Napster creator Shawn Fanning's new startup "Yo" when he heard about it, Arrington jumped in as an investor. Only when one of his reporters uncovered the story independently, as Arrington describes it, did TechCrunch publish the news that the site's own editor had known for some time. And that is the flaw with trying to mitigate conflicts with disclosure: You can't disclose when you're sitting on information; otherwise you are, by definition, not sitting on the information. Likewise, it's hard to see how TechCrunch is going to disclose when it doesn'tcover a competitor of one of Arrington's companies (Twitter, maybe?).

The problem with isolating financial gain as a serious conflict of interest is it ignores all the other conflicts that are just as likely to cause a bias.

The most obvious of these is personal relationships.  The valley you read about in blogs is really just a series of relationships between the media and those founders who are lucky enough to interact with them.  There are tons of other startups that will never personally meet a TechCrunch author and as a consequence will be lumped into the thousands of startups begging for coverage by e-mail (and getting none). 

Even where a personal relationship isn’t present things like location play a huge factor in coverage.  Is there anyone reading this who honestly thinks a startup in Chicago would get as much coverage as one on Market Street?  If so you’re fooling yourself.

In fact I’d argue financial bias is the least of all biases.  Because people acknowledge it’s wrong so they actively resist it.  That’s not true of other biases.

You’d never see someone like Mike Arrington write a post disclosing his friendship with Loic Le Meur because as a society we don’t see anything wrong with “helping a friend”.   Yet the second he invests in Seesmic he feels the need to disclose it. 

But isn’t a personal relationship just as likely to cause a someone to view a startup favorably? 

So all the talk about Arrington’s investments hurting TechCrunch is much ado about nothing.  In the end a media outlet’s only guard against bias is to actively resist it from where ever it comes and the only factor a reader should consider is whether they believe that outlet is capable of resisting it. 

Slate author Farhad Manjoo brings the issue of Anonymous Comments back in a piece entitled “Why we need to get rid of anonymous comments”.  I don’t agree with the piece but give him credit for admitting the consequences of his desire…

Advocates for anonymity argue that fuckwaddery is the price we have to pay to ensure people's privacy. Posting your name on the Web can lead to all kinds of unwanted attention—search engines will index you, advertisers can track you, prospective employers will be able to profile you. That's too high a price to pay, you might argue, for the privilege of telling an author that he completely blows.

Well, shouldn't you have to pay that high a price? I'm not calling for constant transparency. If you're engaging in private behavior—watching a movie online, posting a dating profile, gambling, or doing anything else that the whole world shouldn't know about—I support and celebrate your right to anonymity. But posting a comment is a public act. You're responding to an author who made his identity known, and your purpose, in posting the comment, is to inform the world of your point of view. If you want to do something so public, you are naturally ceding some measure of your privacy. If you're not happy with that trade, don't take part—keep your views to yourself.

Essentially the author is saying he knows there are negative consequences but he feels the benefits to society out weigh those.  So the question is whether he’s right on that point.  In order to determine that I’ve listed the pluses and minuses of such a policy.

Minus: People’s REAL lives are impacted even when their comments are benign

People can be fired for their political views.  People have been fired for their sexual orientation (not legally but it costs money to sue and if you’ve just been fired it’s hard to find lawyer money).  People in high positions can be fired simply for having benign hobbies that seem unprofessional (I know a CEO who was fired for collecting Comic Books). 

Beyond the professional it’s even easier to become ostracized from a group.  How many of  us have had to choose between two friends because of some silly argument?  Once people’s every online comment is posted to their Facebook wall you can expect even more of those rifts to occur. 

So there are literally a million ways that a person’s benign online activities could harm their actual life. 

Minus: You lose worthwhile comments

From the post…

Sure, this isn't terribly high-minded. I'll concede, too, that forcing people to use their real names might give us more "sterile and neutered" comments, as the blogger Steve Cheney argued last week. And perhaps we'll miss some important comments that could only be posted anonymously. If TechCrunch writes a post wondering about some terrible new Apple policy, for instance, we likely won't see an anonymous comment from a whistle-blower explaining the policy. But I doubt that's a real loss—I don't think raucous comment forums are the first place that whistle-blowers turn to.

So essentially he concedes the point but then immediately backtracks because he realizes the point is valid enough to disprove his whole theory. If we’re losing valuable insights from inside sources than it really isn’t worth it.

Plus: There are fewer nonsense comments

This I’ll concede. Since TechCrunch banned anonymous comments there have been far fewer comments to read. And since most TechCrunch comments tend to be from people who were too lazy to read the previous comments and see their point was already made 50 comments ago that has helped.

Fallacy: Cutting out Anonymity creates a better environment

To quote the post again…

I can't speak for my bosses, who might feel differently than I do. But as a writer, my answer is no—I don't want anonymous commenters. Everyone who works online knows that there's a direct correlation between the hurdles a site puts up in front of potential commenters and the number and quality of the comments it receives. The harder a site makes it for someone to post a comment, the fewer comments it gets, and those comments are generally better.

Cutting out the anonymity gives us a more sterile environment?  As I was writing this post the quoted Slate story was #2 on their homepage.  The #1 story was on Newt Gingrich.  These are some of the Facebook comments on that post…

What a freakin’ creep. – Emily Jane Pucker

“Or an orgy. That's what I call putting the 'c0ck' back in 'caucus'.  
If a handsome, charming devil like Clinton can't resist temptation, what hope does an angry potato-body like Gingrich have? Then again have you SEEN the women he was cheating with. Cruella DeVil as played by Joan Rivers!” – alex

“Yes, they're called his second and third wives. At least Clinton had the brains not to marry his bimbos.” – Top Scientist

“He's a twit demagogue who sincerely believes he is sincere, and, not to forget, a serious intellectual. We will remember him as the man who was getting the same treatment at the same time as the president he impeached for same.” – Robert J Crawford

“To summarize, he screwed his mistresses because he loved screwing America so much.  
He's a horrible Ewok, this Newt” – Jaysit

And that’s just from the first page of comments!  Doesn’t seem very sterile and neutered to me. 

Conclusion (or The False Plus: A Blogger’s ego is preserved)

So in the end the positives are mostly a fallacy and the negatives can lead to people losing their jobs, friends, etc…  Doesn’t seem like a fair trade to me.  So why the sudden push against Anonymity on blogs?   

As Allen Stern of CenterNetworks so deftly put it…

The real issue I see is that many bloggers don’t want feedback – there is no freaking way someone commenting on my post can be right. There’s no way my grammar could be crappy – or my research wrong. Imagine if each blogger spent some time looking at their comments and then decided if perhaps I should change how I do research or try a new style. My fear is that a move to Facebook comments will mean more “you are great” and less “here’s why you are wrong” comments.

That really is the issue here.  When you look at the pluses and minuses of the situation you realize there’s very little reason to ban anonymous comments unless you simply don’t want to face what they have to say.  And contrary to common belief Internet trolls usually speak the truth.  They speak it in a way that’s unnecessarily harsh but that doesn’t make it less true. 

But that’s the way of the world.  Politicians get elected every year by promising things we know they can’t do.  But people still vote for them because even in the most important areas of life people don’t want to face hard truths. 

As surprising as it might seem some bloggers choose to be inflammatory to boost traffic.  I’ll give you three guesses as to what popular blogger’s traffic is down 2/3rds since this time last year.  Here's a hint…

These [people who say Facebooks unanonymous comments kill authenticity] are cowards.

See, where I ONLY post opinions I’m willing to sign my name to, lots of people are actually cowards and just not willing to sign their names to their mealy-mouthed attacks.

Don’t give me that horseshit that you won’t be able to whistle blow at work.

I once took on Microsoft WHILE I WORKED THERE because of an injustice I felt was happening at every level. The execs had decided to pull support for an anti-discrimination bill due to pressure from a local church. I thought that was horseshit and wrote about it continually for a few days. Within a week Ballmer had reversed himself and within a year that bill passed for the first time in eight years of tries. What you didn’t know back in 2005 was that my boss was a member of that church. Every day I went to work that week I knew it could have been my last day at Microsoft. In my discussions with my wife I told her that I could get fired at any moment for what I was writing. She knew my boss at the time belonged to that church. She knew I was calling Steve Ballmer a coward. She knew I was behaving in a way that would be seen as really nasty by nearly everyone at work.

I really don’t have time to beat around the bush here so I’m going to be painfully blunt. 

If you’re a father of two school-age children without a college degree and you’ve managed to get a six figure job than you shouldn’t be risking that job to express your opinion online.  Doing so isn’t brave.  It’s at best overly self important (“No one will stick up for this issue if I don’t”).  At worst it’s just selfish and unthinking (“My integrity is more important than whether my kids have food on the table”). 

If there’s one thing the economy has taught us in the last couple years it’s that there’s not always another job waiting out there.  So even if Scoble wants to treat his own life and the lives of his own family in such a haphazardly way he's way out of line accusing others of being cowards for not doing the same.

Being an adult means accepting responsibility for the trusts that are placed in you.  It means denying yourself the pleasure of doing whatever the heck you want if your actions might hurt others who depend on you. 

Finally let’s be honest here.  You don’t need to be anonymous to be a troll.  A troll is just someone who posts inflammatory messages to get attention.  I can think of at least one blogger who uses his real name while doing just that (unless you honestly want to make the point that calling a large swath of people cowards isn’t trollish behavior). 

I’m not really blown away by the iPad 2 but I didn’t expect to be.  One of the great things Apple does is to throw an incremental release between big product jumps (think iPhone 3GS).  So someone who bought an iPad 6 months ago doesn’t feel like they were completely ripped off.  That’s what the iPad 2 is. 

What really impressed me (and what I think says the most about Apple) is the new “Smart Covers”.   Engadget has a bunch of pictures and a video here.

This is not something that would have come out of Samsung or Motorola and that’s an important point. 

Apple’s view of a product is more holistic than other manufacturers.  They’re thinking as much about the little things as they are about the big things because they…to use a management term…take ownership of the whole product.  They aren’t just building a device around someone else’s operating system they’re building the whole interaction.  A product in its entirety from the chip to the OS to the case.  It takes that kind of thinking to realize “these thick cases are ruining the user experience of our thin device” or "all those finger smudges on the screen really ruin the experience"

To quote Steve Jobs’ presentation…

"This is worth repeating. It's in Apple's DNA that technology is not enough. It's tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it's the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive."

I’m more of a business oriented person so when I talk about Apple’s approach I’m usually discussing the profit implications.  Apple’s great at cutting out middle men and coat tail riders and getting as much profit out of their customers as possible because of it.  But the design aspect of that approach is even more integral to the company’s success and these smart cases are the perfect example of why that’s the case.

Today Bloomberg reported Microsoft has “shipped” 2 million copies of Windows Phone 7 to phone manufacturers.  (as opposed to phones actually sold to consumers)

That’s 500,000 more than was reported on Dec. 21st of last month.   Explaining that difference gave me an interesting theory.   I bet that’s roughly the number of phones that have been sold to consumers. 

Think about it.  A company Microsoft’s size has a chain by which information goes through.  The 1.5 million number was released via the marketing dept which means there are all kinds of approvals that had to be involved.   So those weren’t the most current numbers (Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 only a couple months earlier)

Now remember Windows Phone 7 had a massive launch on October 11th.  10 Phones launched in 30 countries available on 60 different carriers.  That’s a lot. 

Each of those carriers in each of those countries had to supply phones to all their various retail outlets so they could be sold.   Meaning it isn’t hard to imagine 1.5 million phones going out just to stock all the retail outlets around the world. 

Having said that I’d direct you to the Windows Phone 7 Facebook app.  Last month this became the focus of many blogs because Facebook is so integral to WP7.  So in theory the Facebook app is a good indicator of how many actual phones have been sold.  On Dec. 17th that number was around 210,000.  Now it’s at 366,000. 

Not bad but not great.

That brings me to my point.  Assuming 1.5 million was around the number of phones ordered to stock the shelves of the initial offering and assuming WP7 has sold a little over 366,000 (I’m sure there are a few people who don’t install the Facebook app) it sure looks like those 500,000 extra licenses are the phones that actually sold.   Since they’d have to be restocked (hence the additional orders)

But again, just a theory…

Fred Wilson has a post today where he notices two trends.   First that large internet companies that acquire small startups tend to unintentionally destroy them…

We have seen again and again that when a large company acquires a startup, they most often let it wither and die (myspace, delicious, etc). We have also seen that if that web services can be spun out (skype, stumbleupon), they can often be resuscitated.

Second that large companies that can’t acquire the small startup they want set out to intentionally destroy them…

But acquiring innovating emerging web services is not the only thing that big companies do that can be detrimental to the web. Worse is competing head on with them. Look at Facebook. They have ripped off Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, and many more small innovative startups. They haven't "killed" any of these companies but they have muddled the market and caused users to have to make choices that may turn out to be the wrong choices for them.

Which leads him to this conclusion…

What I would like to see (and obviously Albert too) is the emergence of a cooperative attitude on the web and mobile web where the big Internet companies and the innovative emerging web services work together to "succeed by making others succeed."

It’s a nice idea but I don’t see it happening and I’ll explain why. 

In my experience acquisitions fail because the senior management in the acquiring company lose interest. It tends to go like this:

- They see a new concept that excites them.

- They have a bunch of action packed acquisition meetings where they discuss all the great “synergies” the merger will produce.

- They close the deal and realize the exciting theoretical talk is about to become a boring discussion on pragmatic execution.

- And they move on to new exciting things.

Which leaves the startup alone and sinking into the bureaucratic quicksand that dominates most big companies.

The thing to note is everyone in that scenario is working against their rational best interest in order to achieve short term gains. The executives get the excitement of an acquisition, the investors get to cash out and the founders get to believe they’ll have more resources at their disposal. But in the end the executives lose money for the company, the investors make less than they could have if the company had succeeded on its own and the founders get driven out by bureaucracy.

Yet, as Mr. Wilson points out, big companies continue to acquire small startups and startups continue to go along with it because they’re acting on emotion. That’s the issue. Mr. Wilson’s idea requires emotional participants to act rationally and realize their exciting deal will probably end in disaster.

The one solution I can see to this situation is for people like Fred Wilson to push for a different kind of acquisition strategy. If it were me I’d encourage the following steps...

1. Encourage large companies to acquire small startups but leave them independent.

2. Give a small amount of equity to current investors via a profit sharing arrangement and lessen the initial buy out amount.

3. Use the financial resources from step #2 and form an external division that will work as an intermediary between the startup and the larger company to pursue “synergies” between the two entities without disrupting the startup’s normal operation.

This would require a lot of sacrifice on everyone’s part. The Founders and investors get less money while the large company has to give up some control. But fundamentally it still allows each side of the equation to act on their somewhat irrational exuberance while keeping the startup independent.

To me that seems like a good deal.

Jon Evans is a software engineer that sometimes writes for TechCrunch.  He has a piece today entitled Can Google Get Its Mojo Back? where he talks about the decline of Google…

Business Insider’s list of the 15 biggest tech flops of 2010 cited no fewer than four from Google: Buzz, Wave, Google TV, and the Nexus One. Bizarre errors have erupted in Google Maps. Many of its best engineers are leaving. Influential luminaries like Vivek Wadhwa, Jeff Atwood, Marco Arment and Paul Kedrosky (way ahead of the curve) say their core search service is much degraded from its glory years, and the numbers bear this out; after years of unassailable dominance, Google’s search-market share is diminishing—it dropped an eyebrow-raising 1.2% just from October to November—while Microsoft’s Bing, whose UI Google tried and embarrassingly failed to copy earlier this year, is on the rise.

Even their money fount, AdWords, is problematic. An illustrative anecdote: I recently experimented with a $100 free certificate for my own pet app, and found my ad got stuck “In Review” indefinitely. According to users on AdWords’ discussion boards, this is common, and the only way to fix it is to file a help request. I did, and the problem was soon repaired—but what happened to the speedy algorithmic solutions for which Google is famous?

The general tone on the AdWords forums is exactly like that on those devoted to the other Google service I use a lot, App Engine: users on both frequently complain about the way Google neglects and/or outright ignores them. I like App Engine a lot, but it’s prone to sporadic bursts of inexplicable behaviour, and some developers are abandoning it because of Google’s perceived reluctance or inability to fix its bugs and quirks.

He hits on a lot of good points but framing the problem as “Google getting something back” is a mistake in my opinion.  I think Google had a halo around them up until now which hid a flaw that’s always been there.  Namely their lack of a Customer-Centric Focus.  

Google rose to prominence on a Search Engine which isn’t really a consumer product.  It provides information to a consumer but it’s incidental information.  No one calls a Search Engine’s tech support because they can’t find something. 

So from the beginning Google’s culture wasn’t customer centric.

At the same time Google developed a philosophy that gained them a cult following.  Between making everything free and “doing no evil” Google managed to accumulate a group of fans who would defend them no matter what.   In doing so they insulated themselves from a lot of customer complaints because their early adopters were so in love with them. 

So they charged into the consumer market.  Development tools, Office Apps, Social Networking and so on.  Suddenly Google was in competition with customer centric companies like Microsoft but with virtually no support mechanisms to speak of. 

Google’s idea of support literally seems to be support forums.  Support forums their employees don’t seem to visit.

I remember one incident a while back when Google decided to strip Google Apps of its ability to edit the raw html of a file.  No warning or explanation was given.   The forums were flooded with questions and complaints (too many to have been missed by Google) and yet no answers ever came.  This is not a unique experience.  Look in any Google forum and you’ll see loads of support requests that simply go unanswered. 

This problem extends to features.  The problems with their search engine are hard to solve because there are too many out there for the company to find.  But if Google just had a mechanism to listen to their customers they could allow those customers to find the problems for them. 

Proof of this came very recently.  Jeff Atwood had a problem with people scraping his content and passing it off as their own.  These sites then used SEO to show up higher in the Google rankings.  But Mr. Atwood’s blog is read by Matt Cutts of Google so the problem was fixed in a matter of DAYS.  There’s no reason Google couldn’t do that for other customers.

No reason except the expense.

That’s where we get to the final part of this problem.  Google is a public company that’s been built around high margins.  Them acknowledging they need a support infrastructure now would be disastrous.  It would send their stock price tumbling downward and stunt their growth for years (which in turn would cost them even more valuable employees).

This puts Google between a rock and a hard place.  They either go on a massive hiring spree to build a support structure and sacrifice their incredible margins or they ignore the problem and allow their brand to continue deteriorating.  It’s not an easy choice to make.

Apparently Borders can’t pay its publishers. 

Borders has been delaying payments to book publishers in signs that it may be one of the first major victims of e-books. Early reports from Publishers Marketplace on Friday said it was putting off the payments to help refinance its debt but also wasn't certain that the plan would be effective. It might have to break its existing credit deals early into 2011 after facing a "liquidity shortfall," it said.

That doesn’t surprise me.  Seeing the number of Kindles received as holiday gifts by “Computer illiterate” friends and co-workers has convinced me the e-book revolution has started.  But something else about this article did surprise me…

Any financial collapse at Borders could have a ripple effect on the e-book business. It would cost Kobo one of its most important markets for e-readers and would close one of the few major online book stores. The shift could feed Amazon, Apple and other survivors with extra customers.

That may be true but I’m surprised it’s what he chose to focus on.  Rather than the much bigger ripple effect this would have on society.  That effect is something I’m becoming more and more passionate about because I think we need to realize a digital future requires fewer workers.

Borders is the perfect example of this…

Whether we’re talking about e-books or paper books the transaction is still the same.  An author writes a book, a publisher distributes that book and a consumer purchases and reads that book.  These facts don’t change.  But with the Paper Book that process also requires…

1. Various people who work to cut down trees and ship the lumber
2. Various people who work to create the paper from those trees
3. People to ship that paper to the printer
4. A person to operate the printer that prints the book
5. A person to examine the output of the printer to verify the product
6. A person to pack that book to be shipped to the publisher
7. A person to unpack the book at the publisher and verify the quantity is correct
8. A person to then repackaged the book and ship it to individual retailers
9. A shipping company (UPS, FedEx,etc…) with various agents (carriers, pilots, handlers, etc…) to carry the package to the retail store
10. A clerk at the retail store who both unpacks, stocks and sells the book

Compare those people to what is required for an e-book…

1. A person in the publisher’s IT department takes the digital copy of the book, converts it to the approved format and uploads it to a server

That’s really it.  Yes there are maintenance people for the servers and the content management systems.  But you can’t believe those few IT people are more than all the ones I left out of the paper book list.  Remember companies that deliver packages, print books, sell lumber and so on all require IT departments of their own.  So if anything the comparison favors the e-books.

My contention is there’s no way to compensate for that kind of job loss. Think about this for a second.  A couple servers could replace the jobs of every Borders sales clerk in the United States.

We always see these utopian societies in Science Fiction.  The “Star Trek Society” where people choose to work for their own betterment and not because they need to.  That’s a great ideal and I believe humanity will one day get there but in realizing that from our perspective you have to look at another less pleasant fact.

There will be a transition.

A period where some will still have skills that are needed by society while others don’t and society will have to deal with those who don’t. 

This is a very complex topic and one I’m sure I’ll revisit at various times throughout the coming year.  But if I could make one request of you I’d ask that you think about this and ask yourself what will happen if Borders does disappear at the hands of e-books.  Where will those 25,000 people go if there’s never a new job for them and how can we as a society keep them from destitution?