Industry

Unintended Consequences

The Nielsen Norman Group has looked at web usability from the perspective of children.

The most notable finding in our study was that children click website advertisements. Unfortunately, they often do so by mistake, thinking ads are just one more site element. In nine years of testing adults, we can count on the fingers of two hands the total number of times they’ve clicked website advertising. But kids click banners. They cannot yet distinguish between content and advertising. On the contrary, to kids, ads are just one more content source. If a banner contains a popular character or something that looks like a cool game, they'll click it. Pokémon, here we come. (Kids clicked on Pokémon characters even though they were simply featured in banner ads for other products, rather than as links to a Pokémon site.)

Advertising on the Internet, aside from being done poorly, is assumed to be more direct, so that the person viewing the advertisement is more likely to have an interest in the subject of that advertisement, and so is more likely to buy the product advertised. If ad clicks are accidents, and the clickers are children, and the products are for adults, then there is something seriously wrong here. Just whose eyeballs are being aggregated?

c.f. http://www.cme.org/children/marketing/index_mktg.html http://www.mediaandthefamily.org/research/fact/internetads.shtml http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruleroad.htm http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/dotcom/index.html http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/policystmt/ad-decept.htm

6:35:14 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Law, Media

Field Reduction

Caldera (CALD) is in trouble. There's enough room in the market for multiple Linux distributions, but not enough for multiple distributors with high overhead. The CALD price has been hovering just above OTC numbers for some time now, so that a puchase looks like a good deal. But is it? IBM or Sun (SUNW) would be a interesting combination. I don't think SUNW could stand the distraction, nor could Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), but IBM might be able to derive some value from the UNIX properties held by CALD from their Santa Cruz Operation (SCOC) acquisition, through smoothing the migration path from what remains of the SCO UNIX installed base to AIX/L (Monterey).

What does CALD have of value to offer a buyer, other than the SCO installed base? There's Volution Manager, a system administration tool, and Volution Online, which is not unlike RedHat Network and Ximian Red Carpet. Of the two, Volution Manager seems more valuable, but it's hard to tell without using the product.

My advice to SCO customers would be to move to Debian, RedHat or SuSE, but not Caldera.

4:43:11 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

In business to do business

1. Provide something someone wants
2. Do it at a lower cost to the customer than your competitors can
3. Do it at a much lower cost to yourself
4. Make a profit
5. Do it with style

If you are not doing the first, the rest don't matter. If you can't do the second and the third, then you can't make a profit. If you don't do the fifth, what use is living?

3:26:27 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry