This is Violence

A photo of a blog about photos that dont exist

“You should probably be a fucking boss at war. If you wanted to juggle you, should have been a juggler. You’re a Prince, dammit, and if you’re shitty at war, your enemies will be relentless, and your soldiers will be like, ‘this motherfucker has no idea what he’s doing, and we have to die? Fuck that.’ And now you’ve got a rebellion on your hands.”

Over the last couple weeks Philosophy Bro has been rapidly ascending my list of awesome sites.

bijan:

“the website as you know it’ is ‘dead, dying, will be dying,’ and that the future lies in reinventing Web experiences on the mobile phone.

“many smart folks have been saying this for a long time and it’s so damn true.”

What does this even mean - ‘the website is dead’? All of them? For everyone? Replaced with….? And why?

The response in this article seems to be: “mobile.” I wasn’t aware that “mobile” was the opposite of “website.” In fact, I spend a pretty huge amount of my time on my phone browsing the web. In fact, I found this article on the web.

An interesting look at the philosophy and economics behind Marco Arment removing the free version of Instapaper from the iOS App Store.

I’ve taken a pretty strong position on ad supported apps on my phone - I don’t download them. My point of view is that I want my dollars to be dollars motivating the developers of apps I use, not advertisers. Every other product I’ve ever bought works this way and I don’t see any reason why apps would work differently. Further, every product I’ve ever seen that was ad supported ended up either being a bad experience for me, and bad experience for the products creator or, most likely, bad for both of us. My feeling has always been that ad supported business models result in lowest common denominator type products, which isn’t the sort of world I want to live in.

With that in mind, it was create to get the perspective of the creator of one of my most favorite apps: Instapaper.

In five sections Arment catalogues his rationale:

“Bad economics
So Instapaper Free has an ad from The Deck in its list screen. It’s unintrusive, its advertisers are respectable, and it pays well. It’s the best ad unit I could ask for.

But it still makes far less than paid-app sales — the increase in app sales with Free’s absence exceeds this many times over. The math to explain this is simple: most Free users won’t give me anywhere near $3.50 worth of ad impressions.”

“Undesirable customers
I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?”

“Low conversions
If I don’t have a free app for a long time, I’m certainly going to miss out on some potential long-term conversions. But how many, really, and what would it cost to chase them?”

“Image and product-design problems
If you have a free version of your app, that will be the only version many people will ever see. So, for the Free users, that app — that extremely limited app that lacks almost all of Instapaper’s best features — is what they think Instapaper is.”

“Minimal demand
When there’s no free option, and the only way to try an appealing app is to pay a small amount of money, people do. Not everyone will, but enough will.”

“Open on three totally cool BROS (2 white, 1 black) having a cool time watching SPORTS on a sick television! One bro starts to freak because they are out of BEER (!) until another bro gives a totally “GOT IT COVERED” look and reveals the coffee table is actually a COOLER FULL OF DELICIOUS BEER! Whoa! The bros high five.”

Only very marginally NOT an actual script for a beer commercial. At least until Super Bowl 2012, at which time: YES!

Uh, what?

Now, according to Deadline, the talks are being hung up because Weiner refuses to accede to three of AMC and Lionsgate’s demands: integrating product placement into the show, cutting two minutes from each episode to make room for more commercials, and “eliminating/reducing two regular cast members to save money.”

Nothing in Lionsgate’s demands have anything to do with making a better product. In fact, each one is about making the product worse to increase margins. I would love to see world where TV and movies could get funded Kickstarter style, that is, paid for by the actual customers of the writers, crew, and actors - viewers - instead of the customers of distribution houses- advertisers.

“Sophie: Well, my grandpa was going to get me a laptop for my graduation gift, but we couldn’t find the one I wanted and my mom said “maybe you should look into that iPad thing” and it’s the same price and it does more.
Bam. It does more.

This is from a blog I just found off Daring Fireball. The writer is 14 (!!) and not only gets the iPad in a way many other tech writers do not, he writes about more elegantly too.

For comparison:

“As far as I can tell, tablets do not offer any significant functionality that’s not already available on a smartphone or notebook computer, yet they lack critical components like keyboards. In fact, you can get a laptop with considerably more memory and storage and a much better CPU for a significantly lower price, as my PCWorld colleague recently pointed out.”

That from grownup writer Katherine Noyes of PC World.

Just think what else could have been done with the time and resources that the company devoted to the pay wall: entirely new news products could have been developed, products that could engage a wholly different kind of audience and expand the company’s reach by several orders of magnitude.

A nice little post from someone with deep insights into culture of the Times and the history of the new paywall. Khoi makes a lot of good points, as have so many others, about the multitude of problems with the Times’ approach to charging for content, but the quote above represents the most important I think - the things NOT done.

Like many companies and industries, the Times is so singularly focused on protecting the reality it knows, it can’t see the infinite other possibilities in front of it.

“In the last decade, Apple introduced their first line of notebooks that didn’t have dial-up modems built in, because dial-up modems were on their way out and most people didn’t need them anymore. But for the few that still did, they offered a little USB modem to ease the transition:”

There have been a few articles since the iPad2 was announced talking about Apple’s evolving view of the device. In this case it’s the move from iPad1’s iWork suite to iPad2’s focus on movie and music creation.

In light of the continuing insistence (not in this article, but generally) that Apple doesn’t do customer research, I believe stands a reminded of two super valuable lessons for agencies looking to adapt:

1) Design something that solves some problem for your (or your clients) customers.
2) Design it in a way that those people can take it, mis-use it and hack it, and learn from what they do.

Apple has done this brilliantly with the iPad.

When I worked at Nemo, I used to tell my team that the very best designs, digital or otherwise, are the ones you design and release into the world, and then people use in ways you never imagined they would.

It’s a bar I rarely, if ever, achieve in my own work, but a goal I love.

The space between advertising and a brand’s product has been made huge by digital. It’s my feeling this idea of developing with a goal but also the intent of learning and adapting is what’s needed to fill that gap.

(Source: marco)