Amazon should have Kindle sales events like Steam

Amazon should take a cue from Steam and run limited-time specials on Kindle ebooks and send me email when books on my wish list go on sale. I'd end up buying more books, I'm sure, just the way I've bought a lot of games from Steam that I don't have time to play.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps their publisher agreements don't allow that.
PPS - Which is the equivalent of "we don't like money", but that's their loss.

Spending movie marketing money on charity

I would like to see lots more charity projects as publicity stunts like this Walter Mitty Philippines trip, even if the studios get to write off their marketing budgets as charitable donations. Wouldn't that be great if all marketing budgets turned into foreign aid instead? Even if we get "Coca Cola Presents Uganda Aid 2014", I think we'll come out on top.

By the time Casey Neistat suggested spending $25K on a trip to help typhoon victims in the Philippines, 20th Century Fox kind of had to let him do it. They'd look like major douches if they turned him down, and it still kind of fits into the theme of the contest they were running. I understand Walter Mitty does some travelling to poor areas in the film. Plus they still get their publicity. It's not as if Neistat just took the money, quietly gave it to people and went home without a fuss. He gave it to them on video on behalf of 20th Century Fox and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and it's going viral. Everyone wins.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure yet if I'll see the movie.
PPS - It's on the list, but so are lots of movies I might not end up seeing.

Paying and getting paid

There's always a tension between customers and producers. As software producers, for instance, we want to keep getting income on an ongoing basis. That means monthly or yearly subscriptions. As a business, we try to set up those ongoing yearly license fees to keep getting paid by our customers, and we congratulate ourselves whenever we succeed.

Our customers, on the other hand, would very much prefer to pay once for our software and never pay again, which is fair enough from their point of view. When I consider BuildMaster, the software I use to maintain my personal programming projects, I try not to hit the limits that require add-on subscription licenses to keep using it, such as having more than 10 projects or more than 3 distributed packages per project. I try to think of how I can organise my projects to avoid those limits, because otherwise I will have to pay every year to keep using the software.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And if I were selling my software, I would be trying to get yearly subscriptions.
PPS - Until someone undercuts me by selling a once-for-all license.

Limited term offers

The time-limited offer sales pitch is meant to pressure you into a bad decision. Remember that the next time you find yourself presented with an offer that is "only available for the next 30 minutes!"

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The shorter the time, the sooner they expect buyer's remorse to kick in.
PPR - Or common sense. Either one.

Making communication interesting

Spending the extra time and effort to make communication interesting and memorable usually seems like a waste, especially in business when you have lots of info to convey and it's always different. If the business punishes you for spending 8 hours getting a 1 hour presentation ready, then of course you're going to get it done in 2 hours and forget about making it interesting.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We all know how to tell someone something.
PPS - We don't all know how to teach it.

Apple and limited choice

Is it true that part of Apple's success in consumer electronics is offering much less choice than rivals? Now, granted, you'd never hear someone saying "well, I was going to buy an Android phone, but there were just so many fewer options from Apple that I couldn't resist!" My point, though, is that choice is hard, and the near-infinite options you have for most items like phones or computers can be paralysing. When Apple offers you "phone" or "slightly bigger phone", suddenly you'd be much more at ease and more likely to buy. Couple that with post-purchase rationalisations about knowing it will "just work" and the fact that Apple designs shiny things, and everything lines up for them. Apple knows that you find choosing hard, and they design and sell based on that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Plus the limited form factor means that the accessories market is bigger.
PPS - It's subtle, but I think it's a valid strategy.

High-demand concert ticket lotteries

When tickets to special events are sold out in mere hours or even minutes, and could command prices much, much higher if they wanted to, perhaps we should change from a straight-up queue system to a lottery instead.

The main problem with selling tickets online is that everyone in the world arrives at the front door the second the servers are open for business, or a long time before that. Then, while you and several thousand other people all clamour for the attention of the poor server, some who get through buy their tickets and the rest of us go away empty handed.

A better way would be to take a page from the Olympics ticket allocation system. If you want to go to an event, you register for a lottery that will be drawn at a later date. There's no rush, because it is no longer a mad grab for all available tickets, so the servers should experience less load. Then, at the appointed time, a selection of patrons is drawn randomly from the registrations and those people get to buy tickets.

The main problems with a system like that are social. People have grown to expect queues and crowds. We can deal with that. The idea that you showed up at three seconds after 9am while I showed up a lazy four seconds after means that you are clearly more deserving of the tickets than me. We understand it. The idea that you can "win" your right to buy a ticket at random is weird and confusing. You can bet there would be a lot of backlash from people who prefer queues, or from people who have never had problems with them.

But on the whole, I think it's a better system for extremely high-demand events. Give everyone the time to register their interest, then everyone gets a fair go. No more first-come-first-served-sorry-mate-sold-out-at-9:01 mad rush.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've missed out on tickets in the "mad rush" system.
PPS - I'm sure I'd miss out in a lottery system too, but it might feel less like a personal failure.

Pro vs Anti

I've seen the pro-life side of the abortion debate starting to be referred to as "anti-choice", presumably by the "pro-choice" side. Without picking a side here, just realise that this will mean pro-lifers will get to call the other side "anti-life", which is the worst possible label of all four.

The reason the "pro" labels were adopted is that they summarise each side's positive arguments in a non-offensive way. When you go back to negatives such as "anti-choice", you try to silence the "undesirable" opinions in order to bolster your side against the menace of The Other Guys. It's not the way forward, and it won't settle things at all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It doesn't seem too common just yet.
PPS - I hope it stays that way.

Microsoft's identity

Who is Microsoft? Do they have a sense of identity that clearly communicates who they are and what they want? They are a server OS company, they are a productivity software company, a development tools company, a game console company and now a consumer hardware company. What if they were aiming to be seen as the mid-range option, producing cheap software and hardware of quality good enough for most people? If the quality is high enough and the price is low enough, that will sell.

Apple aims for gleaming sculptures of consumer electronics, polished within an inch of their lives, and priced as if they don't expect you to replace it in 12 months. Microsoft should produce solid quality at reasonable prices. Not the no-fuss, no-frills, bargain basement stuff, just good hardware and software that people can afford. Differentiate from Apple by going for sensibility, not being just as shiny.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The problem, of course, is that shiny also sells.
PPS - And sells very well.

Handbrake video editor branding

Handbrake is the most reliable video converter program I have used, but you have to admit, when you look at it, that it's not very consistent in its image or branding. For instance, "Handbrake" is not a word in any way associated with video files. It's a lever you pull in your car to keep all the wheels from moving when the car is supposed to stay motionless. There are a few concepts there that are at odds with video editing. Second, its icon is a pineapple and a cocktail glass, which not only has nothing to do with video files, but nothing to do with handbrakes either. If you were looking for a video transcoding program and had only a list of titles or icons or even both of them together, you'd still be more likely to pick up something that uses the word "video" in its name and/or a frame of film as its icon before you'd pick the pineapple car brakes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The program itself I can hardly fault at all.
PPS - It is a complex program, but video transcoding is a complex task.

Kickstarter

The longer Kickstarter goes on, and the more projects get on it, the more the problem for each project becomes publicity rather than funding. As noted by xkcd, we might then get meta-kickstarter campaigns whose goal is to raise enough funds to pay for the advertising for the real campaign. And that's been the problem all along, really. If you can reach enough of the right people, you're going to get up-front capital to fund your project, and the one thing Kickstarter contributed to that situation was crowdsourcing. You don't need to find yourself one person with $100,000 to invest now, you just need 100,000 people with $1 each. But when there are 100,000 other projects on Kickstarter, you need to stand out enough to grab everyone's attention.

For instance, the Two Guys from Andromeda, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, the creators of Space Quest (a favourite series of mine), have a project on Kickstarter to get a new, similar game going, but it feels to me like they might run out of time. Is it a failure of advertising? Possibly. It's hard to say for sure. I really hope they make it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've put some of my money in.
PPS - Unfortunately, I don't have $230,000 to put them over the top.

Apathy online

Since the internet the problem is not getting published but getting noticed. The enemy online is not hate, but apathy. When people are free to ignore you, and you them, you either do more because they love it or do less because they don't care, not because they don't enjoy it enough.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or, sometimes, you just keep doing something because it's a habit.
PPS - Like me and this blog.