CUTTING THROUGH THE HYPE

Grange gets all the PR, but St. Henri is a corker

It was an anniversary, and I thought the 1986 St. Henri should be about ready to drink. The last bottle we drank about 7-8 years ago showed sublime fruit and balance but surprised us with its youth and vigour. This time, the wine had mellowed to an almost perfect degree showing sweet fruit, wonderful balance, great length and a soft elegant finish. Perfect with my partner’s duck and my lamb shanks.

 

Grange and St. Henri were created by two young Turk Penfold winemakers in the early fifties: Grange by Max Schubert and St. Henri by John Davoren. We know all about Grange and how Penfolds sent Max to Bordeaux after WWII, and how Max came back saying: their secret is maturing the red wine made mostly from Cabernet grapes in new small French oak barrels.

In those days, there wasn’t much Cabernet grown in Australia, so Max used shiraz from selected sources that included the Grange vineyard in Adelaide. French oak barrels were - and still are - hideously expensive, so Max bought the cheaper American oak. The rest, as they say, is history.

Nothing had prepared our leading wine men for the early Granges because new oak flavours were foreign to them. And it took Max a few years to work out that ripe South Australian Shiraz was much more muscular than Bordeaux Cabernet, and that American oak contributed a lot more oak flavour than the French timber because it is much more porous.

His masters told Max to stop making this wine that caused Penfolds so much bad PR in the fifties but Max persevered in secret. A few years later, our judges started to see how these wines developed and became fans. Today, Grange sells for hundreds of dollars a bottle when released.

St. Henri has a much less exciting history. John Davoren made the wine from shiraz and matured it in big old barrels as was the Aussie tradition then. He found a box of the quaint St. Henri Claret labels in an attic and decided to use it. Both wines were blends from sources that varied year on year and both wines sold for the same price until the early sixties (a bit over $2), then St. Henri dropped behind.

For many years it was the bargain in the Penfolds range as punters chased the other reds that were matured in oak – Bin 389, 28 and 128. I remember picking up a dozen 1967 St. Henri from Farmer Bros for about $11 a bottle in the early eighties, when the Grange of that vintage would’ve cost 10 times that or more. The 67 St. Henri was another elegant, well balanced wine that mellowed gracefully.

Today, St. Henri costs more than $100 a bottle on release, so it’s no longer a bargain by ant standards. So this 1986 may be the last bottle of St. Henri we’ve enjoyed, and it may be a good thing that it made such a wonderful impact. It was one of the best reds I’ve ever drunk, it was that good.

Customer Experience – all talk?

These days, we hear a lot about organisations ‘getting’ what a good customer experience is all about, and pulling out all stops to provide it via all kinds of means from context-aware communications to rich, interactive web experiences. We read a lot about lead management and nourishment, where every potential prospect is as precious as a small diamond.

And then reality smacks you in the face and shows you that some companies still don’t get it, despite all the talk on Twitter and Facebook. Worse, companies who once got it, can lose it in a big way. We buy quite a bit of PC gear for Technoledge, and the time had come to buy a new laptop. Dell had the most attractive deal on a Vostro 3400, which I configured online and ordered by phone from a sales rep in Malaysia because I also wanted to order a 24” screen which sat in different silo on the website. 

That was the first glitch: If you’re in the small business silo, you can’t add a product from Dell’s consumer line. The next problem was that no order acknowledgement arrived, even though the sales rep had my address. My pleas late that day and the following day (by email and phone) went unanswered, and this got to me after 24 hours.

Anything you order online these days from anywhere produces an instant acknowledgement by email, but not Dell. They have our credit card details, and we have nothing, not even an order number. So when I called Dell to try and track down what is going on, I’m shunted from one phone ‘reception’ to another like an unwelcome visitor. Eventually I end up being pointed back to the same sales rep who refuses to talk to me. Needless to say, she’s on the phone.

There’s no way that I can see of getting through to Dell Australia who claims to have an office at French’s Forest in Sydney, not on the company website and not in the white pages. Every phone number lands you in the far east, where Dell’s agents are very polite but very useless.

In desperation, I find a place on the Dell website where I can report a problem with my order. I do that, and just to add insult to injury, there is no acknowledgement that the submission of my problem report was successful. The screen twitches but doesn’t change.

We have developed conventions after many years of internet use, but it seems Dell has forgotten them along with customer care in the true sense. 

Kim

Apple iPAD – Style Let Down by Function

It’s a slick piece of design, with that glossy screen and the touchy-feely-finger-stroking navigation. Brilliant. It’s just gone on sale in Australia starting at around $600 and people are queuing up to buy theirs. 

We suggest you wait. Why? There are half a dozen essentials missing on the current version, that why. Let’s have a closer look at this slick tablet to see if it meets real world needs.

1. There’s no USB port. Not a single one. That means you can’t plug in a keyboard, mouse, digital camera or USB modem. The only peripherals you can use are those which connect through Apple's proprietary dock connector, and that means you’re paying through the nose for everything you attach.
2. MS Office compatibility. Apple made a big deal of their iWork productivity but you can't open Microsoft Office files and that’s just the beginning. Pages can import and export Word's formats but there’s no support for headers and footers, footnotes and other essentials. Spreadsheets using numbers can’t be exported as Microsoft Excel files.
3. Flaky WiFi – problems range from fluctuating signal strength and poor performance to connections dropping out requiring re-entry of WPA credentials to reconnect. The iPad’s download speed is said to be several times slower than that of the iphone.
4. No SD card slot means you can’t just slot in your camera’s flash card to backup photos while travelling. You can of course buy Apple's iPad Camera Connection Kit.
5. No camera for video calling/Skype. Not very slick.
6. No file system access for external storage devices. To copy files to the iPad's Document Manager, the only options are using iTunes or email. You can't even browse network file shares. Not very slick.
7. No printing. The iPad can’t be used on a local network and can't talk to printers. Apple partners have produced printing solutions but they’re another ad-on.
   

What you’re left with is a slick piece of kit that isn’t much more useful than an iPhone. It has a bigger screen but can’t make phone calls. Not very smart really. Not very useful either.

We’re indebted to iTNews for some of this content. Check this link for more details:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/171557,analysis-a-dozen-reasons-not-to-buy-an-ipad.aspx

Kim

ANZ BANK – WHOSE WORLD DO BANKS LIVE IN?

 

The current ANZ ad campaign has left us scratching our heads. The first ad we saw featured a lot of people with what looked like mobilés on their heads – you know: those things you hang up in nurseries to amuse babies. Eventually the bits fall off people’s heads and the take home message is that ANZ MAKES BANKING SIMPLE.

The next commercial we saw features a revolting woman called Barbara who abuses a poor sod of a customer, then she keys something into her computer, saying she’ll sign him up for something he didn’t even ask for. When he protests feebly, she says: too late, and further protests are answered with: I’m busy, I’m the manager, I’m in a meeting and I’ll put you onto an automated voice system ...’ Finally she tells him to go away.

 

In yet another commercial, she abuses a young woman and tells her to go away. The take home message? BARBARA LIVES IN BANK WORLD. WE LIVE IN YOUR WORLD.

 

 
We were curious and checked the web, where we found that ANZ Bank had paid MC Saatchi $15 million for a new logo, a new tagline and the ad campaign. http://www.news.com.au/business/new-brand-and-logo-to-cost-anz-15-million/story-e6frfm1i-1225790269154

We’ve long suspected that we’re in the wrong end of this business, charging clients a few thousand dollars for a lead generation campaign or a website revision, and a few hundred for a tagline. We really work hard on our taglines, and we know a little about how to craft them http://www.technoledge.com.au/pdfs/branding3.pdf . At the very least, we know enough to know that WE LIVE IN YOUR WORLD doesn’t cut it.

And the logo? Haven’t we seen those style elements somewhere before? Decades ago?

 

 

 

Graham and Friends have a funny take on the logo, so we’ll leave you in his capable hands http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfgx5czpeJc

 

Back to Barbara. Writers of novels are familiar with the term verisimilitude, which describes a semblance of truth or reality. The curious thing with this term is that it applies to all stories, from church sermons to jokes to TV commercials. Why? Simple: Unless they relate to some element of your reality, you will not relate to them. The ANZ commercials describe banks which don’t exist, and didn’t even exist in the bad old days. As a result, the commercials don’t speak to anyone.

 

Another rule in our marketing book is that a message must touch on a pain some members of your audience feel and want relief from. The ANZ commercials don’t do that. The pain the poor sod in the commercial feels is not a pain we can relate to, because our banks don’t treat us like that.

 

So the ads miss the mark. A waste of millions. Only a few months before this campaign was launched, Westpac was running the infamous commercial that tried to explain its interest hikes with some fairy tale about a storm hitting a banana plantation. That ad was just as wide of the mark, and just as silly.

 

 

Does it matter? No. Do Mike Smith or Gail Kelly lose sleep over ludicrous advertising campaigns they paid $15 million for? No. Why not? We have four major banks in this country, and they make billions from us, effective marketing or not. Every one of us knows that they’re all the same, and that their attempts to differentiate themselves are as laughable as a decade of BP’s greenwashing, but they have to keep up appearances.

 

Kim

GFC - Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won

I came across this piece in the New York Times, and it reminded me that no one has yet gone to jail for the biggest fraud of a century and more, for stealing money from innocent pensioners and retirees as far away as Australia.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I mean these guys packaged up their bundles of junk mortgage securities, threw in some others to muddy the waters, got their buddies at S&P and Moody’s to put AAA stickers on the boxes and sold them to their clients. Just how agencies who’re paid by the very people they’re supposed to grade can still rule the roost is beyond me. Just how they still do the ratings after this sleazy episode beats me.

 

That's bad enough but it wasn’t all. The investment banks hedged their bets and bought credit default swaps so they’d make money when those parcels of junk CDOs did a jack-in-the-box trick and went futt. This kind of insider trading was standard practice for investment banks like Goldman Sachs who hedged bad bets even while selling the suspect product to their clients.

It turns out that the GFC (great euphemism for a great scam) didn’t happen because the housing market went down. Na. According to Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, it happened because: ‘The banks have made mega-bets with one another through complicated instruments such as derivatives, credit-default swaps, and so forth. With these, one party pays another if certain events happen—for instance, if Bear Stearns goes bankrupt, or if the dollar soars. These instruments were originally created to help manage risk—but they can also be used to gamble. Thus, if you felt confident that the dollar was going to fall, you could make a big bet accordingly, and if the dollar indeed fell, your profits would soar. The problem is that, with this complicated intertwining of bets of great magnitude, no one could be sure of the financial position of anyone else—or even of one’s own position. Not surprisingly, the credit markets froze.’

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/stiglitz200901?printable=true

 

So did anyone go to jail?

Yes, Bernard Madoff did, but he was running a simple Ponzi scheme. Enron was built around a bold scam and, in that case, CEO Jeff Skilling went to jail. But no one has gone to jail over the trillion dollar GFC. Sure, a few people had to resign, tutt, tutt, with golden handshakes mind you.

Not only did no one go to jail but you and I bailed them out. Yes, governments used our taxes, our money, to bail out the perpetraitors who claimed the world would come to an end if they didn’t get a trillion or so to put things right. It’s like a burglar breaks into your house, rapes your wife and daughter and steals your possessions and you run after him and promise not to call the cops but to pay his salary and his mortgage forever instead.

 

Flicker, IMG_0326 

This letter in the NYT in response to the article says it all very well (DEC 24, 2009)

‘Speaking as someone who worked in the IT and risk area for credit derivatives at one of the largest financial institutions -- it was fraud on a massive scale. Nobody really believed the risk management numbers for CDOs were anything more than so many angels dancing on the head of a pin. I'm talking about the quants/mathematicians, the traders and most of all the high level executives at the top of the fixed income food chain.
What they did believe was that bonuses were paid out on an annual basis for performance that was measured largely by sales. Not the eventual value of the trades, which ended up being worthless.
These bankers should be dressed in orange pajamas and sent down to Guantanamo. They are the real terrorists. Not the fake movie style terrorists and bank robbers that the government wants us to believe in -- who wear masks and carry guns. No, these are the real bank robbers who work inside the institution and would need tractor trailers to carry out all the money. Real bank robbers wear suits and have the money transferred directly to their own bank accounts.
What a joke that Goldman pretends to be innocent, and claims to have "paid off their TARP money," while their biggest creditors -- including AIG -- were given huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to pay off trades they had with Goldman. The Goldman bonuses are our tax dollars at work. Plain and simple. I was a witness to history. I saw it happen. The mathematical models were so complex even the mathematicians made jokes about them. Well, the joke is on all Americans.’

 

All I can add is that the joke was on Brits and Germans and Australians too. 

 

 

Bidrivals.com – Is It a Scam?

YOU BET!

'Scam - Trick or Swindle.' Oxford Dictionary

 

BidRivalsmust be raking in the money. The driver for people falling for this deception is the same as the one that makes people fall for the Nigerian money scam: Greed. And the lure of astonishing bargains, like a brand new $1,000 Nikon camera for $70.

 

  
  
Sites like these are a new wave called Penny Auctions. Here’s how they work:

Once you become a member,  

1. You place bids by pressing the BID button
2. The latest three bidders are shown, the last bidder is on top
3. The current auction price is shown as well
4. The user with the highest bid when the time reaches zero wins the auction and buys the product for this price
5. Time is counted down towards auction closing. The time is reset with the bid time indicated in the grey field if a new bid is placed

If you lose, the money you’ve spent bidding is left on the table as in a poker game. The difference here is that the winner gets the goods and the house keeps the money all the players have left on the table. You bet! They win. Simple, isn’t it?

How does Bidrivals make money?

Members pay 80c for each bid they place. Each bid raises the auction price by 2c and extends the auction by 15 seconds. If you end up the top bidder when the clock strikes zero, you win the item for the price it has reached and the Nikon is yours for $70.11.

Well not quite, because you’ve most likely placed a number of bids at 80c before you won. Let’s say you placed 50 – that’s $40 you’ve spent, plus the $70 final price. At $110, you're way ahead, right?

Yes you are, but Bidrivals is the winner here. You see, to drive the price up to $70 would’ve taken 3,500 bids at 80c each (2c at a time). Bidrivals would've collected a cool $2,800 from all the bidders. You see what a great system this is?

It is for Bidrivals. They’re quite open about it. You can check auctions that have closed on their website and get all the stats. Here’s an example (date stamp is in US format):

 

There is an OUT from the GOTCHA: you see the ‘Buy Now’ option in the left bottom corner? It lets you buy the item you lost out on by ‘paying the difference between your spent bids and the purchase price. You can do this ... up to 24 hours after the auction closed.’ (http://www.bidrivals.com/au/how_it_works.html )

The old Bait & Switch! Suddenly the online auction site that lured you with a $70 Nikon DSLR or a $122 MacBook Pro turns into a regular online store, where you can buy regular goods at regular prices. If you’ve put $500 on the table and missed out on the MacBook Pro, doesn’t it make sense to spend another $1,400 and buy a MacBook Pro rather than kissing your $500 goodbye?

Is it Legal?

It shouldn’t be but it seems that way. Legally it’s an online auction site, not an online gambling site. Actually it’s an online store masquerading as a bargain auction site. I called the ACCC to check but it can’t name a company a scam merchant until its proven in court. Here’s a link for generic advice and reporting suspected scams:

http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/tag/OnlineAuctionShoppingScams

My old friend Nick Ross wrote a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald that raises various concerns about these ‘Penny Auctions’ operating in a greay zone below ‘the radar’ of Consumer Watch Groups http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/when-the-bid-becomes-a-bet-20091202-k55a.html .

I also spoke with the good people at Choice, and they couldn’t add much at this point. I checked what people were saying on the internet, and some said funny stuff happened at the last moments in an auction, preventing them from making a final bid.

The reality is that Bidrivals and similar Penny Auction companies operate freely in lots of countries. The first and clearest warning I received was from a very different source, and I received it when I went to the bidrivals.com.au website

   

You see, unlike website link scanners that check for malicious intent, Web Of Trust works by collecting feedback from millions of users. And it seems users have voted, because you’ll get this warning when directing your browser to most of these penny auction places. Check out this brief piece on Safe Online Travel where I’ve reviewed several early warning systems (all free) http://bit.ly/Pljwy

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG?

Most blogs are traffic jams clogging the internet highway, started for the wrong reasons, and lacking key ingredients or substance. Most are badly written by people who don’t know or care – and it shows. These charges apply to corporate blogs too, only more so. So, before you rush in, take this quick sanity check:

DON’T START A BLOG

§    Because your competitors do

§    Because your PR agency thinks you should

§    To promote your company

§    Just to share your thoughts

§    Unless you have material of value or interest

§    Unless you can sustain it long term

§    Unless you’re clear about why, what and how to.

EXCEPTIONS

1. Ignore these points if you’re a celebrity

People will always read celebrity blogs e.g. Richard Branson http://entrepreneur.virgin.com/ or Mark Shuttleworth, the father of Ubuntu Linux and first private space traveller http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/date/2008/11 . If Bill Gates had a blog, he’d be sure to be read widely too.

2. Ignore these points if you're Apple or Google

If you’re hot, high-tech and your fans demand it, write a blog or they will do it for you e.g. 'Secret Diary of Steve Jobs'. But you must deliver what they expect, or you’ll lose the most faithful in a click.

TIPS

1. Accept that it’ll probably be tougher

If you’re not famous and your company isn’t hot with a celebrity figurehead, you’ll have to work harder to attract and keep readers. Worse, your readers will suspect your blog is just another way to promote your company.

2. Don’t Blog about your company, products or services

Blog about the challenges your industry or customers face or insights they can use. Good blogs are useful and inspire, entertain or educate readers; they’re not ads or infomercials.

3. Don’t Blog unless you can share

Don’t worry about giving away your secrets - successful entrepreneurs don’t. They know there's really nothing new and that success doesn’t come from knowledge, but how it’s applied.

4. A Blog is not a new advertsising channel

Blogs are about communities and sharing and receiving freely, not about building email lists and collecting opt-ins. The more useful info you share - about your industry, challenges, trends and lessons learnt – the more popular your blog will be and the more it will be shared.

5. Understand what Blogs can and can’t do

Your corporate blog is just one communication line with your customers and market. You can use it to get frank feedback or as an immediate way to get useful news out. A corporate blog with the right form and content can do wonders – and the reverse is true too.

6. Pick the right author for the blog

Just because you are CEO, CTO or CMO, doesn’t make you a great blogger. You may have valuable insights, but do you tell an interesting story, use the right phrase or add the right amount of humour? Find the person in your company who can - and support him or her – or you’ll lose the audience in another click.

7. Know what your audience wants

If you’re close to clients and business partners, to your sales reps and support people, you’ll know the buzz - or you can use your website hits as a guide to hot topics. A prime example: In 2008 we wrote a user piece called ‘How to make Vista Fly’

http://www.technoledge.com.au/resources.htm , gaining a whopping 300,000 downloads. This showed just how hot the sluggishness of Microsoft’s OS was at the time.

8. Start a conversation with your readers

Allow visitors to comment on your blog and publish the raw feedback (after filtering it for SPAM etc of course). You’ll need real, blunt and honest feedback if want to fine-tune your blog. You also want open dialogue between your readers.

A FEW EXAMPLES

Here are some corporate blogs—some good, some not so good. Judge for yourself.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/  - a great blog, very successful, lots of stuff about a favourite subject – User Interface design – and very little about the company.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ - the exact opposite. Google clearly thinks it’s a celebrity; the blog is about Google and nothing but Google.

http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/ - multiple bloggers and lots of photos.

http://storageeffect.com/  - blog by hard drive maker Seagate; a crashing bore of a topic? Actually, no- this is a great model.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/ - inside broadcasting, with multiple editors contributing; interesting idea.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog/ - of course!

 

 

How Microsoft Came to Rule the World

Have you ever wondered how that happened? Did you know that Apple was the biggest force in microcomputers in the beginning? How did Apple allow Bill gates to run away with the race? What did Apple do that almost destroyed the iconic company? What happened to all the other contenders who ceded power to Microsoft, the makers of the world's most cursed software?

 
 
For a light-hearted romp through more than three decades of computing, check out this entertaining account in two installments, both free and easy - History of Silicon - but please don't believe every word of it http://www.technoledge.com.au/pdfs/history_silicon1.pdf