Monthly Archives: August 2008

August 15, 2008 · 9:00 am

Choice?

I was up way too late last night watching the great performances by Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson.  Of course, as a soccer fan, I’m missing the USA/Canada Women’s match since it’s not on TV and as a Cablevision subscriber, I have no access to NBCOlympics.com video.  Yes, I’m aware that it’s pretty easy to spoof the system so one can watch but that’s not this morning’s point.

NBC is charging cable operators for a supplemental package of channels for the Olympics and the online broadband site.  While many operators have said OK (and I’m wondering how they’re passing along the costs to consumers), Cablevision said no thanks.  I have no issue with this- it’s the same decision as they and others make with respect to new channels and broadband packages such as ESPN360 all the time.

My issue is that history shows that consumers don’t like gatekeepers and will find ways around them.  AOL’s walled garden is gone.  Others are as well.  ISP’s have been fairly open to date (I say fairly since some of where Comcast is heading bothers me) and wireless networks are slowly opening.   Again, I have no quarrel with Cablevision’s decision.  But why didn’t SOMEONE ask me is I wanted to pay for it?  Cable guys hate ala carte pricing, NBC wants to get paid on the whole of a footprint rather than by individual users, but in the end, in theory, my sleepy wife misses some great performances.  Sure, she can watch highlights, but if NBCOlympics.com has any archived full-length stuff she’s out of luck.

By the way, why does NBC have you install Silverlight (required to watch) before they let you know if you are able to see live video?  Nice benefit to our friends in Redmond but sort of sneaky.

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August 13, 2008 · 11:22 am

Getting What You Paid For

There is an article this morning in the Wall Street Journal entitled Big Sponsors Are Upset Over Visibility at Olympics.  Basically, a number of the official sponsors have spent millions of dollars on building corporate experiences at the Olympic Green.  These experiences are designed to have the folks walking around Beijing interact with the company in some way.  In prior Olympics, the foot traffic to the Green has been massive and the partners were expecting 200,000+ visitors a day.  One problem: the Chinese, always security conscious, have limited visits to the Green to those holding event tickets, thereby making the traffic actually showing up at these very expensive pavilions about 20% of what the partners were expecting.  Doh!

I’ve always believed that contracts were less important that relationships.  That said, how is it possible that this issue wasn’t discussed and documented, either with the Chinese or the partners?  Who thought it was a good idea to rely on prior practice (“Gee, we’ve always given people unfettered access”) in a country where things are not always what they seem and a government that is going to do things its own way, period?

It’s one thing when the IOC tells the press that there will be no censorship of the internet by the Chinese and there is – the press isn’t paying the bills.  It’s quite another when the folks who ARE paying the bills get screwed.  My favorite quote:

“Here in Beijing, there have been a few who have requested that more people be admitted into what are known as the ‘Olympic common areas’ and the organizing committee has been working to find appropriate means of doing this, which we welcome,” said IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies.

I know from working with a few other international organizations that this is the polite way to say “buzz off” so maybe the relationship thing isn’t working either (obviously there isn’t anything in a contract).  The games are over soon – every day counts to amortize the investment.  Lost sales aren’t coming back.  Maybe the sponsors aren’t either!

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August 12, 2008 · 8:17 am

Who touched my stuff?

You just made the list, buddy. Also, I don’t like no one touching my stuff. So just keep your meat-hooks off. If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I’ll kill you

OK, so someone touched my stuff.  Well, not my real stuff – my digital stuff.  Specifically, somewhere between my web host, Spry, and the Gmail client I use to access the mail on the Spry server, something changed.  Yes, I’m aware that there have been big problems with Gmail recently, although I must admit that I have not had any trouble with one account while another one is inaccessible.

Nope, all was working quite well until late last week.  For months, Gmail would ping Spry every so often, emails sent to my business mail would pop up and I’d be…umm…in business! Then, nada.  I became Mr. Unpopular.  In fact, in looking at it, it was around 7:30 Thursday evening when the mail stopped flowing.  When I had received nothing via Gmail on Friday, I used the Spry client (not as nice as Gmail) to check mail.  Hey!  Turned out I was the belle of the ball and now officially negligent in responding to the folks who had written.

So fess up.  Someone changed something and now it’s broken.  As businesspeople, it’s important to constantly improve the product, but when something goes wrong, we need to let the people who rely on us know that we screwed up.  Did the folks at Spry do something to change how POP access happens?  Don’t know.  Twitter had way more to say about Google’s problem than did Google (such irony) and that’s wrong.

The problem happened late afternoon Eastern Time and so caused an explosion in the US blogosphere. Google said it didn’t usually respond publicly to such problems, but decided to because: “We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts.”

Doesn’t respond publicly?  The openness of the web should inspire the same open, candid atittude among those who derive their living from it.

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