Michael S. Malone published a really interesting article on popular well-known bands releasing their albums for free. The latest band to release their music for free is Nine Inch Nails. The best part about this release is that fans can do what they want to the music including mixing and reusing it in their own projects.

Why would an artist give away their music? Because they make most of their money from the concerts, t-shirts, and other add-ons, not from selling albums. Years ago, the record companies had the advantage that they were the only source of music distribution: selling records to stores, having music played on the radio, getting music made part of TV and movies, etc. The Internet has completely killed their distribution model. iTunes started the job. MySpace and Facebook with their pages that let artists showcase their own music has finished it off.

While this new freebie system may work for artists, it leaves the big record companies with nothing to contribute with their current business models. That does not mean that the record companies have to die, but they will need to change. In an interview given by Jin-Young Park, a Korean pop music manager, he explains that the big record companies that he meets with don’t get that the CD is dead. He makes his money by cultivating talent and marketing the acts.  Quoting directly from his interview:

When prospective U.S. partners ask music mogul Jin-Young Park where he’s from, he has a conversation-stopping answer: “I’m from the future.”

It’s a deft riposte that opens up space for Park, who discovered and managed Asian pop phenomenon Rain for many years, to spool out a string of facts that make record execs weak in the knees. “In meetings with music labels here, they talk to me about releasing albums,” says Park. “They can’t accept that there’s no such thing anymore. Where I come from, CDs are nothing—they’re just souvenirs. I tell them, ‘Wake up!’”

There is so much to say about Microsoft’s latest actions that I really requires multiple posts.

Patrick Logan’s blog pretty much summed up what regular people think about Microsoft’s Mesh. Probably many folks at Microsoft feel the same way, but they keep their mouth shut. They know where their paycheck comes from.

The saddest part of the post is the last which quotes Bob Warfield.

There are 100 engineers at work on Live Mesh already, and lots of key functionality (like version control) nowhere in sight. Aside from the Tactics of Monopoly, the other Fail mode is creating a giant monolith of software. Vista is a painful example of how far things can go wrong. Mesh is, at its core, another attempt to rework the document and folder file system. Microsoft promised this in Longhorn for years but never delivered.

The sad part is that 100 Microsoft engineers working for two years has produce something that no one is especially excited about. Love it or hate it, Twitter accomplished something much more unique and interesting over a span of two years with only three engineers.  

Warfield’s own analysis goes on to talk about how Google takes a more open approach that gets others excited enough about the app that they freely put their own time into it. At the end of a few months, the initial effort by a few Google engineers and potentially hundreds of unpaid volunteers (see Google’s Android Competition results) quickly produce great results.

It is hard to understand what it is that is holding Microsoft back. It is not that it is a big company. Apple, Google, and Sun are big and have produced some great products and open source platforms. It can’t be that they are not located in Silicon Valley. After all, they are neighbors of Amazon. The problem may be that their management believes that they really are the smartest people in the room. They may truly believe that a few hundred people at the top of the Microsoft corporation really does know more than millions of web users. 

They have a history of producing products that suit them, not their customers. Even their latest Mesh product sounds like a product that is more useful to Microsoft to get control back over their customers than useful to their customers to get control over their data and devices. Maybe some setbacks like Zune and Vista will help them to put the customer first.

Given their history of not playing nice with others, who really will want to work with Microsoft to make their product better? If third parties like Apple don’t want their products like the iPhone to work with Mesh, then will Mesh be of any real use? If it does not work globally, will it end up a partial (or worse, no) solution for customers?  

Possibly the problem that Microsoft has with creating hot new products is that the company functions from the top down but with no real vision of what the future can bring. I remember back in the mid 90’s that it seemed to take Microsoft forever to understand the importance of the the Internet. This delay allowed Netscape, Amazon and other Web 1.0 companies to get a chance to grow. I remember thinking what was wrong with Microsoft that they could not see what every college student at the time could see: the Internet was where everything was going. I guess that Microsoft’s upper management did not talk to new college hires. I am guessing that they still don’t.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Google, Twitter, innovation

Microsoft’s big news at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday was the release of Mesh. It sounds like the Windows Explorer utility on steroids. It seems to be an advanced way to search and update files on your computer, your mobile devices and your family and friends computers.

As we all know, Microsoft has been in the news with their bid for Yahoo. So far, it has not been hostile, but that could change any minute if they don’t get a better answer from Yahoo. Microsoft is having some trouble lately with its Windows Vista OS. This is really the bigger problem. Microsoft makes most of their money from the $300 a pop OS. Microsoft Office is also nicely profitable but easily replaceable with free versions that work just as well. The Xbox is supposed to be a nice gaming platform, but it looks like the Wii has taken gaming from the traditional base of young male gamers to the general population. Very innovative. It is so much nicer to expand into a new untapped market than to keep fighting with your competitors for the same bunch of customers.

Overall, Microsoft’s biggest problem is the Vista OS. The desktop is theirs for now. But what good is it in the Web 2.0 world.

Microsoft’s release of Mesh was covered in this Forbes article, but I think that the most important point is in the second paragraph that says

“Microsoft’s pitch is simple: Today’s world is all about the Internet.”

Microsoft problem: They are not really part of the Internet. For example, if Windows OS was magically removed from all of the computer in the world, about 95% or more of all desktops and laptops would become boxes of useless circuits. But if you were to remove all Microsoft software from the Internet, what would be the damage?

The majority of websites use free open source software like Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, etc. The servers that are using Microsoft products are paying for them. Most new websites can’t afford to pay for something when they can get for a free open source program that does virtually the same thing.

In fact, Microsoft’s most successful play in the Internet space is their free Internet Explorer browser. But it is easy enough to replace Internet Explorer with Firefox or another some other free browser.

Without Windows, what really remains of Microsoft?

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Mesh, Web 2.0 Expo, open source

T-Mobile has announced that it will have actual, real-life, not-just-virtual phones that run on the new Google Android OS open source platform, better known as the GooglePhone, at the end of the year. 

That’s the good news; the bad news is that T-Mobile does not seem to know what to do with it. They seem to believe that the direction for these new devices will come from the user.

Reading the comments from the panel of people quoted in the article does not help me feel more comfortable that T-Mobile and Google will pull this off. When asked what the killer apps would be, Nedim Fresko, director of strategic platform initiatives at Blackberry maker Research in Motion Ltd. (RIMM), listed security as the biggest thing that customers are looking for. I have to disagree. Customers are not looking for security from the top companies in the world; they expect it without question. They are not looking for it. Just like customers expect that all of the food in the supermarkets have been verified by the government and the food companies, they expect that any application from a major company has been tested and verified safe.

There is nothing wrong with looking for direction from the customer. Tech companies are well-known for releasing updated code frequently as users provide feedback. But phone companies are not known for being flexible and are not known for getting out of the customer’s way to let them experiment. In fact, the “security” concern listed above is more a big company issue with respect to getting sued. It tends to be used by companies for their “Big Brother” concern for their customers and their data.

The biggest issue with the laissez-faire attitude of T-Mobile with respect to the GooglePhone is that this is 180 degrees opposite what Apple did with the iPhone. Apple’s marketing campaign not only made customers want the sleek, shiny iPhone, but it also taught the customer what the iPhone was capable of and making the customer want it even more.

Without that tight interlocking of Apple’s message and customer expectations, would the iPhone have succeeded? Probably, but it would have required much more time to get the same sales result. And it would never have added to the mystic that the Apple name carries with it. 

It sounds like Google and T-Mobile are planning to skip the marketing/educating portion of the GooglePhone release. It sounds like they expect that the message will be delivered by a variety of small tech companies building their own 3rd party apps using the Andoid open source OS. The problem is that such a patchwork of small tech companies with wildly different products will deliver wildly different messages. Will this work for Google and T-Mobile? 

Technorati tags: T-Mobile, Google, Android OS, GooglePhone, Apple, iPhone, marketing message

The first submission date of the Google Android Challenge has offically closed. After looking in depth at the Android SDK, I can say that Android is very interesting code, but it still needs a bit of work. There have already been three different releases of the SDK in just the few months that it was first released by Google. You really get the feeling that it was not ready for prime time when you release that the Android site did not have a central area for bug reports and the challenge submission program did not inform users that their application was accepted. Over time the Android team did add on these bits and pieces to the site, but it seems strange that they were afterthoughts. After all, you would expect that Google’s programmers would be familiar with other open source efforts and would be aware of tools to allow outside developers to report the errors that they found in their programming and testing of Android. That was the whole point to releasing the SDK with the Challenge.

While the SDK and what Android can do is somewhat impressive, the really impressive part is if it really works as advertised across a range of devices. Android is often compared to the iPhone, but the comparison is not really fair. The iPhone is a tightly controlled device with a small number of variations. Important pieces like memory, screen size, user interface, and usable media file formats are well known for the iPhone. Not so with other mobile devices. Android removes most of this messy complexity from the programmer. It will be great to see if the Android SDK will actually work in the real world on real devices.

 One aspect of the Android SDK docs and support that surprised me was the way that the Android team spent a huge amount of their example programs on various elements of the UI but completely ignored the MediaPlayer. Maybe it is because media is such a large part of the Geogad site and the Internet is continually becoming more video oriented, but I would have thought that playing media files and including example files for this would have been top priority. Example files were put on the Android message boards after developers begged for them. Since Google spent $1.7B on YouTube, you would have thought that video and audio examples would have been included from the beginning. 

 Either the Android team was rushed to release the SDK before they were really ready to (a likely bet since Google probably was getting tired of hearing about the iPhone and press speculation on Google buying 700MHz spectrum from the FCC), or Google is focusing on the text delivered via mobile for pairing with their text AdWords. I really think that Google will have to get a focus on serving video ads for mobile devices. Reading these small screens, even one as lovely to read as the iPhone, just increases my ADD and my speed reading abilities. I doubt that I will have much interest in reading text ads that take up my limited and valuable mobile screen space. If any company can handle successful video ad delivery, I am sure that Goggle and Geogad, of course, will do it out.

Technorati tags: Google, Android, Challenge, video, MediaPlayer