Marketing to extremely critical customers

I went into Gregg's Bellevue Cycle a while back to pick up a jersey I wanted (side rant: jerseys in the US don't fit tall, skinny guys) and while I was waiting around, I drooled over the display of Seven bikes. I've seen them on the road, and they're beautiful bikes, but up close I almost started to drool. The workmanship is amazing. They seem to hum to themselves on their stands.

Now here's the thing:
- You can buy a decent bike for a couple hundred dollars
- You can buy a nice bike for under a thousand dollars or maybe a little more

After that, value takes a walk. I used my modest book advance to buy a bike (yes, I know) from a crazy shop in Florida. It looks a lot like this picture from their site. This is me being really cheap compromising with my desire to have an amazingly cool bike (and, admittedly, my need to be into obscure stuff no one's heard of).

Seven's marketing is a lot like, say, Ferrari's. If you're enthralled enough to pick up the brochure, they're not trying to tell you why the bike's worth more than a $1500 Trek. You know why you're there. They know why you're there. They're now trying to explain why spending an insane amount of your annual income on their product compared to others is a good choice. They're not even haggling over whether you should donate that money to charity, or buy a decent used car.

When the guy found my jersey, he apologized for the wait, and I said it was no big deal, I was just drooling over the Sevens. He mentioned that he owned one and then offered to let me take one out. I turned him down, not because I wanted to get back to work, but because I knew, if I took one of them out and it was as good as I felt it would be, I'd start feeling dissatisfied with my current (quite awesome) ride until I inevitably bought one.

That's marketing: Seven has established, through little more than reputation, knowing its customer, and letting an experienced, jaded eye stare at their bikes at a local shop for a while, that they're almost certainly the next step up from what I'm riding.

That's a little frightening.

A really good idea

I have an amazing idea for something I want Expedia to do that would be environmentally great. I will now, without mentioning the idea, chronicle what happens to the amazing idea as I try to get Expedia to take it up and build it. I hope it will show Expedia's strengths and why it's such a great place to work, but I fear it will end up showing instead all the reasons why I've been thinking I should go work for a startup.

So first steps: I did a one-page writeup on the idea, which I'm going to circulate to some people and hope to get feedback on and ideas to proceed. I'm secretly hoping that next week it will be recognized as such an amazing idea that it burns up the chain of command and gets funded immediately. This is unlikely.

Five years of lost words

I've been writing for work for seven years now, and I realized today that as much as I get depressed about the futility of blogging, I should be down about what I've left behind. For five years at AT&T Wireless, I wrote test plans with jokes, functional specs with poetic cadences, filed some beautifully written bugs, and once wrote up a request for us to develop a cloning machine as a way to open discussion on how woefully understaffed my team was. And it's all lost: the chances that anyone who even still works there could practically access any of them is extremely small.

I was surprised, when I realized this, at how bad it made me feel. I wrote for much of the day, every day, since I went into software development, and I can't share any of it, no matter how well I did. That's sad, and an argument to freelance and license it all under an open source agreement or something -- to at least leave artifacts for others.

Google ad scams, continued

This video demonstrates a lot of the problems I saw running AdSense on USSM.

I have talked to Google about the "multiple advertisers with the same product" problem, and never got a good response from them.

One of the biggest problems with Google, and eBay and whoever, is that they have to weigh things like "rabidly persuing fraud" against "that fraud makes us money and we're perceived as pretty good."

Both could, if they really wanted to, dedicate the kind of resources required to dramatically reduce the fraud and misrepresentation they face. But the inclination to call it "good enough" when there's a double cost to further action in resources and lost revenue must be almost irresistable.

Oh Billy

You find a lot of strange stuff when you read as many baseball books as I have these last few years.

From "The Last Yankee," on Billy Martin. Martin's out touring Japan with the Eddie Lopat All-Stars, and is rooming with Hank Sauer.

Billy had struck up a friendship with a beautiful Japanese actress and one night, as this friendship progressed, Billy asked Sauer to stay away from the room they shared until around midnight. "So of course I did," Sauer said, "but when I came back and unlocked the door, Billy's still there with this actress - and someone was sitting at the foot of the bed. Billy couldn't speak Japanese and this gal couldn't speak English - so they had an interpreter there with them! It was a helluva sight."

Haiku of the work day, April 17th

a beautiful day
sun and clouds cross hills and lake
blocked by three drawn shads

The worst part is when they're right

I'm deep into rewrites on my book, under a May deadline to turn in the first reworked chapters. I turned the manuscript into Houghton-Mifflin in September, before I headed off to Australia for a month (side note: I miss Australia). Then I didn't get anything back for a long time, which means part of my frustration is that when I get a note like "more examples here" I think "yeah, I could have given you twenty six months ago, when all this stuff was fresh in my head". And then there's the notes to myself I didn't catch when I turned it in, like [Derek: should I move that other chapter here?] and now I'm embarassed when I see the note and feel twice as bad when my editor's written "yes" next to the note.

Yeah. You work on something that closely for over a year, you start to develop blind spots.

Anyway, most of the criticism I get when I write for the internet is crazy. Like "You're an idiot for totally ignoring the issue of player service time" when there are three paragraphs in the middle of the article about the implications of player service time. Sometimes, I realize it's me not being clear, but a lot of the time, I really just want to respond "hey, screw you for skim-reading".

So, the book revisions. Here's the problem: there are notations all over. And they're all right. Some of them I knew were right because I spotted them when I gave the whole thing a fresh read, but a lot of them I recognize immediately as things I should have seen all along. And this is the worst part, the realization that for all the work that went into it, it is still not nearly as good as it is, and that I know how much work it'll require to be as good as I want it to be.

I feel like I'm doing some huge day-long bike ride, tooling along kind of tired but still cruising, knowing that I'm only a couple hours from being done, and being told that I'm about 45 miles off and I'm going to have to really haul because the finish line's closing in two hours and change. And they've got a map and everything.

All you can do is stand up in the saddle and charge up the next hill.

To meet a spring 2007 date, I need to do some serious sprinting, and I don't come home with a lot of energy after work these days.

Google ad scams

I've been playing around with Google's AdSense over at USSM, tinkering with various layouts and trying to see if it's possible to scrape up enough money to pay for a server upgrade.

It's been kind of a pain, for a variety of reasons.

Anyway. One of the things I hate is the ads for places offering "free" stuff if you complete 20 offers. So I use the competitive ad filter to block them.

The problem is, the same place runs a ton of these as different companies. So you may get Google putting up racks of essentially the same ad from nominally different companies.

media-offer.com is onlinerewardcenter.com is sports-offer.com

Compare, for instance, their terms of service.
http://media-offer.com/info.htm?tp=tos
http://onlinerewardcenter.com/info.htm?tp=tos

They're all exactly the same company. They place the same ads. But I have to block each one of them, using one of my limited filters. Ugh.

Also: man, we are not earning money off AdSense.

Look pedal disclaimer

I read everything. My parents used to make fun of me when, for lack of anything better to do, I would read the cereal box labels at breakfast.

So I read EULAs, and privacy policies, and all that stuff people count on you not reading. I came across a gem today, in the disclaimer for a replacement cleat for my clipless pedal.

LOOK declines, within legal limits, all responsibilities in the event of direct or indirect damage resulting from an incident involving its products. In certain countries or regions, limitation of responsibility for injury resulting from material or immaterial damage is illegal. The previous paragraph therefore would not apply.

Wait, what?

So a) if crazed EPO-freak cyclists go on a killing rampage in your town, Look wants you to know that they take no responsibility for either their superior mobility and pedal power or the indirect effects of the spree.
b) unless it's illegal to say that. Then pretend we didn't just say that, though we pretty clearly just did.

I love the semi-lawerly slinking tone.

c) technically, "previous paragraph" is the warning that the "Good operating guarantee" only applies to products made by Look International, thus leaving the illegal disclaiming of responsibility intact.

Mmm... personalization

So a long time ago, when I briefly quit my job before I came to my senses, I put my resume up on Monster and sent it out around town. I got some really stupid queries -- do I want to sell insurance for a company that went out of its way to hose me on a settlement for years? Or be a financial consultant?

Anyway, I sent Google a nice note with my quite-nice resume, and said, essentially, "Hey, here's my pitch about who I am, check out this great resume, blah blah blah..."

It took them a while to get back to me, and when they did, I got an email that didn't even have my name as a salutation.

This is not a huge deal. I wasn't really surprised I got rejected -- they hire people who do my job, but not where I wanted to work, so I was kind of asking for someone to read it and be willing to talk to me about the position in general and maybe even discuss working out interviewing or whatever -- and I'm sure Google's swamped with resumes from great people applying for exactly the right job at the right time.

And I know their hiring process is broken and takes too long to get back to people.

What struck me as notable, though, is that Google, of all places, with all the importance they put on personalization and tailoring search results, all of that good stuff, couldn't manage to put a name in there. I guess I'd expected that they'd put the kind of care and thought into hiring that they put into, say, Gmail, or Google Earth.

Public and private space

I have trouble trying to write here in part because I know that writing about work is going to get back to work, and right now, work dominates my life. I'm reluctant to even say that I'm really stressed out about work, because that implies that things aren't going well, and that... you see where I'm going.

This is interesting because here's a situation where online community can't cover: I can go out with a friend and whine my head off, and no harm done. Email to trusted parties is a little more reliable, but there's pretty clearly a line between discretion and disclosure.

Acceptable level of whining:

Over a beer --> Over a blog
I hate my life --> I could be better

This was all easier when I worked for a huge telecom that was largely blind to this sort of thing, and I didn't care if my job was affected.

Stupid internet.