Rafe's Blog

Too much choice

I'm at PC Forum, listening to Barry Schwartz talk. He's author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.  The data he's rolling off is frightening: The same store that offers 29 jams sells less jam than when it offers six.  For every ten 401(k) options funds a company makes availalbe to its employees, participation in the plan itself goes down 2%. Too much choice, Schwartz says, leads to paralysis, which leads to misery. Which leads to bad business, obviously.

Although people want choice (he has data to prove that, too), it makes them unhappy and lowers engagement in life and in commerce.

"The secret to happiness," Schwarz says, "is modest expectations."

So one secret to good business is a defined, reasonable product set. Don't bludgeon people with choice when it's not necessary. Focus on function and design (iPod), not feature bloat (Microsoft's Origami). To that end, at CNET we should probably take a very hard look at our own crowded front page...

[Cross-posted to the CNET Alpha Blog.]

Hardware is a dead end

I gave a talk on Tuesday for the attendees of the Gartner Small Business Vision event. My topic: Emerging technologies for small businesses. To prepare for the talk I wrote a column, which recently ran on CNET.

After I wrote the column, I continued to work on the talk, and it ended up going in a different direction. As I was preparing my notes, I realized that I had collected a list of hardware and software product categories that I consider important for businesses to adopt, but that none of these products could truly move a business forward. These tools- - smart phones, laptops, etc. -- are productivity enhancers.  They're important. But from a business perspective, not exciting.

On the other hand, emerging online trends and technologies are business enhancers. Blogs, video, community, search engine optimization -- these are technologies that, if employed wisely, can really improve a business by opening new avenues of marketing, sales, and most importantly, communication between a business and its customers.

It all reminds me of what I learned way back in 1992, when I edited Corporate Computing magazine: There is no fundamental business problem that new hardware can solve.  But it's equally clear to me that most small businesses barely have a pulse when it comes to using the Internet to improve their prospects.

United's loss is your gain

The potential collapse of the big business pension could be a boon for small business. Here's why: Already, technology is closing the gap between what a small business and a big business can accomplish. But one of the last areas where big business has an edge is in recruiting. Employees who want a steady income -- now and forever after -- look to large companies and the pensions they offer. But if big-biz pensions go the way of the dodo, large companies have one less recruiting advantage over small ones.

Speaking of small business, I had an interesting talk with HP's Kevin Gilroy yesterday. He runs the company's small business unit. Citing rapid growth in the small biz sector, he says we should expect to see more big companies (like his) offering more small-biz-friendly tools and support in the near future.

One more time: Encrypt your backups!

Let Time Warner's data disaster be a lesson to us all. The company lost backup tapes with data on more than 600,000 employees. Maybe the tapes were protected or encrypted. Maybe not. The stories don't say. The big question, though, is this: Are your backups protected?

See also: Previous rant that says the same thing.

What's in a blog?

I'm writing a Works for Me column on the different types of blogs that small businesses can use.  It's scary territory, because so many vociferous bloggers have very strong opinions about what is, and isn't, truly a blog. Still, I've come up with a taxonomy that I'll be exploring in slightly more depth in next week's column:

Blog types for small business:

• The diary blog
• The project blog
• The grok
• The group grope
• Podcasts
• Wikis

I know full well the last two aren't really blog types at all, but they are emerging forms of Internet media and I think they belong in the list.

Gadgets of the day: Two computers

I've written before about using two computers (my big desktop at home and a laptop from work). From time to time this two-PC setup needs a remote control program. I've been using GoToMyPC until now, but there's a free remote control program, LogMeIn, that competes well against it.  There's a paid version of LogMeIn that offers remote printing and file transfer, but if remote control is all you need, you don't need to pay for it and you certainly don't need to shell out for GoToMyPC. Logmein is also the only remote control program I've used that can actually access multiple monitors on a remote PC. (There's a third remote option: MyWebEx PC, which I tried but didn’t like.)

However, none of these remote control programs offer real-time folder sync, which is another key component of a two-PC life. For that, I use FolderShare.  There's another sync program called BeInSync. I haven't used the latest version but the previous one required special directories, which made me steer clear.

It might be time to write another column about this topic.

Bonus Gadget: TaskSwitchXP. It beats the stuffing out of Microsoft's built-in Alt-Tab function. Free, too.

Why I hate Iomega

I wrote a Works for Me column on CNET about losing data to proprietary disk formats, in particular Iomega's. Read it here.

Gadget of the Day: Treo software

I've had my Treo 650 for about a week. Things I hate: It's too big to carry comfortably in my pocket (and holsters are dorky), and it crashes every day or two. Things I love: It's a very good phone, and it runs real applications, some of which are unbelievably useful, especially for the business traveler. Here are my picks so far:

• GoodLink mail. Our IT department runs this, and they installed it on my Treo. Love it! I get perfect, always-on synchronization with my Outlook email, calendar, contacts, and notes, and I never have to sync my Treo. Unfortunately, the Good software does step on some of the built-in Treo apps -- for example, I can't access an address book from within the Treo's native VersaMail, which I need to send pictures, since GoodLink doesn't support attachments. Also it drains the Treo's battery quickly. I recharge every night, but if I didn't, I think I'd be in trouble. On the whole, it's still fantastic.

• United Airlines timetable. This is a self-contained database of the United flight schedule that you can load into your device (PC, Palm, or PocketPC). Very useful for seeing all the flight options available to you, not just the ones the UA website decides to display when you're planning a trip. Free.


• FlightStatus. This app gets up-to-the-minute flight arrival information over your data connection. Better, by far, than the flight status Web pages hosted by the airlines or the travel sites. It's free (tips accepted), and written by Andrew Faber, now a 15-year-old high school sophomore. You gotta love that.


• QuickNews. An RSS reader. Web access on my Cingular Treo is rather slow, but most of the sites I use have RSS feeds, and this app makes short work of consuming them. $14.95 after 30-day trial.

• Most useful Web site: Google's mobile search engine, www.google.com/xhtml, which parses everything into small-device-friendly pages. Just added to the service: Google Maps -- although they're really too small for the Treo's screen.

• Utility that shouldn't be needed but is: LEDOff. Turns off that damned blinking LED. Free, donations accepted.

More to come.

Windows everywhere

This is our Canon copy machine at work. Some joker noticed that its touchscreen control panel is a Windows app. So he fired up Windows Media Player, which he set to play Beethoven over and over. There's a PC hardwired to the copier and it has a tiny, tinny speaker, which you can barely hear. But a little music to occupy you while you're copying isn't so bad.

Why does this copier need Windows? Because it's also a scanner. You can do copy-machine stuff without touching the Windows screen, but you can also use the copier to scan and email directly, which is what the external screen and the attached PC does. It's a pretty cool setup, although advanced copying is still beyond my ken. Just this morning I royally messed up making double-sided copies from one-sided originals. There needs to be a book: Photocopying for Dummies.

Children shouldn't blog

"Don't write down anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times," my father told me when I was a boy -- as I'm sure many other fathers told many other sons. This is old-fashioned thinking, of course. Today, in blogs, everybody writes everything, and anybody can read it.

For some people, this openness will come back to haunt them. Blogs are the new resumes. We just did a bunch of hires at CNET, and some of the new people have rather personal blogs. I know more about these bloggers/new employees than I would ever know about new hires before the blog era. 

I didn't come across any of the utterly weird hobbies or predilections that some bloggers are happy to flaunt. Not that there's anything wrong with enjoying being hung from the ceiling by meat hooks, mind you, but when you're applying for a job do you want your potential employer to have that picture in his or her mind? Wouldn't you rather they focus on how you got your last project done on time and under budget?

As we age and take on professional lives, the act of keeping separate our persons and our professions becomes ingrained, at least for most of us. At least we are able to make informed decisions about which parts of our personalities we want to be out about, and which we don't. But I worry about the kids who are blogging today, and how those blogs will likely continue to reverberate through the Net long after they've matured past whatever opinion or emotion they are blogging today. I worry because Timmy the 8th grader might want to get a nice job when he's Timothy the lawyer, and what he wrote as a 13-year-old could conceivably influence his potential employer. "You were a vindictive little snot, weren't you?" isn't a question he's going to want to have to answer.

So here's my modest proposal. People under 21 can't vote or drink, and under 16 they can't drive -- because our society doesn't trust their judgment to do the right thing for the rest of us or for themselves. Blogging, likewise, should be restricted to those of majority, or at least those with parental consent. Not because we don't want to read what 13-year-olds have to say. But to protect them, because ten or twenty years from now, many kids are going to wish they had the judgment to not broadcast their petty thoughts to the Internet and to eternity.