Top 10 Snarky Apple Predictions for 2010

Well, it’s a new year, a new decade (according to some), and that means it’s time for the pointless predictions about what’s going to happen this year! Being a cranky Apple fan as I am, I present my list of Apple predictions for 2010.

1. Apple will reveal a new award-winning ad campaign…Microsoft will copy it and embarrass themselves.
2. Phil Schiller will have more face-time during keynote presentations than we want him to.
3. Apple will reveal at least one new product that no one is expecting and that changes the world
4. Apple will reveal at least one new product that no one is expecting and that confuses everyone and is quietly ignored or removed before the year is over.
5. Apple will update various product lines in ways that make them harder to mod. The Mac Moders will mod them anyway.
6. The Wall Street analysts will be wrong about Apple sales estimates and earnings.
7. Apple will wait until a lawsuit hits class action status to issue a product recall.
8. Kevin Rose will make press with an Apple rumor, and we’ll find out later that he was completely wrong.
9. Apple will charge iPod Touch owners money for something iPhone owners get for free and claim that ‘the accountants made us do it’.
10. Steve-Jobs will non-ironically use the term “greenest” in a keynote.

Come to think of it, I can probably recycle this same exact list next year as well

Worthless SMO

I listened to a webinar today on the topic of Social Media Optimization (SMO). I’d tell you who produced it, but there was a “private and confidential” notice at the bottom of the slide deck…despite the fact that it was free and anyone could register. Go figure.

The person doing the presentation, who works for a marketing firm, had a VERY negative view of SMO and concluded with saying that it should be the very last thing you spend your marketing dollars on, after you’ve done everything else. I couldn’t disagree more strongly, but before I explain why, I want to clarify that the term SMO strikes me as a hollow industry buzz word and makes me feel dirty even typing it.

Now that that’s out of the way, the thing that I really took issue with is they spoke as if the only worthwhile goal for a business in this space would be to try to increase sales, or to improve search engine ranks to, wait for it, increase sales. This is ENTIRELY the wrong kind of thinking, in my view.

While social media certainly CAN be used to increase sales, in the vast majority of cases I think business would be better off to aproach it as either an extension of their customer service department, OR as part of their PR efforts.

Note that I said PR and NOT marketing. Though often tossed together and handled by the same people, Marketing and PR are two VERY different things, and business would do well to remember that. Social Media will allow you to do things like strengthen your branding, get customer feedback quickly, and rapidly respond to public criticism of your products.

If you step into the Social Media space with the intent to sell something to people you will FAIL. Think 1) Brand 2) PR 3) Customer Service (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps even 4) Recruiting. All of these are a vital part of business and improving them WILL increase your sales, but it is NOT a marketing effort. Remember that.

Does Your Job Suck?

I received the news today that a former boss of mine (the only sane manager in that place) has been fired. I had the good sense to get out of that place a while ago, but I feel bad for them. That department has had more than 100% turnover in the last two years so I’m not particularly surprised, but a lot of people have been caught up for the worse with the corporate politics and red tape and found themselves turned out to the streets in this horrible economy.

I present to you a list of warning signs that might help you know in advance that it’s time to spread your resume around, or if you are considering a new job these might be good questions to ask during your interview:

• Are you the last one standing? Take a look at the turnover rate. If the company is well established and your department has been around a while yet everyone there has been there less than a year, there is a good reason for it. There’s only so many people they can fire before it becomes obvious that the problem is NOT the employees.
• How red is the tape? If a task that takes you 30 minutes of actual work takes 4 hours to complete because of the paper work, then you should have alarm bells sounding in your head. It’s not even that bad in the health industry, and they are KNOWN for paperwork!
• Are you qualified to think? If you are not considered qualified enough to think or have ideas, then you need to get out of there. Any organization that has a hostile reaction to new ideas is bound for finantial ruin anyway. Besides, ANYONE can have a good idea, no matter what your pay rate is.
• How many layers to this Fail Cake? The more management layers there are, the harder it is for anything to get done, and the harder it is to get recognition for your hard work. If there used to be only one manager between you and the CEO, but now there’s more bosses than you can shake a stick at then RUN! They are compensating for incompetence by hiring more people, and when they find that the incompetence is still there they fire the little guy, and that’s YOU!
• Shouldn’t this task be outsourced? If you have been in the job market a while and are making significantly more than you did when you were flipping burgers at McD’s, but STILL find yourself being given mindless repetitive work that is not only below your job description but would be better off given to someone working in a Bangladesh call center, then get the crap out of there! Seriously. That kind of ridiculous waste can only turn out bad. It not only shows that they don’t value you or their OWN money, but that will bite you in the butt later when your reviews come up and you didn’t work on anything important.
• How much am I worth again? If you put in notice that you are getting a new job and they offer you a HUGE salary increase to stay put, don’t fall for it! This is bad. If your best hope of getting a good raise is to actually quit and get hired again then there is a SERIOUS problem with this company and you’re better off somewhere else.
• Can we have a meeting to talk about the meeting we had because of that other meeting? Some jobs, especially management, require a lot of meetings. Sad, but true. But if you are NOT in management, and instead have deadlines and tasks to complete, and yet you find that having ONLY 3 meetings in one day to be an improvement…well, there’s no hope. Get out now while you can still get a good reference.

I could write more, but this is too depressing. So, go think hard about your job, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Stoopid Spammers

My blogs have been hit with a new wave of spam this week. In itself that isn’t anything unusual, spam is just the nature of things these days, but there’s something notably different this time.

The links are all broken!

I’ve had 8 or 9 of these get through my spam filters so far this week with the same issue. They include a link to their site to try to collect your money, but the link that they use is not even a valid URL! This gives the user no possible way to get back to them to give them money even if they wanted to.

What a waste of bits. Stoopid Spammers.

Commerce Server 2007 Catalog Import Breaks Inventory

I have noticed this annoying problem with the Commerce Server 2007 Catalog Manager tool. I have to admit that I haven’t done a lot of research on this topic, so I don’t know what the root cause is, or what fixes there might be available.

We have a staging area that the business folks use to massage data before getting released to production. To get our dev area in sync with stage we can use the Commerce Server Catalog Manager to export the product catalog from our staging server, which creates an xml file, and then use that to import the more up to date catalog on our dev box.

The problem is that when we do the import to the dev box the inventory catalog gets corrupted. I get arround this annoyance by doing a backup export of the dev inventory catalog first, then importing the stage product catalog, and then importing the inventory catalog back again to fix the corruption.

If anyone knows how to fix this little annoyance, please email me.

iTunes 7 annoyance

The more I use iTunes, the more it bugs me. I’ve been in love with the program for some time now, and it’s just now starting to wane and I see more and more little quirks that really should have been ironed out by now.

The one that I’m ranting about today has to do with iTunes’ abilities as a podcatcher. It puts me in the situation of having to constantly babysit my feeds. This happens for a number of reasons, but the most common thing that I run into is the “feature” where it automatically stops downloading episodes of a podcast if you haven’t listened to them in a while.

This really sucks because I subscribe to about 50 podcasts and I go through periods where I get pretty backed up on my listening. But this isn’t always a bad thing, especially in the context of podiobooks because when I come back to it I can have 4 or 5 episodes to listen to right in a row. But when that happens, iTunes has decided to stop downloading them so instead of having them right there waiting for me on my iPod, I have to be constantly checking the feeds in iTunes to make sure that they haven’t been stopped. If I don’t then it takes me three times as long to download the episodes because I have to grab them all at once.

Knowing my luck there is a preference to turn this off and I just haven’t noticed it, but even if that’s the case, I still find this a dumb default behavior.

Annoyance: Ethnic food that is completely wrong

Today’s annoyance comes in the form of enthic food that is completely, utterly, and unapologeticly wrong.

My wife and I spent an evening at the mall in Appleton, WI (I had to pick up a fresh pair of Chucks) and we ate at the food court for dinner. After sampling the stuff that the guy with the toothpicks was handing out it came down to either the Cajun place or the Japanese place. The Cajun place had a shorter line so we went with that. It’s called Kato’s Cajun, and the food is…wait for it…not remotely Cajun at all!

What comes to mind when you think Cajun? For me it’s seafood, especially crawfish, sausage, and jumbeliah. This place had no seafood (they had one sign that said something about shrimp, but it was no where in sight), no jumbeliah, nothing with sausage, in short - nothing remotely Cajun at all. In fact, it was just a generic Chinese place with Cajun on the sign.

Guess what was on the menu? Egg rolls, which we all know Louisiana is famous for (not!), fried rice, Lo Mien (which they called “Cajun Noodles”), something called “Cajun chicken” which was indistinguishable from General Tso’s chicken, crab rangoon which I’m sure had been relabeled as well but I didn’t see what they called it, and that chicken entree that you see at every Chinese place that has chicken stir fried with onions and red and green peppers.

Sure Wisconsin is about 1100 miles from the bayou, but surely anyone who has been to a Chinese place anywhere in America will have seen this food before. I would really like to know if this is a common practice, and how far south they are brave enough to go before people laugh them out of the mall for trying to sell crap like that.

I was embarrassed for them. I really was.

Annoyance: Children’s books with unavoidable innuendo

I’m reading stories to my children tonight and we decide to read some library books that we brought home recently. One book in particular featured a character named “Weiner”. Weiner is of course a loveable dog of the daschund breed who get’s involved in various anticts throught the book.

This is just plain annoying.

So for the rest of story time I’m trying not to snigger while I’m reading the book to my three year old daughter. They didn’t even have the good sense to include the glaring (and trust me, they were glaring) innuendos in places that are suppsed to be funny for the kid for other reasons so that I don’t get weird looks from the kid when I’m laughing for no reason that she can figure out.

I’m not suggesting that the book is doing this intentionally, but really…SOMEONE had to have thought about this when the book was going through the editing and publishing stages. I might be able to buy that someone who writes children’s books for a living would be naive enough to not think about the double meanings, but you can’t tell me that it didn’t cross the mind of at least a college-aged intern at the publishing company before this book went out the door.

Why is this so annoying? Because it puts me in that unconfortable place of trying to decide if they are doing this to me on purpose, or if I just have a dirty mind. So to them I say a loud “bad Weiner, no doughnut!”