Make it easy to give you money

Apple makes it hard to give them money today.

I want to buy the new iPad Air. It’s available next Friday.

I’d like to buy it and pick it up at the store.

If I order it online I won’t have it until the next week (when I’m travelling).

I’d like to order it for pickup on launch day so I can be assured that I have it on that day.

But I can’t.

Because it’s not in stock today, the “pickup at store option” is disabled.

Someone didn’t write the code, because they weren’t asked to, that overrides the store inventory check and allows pre-availability date orders for in-store pickup.

I understand that managing launch day inventory to satisfy both retail customers and pre-orders might be complicated.

But putting a computer more powerful than the one that put man on the moon in our pockets was complicated too. That seemed to work.

Not only is it currently unavailable, it’s unavailable on launch day too.

My $2,500 messaging solution

I blame iMessage.

A few years ago with a loaned Mac on my desk, I found that my most productive conversations with colleagues were happening over iMessage. .

And then, about 14 months ago I (finally!) got my first iPhone. Suddenly those conversations on my Mac were effortlessly replicated to my iPhone.

And then, about 7 months ago, I got an Apple Watch. And suddenly those conversation on my Mac and my phone were effortlessly replicated on my wrist.

The value of this seemingly simple, commonly teen-associated, feature is remarkable. It’s replacing emails. It’s more immediate and, because of its simplicity, more likely to generate a response and that response is more likely to be immediate.

I guess the OS matters. It’s nice that I can use (most of) Office here on the Mac. But iMessage is sticky because its immediate, absolutely my most frequently and heavily used technology, it effortlessly unites my devices, and its mindlessly quick and effective to use.

Who’d have thought?

Seattle Library Rebranding Comments

[note: Yes, this decision has been taken: the SPL board decided not to pursue this re-branding exercise, thankfully. A friend thought these thoughts were worth sharing though, so enjoy, you brave branding warriors you.]

Seattle Public Library is running a rebranding exercise. It’s getting some notice. Most folks think that the ephemeral conversation around brands, their affect and effect, sounds like airy mumbo jumbo.

And they’re right. It often is. Branding work is grasping at the heavens trying to catch a star, so it can look kind of silly. It’s the liberal arts version of ‘making sausage.’

Branding is hard because it involves two opposite types of work: Intense, blue sky brainstorming, where the group’s brains are stretched too and from to wring out every possible association to get all the candidates on the table. And then the painstaking work of editing, in an increasingly granular fashion, until you’re counting syllables, measuring phonemes, and parsing every fragment of structure at an atomic language level.

But its important. It’s inarguable that a hefty part of Apple, Nike, Coke and many other companies market value, enduring sales, pricing power are because of the strength of their brand, and the ephemeral feelings those brands generate that just happen to do a wonderful job unlocking wallets.

To their credit, SPL is conducting a survey asking for feedback on the new proposed name, branding statement and a few logos. (The survey expired October 11th.)

I thought I’d post the thoughts I shared with them:

First comments on their proposed new branding statement, which follows:

“The Library provides access to knowledge, experiences and learning for all. We preserve and create opportunities for the people of Seattle who make it such a dynamic and desirable place to live. When we’re empowered as individuals, we become stronger together.”

Overview: Too many words, and word choices that are, at best, an odd fit with what people and communities expect from a library.

“Access to” is unnecessary. “Provides” carries the water, and the sentence scans better without it.

How do you “preserve” an opportunity? Create I understand, and that has value. A preserved opportunity has no value until it’s engaged — or created for the patron. You also store books, but that’s not the value you provide — its the *use* of the books that provides value.

Dynamic and desirable. Don’t flatter us. Just say “the people of Seattle”. We know who, and what, we are.

Avoid “Empowered”. It’s lazy, corporate, bland and overused.

Is being “stronger together” what anyone is looking for from a library? Is “stronger” a primary motivation for folks to use the library? Is use of the library something that individuals think they are doing together?

I don’t engage with the community aspect. I understand that the goal is to communicate the community value of the library , but I suspect most folks are glad its there for themselves and for others, but our uses for the library are likely so diverse that the sense that it meets an overall community need is distant. The library interaction is not — unlike sports, or arts events — a group endeavor: It’s solitary, personal, introspective and quiet. I’m not sure that its even a “community” experience. Perhaps you’re confusing the desired *effect* you aspire the Library to have with the experience that individuals (and individuals, not groups, are your patrons) have with the library.

I’m a big fan of ending with triplets. They have a natural,  human, highly menomnic rythem , “…making our community more enriched, informed and enlightened.”

How about this:

“The Seattle Public Library provides knowledge, experiences and learning for all. We help Seattle become more informed, enriched and enlightened.”

Sentence one says what the SPL does. Sentence two is the benefit statement.

In addition to the branding statement, there are logos. My thoughts below:

Logo one:

Immediate associations are “unstable” and “random”.  Orange is not a color I associate with either Seattle or libraries.

Odd that a new name that is emphasizing multiple buildings trades so heavily on SPL’s most famous building. There is a dissonance between the plural new name and the very singular reference implied by the image.

Should be “library”, not libraries. The brand is the concept of a library, not the fact that you have many locations. Because of SPL’s excellent online reservations and pickup at any location, I feel like I have access to the library anywhere. And many of your libraries (Wallingford, for example) are too small and under resourced to really do justice to the term “library”. Glad its there, but its as much of a hub distribution point as a “library”.

Logo Two:

Hello Century 21!  Straight out of the worlds fair. Very 1962.  I have a wall clock with this design. Ok, I get that you’re trying to communicate “many elements” to sync with the transition from singular to plural in the name and the sense of community you want to emphasize, but, no.   Missing how this supports the “preserve”, “Create”, “Stronger” elements of the branding statement. In fairness, “opportunity” rings true with this image ( but opportunity isn’t a great word to brand a library system).

More variety than just a few shades of one color would emphasize the diversity of the community SPL serves. You can include green w/o it being a Seahawks promotion, I’m sure.

Logo Three

And whaddya know? Green on the very next sample!

See previous comments on the shape. New immediate reactions: Someone is trussed in a sheet and is fighting to get out. A Cubist ice sculpture is about to fall. Isn’t this a biotech logo? And if so, the company probably doesn’t need it anymore and you can pick it up for a song.

Reinforcing the lack of stability motif, it seems to be balanced on a single, uncentered point. The brain tends to look graphics like this and imagine them having a physical presence, and one has a hard time imagining this as a stable, free-standing object — kind of the opposite of what a revered, practically ancient public institution wants to project for itself.

The colors are an improvement, both the range and the palette.

This doesn’t communicate “Stronger together”. That apparent random unstableness counterdiects the notion of “stronger” and its potential imminent demise makes the “together” promise temporary.

Final Thoughts:

I get the point. You want to emphasize the broad community benefit the library delivers.  I appreciate that you’re putting some effort into raising the profile and the awareness of the value that the (very excellent!) SPL brings to Seattle. It’s a worthy and important exercise.

But this *particular* branding approach does not help you reach that goal. Instead of diffusing the institution by pluralizing (“libraries”) it to represent a collection of buildings (yeah, I know, in *communities* across the city), communicate that the library is one thing to all the people of Seattle. And work hard on that mission statement so it incorporates the broad set of benefits to a broad set of communities, and is flexible to grow over time.

A place for knowledge, reflection and enrichment.

I would also think carefully about some of the other key words in your branding statement. A magic and value of a library is as much a concept (making ideas widely available to all) as it is a “thing”. This branding feels like it emphasizes the thing more than the concept. See my previous comments on “stronger”, “together”, “preserve” “empower”.

I’ve done branding. I know its value and how hard it is to get right. I’ve worked with the firm you’ve engaged, who are top notch. These comments are meant to be constructive, and I hope you’ll take them as such.

Why I’m not pledging to KUOW.

I don’t listen as much. 13 months ago, two things happened.

#1: I got an iPhone.

Finally coming over from Windows phone, which has a barely functioning podcast technology, suddenly there was a wealth of content available for my listening. Some of the programs are items I already listen to: This American Life, On the Media, Studio 360, but most of them aren’t.

And once you start looking, there is such a wealth of incredible long form content available, that it displaces my interest and need to listen to someone else’s programming decisions. I can make my own.

#2: KUOW changed. 

Change is good. I’m a fan. But KUOW’s change made the station less listenable for me. Shorter stories. More national content and dramatically less local content.

And, the tourette’s like constant repetition of “news and information” after virtually every mention of their station ID.

In an age where — just as in music (Pandora, Spotify), and video (Netflix, Amazon), I can consume the media I want when I want it, I’m no longer bound to listen to someone else’s priorities.

With podcasting, I can enjoy my own.

Monday Morning, Day 1, Age of the Smart, Connected, Aware Device

Great cover story in the Economist this week (hat tip to @jfpollard) that previews the world some of us have been living in for awhile and that all (as in billions) of us will be living in forever onward.

The “Smartphones” part of the story is just the beginning. Its really about personal, smart,  aware, connected devices that will be with us all the time, helping us with everything.

The ramifications are beyond imagining now. The potential interactions for ubiquitous smart devices to interact with an increasingly digitally aware (think people places and things that know about and can interact with our digital presence) world are too numerous to wrap the mind around.

Threats? Sure. Privacy issues? Absolutely. (We’re going to be redefining our definition of what privacy even means, as well as our expectations of what we want to choose to share, and who we want to share it with).

This is analogous to the PC revolution, but it will be far more pervasive in its impact. The power of these devices, particularly to be aware of our location and activities, combined with the fact that they’re nearly always with us will power the uses that smart companies put them to in ways that will transform our lives more than virtually any other development we’ve seen in the last fifty years.

Band on the Run

So it turns out that reaching for my phone. Turning it on. Logging in and then either pulling up my notifications screen or finding the app with the notification and opening it (are you still counting the steps) is ‘cognitive overhead’.

Hearing something on my wrist jingle and feeling it vibrate, directing my attention to the band are all it takes to see whatever new notification has just come in.

Yeah, yeah, first world problem. But meaningful when multiplied over the 50-100 times a day I get one notification or another on my phone.

I’m only a week into my Microsoft Band, and I’m sure the novelty will wear off at some point, but I am paying more attention to my activity as tracked by the band.

Most valuable has been its monitoring of my sleep — in particular its analysis of my deep/light sleep ratio.

I wear it all day, it doesn’t get in the way of typing on my laptop.  I occasionally use it to look for the Time (see above — many fewer steps than hauling out my phone).

Will v2 be much better? Absolutely. Will I still be very interested in an Apple Watch? Even more so now that I’ve had the benefit of learning the value of having wrist-based notifications.

Still, nice job for a first effort on a uniquely personal device — something that has not exactly been their strong suit.

Peanuts and Priorities

Great story for a number of important reasons.

#1. It’s always fun to hear about what Southwest flight attendants are doing to make the SWA experience fun and memorable.

#2. The customer is not always right. Nice to see a CEO making that call. Buying something from me does not make you God.

#3. SWA has their priorities right: Employees, then customers, then shareholders. They understand that doing right by the first two takes care of the last one.

Much of the decline of the American middle class can be traced to CEOs, and their boards, who (wrongly) put shareholders first when making decisions about how they run their companies.

SWA has it right. Which is why they’ve had 90% of my travel business for the last five years, a decision confirmed by some recent travel on United and American, airlines that see their employees and customers as costs and revenue, respectively, not people.

Gone Mac

30 years after I bought the very first Macintosh, I’m back to the Mac.

A few months of having a Mac Mini on my desk, using it first to edit some videos for a non-profit I work with, then getting pulled into a little web browsing, then, what the heck, I’ll use one of my Office365 licenses on it.  And then another thing and another thing, and pretty soon I’m enjoying the different look, the responsiveness (even on the late 2009 mini). And I guess it was time for a change. I was ready to navigate a computer differently. As much as I’ve been one of the few to enthusiastically enjoy Windows 8, especially the metro apps, I’m finding the Mac mostly very comfortable. (File and Window management are weaknesses.)

The mini eventually became a little too slow, and I was getting tired of toting my (very nice) Asus X202 (with speedy SSD) around, so after a few weeks stalking the refurbished macs, I pounced on a late 2013 Mac Book Pro 13″ with 8GB Ram and an enormous 500GB SSD.

Wow.

Just blazingly fast at everything. Photoshop loads in under 5 seconds, Outlook even faster.

Most importantly, I feel like I’m catching up with a way of working that many folks have been happy with for quite awhile. I know the mac market share numbers are still stuck around 10%, but my coffee shop counts, along with the stats on the sites I monitor, show much higher %s of Mac usage.

So, without any need to trash talk Windows, I’ll be spending a year or so on this gorgeous new machine and checking in occassionally on what I’m loving, what I’m wondering about and what, if anything, makes me pine to go back to Windows.

What’s wrong with corporate America in one sentence.

See if you can spot it for yourself. And this from the WSJ!!!:

Boeing next week is expected to report record earnings for its commercial unit, in part based on its accounting for the 787, which allows it to spread its early high costs over 1,300 deliveries and book future profits today.

Hmmmm. I wonder what metric executive bonuses are based on. Hmmmm…….

 

Disruption

Definition of disrupt (vt)

 

• dis·rupt
• [ diss rúpt ]

1. interrupt: to interrupt the usual course of a process or activity
2. destroy order: to destroy the order or orderly progression of something

That’s what T-Mobile’s up to these days. This uncarrier plan, the fourth segment of which was revealed today at CES, was nicely paired with their most recent quarterly results trumpeting great subscriber adds.

Microsoft CEO candidate had his famous burning platform memo a few years ago at Nokia, and all he got was this meh buy out. It looks like Mr. Legere is making a little more progress with his radical transformation of T-Mobile by, you know, executing and delivering results.

Good for Mr. Legere. Great work by the T-Mobile board in choosing and supporting him.

And incredible for consumers.

The US  wireless market will look very different, and cost consumers much less, in six months.

That is vision, leadership and execution.